Awake in the Dark: The Best of Roger Ebert (68 page)

The Tonys, Emmys, Oscars, Grammys, National Book Awards, and Obies are all insider prizes, run by the industries they honor. The Pulitzers have always stood outside and a little above, convening panels of independent experts to look for the best work in a field without regard for popularity, sales, or sentiment.

A Pulitzer Prize for film would presumably go to the kind of good film that doesn't often get nominated for an Oscar. It would not be inhibited, as the Oscars are, by a tendency to select films that reflect favorably on the industry. It would consider documentaries and made-for-TV movies, as well as theatrical fiction films.

This year, for example, Pulitzer candidates might include a film like In the Company of Men, with its searing portrait of male corporate culture. Or Spike Lee's 4 Little Girls, about the Birmingham church bombing. Or Gattaca, about a fearsome new world of genetic discrimination. Or Eve's Bayou, a Louisiana child's rich and tragic family memory. Or Waco: The Rules of Engagement, which offers a revisionist portrait of what happened in the Branch Davidian siege. Or George Wallace, the made-for-cable biography of the troubling politician.

The Pulitzer's board members meet at Columbia University in New York on November 3 to consider changes in the prizes. Surprisingly, it will be the first time they have seriously considered adding movies, according to Kristen McCary of Hollywood Hills, California, who is leading a campaign for the change.

One tricky question they're sure to discuss is: who would the Pulitzer Prize for Best Film go to? The Pulitzer in drama goes to the playwright, not the production. The Pulitzers in music go to the composers, not the conductors or recording artists. Literature prizes, of course, go to the authors-but who is the author of a film?

That question has occupied the movie industry almost since its inception. The Oscar for best film is presented to a film's producer, in keeping with the Hollywood tradition that studios and producers are the only true begetters. The top prizes at film festivals are generally accepted by the directors, in keeping with the ascendant auteur theory, which holds that the director is the ultimate author of a film. But French critics first proposed the auteur theory because in France until the late 19505 the screenwriter was considered the true author. And in the case of the adaptation of a great work of literature-the 1996 Hamlet, say-who is more the author? William Shakespeare, or Kenneth Branagh? Do not answer too hastily; Branagh won an Oscar nomination for his screenplay of Hamlet, even though he proudly filmed Shakespeare's uncut text.

Movies are children with many parents. It is impossible to untangle the contributions of the collaborators on a film-also including the actors, cinematographer, editor, composer, set designer, and special-effects artists. It is obvious, I think, that Pulitzer judges should consider only the excellence of a film, and not get involved in sorting out its pedigree. The Pulitzer Prize for Film should be awarded to the film itself, period, end of discussion.

Consider. The Pulitzer for drama goes to the playwright because his play is the underlying reality on which all productions must be based. The judges cannot see or imagine all productions, but they will all reflect the same text. It's the same with a musical composition.

But a film is seen everywhere in the same form. It will not feature different actors or costumes for its run in Chicago than it had on Broadway. All of the collaborators have come together once, made the film, and gone their separate ways. No matter who made what contribution to a great film, together they made this film and no other. They did not make a bad film, although they might have. The film itself should be honored, and Pulitzer's glory shine on all the contributors.

What practical good would the Pulitzer Prize for Film be? Would it be j ust one more award? Not at all. The Pulitzers are seen as more informed and disinterested than the honors given within each art form. They are the most prestigious awards in America. The annual debate over Pulitzer finalists would draw attention to many worthy films. The prizewinner would be booked into more theaters and win a larger audience, and its life on television and on video would be greatly enhanced.

The American film industry today straddles a great divide. On the one side are the multimillion-dollar blockbusters, the thrillers, and specialeffects pictures. On the other, the renaissance in the world of independent and alternative films. The Oscars will usually be tilted toward the mainstream films-and above all toward successful films; it is easier for a film to pass through the eye of a needle than for a box office flop to win the Oscar.

The Pulitzers might help restore the balance between success and quality-might even act as an inspiration or a rebuke for the Oscar voters. It's time for America's most important honor in the arts to be extended to America's most important contribution to the arts.

DECEMBER 12, 1999

have seen the future of the cinema, and it is not digital. No matter what you've read, the movie theater of the future will not use digital video projectors, and it will not beam the signal down from satellites. It will use film, and the film will be right there in the theater with you.

How can this be? How can a technology that is a century old possibly be preferable to new digital gizmos? This is a story of the limitations of video projection, and the hidden resources of light-through-celluloid. Please read carefully. The future of traditional cinema is at stake.

