Awake in the Dark: The Best of Roger Ebert (69 page)

• One advantage of a film print is that the director and cinematographer can "time" the print to be sure the colors and visual elements are right. In a digital theater, the projectionist would be free to adjust the color, tint, and contrast according to his whims. Since many projectionists do not even know how to properly frame a picture or set the correct lamp brightness, this is a frightening prospect.

• How much would the digital projection specialist be paid? The technicians operating the Ti demo installations are paid more than the managers of most theaters. Hollywood is happy to save money, but are exhibitors happy to spend it?

• What about piracy? Movies will be downloaded just once, then stored in each theater. Thieves could try two approaches. They could grab the signal from the satellite and try to break the encryption (as DVD encryption has just been broken). But there is a more obvious security gap: at some point before it reaches the projector, the encrypted signal has to be decoded. Pirates could bribe a projectionist to let them intercept the decoded signal. Result: a perfect digital copy of the new movie. When the next Star Wars movie opens in 4,000 theaters, how many armed guards will Twentieth Century Fox have to assign to the projection booths?

• Film is harder to pirate than digital video, because a physical film print must be stolen and copied. An MV48 print would be even harder to pirate than current films; it would not fit the equipment in any pirate lab. Those fly-by-night operations, which use ancient equipment cannibalized over the decades, would have to find expensive new machines.

All of these are practical questions. They set aside the aesthetic advantage that MaxiVision48 has over digital. Once you've seen the system, you just can't get it out of your mind.

You have to actually go to San Luis Obispo, south of San Francisco, to see MaxiVision48 demonstrated. That's where the prototype projector resides, in Ty Safreno's facility. Not many Hollywood studio honchos have made that trek. On the day I visited, I was joined by Todd McCarthy, the chief film critic of Variety, and two leading cinematographers, Allen Daviau (E. T., Bugsy) and Dean Cundey (Jurassic Park, Apollo 13).

We saw a scene that had been shot for Goodhill by another cameraman who likes the system, Steven Poster, vice president of the American Society of Cinematographers. Poster deliberately assembled a scene filled with technical pitfalls for traditional film and video systems: We see actor Peter Billingsley walking toward the camera, wearing a patterned shirt. He is passed by another guy, wearing a T-shirt with something written on it. The camera tilts down as Billingsley picks up a hose to water a lawn. The camera continues to move past a white picket fence. In the background, a truck drives out of a parking lot.

Not great art, but great headaches for cinematographers, who know that picket fences will seem to "flutter" if panned too quickly, that water droplets will blur, and that the sign on the side of a moving truck cannot be read. All true in the old systems. With MV48, we could read the writing on the shirt, see every picket in the fence, see the drops of water as if in real life, and read the side of the truck. Case closed.

McCarthy and the cinematographers praised what they saw. I was blown away. I've seen other high-quality film projection systems, such as 70 mm, IMAX, and Douglas Trumbull's Showscan process. All are very good, but they involve wide film gauges, unwieldy print sizes, and special projectors. MV48 uses projectors and prints which look a lot like the current specs, with costs in the same ballpark. Why, then, do we read so much about digital projection and so little about MaxiVision48? One obvious reason is that Texas instruments has deep pockets to promote its system, plus the backing of propeller-head George Lucas, who dreams of making movies entirely on computers and essentially wants to show them on theater-sized monitors.

Another reason is that many Hollywood executives are, frankly, not much interested in technical matters. Their attention is occupied by projects, stories, casting, advertising, and box office, as it should be. When they hear the magical term "digital" and are told their movies will whiz to the aters via satellite, they assume it's all part of the computer revolution and don't ask more questions.

Hollywood has not spent a dime, for example, to research the intriguing question, do film and digital create different brain states? Some theoreticians believe that film creates reverie, video creates hypnosis; wouldn't it be ironic if digital audiences found they were missing an ineffable part of the moviegoing experience?

Now that a decision is on the horizon, Goodhill's process deserves attention. One of the ironies of MaxiVision48 is that it's so logical and inexpensive-such a brilliant example of lateral thinking-that a couple of guys could build it in a lab in San Luis Obispo. If it were more expensive, it might attract more attention.

The big film companies like Kodak and Fuji should like the system, since it will help them sell more film. The directors who love celluloid, like Spielberg and Scorsese, should know about MV48. And there are other applications. Retail outlets use "video walls" to create atmosphere. Rain Forest cafes could put you in the jungle. NikeTown could put you on the court with Michael Jordan. No more million-dollar walls of video screens, but a $zo,ooo projector and a wall-sized picture.

But the industry has to listen. At the end of its first century, it shouldn't be so cheerful about throwing out everything that "film" means. And it should get over its infatuation with the "digital" buzzword.

When I told Dean Goodhill I was working on this article, he e-mailed me: "I'll make a special offer. We're leasing MV48 for $28o a month, but for $2,8oo a month, which is closer to the per-screen cost of the digital system, we'll throw in a little chrome plate that says `digital' on it."

