Free Culture
How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity
Chapter One
Jon Else is a documentary filmmaker, who has been very successful in spreading his art. He is a teacher of other
filmmakers and, as a teacher myself, I envy the loyalty and admiration he has built in his students. (I met, by
accident, two of his students at a dinner party. He was their god.)
Else worked on a documentary that I was involved with. At a break, he told me a story about the freedom to create
with film in America today.
In 1990, Else was working on a documentary about Wagner's Ring Cycle, and the story was to be told by the
stagehands at the San Francisco Opera. Stagehands are a particularly funny and colorful aspect of opera. During a
show, they hang out below the stage in the grips' lounge and in the lighting loft. They are a perfect contrast to the
art on the stage.
In the course of one of these performances, Else was shooting some stagehands playing checkers. In the corner of
the room, there was a television set. Playing on the television set, as the stagehands played checkers, as the San
Francisco Opera played Wagner, was The Simpsons. And as Else judged it, this touch helped capture the oddness of
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