E-Mail This Article to a Friend Drop that screener! The cautionary tale of Carmine Caridi BY GERALD PEARY

Sopranos profiling? The Italian-American wise-guy roles he acted in his sleep might have tipped off the feds to Carmine Caridi. He’s been mobster Frank Costello in Bugsy (1991) and Mafia top dog Sam Giancano in Ruby (1992), and he played different-but-similar gangsters, Carmine Rosata and Albert Volpe, in The Godfather, Part II (1974) and The Godfather, Part III (1990). Are crooks and cops from the same mold? He appeared 15 times as Detective Vince Gotelli on NYPD Blue. You might have heard the go-straight-to-jail news: Caridi, now 70, is the first member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) to be caught red-handed transferring to others the VHS screeners he was given to watch before casting his Academy Awards ballot.

In 2004, for the first time, each Academy member was required to sign a pledge "not to allow the screeners to circulate outside my residence or office" and "not to allow them to be reproduced in any fashion, and not to sell them or to give them away at any time." Caridi signed, but then (this he’s admitted) he did what he’s done the last three years: send from LA a box of 60 screeners to one Russell William Sprague of Homewood, Illinois. Caridi’s story is that he received no compensation for the screeners — he sent them to Sprague because the Illini man is such a film buff.

Hmmmm. Okay. And that’s sort of Sprague’s tale, though the FBI came to his house and found the kind of duplicating machines that convert VHS tapes into DVDs. Sprague confessed that he made six copies of each film, but only, he said, for friends and family; no money changed hands.

There’s a different version of affairs from the other side. Warner Brothers VP and intellectual property counsel David Kaplan asked the FBI to investigate when he was heard that prime 2003 Hollywood features were available for sale on the Internet. Among these were seven Oscar-nominated films including Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World and Mystic River. When the FBI got hold of some of these cassettes, they were traced, via digital watermark encoding, to those that Caridi had received.

It was Caridi who was first questioned about peddling these new movies on the Internet, a federal crime that,on each count, could bring a three-to-five-year jail sentence and a $500,000 fine. It was a frightened Caridi who finked and fingerpointed and sent the FBI scurrying to Illinois. Sprague has a March 30 trial date at which the US Attorney General’s Office will charge him with "conspiracy and copyright infringement." Caridi is being sued in federal court by both Warner Bros. Entertainment and Columbia Pictures. On February 3, Caridi, a 22-year member, was expelled from AMPAS. Even if in fact he wasn’t compensated, Caridi’s admission that he gave away screeners was sufficient ground for expulsion. Never again can he vote for the Oscars.

And what about us film critics, who, like AMPAS members, have a pile of screeners on hand? Will I be arrested if, for example, I show one of these to my mother? And do I dare throw out screener cassettes that I don’t want? What if they’re plucked out of my garbage can and find their way onto e-Bay? Will I go to Alcatraz? To Guantánamo Bay?

David McNary, a Variety reporter, noted in a recent column that the Academy agreement "offered no specifics on how to get rid of screeners," so he queried John Pavlik, an AMPAS spokesman. Here’s Pavlik’s advice: "We’re telling members to cut up the discs and pull out the tape from the cassettes if they want to throw them out."

Well, why not give it a try? I’m pausing from my typing now to rip the cellophane off the box of a duplicate cassette I possess of the 2003 teen film Blue Car (Miramax Films inadvertently shipped me two copies). "Do not touch the tape inside," is the direction on the tape, but I’m ignoring it, because I have a higher duty to AMPAS. I’m smashing the plastic now; I’m pulling out the tape. I’m ripping the tape! Blue Car is an unwatchable mess, but, whew, I’m not being hauled into federal court.

BASED ON A HUCKLEBERRY FINN-LIKE cowpoke tall tale by Arkansas cult writer Charles Portis, True Grit (1969) is a passable Western movie, more for the inspired cast of offbeat villains (Dennis Hopper, Robert Duvall, Jeff Corey) than for John Wayne’s one-eyed, pot-bellied federal marshal, Rooster Cogburn. For this caricature, the Duke won the Oscar he should have received for his not-nominated Lear-like Ethan Edwards in John Wayne’s The Searchers (1956). Part of the Coolidge Corner’s "Famous Families’ Favorite Flicks" series, True Grit will screen at 7 p.m. this Monday, March 8; realtor and activist Chobee Hoy leads the discussion with her son, Brookline selectman and attorney Gil Hoy, and her daughter, Tracy Hoy Clark, a realtor and mother.

Gerald Peary can be reached at gpeary@world.std.com