DECEMBER 30, 1999

he motion picture was invented before 1900, but "the movies" as we know them are entirely a twentieth-century phenomenon, shaping our times and sharing these hundred years with us. This was the first century recorded for the eyes and ears of the future; think what we would give to see even the most trivial film from the year iooo, and consider what a gift we leave.

This list of the ten most influential films of the century is not to be confused with a selection of the century's best, although a few titles would be on both lists. As film grew into an art form, these were the milestones along the way.

1. The Early Chaplin Shorts

In 1913, there were no Charlie Chaplin movies. In 1914, he made no fewer than thirty-five, in an astonishing outpouring of energy and creativity that made Chaplin the first great star. Stardom was to become so inseparable from the movies that it is startling to realize that many early films had unbilled performers. In the earliest days just the moving picture was enough; audiences were astonished by moving trains and gunshots. Then Chaplin and his contemporaries demonstrated how completely the movies could capture a unique personality.

2. Birth of a Nation

D. W. Griffith's 1915 film is a tarnished masterpiece, a breakthrough in art and craft, linked to a story so racist, it is almost unwatchable. This was the film that defined the film language, that taught audiences and filmmakers all over the world the emerging grammar of the shot, the montage, and the camera. At 159 minutes, it tilted Hollywood's balance away from shorts and toward the more evolved features that would become the backbone of the new art form. What a shame that it also glorified the Ku Klux Klan.

3. Battleship Potemkin

Sergei Eisenstein's 1925 film about a revolutionary uprising of Russian sailors was considered so dangerous that it was still banned decades later in some countries, including its native Soviet Union. It demonstrated Eisenstein's influential theory of montage-of the way images took on new meanings because of the way they were juxtaposed. Potemkin also demonstrated the power of film as politics, polemic, and propaganda-power that many regimes, not least the Nazis, would use to alter world history.

4. The Jazz Singer

"You ain't heard nothin' yet!" Al Jolson promised in 1927, and movies were never the same. The first talkie was released that year (actually, it was a silent with sound passages tacked on), and although silent film survived through 1928 ("the greatest single year in the history of the movies," argues director Peter Bogdanovich), the talkies were the future. Purists argued that sound destroyed the pure art of silent film; others said the movies were a hybrid from the beginning, borrowing whatever they could from every possible art and science.

5. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs

Eisenstein himself called Disney's 1937 animated feature the greatest film in history. Excessive praise, but world audiences were enthralled by the first full-length cartoon. Animation was as old as the movies (the underlying principle was much older), but Disney was the first to take it seriously as a worthy style for complex characters and themes. Disney's features continue to win enormous audiences and have grown in artistry and sophistication; audiences, alas, seem resistant to animation by anyone else, despite some recent success by the geniuses of Japanese anime.

6. Citizen Kane

If Birth of a Nation assembled all the breakthroughs before 1915, Orson Welles's 1941 masterpiece was the harvest of the emerging art form. It was not the first to use deep-focus photography, or overlapping dialogue, or interlocking flashbacks, or rotating points of view, or trick photography, or a teasing combination of fact and fiction, or a sampling of genres (newsreel, comedy, drama, musical, biopic), or a charismatic director who was what the French later defined as an auteur. But in the way it assembled the pieces, it dazzled audiences and other filmmakers and so fully exploited its resources that Kane is often voted the greatest of all films.

7. Shadows

John Cassavetes' 1961 film was a salvo that shook Hollywood to its foundations. Renting a 16 mm camera and working with friends on a poverty budget, he made a film totally outside the studio system. That had of course been done before, but Shadows was the symbolic standard-bearer of the emerging New American Cinema movement, which gave birth to underground films and to today's booming indie scene. Cassavetes demonstrated that it was not necessary to have studio backing and tons of expensive equipment to make a theatrical film.

8. Star Wars

There had been blockbusters before, from Birth o fa Nation to Gone with the Wind to Lawrence of Arabia. But George Lucas's 1977 space opera changed all the rules. It defined the summer as the prime releasing season, placed a new emphasis on young audiences, used special effects, animation, computers, and exhilarating action to speed up the pacing, and grossed so much money that many of the best young directors gave up their quest for the Great American Film and aimed for the box office crown instead. Now most of the top-grossers every year follow in Star Wars' footsteps, from Armageddon to The Matrix to Titanic.

9. Toy Story

This delightful 1995 computer-animated feature may have been the first film of the twenty-first century. It was the first feature made entirely on computers, which allowed more realistic movement of the elements and the point of view, and characters that were more three-dimensional in appearance. Someday, computer-animated movies may be able to re-create "real" human actors and settings. Whether or not that is desirable, Toy Story demonstrated that the possibility was on the horizon. If films shift from celluloid and flesh and blood to the digital domain, this one will be seen as the turning point.

so. The Blair Witch Project

Important not for its entertainment value, which was considerable, but for what it represented in technical terms. Released in the summer of 1999, it was the first indie blockbuster, a film made for about $24,000 and shot entirely on inexpensive handheld cameras (one film, one video), which grossed more than $i5o million. The message was inescapable: in the next century, technology will place the capacity for feature filmmaking into the hands of anyone who is sufficiently motivated, and audiences will not demand traditional "production values" before parting with their money.