It was a Friday evening in 1975, and Woody Wise was driving from Los Angeles to Palm Springs, with his two kids in the car. He had picked them up from school in a rush, but they weren’t going on vacation. They were hiding out from the FBI.
While Wise was on the road, the FBI descended on his Burbank apartment, guns drawn, as his landlady would later tell him. Woody’s crime? Film piracy. The cops would make away with dozens of movies. But this being 1975, he wasn’t trading in DVDs or even VHS tapes. He was trading in film. Real film. Long before the internet’s bandwidth could handle the traffic of a single photo, Hollywood studios saw Woody and others like him as the Pirate Bay of the 1960s and ‘70s.
“The FBI had a real hard-on for me,” Wise told me recently when I visited him at his home on the outskirts of LA. “They thought I was the big guy, but I wasn’t the big guy.” Wise wasn’t the biggest name in the film piracy world of the 1960s. But he certainly was a name. And even the FBI couldn’t kill his obsessive love for collecting movies.
When it comes to media, we’re incredibly spoiled here in the 21st century. Is there a particular old movie or TV show you’d like to see? You can probably find it on DVD or a streaming service like Filmstruck. (Most of the time, anyway.) In the 1960s and ‘70s, if you didn’t catch something in the cinema or on TV, you were usually out of luck.
Unless you could find a pirated copy. There was a loose-knit community of pirates in the 1960s and ‘70s who would prefer to be called collectors. They operated in a gray area of movie legality, where handling a movie print outside of “official channels” set up by the movie studios probably meant that you were breaking the law. By the mid-1970s, the world of pre-video film and TV piracy quickly became a risky underground in which to participate. And in 1974 and 1975, at the behest of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), the FBI was knocking down doors to shut down the film collectors who sold movies from New York to Los Angeles.