Can Hollywood Reinvent Itself in the Age of Digital Cinema?
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Over time Odeon Digital Cinema aims to offer a variety of options to our content providers for receiving their digital media. Facilities for satellite, fibre cable, disk or tape will be guaranteed, with the transport fees and any physical media being the expense of the content provider, identical to how a film print is the cost of the movie distributor. Beam it to us, courier a tape or disk, stream it underground via broadband – it’s up to you. One thing is certain, as we all know, any of the above is a lot less expensive and more secure than print distribution in relative terms.
Certainly in the near term, until critical mass is achieved, I cannot imagine beaming content via satellite will be cost effective, except obviously for special live events. I expect tape and disk loads as per delivery by hand to be the early phase routine. Once the media is with us onsite at the theatre a quality check would be performed for mutual satisfaction. How you compress and encrypt should hopefully be your decision provided we can introduce the MECSAR. Prior to this we will be soon be deciding our starting point for servers and will work with content providers to ensure we can acquire their media in line with the functionality of our servers, with security and image qualities we expect to be exceptional. [an error occurred while processing this directive] If 2002 is to be a pivotal year for digital cinema in general we must abandon all the wild speculations and unrealistic notions and get down to what really makes dollars and sense. This means alternative content driving digital cinema for installations to reach critical mass before movie titles benefit from going digital. Third parties and exhibition can and will pay for this and Hollywood can help this process if they want and I believe it a duty to share all the good, valid reasons why they should.
Several of Hollywood’s studios are already ideally placed with vast alternative content libraries of their own. Disney owns ABC, the US broadcaster, for example. Paramount Pictures are owned by Viacom, a major media conglomerate that owns MTV among others, AOL-Time Warner has vast media libraries and so on. Hollywood can ensure a win-win situation if it realises soon enough that it needs to accelerate its presence in alternative content because this will be the starting point and market trend that will formulate the main business and programming future in digital cinema.
Hollywood does still hold an advantage in that they have the experience and proven savvy, not to mention the wallets, for major advertising and marketing campaigns which for theatrical exhibition is crucial for any event, film or otherwise. A major threshold will be crossed by the first alternative content provider who successfully promotes an event matching the style and splash made when a Hollywood movie is “launched”. Once this becomes as routine as movie fanfare we will then see alternative content titles drawing the masses and at some stage even finding themselves in the box office top ten lists. It will begin as a fascinating novelty but can only grow, and then the public, the press and the entire entertainment industry will realise just what a revolution digital technology is causing.
It is no single opinion that digital cinemas will become more than movie temples. They will be imaginative, silicon driven entertainment and immersion complexes, offering anything imaginable -- and as yet unimagined -- that visually and audibly can be produced for the willing mind. The tip of the iceberg in digital cinema has a tip of its own and not even this has been seen, much less touched! If I could travel in time one of the first places I would want to visit is my local digital cinema in just 10 years time. The exciting thing for me is that I will actually get to experience this without having to travel through time.
Celluloid and 35mm projection will become an archaic art house novelty occupying the smaller screens of digital cinemas within a decade. I firmly stand by that. It was just five years ago that nobody saw the Internet coming and today the world has been forever transformed by its capabilities. This level of this technology, the unstoppable, immediate and omnipresent power of digital, is so sophisticated and limitless that, like the big bang of the Internet, we still seem short sighted by a 20th century perception that certain things still take time to change. In the 21st century the future will happen a lot faster.
The first US studio to embrace non-film formats and produce major events in alternative content for digital cinema will show a boldness and vision worthy of rejoice – and tempt a wager that therein lies the Hollywood studio of the future!
The only transition celluloid can ever make now – and inevitably will do so – is to become a fantastically cheaper medium to shoot and distribute on. Digital will force its price down. It still will never match the cost efficiency of digital production and distribution but expect a celluloid renaissance before the end of the decade based on cameras, stock, processing and printing having nothing to do but practically give themselves away.
There will come a time when the customary practice of coming to experience a beautiful, crisp, pristine digital presentation will be contrasted with a nostalgic film renaissance. Cheaper celluloid will inevitably make it an occasional medium well into the first quarter of our new century. In the same way that directors like Mike Figgis and Spike Lee are seen to be experimental is their use of digital movie cameras today there will come a time when the digital literate content producers of the 21st century dabble in celluloid as a means of experimentation. But for anyone in any branch of the industry to remain strictly committed to celluloid is like a sea steward attributing too much to his anchor and none to his sail.
Odeon Digital Cinema is not preaching to the industry. Our developments are almost subject to a process of its own forming. A natural evolution is at work and is bigger than all of us! So Hollywood is being told nothing, it is being asked. Asked for its awareness of this process, asked for its vital participation, asked for its wisdom in seeing opportunity not threat. Odeon Digital Cinema also considers itself to be a work-in-progress, as experimental as anything undertaken before. We seek to combine with the US studio community and other industry visions to further refine this process for the benefits to all. This is not the apex, merely the alpha.
We want the Hollywood community to be very much a part of all this.
Hollywood is not yet facing the future. In this 21st century digital era the US studios should want only one thing from its past and that is someone like Irving G Thalberg. Thalberg is one of my heroes and inspirations, a great producer, brilliant organiser and true Hollywood visionary from the early days of the studio era. He was the unassuming genius who ran Universal and then MGM in the 1920’s and 1930’s and was barely over 30 years old at the height of his command. He was to the Hollywood studio system what the wheel was to transport; he made it roll like never before. There is even an honorary Academy Award named after him as a tribute to his great influence in making Hollywood a far more formidable industry than would likely have been the case without him.
Hollywood needs someone with an understanding of the digital future to match the wisdom and understanding Thalberg showed in organising the studio system.
If people like Thalberg no longer exist out there then Hollywood is finished. But I believe people like Thalberg do exist and they are needed. As I work to develop the digital cinema market for Odeon I so eagerly hope more than a few encounters are made with minds like his. As great as any technology can be nobody should ever assume the human factor is not just as significant. It is often the most important thing of all.
I hope this article, an introduction to Odeon Digital Cinema and myself, will encourage people in all branches – from technology services to production, from distribution to advertising - to extend an invitation for me to come and talk with them about working together. We want to talk to everyone.
During the first quarter of 2002 I am scheduling trips to New York and Los Angeles as well as parts of Europe and Asia specifically to meet companies and individuals interested in digital cinema. This will include national exhibitors and their exhibitor associations. While this will not mean Quantum Digital can develop commercial opportunities for other cinema operators it does mean we want to help foster technical compatibility as widely as possible. This is in everybody’s best interest so dialogue and co-operation is crucial. Digital technology has already begun to show its potential to put unprecedented power and autonomy into the hands of the exhibitor. If digital exhibitors can build cohesion and work in unity there can be only benefits from a process of collaboration over competition. Discussions in this direction are underway.
Odeon Digital Cinema aims to demonstrate at every opportunity that its launch and embrace of alternative content in no way represents a disregard for the importance of Hollywood product. On the contrary, I cannot stress enough that we want to grow the new digital industry hand in hand with US studio content providers and not deceive ourselves to believe we have any ascendancy or advantage going forward. This is a symbiotic industry.
History is made, it doesn’t just happen. Where we fail to make our own history, individually and collectively, we become shaped by those who do. There is a tremendous opportunity for Hollywood to script a major arc for itself in the plot of digital cinema but other ink is finding its way onto the page and Hollywood will not own the paper! Let’s get scribbling, Hollywood. We want your ink on the digital screen!
Are you out there, Mr. Thalberg?
Marc John is the Head of Odeon Digital Cinema in Aylesbury, UK.
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