In Hollywood, 2003 is rapidly becoming known as the year of the failed blockbuster, and the industry now thinks it knows why.

No, the executives are not blaming such bombs as The Hulk, Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle or Gigli on poor quality, lack of originality, or general failure to entertain. There's absolutely nothing new about that.

The problem, they say, is teenagers who instant message their friends with their verdict on new films - sometimes while they are still in the cinema watching - and so scuppering carefully crafted marketing campaigns designed to lure audiences out to a big movie on its opening weekend.

"In the old days, there used to be a term, 'buying your gross,' " Rick Sands, chief operating officer at Miramax, told the Los Angeles Times. "You could buy your gross for the weekend and overcome bad word of mouth, because it took time to filter out into the general audience."

But those days are over, because the technology of hand-held text-message devices has drastically cut down the time it takes for movie-goers to tell their friends that a heavily promoted summer action movie is a waste of time and money.

Five years ago, when summer movies were arguably just as bad as they are now, the average audience drop-off between a film's opening weekend and its second weekend was 40 per cent. This summer, it has been 51 per cent. In some cases, the drop-off has started between the film's opening on a Friday night and the main screenings on Saturday. The upshot: unsuccessful films disappearing from cinemas so fast that there is no time for second opinions.

A 56 per cent drop over the first week of Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines was not what the studio moguls had expected. As Arnold Schwarzenegger himself might say, hasta la vista, baby.

Jack Valenti has led a prolific political life. A decorated World War II pilot, Valenti served as a special assistant to President Lyndon Johnson until 1966. Since then, he has served as the President of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), turning the entertainment studio consortium into a lobbying juggernaut. Valenti helped pioneer the movie industry's voluntary rating system and has tirelessly fought government censorship. He has also headed the Motion Picture Export Association, protecting American film studios' interests in other countries.

In recent years, Valenti has become an outspoken leader in the fight against piracy on the Internet. Known for his sharp rhetorical abilities, Valenti always speaks about piracy in calamitous terms, prophesizing the eventual death of the movie industry. To defend its copyrights, MPAA successfully sued publishers of a program that undermined the copy prevention technology on DVDs and is currently suing several file-sharing services. In addition, Valenti has taken his case to Congress, pushing for mandated copy prevention technologies in all digital devices that play movies, music, and other media.

But many people have criticized Valenti's hard-line stance, calling it anti-technology and anti-consumer. These critics assert that Valenti's copy prevention mandates will harm innovation, forcing all technologists to ask the MPAA's permission before creating the next generation of amazing gadgets. Copyright holders have always fought new technologies, from Marconi's radio to cable television to VCRs, and in no case have their apocalyptic visions come true. Furthermore, copy prevention technologies will go beyond ending piracy by limiting how consumers can make personal use of their legally purchased movies.

After delivering a speech on "Persuasion and Leadership" at Harvard's Institute of Politics, Valenti sat down with the HPR to discuss his side of the digital debate and his life in politics.

Wish you could watch major films at home without being offended by words you wouldn't use in your own home, and worrying whether your children are seeing things they shouldn't?

Think you should have the right to view the movies you own (or rent) the way you--and not the content's creators--wish?

IN EITHER CASE, you should know about a company that hopes to market a special DVD player that will automatically skip over violent and sexually explicit scenes and mute the bad language that is so prevalent in Hollywood blockbusters.

Here's the problem: Hollywood is suing to keep this DVD player off the market. The major studios and the Directors Guild of America are essentially saying that, when you buy a DVD, you must watch it exactly the way it was created--or not watch it at all.

The company that's created this DVD technology, ClearPlay, is one of a dozen or so businesses that, in one way or another, offer cleaned-up versions of PG- and R-rated movies. Others, such as CleanFlicks, rent and sell DVDs and videotapes that have been physically edited to exclude objectionable content.

According to CEO Bill Aho (whom I interviewed yesterday on my radio show), ClearPlay uses special software--already available for PC-based DVD players--to skip over specific scenes and mute language while the disc is being played. ClearPlay editors have viewed and created filters for more than 300 films, from A.I. Artificial Intelligence to Zoolander. Aho admits that there are some movies (such as Saving Private Ryan) that ClearPlay hasn't filtered because doing so would ruin the film. The filters are specific enough that even a gritty war drama like Blackhawk Down might lose just three or four minutes of run time.

The ClearPlay service is available right now (if you're willing to use your PC as your DVD player) for $7.95 a month, or $79 a year. The custom DVD player, expected to sell for less that $100, will come to market later this year--unless it's blocked by the courts.

ClearPlay, CleanFlicks, and other similar companies are presently locked in legal battles with the entertainment industry, which claims that copyright owners alone have the right to make "derivative works" by editing the originals. If anyone else creates derivative works, the studios and their allies argue, that would violate the studio's trademark rights to a motion picture.