David Denby wrote a piece for The New Yorker that’s been getting a lot of play. “Big Pictures” is in many respects some sort of apocalyptic vision of movie theater visits becoming a thing of the past while being replaced with watching videos on the iPod in your lap. Unfortunately, for all the absurd sympathy given to the multi-billion dollar studios and all the fear-mongering towards consumers, the article’s most marked by an irrational fear of change.
As said, despite some downplayed caveats, the piece is largely a doom-and-gloom view of what is happening with digital technologies finding mainstream roles in the movie industry, particularly regarding the manner in which movies are viewed. For maximum effect, there is a lot of nostalgia for the good ol’ days of seeing great movies at nice theaters with enthusiastic audiences. Meanwhile, modern times are characterized by people growing discontent with theaters and turning to the smallest screens they can find, on which they can barely make out what’s happening, and this trend spells the downfall of all that is good and filmic. Denby does later discuss sitting down and actually enjoying some movies on decent home theater setups, but he can’t resist returning to the iPod or small portable DVD players as the end game of dissipating theater audiences. He seems to believe that kids will all grow up not only being used to small screens, but desiring them. Of course, this seems to fly in the face of all industry trends of figuring out ways to make the screens of all types of devices, from cell phones to televisions, as big as humanly possible. Even he eventually concedes that televisions will likely end up the size of walls, and yet, this can’t compare to the size of theater screens that force viewers to “submit” to the movies. A variety of other complaints are made about digital formats, from compression and sharpness and whatever, most of which is exaggerated by nostalgia, influenced by the flaws of already old technologies and a misunderstanding of the technology’s inevitable ability to give the filmmaker complete control over virtually everything. If the filmmaker wants that “painterly” look that celluloid might provide more naturally, they’ll get it either via computers or some combination of lenses and lighting or any other technology.
While some superficial concerns are provided about irreconcilable differences between film and digital, the running theme in the piece seems to be a fear that watching movies without a large audience will destroy an extremely valuable part of the experience. I say, maybe, but that experience doesn’t really exist anymore anyway. Aside from a few specific theaters like the ArcLight (discussed later), the movie-going experience is rife with annoyances. People are downright inconsiderate of others, and any quick Google search (of say, “movie theater attendance”) would yield tons of firsthand accounts of horrible experiences. People fumble with food, they talk to friends, they bring children or even babies to inappropriate films, they check their illuminated phones for texts, etc. God forbid some teens decide to turn your screening into their personal episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000. This is why people are leaving theaters for the comfort of their own homes. I caught an 11 PM showing of The Matrix Reloaded on a Saturday night back, and there were at least two crying babies in the theater. When I saw Sideways, a man’s cell phone rang not once, not twice but thrice. These instances are hardly exclusive to myself. What’s a viewer to do? If things go right, they politely notify the offender and the nuisance stops. At worst, they try to find a manager, miss part of the movie, and maybe get something done about it. Everyone knows this, except it seems for movie studios that continue to blame decreasing attendances on everything but this. Sure, when an audience is polite and really connects with the film, there’s a fantastic energy there that can’t be replicated at home, but except for when I pay top dollar for ArcLight tickets, that’s only happened for me once over the last three years.
So when Denby talks about the great social aspects of the movie theater, I say great. Point me and the rest of America to those theaters, and don’t tell me I need a souped-up De Lorean to get there.
In a theatre, you submit to a screen; you want to be mastered by it, not struggle to get cozy with it….
The neighborhood theatres that thrived at the same time were easier to deal with. Slipping in and out of them, we avoided the stern white-shoed matrons who patrolled the aisles; sometimes we arrived in the middle of the movie and stayed on until it reached the same point in the next show—we just wanted to go to the movies.
Compare the above two statements. They appear several paragraphs apart, but I can’t for the life of me figure out how they can coexist. For someone arguing that watching a movie on anything but a movie screen is a disservice to the movie, I can’t even come close to understanding the apparent nostalgia for sitting down to watch a movie at any point but its beginning. Now that’s a disservice that few could intelligently contend with.
And it brings up another advantage of home viewing. People don’t need to arrive at a set time. If they can set aside two hours to watch a film, then they can watch it. No one else’s schedule gets in the way.
