I finally view "The Fellowship of the Ring" in its entirety for the first time at a guesthouse in Luang Prabang, Laos. It's common for guesthouses along backpacker trails across Asia to host films, usually on a large-screen television, predominantly bootleg VCDs. It's a nice way to sell some extra beer, attract new guests and bring in some additional revenue.

I offer to show any of my films at the guesthouse. I am thinking maybe a double feature of zombie flicks with "Dawn of the Dead" and "Evil Dead," or a night of bad cops with "The Bad Lieutenant" and "Romeo is Bleeding." The managers of the guesthouse are thinking money: They want "Lord of the Rings." I say "no problem." After a couple of glitches getting the video out from the iBook to the TV, the movie plays to an audience of maybe 10 to 12 people. Far less than the full house for "Harry Potter" the night previous.

The little things I had overlooked about the quality when just previewing come into the glaring foreground with an audience. The sound quality is barely adequate. The color is far from rich. It would seem that this bootleg was created by smuggling a camera into a theater and filming the screen. You can hear the audience chuckling at the jokes. A couple of minutes are missing here and there, either because a battery change was in order, or a head was in the screen. Characters speaking in the Elven tongue are subtitled in (presumably) Chinese, instead of (presumably) English. Credits are entirely left off at the end. All in all the quality is in the realm of passable, but barely.

Still, in a country like Laos, where I was unable to find a single movie theater, you take what you can get. "The Fellowship of the Ring" now sits in a stack of over 20 DVDs awaiting its turn to be played again. I am trying to fight the urge to return to the DVD market for more carnage and needless weight to tow. I do need to replace "Natural Born Killers," and there are dozens more shops waiting to tempt me. But mostly I am trying to grasp the economics at work here. I've been visiting countries where the per capita income is often less than $1,000 a year, and it has cauterized whatever sympathy I have left for the gluttons in the Hollywood food chain.

I realize that I am depriving the very artists I most appreciate of compensation, but I rationalize it all away with the thought that a disproportionate piece of the pie ends up in the hands of the same soft-porn schlock merchants pumping out the tons of trash that can't even sell for $1.50 in some little stall on a side street in Saigon.

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