Pirate Cinema

Chapter 5

Flop!/A toolsmith/Family Reunion/Late reviews

We all had theories about what would happen next. I thought that the cinema people would go well mental and announce a fatwa on all of us, releasing weird, blurry CCTV footage of our costumed army with our fuzzed-out heads; cut to apoplectic industry spokesdroid who'd call us terrorists and declare us to be the greatest-ever threat to the film industry, while solemnly intoning the millions we'd cost them with our stunt.

All the rest of the night, and then the rest of the weekend, we reloaded as many news- sources as we could find, searched on every search term. All we found were a few be- mused tweets and that from people who'd been in the queue; almost everyone, it seemed, had discarded the booty we'd distributed or not bothered to plug it in.

In hindsight, I could see that this made perfect sense. No one cared about what a human spammer shoved into your hands, it was assumed that anything you got that way was junk. That's why they had to hand out so many brochures to get a single person to sign up for a gym membership or whatnot. Add to that the antique media -- you couldn't even do a rub-transfer, you had to fit it to a USB connector, and half the PCs I saw these days didn't even have one -- and the risks of sticking dodgy files on your computer and it was perfectly reasonable that nearly all of our little footballs went in the bin.

What a misery.

“I'm a flop,” I said, lying awake and rigid on Sunday night, while Twenty sat up and worked on her chem homework for the next morning. “I might as well go back to Bradford. What a child I was to think that I could beat them. They're sodding huge. They practically run the government. They're going to shut down every channel for showing around video except the ones they control, and no one will be able to be a filmmaker except through them. It's just like music -- the way they went after every music download site they couldn't control.”

26 gave no sign of even hearing me, just working through her problem-set, tapping on the screen and at the keyboard.

“The worst part is that I got all those people out there, used up all their time, put them all at risk, and it was for nothing. They must think I'm an absolute tosser. I want to stick my head in the ground for a million years. Maybe then, everyone will have forgot my stupidity and shame.”

Twenty set down her laptop and blew at the fringe of her mohican that fell across her forehead. She'd died it candy-apple red that week. “Cecil, you're wallowing. It is a deeply unattractive sight. What's more: it is a piece of enormous ego for you to decide that we all were led into this by you, like lambs led by a shepherd. We went into Leicester Square on Friday because we all thought it would work. You didn't make the plan, you got it started. We all made the plan. We all cocked up. But do you see RD or Chester or Jem moping?

Look at the freaking Germans! They're out in Hackney tonight, trying to sneak into all- hours clubs and planning on drinking their faces off no matter what! So leave it out, all right?”

She was right, of course. Not that I felt any better about it. “All right, you're right. It's not just about me. But it's still awful and rotten and miserable. What do we do? They buy the laws, attack our families, put us in prison --”

26 picked up her laptop again. “Cecil, I don't want to talk to you when you're like this. You know the answer as well as I do: you're doing something that they want you to stop. They fear what you do. They fear what we all do. So long as you keep doing it, you're winning. You don't need to go on a commando raid to beat them: you just need to keep on making your own films.”

I don't think anyone ever said anything more important to me than those ten words: “you just need to keep on making your own films.”

I threw myself into the project, stopping work only long enough to eat and snatch a few hours sleep, or to go out for a little fishing in the skips to find some food. I hardly left my room apart from that. My skin grew pale from the hours indoors, and I noticed that when I went up and down the stairs, I felt all sorts of awkward pulling and pinching sensations from deep in my muscles, especially around my bum and back and neck. 26 said I was sitting too much and made me download some yoga videos, which we did together in my room when she could force me off the box.