Pandora's Digital Box: Films, Files, and the Future of Movies
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PANDORA’S DIGITALFilms, Files, and the Future BOX of Movies DAVID BORDWELL Pandora’s Digital Box: Films, Files, and the Future of Movies David Bordwell e Irvington Way Institute Press Madison, Wisconsin © David Bordwell 2012 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopy, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher. Set in Minion Pro and Supria Sans. ISBN 978-0-98322440-2-8 For Douglas Gomery Contents Introduction: Changeover ..................................................................5 Acronyms for a New Age .................................................................17 1 | e Last Redoubt .........................................................................22 2 | From E-Cinema to D-Cinema ...................................................46 3 | King of the World ........................................................................64 4 | Pay No Attention to the Man Behind the Curtain! (He’s Not ere Anyway) ............................................................83 5 | e Road to Harmony ...............................................................105 6 | Art House, Smart House ...........................................................131 7 | Pandora at the Festival ..............................................................153 8 | e Artworks Formerly Known as Prints ...............................174 Conclusion: Churn ..........................................................................192 References and Further Reading ...................................................218 Introduction Changeover It was the biggest upheaval in film exhibition since synchronized sound. Between 2010 and 2012, the world’s film industries forever changed the way movies were shown. For decades, a simple routine was followed. A film print emerged from a photographic laboratory and was coiled onto 35mm reels. Jammed into squat, hexagonal shipping cases, the reels were sent Introduction: Changeover 5 to a theatre. ere a projectionist inspected the print and prepared it for showing. Until the 1970s, projection was reel to reel. e film was trans - ferred from shipping reels to sturdier show reels. ese were mounted on two projectors side by side. e projectors ran the film, at a spectacular ninety feet per minute. Each reel lasted fieen to eighteen minutes, so there would be several changeovers per film. e upcoming changeover was signaled by a light, a bell, or a buzzer, along with punch-holes in the upper right of the onscreen image. When the warning came, the projectionist flipped a switch and the changeover was made. While the new reel was running, the projectionist threaded up the one to come. At the end of the book - ing, the film was wound back onto the battered shipping reels and made its way to the next venue. is system was started in the 1910s and modified for sound cinema in the late 1920s. It made little economic sense in the 1970s. Now films opened simultaneously on thousands of prints, and most copies would never be screened aer their initial run. In the mul - tiplex era, prints had a life of only a couple of months. Moreover, manual changeover required trained projectionists to stay by each machine. e new multiplexes would have needed several expen - sive, unionized projectionists. Instead, platter projection came into its own. In that method, the projectionist inspected the print, spliced the reels together, and wound the whole couple of miles of film onto a large aluminum disc. During the screening it would run continu - ously, from feed platter to take-up platter. When the film was fin - Introduction: Changeover 6 ished, at the flip of a switch it would rewind back onto the feed plat - ter at whiplash speed. Aer the movie’s run was over, the print would be broken down into shipping reels and sent to another venue or to a depot for storage or destruction. With the platter sys - tem, many screens could be handled by one or two projectionists, or even teenage staff. Platter projection was rougher on a print than reel-to-reel, and aficionados resented its degree of automation. Yet it retained some of the ramshackle, Steampunk flavor of the traditional method. Watching any projector in action, you saw metal gears and sprock - ets and drive shas, illumination from a searingly bright lamp, and a ribbon bearing little pictures snaking its way around rollers and through a chattering aperture. Movie cameras and projectors, not- so-distant kin of the sewing machine and the machine gun, emerged from an age ruled by mechanics, optics, and chemistry. Cinema was one of the last remaining nineteenth-century machines. But ours is the age of plastic, electronics, and keystrokes. Film on film was an anachronism. Sooner or later it would be trans - formed into ones and zeros. e film is no longer a “film.” A movie now usually comes to a theatre not on reels but on a matte-finish hard drive the size of a big paperback. e drive houses a digital version of the movie, along with alternative soundtracks in