Celluloid Chickens Come Home to Roost

There was an interesting article by Sharon Waxman in the New York Times this week stating that one of the reasons for the precipitous drop at the box office this past Summer was not just that the movies released by the major studios sucked (although they did), but that the movies are being "jilted by the one audience it has pursued most ardently for at least two decades: young males."

It's ironic, isn't it? Hollywood has worshipped at the shrine of the adolescent male for at least the last 15 years, pumping out one fast-paced, high-octane piece of cinematic crap after another, only to have that audience abandon them for modes of entertainment requiring even less of an attention span than a feature film. According to the article, "young men aged 13 to 25 reported that they were busy surfing the Web, instant-messaging with friends and playing video games on consoles like PlayStation 2 and Xbox." Too busy, that is, to shell out $10 to see some over-produced, ear-shattering, mind-dulling piece of junk at their local multiplex.

Can anyone doubt that this development, as well as the forthcoming demise of the movie theater as we know it, is a good thing? Hollywood already derives fully 60% of its income from DVD sales -- and that percentage is only going to get higher. It's already gotten to the point where a film's theatrical release is (almost) considered to be nothing more than a coming attraction for the eventual DVD issue. The age of "top-down" cinema is rapidly coming to a close.

So what's will take its place? In my opinion, something that is both more democratic and more solipsistic. As "film" becomes digital, what Marx (Karl, not Groucho) used to call the means of production will be available, not just to a relative handful of highly paid people in Southern California, but to almost anyone who can afford to buy a Mac G5 and Final Cut Pro. The implications of this revolution are only just now beginning to be felt.

Think of the difference between a syndicated column in a newspaper and a blog, like this one. With the onset of the blog, journalism (or at least opinion) became democratized. You don't need a newspaper syndicate and printing presses and trucks and newsstands to be able to express and disseminate your opinion -- all you need is a computer, an ISP and a nifty website like Blogger. And bada-bing! You can tell the world what you think and some of that world might even find out about it.

That's what's coming in the world of film. The age of the what the French writer Alexandre Astruc once called in 1948 "la caméra-stylo," or the camera as pen, has arrived. With a miniscule investment relative to the budget of even the smallest Hollywood features, anyone (and I mean anyone) will be able to make a film. Of course, the quality of these films will be uneven. But they will be very personal, avoiding the mass-market, go-for-the-lowest-common-denominator attitude of the Hollywood studios, and that will be in the long run a boon for movie lovers. Especially those above the age of 14.

Of course, every gain conceals a loss -- no matter what you gain, you always lose something. When you become famous you gain notoriety but you lose privacy. When the cable revolution hit, we gained a much greater freedom of choice in television programming, but we lost that sense of national cohesion that we once had when the whole country watched the same shows on the same three networks. And the coming democratization of film will give us more personal visions from people who would not have been able to express themselves in that medium before, but we'll lose something as well. Young kids today have no idea what it's like to see a film in a genuine movie palace filled with thousands of people. Seeing a film in your home, even on an HDTV screen 40" wide, is one thing. But seeing it at Radio City Music Hall on a screen 50' high and with 6,000 people in the audience, is quite another. That experience is now almost entirely gone, and I know I'll miss it. But if it keeps us from another slew of sequels and movies starring non-actors like The Rock, it just might be worth it.

Tom Moran