The provincial town of Vierzon has had little recognition since 1866, when France’s first combine harvester was developed in its workshops.
So the news that it is home to an internet pirate wanted by Hollywood caused a distinct frisson. “Wow,” said Hugo, an 18-year-old student. “We’re going to be famous now.”
Not everyone shares his delight at being the centre of international attention. The burly, blonde, female security guard at Cin? Lumière, the seven-screen cinema where blockbusters have been recorded illegally, frowned at the mention of the mysterious fugitive whom her employers have been trying to catch with measures such as night-vision goggles and posting detectives behind a cardboard cutout of John Travolta.
The projectionist, preparing to show Inglourious Basterds and Final Destination 4, said: “My boss doesn’t want us to say anything.”
The troubles started a year after the cinema opened in 2005, in the building where agricultural equipment was once manufactured. Two days after Spider-Man III was released, Columbia Pictures called to say that four pirated copies of the film were circulating on the internet. One was recorded in Russia, two in Asia — and the other in Vierzon.
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Columbia’s technicians knew because each copy of every movie was labelled through tags on the pictures and the soundtrack that cannot be detected by cinemagoers. The pirate used the name Thx F**k on the web, but not even Columbia could establish the identity behind the signature.
So when Pirates of the Caribbean III was released, Cin? Lumière asked the French Association for the Fight Against Internet Piracy to send two of its best investigators. They spent four days trying to spot the camcorder, mobile telephone or MP3 player used for the illicit recordings. They sat among the audience, slipped into the projectionist’s cabin and hid by the screen, behind Travolta — all to no avail.
Thx F**k had disappeared, or so it seemed. Then, last winter, the cinema was warned that the soundtrack to Valkyrie had been pirated there before being dubbed on to pictures of the movie recorded secretly in Germany for distribution on French internet sites. Recordings of the soundtracks of Slumdog Millionaire, Che: Part II, Yes Man and The Day the Earth Stood Still followed.
With distributors threatening to boycott cinemas that failed to tackle piracy, Cin? Lumière bought some infra-red goggles to detect the culprit — again without luck. Finally, it tipped off the local press in the hope that publicity would deter the pirate. Managers thought that Thx F**k would be held up as a villain participating in a global internet scam said to cost £1.2 billion a year.
However, Thx F**k seems to have become a cult figure in Vierzon. “It’s not theft,” Matthieu Hamon, 22, from Brittany and holidaying in central France, said. “If I was sitting next to someone secretly recording a film I would not denounce him. It would just make me smile.”