(By Ann Hornaday, Washington Post, 17 August 2012)
The movie
“360,” a dramatic roundelay of interlocking stories set in Vienna, London,
Denver, Phoenix and beyond, boasts an impressive pedigree. Written by Peter
Morgan (“The Queen”), directed by Fernando Meirelles (“City of God”), starring
Rachel Weisz, Anthony Hopkins and Jude Law, it’s just the kind of film I love
to watch at the local art house, popcorn in hand. But when “360” opened in Washington two weeks
ago, I had an unusually crammed schedule: writing deadlines, the return of a
summer camper, preparations for a busy weekend. So, I did what filmgoers are
doing in increasing numbers: I fired up my computer, went to my satellite TV
service’s Web site and ordered “360” on demand for $6.99. On opening day, I was
on my couch watching “360” — with no popcorn or coming attractions, but
grateful that I hadn’t gone to much trouble to see what turned out to be a
modestly engaging but non-world-rocking movie.
I like to
consider myself a movie purist — a fan of film as both experience and material
object, with a romantic attachment to its grainy texture, mythic scale and
enveloping sense of grandeur and collective worship. I have fulminated — in
these very pages — against the encroaching tyranny of technology, from the diminished
visual values of digital cinematography to the bland close-up-dominated grammar
of a medium now as likely to be encountered on a three-inch phone screen as in
a spacious movie palace. Put simply —
and to paraphrase Norma Desmond in “Sunset Blvd.” — my aesthetic expectations
have always been big; it’s the pictures that got small.
But in
recent years, forces have converged to make me reassess my stance. Obviously,
TV screens and sound systems have gotten bigger, flatter and more
sophisticated, allowing them to more closely approximate theatrical projection.
With audiences texting, talking, beeping and buzzing through a movie they just
shelled out nearly $20 to ignore, a compelling case can be made that watching a
movie at home — even with kids, electronic devices and easy bathroom breaks —
is more immersive and less prone to distractions than going to the multiplex. Some industry analysts have suggested that
it’s precisely those considerations that led viewers to wait to see “John
Carter,” “Battleship” and “Dark Shadows” on VOD, rather than in theaters, a
calculation that made them all box-office flops. But in another corner of the movie business,
where low-budget independent films huddle for warmth against encroaching
extinction, the simultaneous release of films in theaters and on VOD — rather
than the traditional months-long window between the two — has proved to be a
sustaining, even crucial survival strategy.
In 2006, I
interviewed Steven Soderbergh the day his experimental thriller “Bubble” made its
premiere in Parkersburg, W.Va., where it was filmed. Soderbergh and the film’s
distributor, Magnolia Pictures, were embarking on what was considered an
audacious release strategy for the film, making it available on DVD and the
HDNet Movies cable channel at the same time it opened in theaters (called
day-and-date in industry parlance). Soderbergh — who’s never been particularly
worried about the sanctity of his images — wasn’t concerned about whether his
work was seen on a 70-foot theater screen or on someone’s tiny television. “I
really don’t care how people see my movies, as long as they see them,” he told
me. “I’m just not interested in controlling how somebody experiences one of my
films.” “Bubble” didn’t turn out to be a
hit. But Soderbergh’s willingness to meet his audiences where they were, and
not try to control where or how they saw his films, proved prescient.
By 2008, the
crime drama “Flawless,” starring Michael Caine and Demi Moore, would earn more
than $1 million in its on-demand window during a contemporaneous theatrical
run. In 2010, “The Killer Inside Me,” an ultra-violent adaptation of a pulp
novel by Jim Thompson, earned around $4 million from people who watched it on
demand. That same year, “All Good Things,” a true-crime drama starring Ryan
Gosling and Kirsten Dunst, earned a whopping $6 million. (By contrast, the film
earned around $600,000 in theaters.) Last year, “Margin Call,” J.C. Chandor’s
taut Wall Street thriller, made its VOD debut day-and-date with theaters. The
film wound up earning about half its $10 million total returns in video on
demand. The message was clear: What was
once considered a marginal or even stigmatized part of the distribution world
had clearly earned a second look.
Whereas
people may once have been suspicious of a movie that showed up on their cable
system’s on-demand menu the same day it opened in theaters, when the synopsis
includes names such as Caine, Moore and Gosling, that stigma significantly
evaporated. “Stars definitely matter,”
says Eamonn Bowles, president of Magnolia Pictures, which released “Flawless”
and “All Good Things.” “Because frankly, it’s a menu . . . and you only have a
certain amount of information you can get across.” (The all-important menu can
be finessed in other ways: At a gathering of micro-budget indie filmmakers at
the Maryland Film Festival in May, one director advised his colleagues to
choose a title that begins with “A,” so it has a chance of being seen first.)
Another
essential element, Bowles adds, is genre: Even the scrappiest no-name action
and horror films can do very well as on-demand offerings, regardless of who’s
in them. “People aren’t going to rent something unless they have some notion of
what it’s about or what it’s going to deliver,” he says. “If it has a [type of]
story or stars no one’s heard of, that’s a tougher sell.”
