Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age

This weekend the live-action version of the ‘60s animated series Speed Racer is hitting theaters. Or rather, given the overwhelmingly negative reviews the film has so far received, it seems more like it’s crashing into theaters. One of the reviews that caught my eye was Richard Corliss’s in Time Magazine. Entitled, “The Future of Movies,” Corliss seems to think that the multitude of computer-generated special effects in the film are a sign of things to come (for a long, long time): “Speed Racer announces the arrival of the virtual movie. If you watch the film overwhelmed by the assault of seductive visual information and wonder what you’re seeing, here’s the happy answer: the future of movies.”

I don’t agree with this, mainly because it doesn’t have to be as either/or as Corliss describes. Just because moviemakers now have computers to help them make films, it doesn’t mean that the ensuing movies need to be wholly computer created. (Even Tron, oh so many years ago, featured more of Jeff Bridge than it did the light cycles.) So instead of creating candy-colored worlds where human heads are the only real thing on the screen, while everything else is computer-generated, moviemakers will use computers to tell their stories, not be the stories.

For instance, I recently watched Charlie Wilson’s War on DVD, and during the movie Tom Hanks visits a refugee camp in Afghanistan where he’s horrified at the tens of thousands of people living in squalor. In the past, this scene would have been a David O Selznick moment: a wide-angle crane shot gradually revealing more and more bandaged extras; dozens becoming hundreds until you finally wonder where they could have even found so many people, not to mention get them all into costume and array them on the battlefield. But today, with modern technology, computers can help create just as effective a shot (without having to rely on hundreds of extras). In the refugee camp scene in Charlie Wilson’s War, as the camera pulls back, you see all the tents with all the people and even though you can slightly tell that the scene has been not only digitally altered but computer-created, it’s okay; the scene is using computers to do something easily (and cheaply) that would have been too expensive and painstaking to do for real. Besides, it’s just one shot in a movie filled with flesh-and-blood actors.

Yes, this is same technology the Wachowski brothers use in Speed Racer to create an entirely synthesized world, but the Charlie Wilson’s War example shows that special effects need not batter us upside the head. Instead, they can be used for accents and nuance, not as bread and butter. (Remember that in even the ultra-influential sci-fi noir film Blade Runner, the amazing special effects and set design were in aid of what was a pretty kick-ass story.) So when another review — this time in the San Francisco Chronicle — declares about Speed Racer that, “If this action extravaganza represents the future of movies, it’s going to be a sad, dead and awful future,” I think there’s plenty of time to make sure this doesn’t happen. The future’s a long way off, and hopefully by the time it arrives we’ll have learned to put story ahead of effects, and people above computers.

The other day I came across the clip above on Gawker, which is taken I guess from David Lynch’s introduction to his film Inland Empire, but here it has been Youtubed into a parody of an iPhone ad. Needless to say, Lynch is not too happy with the idea of you watching Eraserhead on your cell phone. In the clip, Lynch says that “You will never in a trillion years experience the film…you’ll be cheated.” He then goes on to call the situation, “Such a sadness.”

First of all, a trillion years is a really long time. Second of all, it’s not really up to him anymore, is it? I mean, is it better to see the movie in a crowded theater when the film is preceded by twenty minutes of previews and commercials, only to have people sitting all around you talking and chomping on popcorn the entire time (not to mention getting, and actually answering, calls on their cell phone?). This versus maybe watching it on an iPhone at home, in a comfy chair, curled up and cocoon-like. Which is the more intimate experience?

Yes, a big screen is great, but to think that true cinema can only be experienced inside a theater is going to lead people like Lynch locking us immobile into seats a la Malcolm McDowell in A Clockwork Orange, forcing us to watch movies with our eyes pried open (heaven forbid we blink and miss something). Instead, Lynch needs to realize that, as a filmmaker, he has lots of control behind the camera, and none anywhere else. Where and how people watch his films is not up to him. Like when a Woody Allen character years ago joked about reading Finnegans Wake on rollercoaster; hey, it’s our choice to do so. And if Lynch, or other directors (Spielberg has been similarly dim and caustic when it comes to things like this), think that it’s not, then they’re going to limit their audience wildly, and this is going to only hurt, and not help, their careers.

In the end, a big screen is not going to make a bad movie good, nor will a small screen make a good movie bad. True, it might add up to a different experience, but so do a dozen other factors (all of which are out of the control of the filmmakers). Maybe this is just a knee-jerk reaction from directors since they get pushed around so much by the film companies (even boy-genius Orson Welles saw pretty much every post-Kane movie recut to some extent by his studio bosses). But the truth is that the control, in a digital age, is in the hands of the consumers. And if Lynch or anyone else doesn’t like that, they’d better stop making films all together. If not, they can face the alternative: their film playing in a theater, but the theater is empty.

