The Many False Starts of the Digital Cinema Revolution - Inventing the Movies

http://www.digitalcinemareport.com/node/278

 

Submitted by Nick Dager on Thu, 08/28/2008 - 17:18

 

By Scott Kirsner

 

Scott Kirsner is the author of the new book “Inventing the Movies,” a technological history of Hollywood that also presents the first chronicle of the digital cinema revolution. This is an exclusive excerpt for Digital Cinema Report. Kirsner is also a contributing writer at Variety and editor of the blog http://cinematech.blogspot.com. The book is available as a paperback at http://www.amazon.com/Inventing-Movies-Hollywoods-Between-Innovation/dp/tags-on-product/1438209991>Amazon</a.

 

When did the digital cinema revolution begin, and who started it?

 

A handful of Hollywood soothsayers were predicting the imminent arrival of digital cinema in the middle of the 20th century. In 1949, the independent producer Samuel Goldwyn, who’d helped to launch three Hollywood studios (Paramount, MGM, and United Artists), anticipated the development of video-on-demand systems that would allow movie fans to view the movies they wanted to see at home, as well as methods for delivering a movie electronically to thousands of theaters, saving the studios the cost of making film prints.

 

A few years later, in 1954, Albert Abramson, a CBS television engineer, published an article titled, “A Motion-Picture Studio of 1968.” In it, he sketched out how digital cinematography and a film-free distribution system would work: movies would be shot with electronic cameras, and then “sent by radio-relay or coaxial cable to the theaters. Five or fifty theaters in an area may be receiving the same program. An area may cover the whole state, a county, or just a large city. But no theater is shipped the actual picture tape.” Abramson also expected that by 1968, a new generation of electronic cameras would be totally self-contained and cordless – capable of capturing 3-D imagery and transmitting it wirelessly back to the production center.

 

In 1955, Abramson followed up with a book, Electronic Motion Pictures, which began with the declaration, “The cinema has entered the electronic age… Motion picture production is changing from a mechanical process to an electrical one…”

 

Anyone involved in the movie industry at the time could immediately grasp the benefits: producing film was an industrial process that involved noxious chemicals and expensive machinery. The quality of film prints wasn’t perfect from the start, and every time they ran through the projector there was the chance to accumulate dust or scratches. Once a movie’s run was over, it was returned to the distributor, where it would be either reconditioned and sent to a second- or third-run cinema, or destroyed.

 

In those early days of television, shifting to electronic distribution and projection felt inevitable. But like many enthusiastic visionaries before them, the only mistake Goldwyn and Abramson made was expecting change to come quickly.

 

Even on the verge of the 21st century, filmmakers, cinematographers, studios, theater owners, and the movie industry’s equipment suppliers remained stubbornly attached to celluloid, and the companies that sought to make the cinema a digital medium encountered countless cold shoulders. Upgrading an industry with such a vast web of interdependent players, each with its own financial motivations and a long list of justifications for preserving the status quo, is rarely an easy task.

 

In the 1990s, the telecommunications company then known as Pacific Bell created an initiative called “Cinema of the Future,” to promote the use of its fiber-optic lines for movie distribution. PacBell successfully sent the movie Bugsy from the Sony Pictures lot to a trade show at the Anaheim Convention Center in 1992.

 

But a 1995 demonstration for cinema owners, held during the annual ShoWest gathering, didn’t go so well. Telecommunications snafus interrupted the presentation of clips from movies such as A River Runs Through It, and Variety dismissed the demo as “a shabby display of makeshift technology at a Las Vegas strip mall.”

 

Though the company had seriously considered building a nationwide fiber optic network to deliver movies to every theater in the U.S., after SBC Communications acquired Pacific Bell in 1997, executives grew impatient of waiting for the future of cinema to arrive and shut down the initiative.

 

Two complete outsiders took the next step forward. Stefan Avalos and Lance Weiler were friends who had met in the film department of Bucks County Community College. Avalos, 30, was working as a teacher’s assistant, and Weiler, 28, was taking classes and hustling for work as a production assistant on film and TV shoots. Both were still trying to figure out a way to crack the movie business from their base in Pennsylvania, midway between Philadelphia and New York City.

 

Avalos and Weiler had heard that some cash-strapped filmmakers were starting to use digital video cameras to make movies on the cheap, but “we weren’t excited about shooting on video,” Avalos said. “We were kind of film snobs.” That was, until Avalos, tinkering around with the way his computer could manipulate video footage, stumbled across a way to make the images look much more like film, shaking off some of their TV-like sharpness.

