They had screens then, wide ones, built for horizontal epics shot in CinemaScope and VistaVision and Todd-AO, designed to combat the boxlike black-and-white upstart called television.
In the prologue for “Around the World in 80 Days,” winner of the 1956 Academy Award for best picture, Edward R. Murrow (with cigarette) appears in a book-lined library and lectures the camera about Jules Verne and the wonders of transportation. Then the screen image widens from a 35 mm square to the panoramic glory of the Todd-AO format, as a 1956-era rocket blasts off in the desert, the roar and flames enveloping the viewer.
Murrow, the voice and hangdog face of unassailable authority — and now, a half-century later, the subject of one of this year’s crop of best picture Oscar nominees, “Good Night, and Good Luck.” — offers the pronouncement: “Speed is good only when wisdom leads the way.”
Fifty years later, moviegoing habits are changing at a speed that would’ve spun Murrow’s head.
Increasingly, moviegoers are being replaced by movie-stayers, proud owners of home-entertainment systems with big, flat, wide high-definition screens — the rec-room equivalent of CinemaScope.
Business at American movie theaters dropped 7.5 percent in 2005. Make no mistake: The admission total, 1.42 billion, represents a lot of people who haven’t yet let the harangue of preshow advertisements or the cost of the nachos dent their habits.
Yet today you can download “Battlestar Galactica” or “Lost” — and soon enough, probably, feature films, heavy on the close-ups — onto all 2.5 inches of a video iPod screen. You can park your carcass in front of your monster flattie in the living room and order “The 40 Year-Old Virgin” on pay-per-view. You can pop in a DVD to watch on a portable player as you ride the Brown Line home. (That was me the other week. A year ago I would’ve done a Danny Thomas spit-take had anyone suggested I’d be watching a lap-size movie on a train.)
For now, virtually all films still enter the marketplace the old-fashioned way. They play the theaters, and three or four months later they come to DVD and pay-per-view. But a few low-budget pictures, such as Steven Soderbergh’s “Bubble,” are getting out there in a different, multipronged way, with near-simultaneous release in theaters and to home screens.
A JPMorgan study released in December sounded a dire warning bell for theater owners, should mainstream Hollywood pictures shift to a multiplatform release scheme. The study predicted a 49 percent decrease in traditional box office revenue if movies were made available simultaneously in the theater and on DVD. DVD sales could increase 78 percent, according to the study, and rentals could rise by 64 percent.
The winner? The movie studios, whose revenues could gain 36 percent overall.
The loser? Exhibitors.
“If the release windows collapse and the product becomes homogenized,” says John Fithian, president of the National Association of Theater Owners, “cinemas are in substantial danger.” And Fithian wonders: If Hollywood starts releasing movies in all formats simultaneously, will the movies themselves become smaller?
Hollywood hardship
When TV sets began proliferating in American homes in the early 1950s, Hollywood took it in the shorts, box-officewise, before fighting back with a variety of showmanship strategies. Its development predated TV’s popularity by several years, but “This is Cinerama” walloped 1952 movie audiences with a wraparound screen — it was IMAX for the gray-flannel-suit era — and a dizzying swoop down the roller coaster at Coney Island. (Check out the Web site widescreenmuseum.com, curated by Houston’s Martin Hart; it’s obsessive about the widescreen delights of yore.)
A year after “This is Cinerama” came the far less nausea-invoking first CinemaScope production, “The Robe.” It was followed in quick succession by everything from “White Christmas” (in VistaVision) to “Oklahoma!” (shot in the Todd-AO process, handing audiences the biggest cornfields they’d ever seen). At the same time it was the smaller, grittier, black-and-white pictures that won most of the early ’50s Oscars: “From Here to Eternity” (1953), “On the Waterfront” (1954) and, in 1955, “Marty,” the first and only best picture based on a TV show.
With “Around the World in 80 Days” winning best picture of 1956, Hollywood insiders rewarded Mike Todd, a nervy outsider who nearly went bust financing the project. The Academy members were also reminding audiences that a big show was something you could not get on the small screen.