As a child of the seventies who grew up alongside the original Star Wars trilogy (I was seven when the first one came out, and just getting into girls when the last one finally appeared six years later), George Lucas’s space epic has always held a dear place in my heart, second only perhaps to Atari. And Star Wars, while not only immensely popular in terms of revenue, was immensely inspirational as well, with devoted fans over the years dressing up as their favorite characters for conventions or Halloween, or else drawing scenes from the movie in hours of wasted art classes. But now, in this new digital age, fans not only pay homage to the Star Wars universe (i.e. Chad Vader), but they can actually interact with it (for instance, the version of The Phantom Menace in which a fan erased Jar Jar Binks). However, these have always been illegal enterprises which, more often than not, have led to either lawsuits or pressure from Lucas to remove them from circulation. But now, as reported in The Wall Street Journal, “Lucasfilm plans to make clips of Star Wars available to fans on the Internet to mash up — meaning to remix however they want — at will.”

The 250 clips will be taken from all six Star Wars movies, and will be paired with an editing program that will allow fans the ability to “cut, add to and retool the clips. Then they can post their creations to blogs or social-networking sites like MySpace. More clips will come out from time to time over coming months.”

This is totally the right thing to do, and I’m pleased to see that Lucas realizes that the creativity of his fans are an asset and not a liability; for years all he wanted was their wallets, but now he wants their minds as well. And at a time when so many big companies and directors are taking an “us versus them” mentality when it comes to things like Youtube and mash-ups, it’s nice to see that someone of Lucas’s stature (and former views) is changing his mind. As the Journal puts it: “While Lucasfilm could fight what amounts to the theft of its property, it has now decided to take the opposite tack. In doing so, it is tackling an issue that faces all media companies today: how to keep some semblance of control over intellectual property in the digital age.”

Wall Street Journal: Make-It-Yourself ‘Star Wars’

Slate has an essay this week entitled “Will the Web make film festivals obsolete?” which talks about how the major film festivals — such as Sundance — have turned into unwieldy behemoths, and that maybe filmgoers getting together online will put film festivals out of business or else make them less relevant. The essay mentions how the Web is amazingly adept at putting people in touch with content, as well as acting as a filter for people looking for certain kinds of entertainment. And now that everyone is downloading music videos and TV shows onto their iPods and laptops, why not movies? The article then goes on to pinpoint a few of the problems standing in the way of large-scale adoption when it comes to people watching movies on small or portable devices, bringing up the inevitable old chestnut which often rises to the surface — the same as it always does with digital reading and electronic books — “the ‘people won’t do X on their computer’ explanation.” I think that’s a great way of putting it, and it’s something I’ve heard over and over. “People won’t listen to music on a computer,” or “People won’t want to look at their photographs on their computer.” And yet time and time again people have shown themselves to be incredibly adept at using new technology and embracing change. In terms of the “future of the book” debate, it’s always “People won’t read books on a computer.” Wanna bet?

From the article: “Many people speculate that no one wants to watch a movie on his or her computer. While that may be a part of the story, the ‘people won’t do X on their computer’ explanation has been wrong so often that it cannot be the full answer. The last decade has demonstrated that people are surprisingly willing to put up with lower quality or discomfort to get the content they want or to get stuff for free, whether it’s telephones (cell phones and Skype), music (MP3s), and even video (YouTube). We just aren’t that picky.”

Slate: Will the Web make film festivals obsolete?

Netflix announced today that they would be offering their users the ability to stream movies straight from the Netflix website. As a diehard fan of the service, even though it only takes movies a day or so to reach me, having the ability to log on to the website, and stream the movie right then and there, is pretty cool. Along with instantly accessible downloadable music, and now that more and more TV shows are available as downloads from iTunes or from the TV networks’ websites, this service is yet another step — for movies — towards an on-demand everything/Attention Economy mindset. That will leave publishing as the last of the entertainment mediums that has yet to really embrace the concept.

From the NY Times story: “In the case of online movies, two forces, one technological and one commercial, are keeping the market from developing more quickly. On the technological front, it is still difficult to deliver various Internet video formats to a TV screen. And on the commercial front, movie studios are leery of piracy and, more important, are fearful of cannibalizing their existing distribution businesses.”

NY Times: Netflix to Deliver Movies to the PC

In an article with Reuters, Steven Spielberg discusses a number of things, including the rise of watching movies on handheld devices such as an iPod video. He’s fairly dismissive of this, and defends the traditional practice of going to the movies. Spielberg is quoted in the article as saying, “I don’t think movie theaters will ever go away,” and on this I completely agree. However, in a world of on-demand everything, the need for people to go to movie theaters will decrease significantly because it’s very expensive, quite often is not an enjoyable experience, and people have shown they don’t mind waiting three months for the DVD. Looked at through the “Print is Dead” prism, I see this as being analogous to books and bookstores. Books and bookstores will never completely go away, either, but their significance will certainly diminish — with the rise of digital reading and delivery — as will their popularity, and large numbers of consumers reading books and going to bookstores will be the exception rather than the rule. In fact, it reminds me of a line in a very early Hitchcock film (Rich and Strange, from 1931), where a bored married couple are looking for a way to spend their evening. The wife says to the husband, “Do you want to go to the pictures or listen to the wireless?” The way she says this makes it sound as if those are the only two choices for entertainment that exist. Well, that may have been true seventy-five years ago, but for a couple today, with Tivo, Netflix, satellite radio and the Internet which acts as a portal to just about any form of entertainment that exists (music, film, literature, television, not to mention the ability to Skype anybody on the planet), and which makes this material available immediately, the opportunities for entertainment have exploded. The days of having only one or two choices are long gone.

Spielberg calls for responsible TV