 

So Avalos and Weiler set out to make a movie about the Jersey devil, a mythical creature, and the fate of a television crew that ventures into the pine barrens of New Jersey to investigate its possible existence. To make The Last Broadcast, the pair used a personal computer, editing and visual effects software from Adobe, and a semi-professional digital video camera from Sony, the DCR-VX1000. (For some sequences, they also used an $80 toy video camera made by Tyco.) They shot the movie in the winter of 1996-1997, in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. By the time they’d finished the month-long shoot, working mostly with friends and actors willing to donate their time, they tallied up the costs of videotape and food for the cast and crew, and came up with a total budget of $900.

 

“We kind of did it on a lark: How little can you make something for?” said Weiler. They spent about nine months in post-production, editing the movie and applying Avalos’ “film look” to their digital footage.

 

Before they’d finished, Avalos and Weiler were invited to Belgium to speak about digital movie-making at the Flanders International Film Festival, and it was there that they first saw a high-resolution digital projector, made by Barco, a Belgian company.

 

Even though it was simply a souped-up version of the liquid crystal display (LCD) projector that might sit in a corporate conference room, “most people wouldn’t have known the difference between this projector and a film projector,” Weiler said.

 

Back in the States, they began thinking that if they could get their hands on a projector like the one they’d seen in Belgium, they wouldn’t have to shell out several thousand dollars to make a 35-millimeter celluloid print of their movie. They hoped to premiere The Last Broadcast in March 1998 at the County Theater in their hometown of Doylestown, Pennsylvania. So they started sending e-mails to different manufacturers of digital projectors, asking them to donate some equipment for the showing. “Nobody responded,” Weiler said.

 

As the date for the premiere drew closer, “the movie still wasn’t done rendering, and we didn’t have a projector,” Weiler said. Renting one, they learned, would cost about $3,000 a day. So Weiler decided to get crafty. He sent another batch of e-mails to the projector manufacturers, this time mixing up the names of the companies, so that each company received an e-mail addressed to one of their competitors. That sly strategy sparked a response from Digital Projection, Inc., a Georgia company that had been the first to license a new technology from Texas Instruments that used an array of tiny mirrors to reflect light onto the screen. Digital Projection signed on as a sponsor of the premiere of The Last Broadcast; Weiler and Avalos, scrappy indie filmmakers that they were, didn’t spend a dime.

 

The projector that Weiler and Avalos helped lug into the County Theater’s projection booth had come straight from the White House, where Tom Hanks had used it to show President Clinton an HBO documentary he’d made about the Apollo space program. It was a tight fit: on either side of the projector, there were about two inches to spare.

 

“For the duration of the one-week run, we had to be the technicians,” Avalos said. “We had to learn to change the bulb.” The projector was connected to a tape deck that would play the movie from a DigiBeta digital videotape.

 

“It was an incredible feeling as the lights went down and the projector started up, and then at the end of the movie when people applauded,” Weiler said. “The movie itself felt like it went by really quickly.”

 

“People paid money to go to the movies, and for probably the first time, they were watching digital video be projected,” Avalos added.

 

Over the week-long run, The Last Broadcast grossed $5,040, earning a 560 percent return on the duo’s initial investment. A film critic for the Philadelphia Inquirer called it “a smart, assured work – no matter how exactly it was made,” awarding it three-and-a-half stars out of four.

 

But digital cinema didn’t win over Hollywood in 1998, or the following year, when George Lucas, Texas Instruments, and CineComm collaborated to have Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace shown in four digitally-enabled auditoriums.

 

The decade that followed the debut of The Last Broadcast saw major investments in digital cinema by companies like Hughes Digital Cinema, Sony Electronics, Christie Digital, Disney, Technicolor, Warner Bros., Kodak, Boeing, Access Integrated Technologies, and Qualcomm. Individuals like Paul Breedlove at Texas Instruments and Phil Barlow at Disney made tremendous contributions, tirelessly pitching the benefits of digital distribution and projection. The studios spent more than $8 million on their Digital Cinema Initiatives joint venture to develop a technical standard – and to try to hash out a business model – for digital cinema.

 

Along the way, people like NATO chief John Fithian cautioned that theater owners would not be willing to pay the full cost of investing in digital cinema equipment, and beloved film critic Roger Ebert warned that putting pixels on the screen might affect audiences differently than the flicker of film. “Wouldn’t it be ironic if digital audiences found they were missing an ineffable part of the movie-going experience?” he asked, speculating that celluloid created a different psychological state than digital projection.

 

If we consider the digital cinema “tipping point” to have arrived when more than half of U.S. screens are capable of receiving and projecting movies in digital form, then we’re still living in the celluloid age. Digital Cinema Implementation Partners, the joint venture representing the three largest chains in the country, has only just begun its roll-out of digital gear, and studios are still haggling over the fees they will pay to have movies sent to theaters in digital form.

 

We’re closer to the tipping point than we were in 1949, when Samuel Goldwyn laid out his vision of the future – but we’re not there just yet.