various languages and all manner of copy-guarding encryption. Instead of lacing a print through rollers and sprockets, the operator inserts the drive into a server that “ingests” the “content.” (By now a movie has become content , an undifferentiated item to be fed into a database.) e Introduction: Changeover 7 server accesses the files only aer a key, a long string of numbers and letters unique to that server-projector combination, authorizes the transfer. Once ingested, the movie appears on a monitor as an item in a playlist. rough drag-and-drop, the operator or the manager com - poses the whole program, from advertisements and trailers to the entire feature. When the projector recognizes the server and iden - tifies the film as something certified to play, it runs it automatically. e projector—“just a big computer with a lightbulb inside,” as one engineer described it—is noiseless, except for the air blasting in to cool the lamp. When the film has finished its run, the hard drive is sent back to the distributor for wiping and re-use. Watching a film projector, you saw a busy, chattering machine, at once lumbering and delicate. Watching a digital projector you see nothing. Films have become files. Historically, most major film technology has been introduced in the production sector and resisted in the exhibition sector. Ex - hibitors have been right to be conservative. Any tinkering with their business, especially if it involves massive conversion of equipment and auditoriums, can be costly. If the technology doesn’t catch on, as 3D didn’t in the 1950s, millions of dollars can be wasted. Shooting on digital media posed no threat to theatres as long the finished films were converted to 35mm prints for screening. But distribution has long been the most powerful and profitable sector of the film industry. Today’s major film companies—Warn - ers, Paramount, Sony et al.—dominate the market through distri - Introduction: Changeover 8 bution. So when the Majors established the Digital Cinema Initia - tives standards, exhibitors had to adjust. Synchronized sound reproduction took about five years to transform most national cinemas, but the digital switchover has come more slowly. In December 2000 the world had about 164,000 screens. Only thirty of them were digital. Five years later 848 were. At the end of 2010, however, 36,103 screens were digital—about thirty percent of the total. In North America, the jump was dra - matic, from about 330 digital screens at the end of 2005 to over 16,000 at the end of 2010. 2011 iced the cake. In the United Kingdom, eighty percent of titles released that year were on digital formats. At the annual Cannes Film Festival there were a great many digital screenings, even of films shot in 35mm. In Belgium the two major theatre chains, Kinepolis and UGC, went wholly digital. In Norway all 420 commercial screens were converted, partly because the government funded the change. In America, the word went forth from John Fithian, the plain- spoken President of the National Association of eatre Owners. He said in March of 2011: Based on our assessment of the roll-out schedule and our conversa - tions with our distribution partners, I believe that film prints could be unavailable as early as the end of 2013. Simply put, if you don’t make the decision to get on the digital train soon, you will be making the decision to get out of the business. Introduction: Changeover 9 Twentieth Century Fox took the lead in declaring that at the end of 2012 it would circulate no more film prints, including titles han - dled by its art-house subsidiary Searchlight. Exhibitors reacted fast. In my hometown of Madison, Wisconsin, the dominant chain went digital just before Labor Day 2011 and, with ironic timing, fired its projectionists. Hundreds of U.S. theatres junked nearly all their 35mm equipment, saving only a projector or two for the occasional film print. By the end of the year, about 26,000 of America’s screens were digital—two-thirds of the total. We have passed the tipping point. By early 2012, over half of the 137,000 screens in the world had converted. e hundreds of new multiplexes opening in China, at the rate of eight screens per day, do not contain reels, splicers, or a scrap of photographic film. “Some time in 2013,” says a spokesman for the National Association of eatre Owners, “all the [U.S.] screens will be digital.” By 2015, predicts IHS Screen Digest , 35mm projection will be defunct in commercial cinemas. As someone who studies film history, I’ve long wished to travel back to witness major changes in the medium I love. I wasn’t alive when exhibitors migrated from storefronts to dedicated venues in the 1910s, or when they wired silent-movie venues for talkies. I was alive, but not especially sentient, when theatres converted to widescreen in the early 1950s. Deprived of a time machine, I’ve longed for on-the-ground reports of what these moments were like. From our vantage point we can study these developments at the macro-level, but witnesses at the moment le us few records of the Introduction: Changeover 10 pulse of change.