With adult
dramas increasingly on the ropes in Hollywood, the simultaneous VOD-theatrical
release strategy would seem to be a no-brainer; how better to reach grown-ups
who want to avoid the sensory overload of modern-day multiplexes than
delivering films to the safety of their living rooms? But don’t look for “Hope
Springs” on your iPad just yet; big theater chains refuse to play films that
are showing on other platforms. (Magnolia, which is owned by Dallas Mavericks
magnate Mark Cuban, shows its films at Landmark Theatres, which Cuban also
owns; IFC Films, another VOD pioneer, owns a theater in New York and its films
are shown in independent theaters, including Landmark. But Landmark often
declines to play other companies’ day-and-date VOD releases.)
Last year,
when Universal Pictures announced plans to make the comedy “Tower Heist”
available on VOD in Portland, Ore., and Atlanta the same day it arrived in
theaters (for about $60), exhibitors squawked so loudly the studio quickly
retreated. “Theatrical revenue for
studios for a release like that is still very critical,” says IFC Films
President Jonathan Sehring regarding big-budget movies. “I can appreciate why
the major chains would take a hard look at the erosion of that [business]. It’s
different for independents.”
Indeed, says
Bowles, the day-and-date VOD strategy has made it feasible for his company to
acquire and distribute small-niche films that, given the costs of marketing,
would be financially prohibitive to distribute otherwise. That reality became
clear in the 1990s, he says, when a handful of independent studios went
belly-up. “You had to spend so much more money to get your film out there,” he
explains. “The upside had become larger than ever, but the downside was abject
failure. I can’t emphasize enough how little revenue came in if a film didn’t
perform well theatrically off the bat.” Tying a VOD release to the advertising
and awareness generated by a theatrical release, he says, has ensured survival
for respected filmmakers who could not have found purchase in big-chain
multiplexes — a slate as diverse as Lars von Trier, Takashi Miike and
documentarian Alex Gibney.
At IFC, such
auteurs as Werner Herzog and Michael Winterbottom have found success with the
strategy as well. Winterbottom’s newest film, “Trishna,” received middling
reviews and didn’t perform as well as expected in theaters, says Sehring. “But
thank God for VOD; it’s helped make that title successful.”
And it’s not
just filmmakers who are grateful: Now, thanks to on-demand technology, film
fans in towns without art-house cinemas can see indie titles they otherwise
would have had to wait months for, as the movies wended their way from theaters
to DVD to television. Rick Allen, CEO of the digital film distributor
SnagFilms, says the company uses a variety of distribution strategies for the
movies it acquires, including opening them theatrically before showing them on
additional platforms. But its core business so far is making films available on
mobile, Internet and TV platforms, as well as on the SnagFilms Web site. Films
on the site stream for free (interrupted every few minutes by ads).
One of SnagFilms’s most successful titles is “Return to Tarawa,” a drama starring Ed Harris about the legacy of a World War II battle that the company acquired in 2009 after it aired on the Military Channel. The movie has played steadily on the site’s ad-supported channel. “It’s well on its way to a million views, if it hasn’t reached it already,” Allen says, adding that SnagFilms’s aim is “to put films where people are. Make it easy for them to watch really good films when and where they want to watch them.”
It’s impossible to argue with that mission statement. Still, one can celebrate the democratization and downright survival of an embattled cinematic niche while bemoaning the sacrifices: Von Trier’s “Melancholia” was an epic exercise in bravura filmmaking, a heightened sensory experience that married image and sound with often stirring results. Could that sense of awe ever be approximated on a six-inch screen? Or on a 42-inch television with kids interrupting, phones ringing or breaks for making popcorn? (Then again, would that epic viewing experience be possible for someone living in a town lacking the theater to play it?)
But even if we accept some loss of scale, we can still grieve the collective ritual we once knew as going to the movies. The closest we can come to in our homes is watching a movie while on Twitter or Facebook. “No one goes to movies on dates anymore,” says “Tiny Furniture” director and “Girls” creator Lena Dunham.“Now it’s, ‘Let’s watch something on Netflix on my bed.’ ” Dunham makes that observation in a terrific new documentary about filmmaking called “Side by Side.” In the same movie, director Barry Levinson recalls going to the film palaces of his youth in Baltimore. “The red curtain would open, and there’s the movie!” he rhapsodizes. “It’s not as special anymore. It’s another thing.”
Produced and
narrated by Keanu Reeves, “Side by Side” adroitly threads viewers through the
digital revolution in film, from how images are captured and projected to the
changing ways we’re watching them, for better or for worse. It makes some
crucial points about the pros and cons of technological progress. If you’d like
to see it, you’re in luck: It opened theatrically in Los Angeles on Friday, but
will be available on demand on Wednesday.
No comments:
Post a Comment