The perception that movie industry grosses started heading south thanks to television isn’t entirely true, says Tom Gunning, professor and chair of the Committee on Cinema and Media at the University of Chicago. After World War II, he says, the suburban leisure culture began cutting into moviegoing attendance. Military men came home from the war, fired up the barbecue and “had the neighbors over for highballs,” as Gunning puts it. “There was a whole new emphasis on domesticity.”
Gunning likens the current home-entertainment watch-at-home boom to the stereo culture of the 1950s and ’60s. The same way our parents and grandparents would “invite their friends over to hear a sound demonstration,” he says, early 21st Century consumers are blowing wads of cash on the highest-definition film viewing experience they can (or can’t) afford and wowing their peers.
You’d think Mark Cuban, co-head of 2929 Entertainment and the HDNet satellite TV network, would be the leading spokesperson for cocooning. He’s certainly the leading spokesman for releasing movies, such as “Bubble,” in a variety of platforms at once.
Not much came of the “Bubble’s” multiplatform release, but Cuban, who also co-owns the art-house theater chain Landmark Theatre Corp., says multiplatforming is the wave of the future. “It’s the Starbucks theory,” he says. “The more there are, the more coffee people consume.” All the same, he says, he would rather see “Bubble” in a theater than at home. And this is a man whose biggest home screen is so big he doesn’t even know how big (“somewhere over 100 inches,” he estimates).
Cuban points out that he is not a teenager, historically — according to recent demographic history, at least — the sought-after eyeballs. “Part of the fun if you’re 16,” he says, “is going to a horror movie such as `Hostel'” — never mind that 16-year-olds aren’t supposed to be seeing R-rated gorefests unaccompanied by a parent or adult guardian; millions do — “and then you’re text-messaging and instant-messaging your buddies about who’s getting slashed, and how.” If this sounds foreign to you, you are not 16.
`Improve the experience’
The theater owner association’s Fithian realizes that more and more customers are hacked off about the present-day moviegoing environment at its most intrusive. “We have to continue to innovate and improve the experience,” he says. He points to the forthcoming digital projection technology, “the biggest technical transition since the advent of sound,” he says. It will feature “resolution levels you can’t obtain at home.” Maybe that’ll reverse the decline in attendance. Maybe more good movies will help.
This summer brings a full load of costly would-be blockbusters: “Mission: Impossible III,” “Superman Returns,” “Poseidon.” Unlike Fithian, many industry observers think the specter of multiplatforming won’t shrink the number of spectacle-intensive blockbusters. Look at “The Chronicles of Narnia,” they say.
Whatever size the picture, “I find no substitute for the big-screen experience,” says William Mitchell, author of “What Do Pictures Want?” and professor of English and art history at the University of Chicago. “I mean, who wants to watch `King Kong’ on a cell phone? I just like watching movies with a lot of strangers and experiencing the shared reception of something. These substitute technologies, no matter how high the resolution on the screen in your den, they can’t give you that.”
Mitchell and others believe size will always matter, even in this any-size, anytime era of film consumption. “For every shrinking screen in every iPod, there needs to be an IMAX,” says Rich Gelfond. He is not what you’d call a disinterested party: He is the co-chairman and co-CEO of the IMAX Corp., which has done well with its 35 mm-to-IMAX “repurposing” of such populist successes as “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.” (Next up for IMAX, in simultaneous release with the conventional big-screen launch: “V for Vendetta.”)
The University of Chicago’s Gunning sees movies becoming more like music, “an ambient part of our environment rather than something we go to the movie theater to see. Though we’ll still go to the movie theaters. Some of us will, anyway.
“Things always work in opposition,” he says. Who knows? Years from now, if enough people have tried watching a widescreen blockbuster on a 2.5 inch iPod screen, “next thing you know Cinerama will come back.”
———-
mjphillips@tribune.com