In recent months the Wall StreetJournal, New York Times, and Los Angeles Times have carried breathless reports that Hollywood is on the brink of a digital revolution. Even Wired magazine, usually informed on technical matters, printed the howler that digital projection is "far better" than film. George Lucas and Texas Instruments have teamed up to showcase The Phantom Menace with digital projection in theaters on both coasts. Disney is now preparing digital theatrical demos; its Bicentennial Man will open in digital Friday at the AMC South Barrington.

These custom installations, we are told, are the first wave of a technological revolution that will overtake movie theaters. No longer will an underpaid projectionist struggle in the booth with ungainly cans of film. New movies will zip down from space and be projected into the screen with startling clarity. Digital video projection (jargon watch: "dijection") is being embraced by Hollywood, we read, because it will save the studios the cost of manufacturing and shipping prints all over the world.

But how good is digital projection? I saw it demonstrated last May at the Cannes Film Festival, and have read reports of those who've attended the custom Phantom Menace installations. A system offered by Hughes is not very persuasive, the witnesses say, but the Texas instruments system is better; reviews range from "85 percent as good as a real movie" to "about as good." The special effects in Phantom Menace looked especially sharp, viewers said, and there's a reason: they were computer-generated in the first place, and so arrived at the screen without stepping down a generation to film. And because they depicted imaginary places, it was impossible to judge them on the basis of how we know the real world looks.

"Dijection" offers a wonderful new prospect, if it's for real. But it's not the only possible future. Far from the boardrooms of Texas Instruments, which has unlimited financial resources and wants to grab the world movie distribution market, there is an alternative film-based projection system that is much cheaper than digital, uses existing technology, and (hold onto your hats) is not "about as good" as existing film, but, its inventors claim, "Soo percent better" That is not a misprint.

This system is called MaxiVision48. I have seen it demonstrated. It produces a picture so breathtakingly clear it is like 3-D in reverse: like looking through an open window into the real world. Motion is shown without the jumpiness and blurring of existing film projection, details are sharper, and our eyes are bathed in visual persuasion.

The inventor of MaxiVision is a Hollywood film editor named Dean Goodhill (he shared an Oscar nomination for The Fugitive). One of his partners is a manufacturer named Ty Safreno, whose company, Trust Automation, Inc., of San Luis Obispo, California, builds digital robotics systems for tasks which must be vibration-free, like the manufacture of Pentium chips.

Without getting into labyrinthine technical explanations, here is how MaxiVision48 works:

• It can project film at 48 frames per second (fps), twice the existing 24 fps rate, by fitting four frames into the film space that used to contain three. That provides a picture of startling clarity. At 48 frames, it uses so percent more film than at present. But MV48 also has an "economy mode" that uses that space differently, offering low-budget filmmakers savings of up to 50 percent on film.

• The MV48 projector design can switch on the fly between 24 and 48 fps formats in the same movie, allowing extra clarity for scenes that can use it. And it can handle any existing 35 mm film format-unlike digital projection, which would make obsolete a century of old prints.

• MV48 uses a new system to pull the film past the projector bulb without any jitter or bounce. Goodhill says he can't go into detail while his patent is pending, but explains in general terms that MV48 completely eliminates the jiggle that all current films experience as they dance past the projector bulb. Watching it, I was startled to see how rock solid the picture was, and how that added to clarity.

• The result: "We figure it's Soo percent better than existing film or the Texas Instruments video projection system; take your choice," Goodhill told me.

It is also a lot cheaper, because it retrofits existing projectors, uses the original lamp housings, and doesn't involve installing high-tech computer equipment. MaxiVision's business plan calls for leasing the projectors at $28o a month, but if you wanted to buy one, it would cost you around $io,ooo. Estimates for the Texas Instruments digital projector, on the other hand, range from $Iio,ooo to $150,000 per screen.

The contrast between the two systems is not limited to costs. Here are additional reasons why the death of film has been much exaggerated:

• The TI systems in the demo theaters bear no relationship to the real world. They're custom installations that do not address the problem of how a real film would get to a real theater. The source of their signal is an array of twenty prerecorded 18-gigabyte hard drives, trucked to each theater. This array costs an additional $75,ooo, apart from the cost of trucking and installation.

• Even so, a movie is so memory-intensive that these arrays must compress the digital signal by a ratio of 4 to I. At a recent seminar at the Directors Guild in Los Angeles, however, digital projection spokesmen said that in the real world, satellite downlinked movies would require 40-to-i data compression. This level of compression in movie delivery has never been demonstrated publicly, by TI or anyone else.

• The picture on the screen would not be as good as the HDTV television sets now on sale in consumer electronics outlets! TI's MDD chip has specs of 128o X 1024, while HDTV clocks at 1920 X io8o. For the first time in history, consumers could see a better picture at home than in a movie theater. A higher-quality digital picture would involve even more cost, compression, and transmission challenges.