(By Ann Hornaday, Washington Post, 15 October 2015)
“Please
remember to turn off your electronic devices.”
That’s a familiar refrain before movie screenings these days, but it had
particular piquancy at the Monday night preview of “Steve Jobs,” the highly
anticipated drama about the Apple co-founder, and the guy who made those
electronic devices so hard to turn off in the first place. Jobs, played in the film by Michael
Fassbender as a gifted but haunted Shakespearean figure, never set out to
destroy the movie business; indeed his purchase of George Lucas’s computer
animation company — a little outfit known as Pixar — helped usher in a
mini-Golden Age of storytelling and audacious creativity to the medium. But
there’s no doubt that, in designing devices so intuitive and beautiful that
they became extensions of the user’s psychic and physical self, Jobs also
helped create a generation of second-screeners, happy to consume sound, images
and stories on their TVs, laptops, phones and, heaven forfend, wristwatches.
Which makes it doubly piquant — deliciously ironic, even —
that, when Washington’s newest Landmark Theatres location, Atlantic Plumbing
Cinema, opens this weekend, it will be showing “Steve
Jobs” in all six of its small, plushly appointed auditoriums. “It is a fun irony,” said Landmark’s
president and chief executive, Ted Mundorff, who noted that Apple didn’t impact
the film industry directly, but it greatly influenced consumers’ expectations
regarding how and when they see movies. Just as symbolically zeitgeisty as the
all-Jobs program at Atlantic Plumbing is the fact that Landmark’s Bethesda Row
Cinema is opening “Beasts of No Nation” the very same day it’s
being made available on Netflix.
But amid all these technological death knells for the
theatrical experience, it’s possible to glimpse a startling degree of saving
grace — at least for Landmark, which specializes in films that appeal to people
who consume movies the way they consume cuisine: not concession-counter junk
food and Big Gulps, but artisanal fare and small-batch cocktails. (Which, not
coincidentally, are being served at the theaters’ cafes). There’s a critical mass of those audiences in
Washington, which is why Landmark is doubling down here, opening Atlantic
Plumbing this weekend, renovating the newly acquired West End Cinema and
preparing to open a theater in NoMa. The company is part of a theater-building boom
in the area that includes the Angelika, ArcLight and iPic theater chains, all
of which are responding to the fact that — Netflix, peak TV and Jobs’s
seductive devices be damned — we’re still going to the movies.
That fact isn’t lost on “Steve Jobs” screenwriter Aaron
Sorkin, who started as a playwright and became famous for such TV shows as “The West Wing” and HBO’s “The Newsroom,” and who is dedicated to
making the kind of smart, sophisticated, mid-budget dramas for grown-ups that
are increasingly rare in Hollywood — which, partly in response to the siren
call of shrinking home screens, has been striving to make movies bigger, louder
and more infantilized. Sorkin was caught
up in a tech-centric maelstrom of his own last year when hackers — believed by
the U.S. government to be based in North Korea — tapped into the computer
system at Sony Pictures Entertainment; executives’ contentious e-mail
negotiations regarding his “Steve Jobs” script were among the most publicized
outtakes from the episode (the film wound up going to Universal Pictures). One
of the hack’s most poignant revelations was how precarious films such as “Steve
Jobs” are within a blockbuster-driven business model.
“They are precarious,” Sorkin told me in a phone
conversation. “Ironically, this movie had a relatively smooth path to the
screen. I’m not exactly sure why, but this kind of movie is a bigger gamble for
a studio. The studio would feel more comfortable spending $150 million
than spending $30 million. With $150 million, they know exactly how
to market it and who to market it to. With this, there are some questions about
who exactly is the audience for this movie.”
With “Steve Jobs” and others like it, Sorkin said, “the job of the movie
isn’t to make a ton of money for the studio, the job of the movie is to not lose
money.”
Which brings us to yet another delicious irony: “Steve Jobs”
is making money. It earned more than half a million dollars when it opened in
limited release last weekend, making it the 15th-highest earner pre-theater in
history. After opening in Washington and 24 other markets, it will arrive on
more than 2,000 screens next week, garnering earned awareness in word of
mouth, strong reviews and Oscar buzz along the way. This is the same strategy that made “Birdman,” “The Imitation Game” and “The Theory of Everything” local hits
last year and that Mundorff, for one, is counting on again as awards season
gets underway in earnest. “Our box office goes up every year,” he said, noting
that overall industry earnings increased by 4 percent in 2015. “And I’m not
seeing any trend going the other way.”
This is usually the moment when a frequent advocate for
big-C cinema makes an impassioned case for the technical and aesthetic
superiority of the theatrical experience. There’s no doubt that “Steve Jobs,”
directed by Danny Boyle with an ingenious visual design using old-fashioned
film stock and digital photography, benefits from the scale, detail and
immersion that theaters provide. Almost word for word, Mundorff and Sorkin
expressed an identical, shared belief in the transportive powers of sitting
with a group of strangers, waiting for the lights to go down and for the screen
to flicker to life.
But that experience isn’t — or at least isn’t only — an
aesthetic one. It’s an emotional one. It’s not only the sounds and images that
come to overwhelming life on the big screen that people crave. It’s the strong
feelings — empathy, disdain, pity, longing — that envelop them as a result.
That same need for sentient connection, not just information or cool graphics,
is something Jobs understood better than anyone, as he endlessly fussed over
round-cornered rectangles and fonts, in search of a machine people would not
only utilize but love.
He succeeded brilliantly, of course, which is one of the
reasons he’s worthy of a movie. But “Steve Jobs” leaves viewers with the
lingering question: At what cost? One casualty of the wired-in, zoned-out
culture Jobs was part of creating is precisely what the movie about him is
helping to preserve: an occasion to make ourselves vulnerable. The secular
ritual of going to the movies is one of the rare times when we can be alone,
together, entering the same collective trance. Whether we emerge delighted,
unsettled, astonished, we can’t go under fully until we’re bereft of our own
devices.
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