Additionally, there’s been a lot of talk around the ‘net about this notion of “submit[ting]” to the movie and how it’s exclusive to the movie theater experience. I say hogwash. Sure, my television may not physically dominate me, but if I turn the lights down my brain is perfectly capable of focusing on the screen without contemplating what’s going on with the furniture it sits on. Granted, a bigger screen would be nice, but as already stated, larger and cheaper screens are just around the corner. That’s a temporary setback, not an inherent limitation. Critics also tend to bring up the tendency for distraction at home. To that, I really only have to refer to the examples of in-theater distractions that I’ve already rattled off, but I’ll say more. At home there is a matter of self-control. If you really don’t want to be distracted or interrupted in the midst of a film, there is no reason you can’t do that, barring a natural disaster. Go to the bathroom before you press play, fill your drink, turn off your phone, prep the lights and enjoy. Perhaps most importantly, make sure you have the time to watch the film uninterrupted. Whether you’re watching a movie on DVD or some On Demand network, you have access to the running time. There is no reason why a viewing experience at home cannot be focused and distraction free. You sure as hell have more control over your environment at home than you do at the theater.
At poorly run multiplexes, projector bulbs go dim, the prints develop scratches or turn yellow, the soles of your shoes stick to the floor, people jabber on cell phones, and rumbles and blasts bleed through the walls.
It’s hard to call such theaters “poorly run” when they make up the vast majority of American theaters. That’s the standard. A “poorly run” theater would be a nightmare.
The lobby contains a restaurant, a bar, and a book-and-gift shop. Before the movie, people hang out and have a drink or leaf through a hot new novel or a movie-star biography. The rest rooms are spotless, and the concession stand serves delicious coffee. All the seats are reserved, and they are plush, with plenty of legroom. The steeply raked auditorium is dark, and insulated from the sound of the other theatres in the same multiplex. Is this some sort of upper-bourgeois dream of the great good place? A padded cell for wealthy movie nuts? No, it’s an actual multiplex, the ArcLight, on Sunset Boulevard near Vine.The idea of user-friendly theatres may be catching on. Sumner Redstone’s daughter Shari, the president of National Amusements, the family-owned theatre business, has vowed to convert half the lobbies of the chain’s hundred and nineteen theatres to social spaces with comfortable lounges, and to build more. Martinis will be served; newspapers and magazines will be offered. If theatres go in this Starbucks-plus-cocktails direction, the older audience might come back, with a positive effect on filmmaking, and the value of the movies as an art form and an experience could be preserved. After you are seated at the ArcLight, an usher standing at the front of the auditorium tells you who wrote and directed the movie and how long it is. He promises that he and another usher will stay for a while to make sure that the projection and the sound are up to snuff. There are no advertisements following his speech, and only four coming attractions. The movie begins, and you are utterly lost in it.
The ArcLight is indeed an amazing theater. However, the Arclight has one other advantage that Denby missed, and it’s the fact that there is a strict no talking and no cell phones policy. Patrons will be removed for being a nuisance, and the presence of ushers not only ensures that but also cements that policy in the theater’s atmosphere. For many, that’s where it’s appeal is, not in the trendy lobby. It’s the in-theater experience, where people are there to see and love movies, not to socialize or treat it like a private playground.
On the other hand, the ArcLight’s mention raises a very important issue that Denby ignores entirely, that being the economic pressures on consumers. The piece spends a whole lot of time worrying about the production costs and returns for studios, but what about the economic factors at play with the viewers? Normal ticket prices are already north of $8 for most of the country, with urban areas even higher. The luxuries of the ArcLight are factored in as an additional premium. If concessions are involved, the price to go see a movie becomes really high. For all the wondering about home theaters gaining popularity, it seems obvious that cost is involved. Sure, you could go pay top dollar for the theater experience, or you could wait three to five months for the DVD, which will likely cost two to two and a half times a single ticket price. Surely that’s playing a role in the market. I know it does for me, and that’s ignoring the entire Netflix enterprise.
Young people get many more movies sent their way than are warranted by their numbers—almost half of the audience but only twenty-five per cent of the population is aged between twelve and thirty….
The trouble is that grownups are less likely than kids to go on opening weekends (they wait for reviews and reports from friends), so, apart from the fall awards season, when most of the serious movies are released, they don’t pull their weight in terms of what gets made.
