| DVD Roundup March 2006
 Is
There Danger Ahead for the Ritual of Moviegoing?
When, recently, Quentin Tarantino was a guest on a
late-night TV show, he said that he loves going to the movies. He sees his own movies
again and again. "Don’t you get bothered by autograph seekers?" the host
interrupted. "Never!" No one bothers him once he’s inside, he said, because
"movies are like church."
What was Tarantino getting at with that simile? Why church?
We can broadly define a church -- or a mosque or temple --
as a designated place where a group assembles to perform a prescribed and uplifting
ritual. Doesn’t that describe what happens in a movie theater? What’s worth
probing in Tarantino’s comment is whether enough of us will continue to assemble for
the ritual, given all the other ways there are to watch films.
What, exactly, is the "ritual" of going to
the movies? I set out to observe it. The movie of the moment was Ang Lee’s Brokeback
Mountain, which then was still so fresh that Jay Leno hadn’t begun to joke about
it. Later, for comparison, I would watch a DVD of another Ang Lee film about thwarted
love, Sense and Sensibility.
We’ve been going to the movies together for a
quarter-century, but it still feels like a date. Planning ahead is part of the ritual --
clearing the schedule, checking out what’s showing, having some cash ready, maybe
eating out first. We arrive and there are all the familiar preliminaries: waiting in line,
catching the aroma of the popcorn in the lobby, adjusting to the darkness inside, choosing
seats, settling in for the previews and the admonitory short on good viewing behavior.
Then the feature begins, and we all sink together into the world of the film, our faces
turned up in unison, our communal chuckles and sighs, our mutual, willing engulfment in
the unfolding story.
About that popcorn. Yes, there’s crunching and
rattling in a movie theater that would be intolerable at a symphony concert. Movies are
pop culture. We can wear our jeans and crinkle our candy wrappers. No babies may cry,
though, as they can in church. No cell-phone conversations, as there are at rock concerts.
No conversations at all, please. There are rules that govern moviegoing, and these rules
create exactly the experience we pay for: two hours of intense, uninterruptible, shared
concentration.
As one, we anguished for Jack and Ennis, for Ennis’s
wife, for his loving teenage daughter. We felt awe at the vast mountains. We stifled our
gasps at Jack’s terrible fate. Finally, as the credits rolled under Willie
Nelson’s sorrowful "He Was a Friend of Mine," we stumbled from the theater
en masse. We were like those exiting an amphitheater in Aristotle’s ancient Greece
who had undergone the classic catharsis, "the peculiar tragic pleasure, the feeling
of being washed or cleansed." Yes, okay, the peculiar tragic pleasure of Brokeback
Mountain might have brought us to catharsis at home, in the living room on the
La-Z-Boy, with the dog begging for some of those nachos. But I doubt it.
Watching Ang Lee’s Sense and Sensibility at
home was a different experience. I sorted my mail, got a snack, answered the phone. I
skipped the closing credits. Whenever the movie lost even a little momentum, it lost me.
To watch a DVD is to see a movie in fragments. According to Marshall McLuhan, movies in
the theater are "hot" and movies on TV are "cool." Some still like it
hot, but more and more are preferring it cool. Fewer than 10% of Americans are regular
moviegoers. Attendance has fallen to the point that more theater profits come from sales
of popcorn than of tickets. People are waiting out the typical four-month window between a
film’s theater premiere and its release on DVD.
How dire it must have seemed to theater owners when
entrepreneurs Mark Cuban and Todd Wagner announced that their independent media company,
2929 Entertainment, would be releasing Steven Soderbergh’s Bubble
simultaneously in theaters, on DVD, and via their HDNet cable station. They call this
pattern of release on all platforms "day-and-date." The DVD market wants to cash
in on the buzz that surrounds films recently released in the theaters, and so does cable.
This profit-driven move seems to foreshadow the demise of all but the small art cinemas.
G. Kendrick Macdowell, general counsel for the National
Organization of Theater Owners, calls day-and-date just plain bad business: after all,
what’s the best advertisement for a DVD but a successful movie run? "It’s a
bad business model as well as a bad artistic decision," he says. "What
you’re doing is collapsing your revenue streams into a single platform. You’re
not going to have people seeing it in theaters, then buying it on DVD. It’s going to
be a one-shot deal."
There’s another negative with day-and-date, according
to Macdowell: "You strip movies of the panache of the original theatrical release --
you collapse it into a television movie-of-the-week. Preservation of the windows makes
good business sense because it separates out different revenue streams to different
consumer preferences and maintains the appeal of movies as special events."
In reaction, theaters may refuse to run movies released
day-and-date. Cuban and Wagner, the entrepreneurs behind Bubble, talk of offering
theaters 1% of DVD sales as a sort of incentive. "Theaters feel they market movies
but never share in the downstream revenues," says Wagner. "We’re saying,
let’s try to make them a partner in all this." As another concession, they would
price early-release DVDs higher than those released after the usual time window.
For now, it’s all up in the air. The numbers on the Bubble
experiment are not yet in. Movie technology continues to complicate, diversify, and
innovate. Among all the changes that are coming, here’s hoping that movie theaters
can survive or, better yet, even thrive. Movies are one of the most important
representations of our common American culture, mirroring it and sometimes even shaping
it. We ought to be able to view them in common. Long may we, the people, assemble for the
great ritual of the Saturday night movie.
…Charlotte Meyer
charlottem@hometheatersound.com |