Mr. Denby seems to be placing a certain amount of blame here on the grownups themselves, which is unfair to say the least. One can argue about whether their waiting for critical and peer reviews is a good or a bad thing. Perhaps it’s a positive sign that they desire quality films. Or perhaps it’s a sign that this demographic is less than inclined to be exploratory, and instead wait to be told what they should or should not see rather than deciding (and seeing) for themselves. Neither condition is particularly important right now since there’s pretty universal agreement that there is very little grownup entertainment being produced anyway. Roger Ebert has been rightly attacking the industry over this for years and years, and I’d say he has correctly pinpointed one of the key oppositions, that being the MPAA’s rating system. An ‘R’ rating must, by definition, be appropriate for someone as young as 17 years old. Since ‘NC-17′ and unrated films are virtually banned in practice if not in agreements between theater chains and the studios, the ‘R’ is the de facto adult rating. (The ‘NC-17′ rating has the unfortunate history of being the successor to the ‘X’, which was largely used to accompany pornography, while choosing to go without a rating flies in the face of the MPAA itself, an organization funded by and serving all of the notable studios and theater chains.) While Roger Ebert and a handful of others continue to try and lobby for a true adult rating, and while the MPAA’s ratings board has announced some superficial and inconsequential reforms, it’s unlikely the Hollywood machinery is going to begin catering to a grownup audience without that audience finding its own voice.
Should they continue to shoot on film or switch to digital? Digital technology opens enormous possibilities for filmmakers, and even for exhibitors, but it also offers a radical break with the many ways of watching movies that have given us pleasure in the past.
It needs to be pointed out that – for the big studios at least – the method of production has little to do with the method of distribution. For starters, two recent blockbusters in Revenge of the Sith and Superman Returns were shot wholly digitally but were primarily projected on film at movie theaters due to the few digitally-equipped theaters currently in the U.S. Besides, movies shot on celluloid are now routinely transferred into digital formats, called Digital Intermediates, for post-production processes like color timing. These two formats interact all the time. Shooting a movie in one format does not mean it must be distributed in the same manner, especially for the big studios where the cost of switching formats is negligible.
It also needs to be pointed out that digital distribution in no way precludes movies from being projected in theaters. Denby acknowledges this later in the article, but for this moment seems to believe that digital inherently involves a move to home theaters or his often mentioned and fear-inducing example of the iPod.
Finally, I want to touch on two bits of studio propaganda that Denby seems to repeat. One is that “theatre attendance is holding up.” This is actually not true. Attendance was widely reported to have dropped by 9% in 2005, and a quick search tells me that 2006 was trending down some 5% by May (link). The overall box office is holding up, and generally climbing, but that has a whole lot to do with rising ticket prices. Attendance has actually been falling. There’s a reason that the film industry in the United States is one of very few in the world that don’t report actual ticket sales. For that matter, it’s one of the only industries in the U.S. that reports solely dollar values and not number of units. CDs and video games are recorded by units and revenue. Instead studios push out box office revenues every Sunday afternoon and con the press and public to believe their nonsense about the latest tentpole summer release breaking some record. Sure it did, if you ignore inflation and other factors contributing to higher ticket prices. Actual ticket sales would yield an interesting and useful number. What we get is cynical public relations spin.
Secondly…
After years of double-digit growth, DVD sales, while still high, have levelled off and cancelled out the recovery at the box office.
Don’t let this blurb mislead you. DVD sales growth has indeed slowed, but that doesn’t mean sales are dropping. They’re just increasing at a slower pace. The studios like to pretend sales are falling and that’s why they’re in a rush to get consumers on the Blu-Ray and HD-DVD gravy trains. Sure, they do hope to get people to buy the same movies over again in a new format, but the new HD disc war is also about who gets to control the medium. The different studios all have stakes in one or both of the new formats, and there is much money to be made from being tied to the format that is ultimately used most (assuming either of these stick around), especially when they may have missed the boat on being behind the DVD tech.
But more importantly, DVD sales are not dropping. Sales growth, however, is, and no one should be the least bit surprised by this. That’s exactly what happens when a new piece of technology, like DVD players, reaches market saturation. If Paramount wants to blame this phenomenon on why they might not turn a profit on Mission: Impossible III well, by all means, but it’d be patently ridiculous for such a large company to not understand the basics of market penetration.
My apologies for this rant being a tad unfocused, but well, the article itself wasn’t exactly streamlined and it meandered into a lot of topics I felt were worthy of touching upon.
