Wednesday, 3 May 2000

THE OVERLOOKED FILM FESTIVAL DAY FOUR

Before I get started, I've been asked to clarify: "Roger Ebert's Overlooked Film Festival is a special event of the College of Communications at the University of Illinois, wholly produced by the College with me as Producer for the community and film buffs everywhere."

And now…

Surviving Saturday night, Sunday would bring Oklahoma! Which demands that I open today with a ROTD.

Mmmmm writes: "Not to nit-pick, but as a native Okie, I must protest your mangling of our esteemed state song (learned with expressive hand motions in first grade and repeated in assemblies every year thereafter--you should really see "sit alone and talk, and watch the hawk making lazy circles in the sky" for yourself sometime. Poetry.)

It is not, as bastardized, "when I saaaaaayyyy, a yip-a-yip-a-yaaaaaaaaay, I'm doing fine Oklahoma, Oklahoma, O-K-L-A-H-O-M-A, Oklahooooooo-ma" but rather "so when we saaaaay, 'YEW!' a yip-i-yo-i-yaaaaaa, we're only saying you're doing fine, Oklahoma, Oklahoma, O-K-L-A-H-O-M-A, Oklahoooooooo-ma. YEW!' Fine distinction, but one that begged to be made."

And so, without even being at The Overlooked 2K, Mmmmm hit the spirit right on the nose. That song and those gestures (We learned very different ones in my school…you should see the one for, "Get you hands off my sister." Poetry.) may have been forced into his head, but years later, there is a memory that is loving and cheerful and worth sharing. (Geez, I'm beginning to sound like a publicist with one of those memory syringes from Dark City, filling your minds with memories you never had. Sorry. But I feel that way about movies when I step away from my industry and silicone fueled cynicism.)

Oklahoma! was certainly not an overlooked movie. Unfortunately, I can't even get a box office gross from Exhibitor Relations on this one. But the budget was $5 million and it's been seen by tens of millions of people. Nonetheless, what makes it overlooked is that the film was made on duel formats. It was shot on traditional 35mm film and then shot again in Todd A-O, a 70mm format created by Mike Todd (of Elizabeth Taylor husband fame) and American Optical, a "hardware" company he commissioned to create an image that would have mush the same feel as Cinemascope, but with just one piece of celluloid. So, the stock used was 70mm and they shot 30 frames per second instead of the normal 24. Back in the '50s, there was no such thing as a wide release for a big movie. Big pictures were sent out on what was called a roadshow. They would go from town to town (more than one at a time, but generally no more than 100) and open the movie in each town with all the fanfare and intensity of a movie opening these days. These films were not your typical days at the movies. And Todd, ever the showman, was trying to make his distinguishing mark.

It is ironic, of course, that an overlooked format closed the festival (as traditional 70mm did last year) at a time when format is all the talk, especially around Roger. I'll lay off the debate on MaxiVision and digital for the moment and focus on the roadshow. I do believe that the idea of the roadshow will make a return. And I believe that digital projection will probably be part of making that return possible. You see, in the '50s when Todd A-O and Cinemascope and VistaVision and 3-D and all those other formats were happening, they were happening because of television. The movie business was sure that TV was the death of movies, so they had to differentiate as much as possible to keep the public's idea of the movies above that of TV. And so, the sky was the limit. Or should I say, your eye was the limit, loaded to capacity, forward and peripherally. Movies survived.

In the '70s, AMC led the way to the multiplexing of America. Soon, movie palaces were an endangered species and quality single-screen theaters were being "plexed" into two crappy shoebox theaters and one decent sized screen. (There were lots of bad configurations, but that is the one I saw most often.) And suddenly, the convenience of having more titles available at your local bijou was being overwhelmed by the visceral unpleasantness of going to see movies on screens not that much bigger than your projection TV, but often with worse sound and on angles created by the redesigns that created sightlines from hell. Plus, your options to view movies at him grew as video blossomed and cable replaced the antenna as the standard.

Meanwhile, the studios started releasing major hits on video closer and closer to the theatrical run. I mark Batman as the start of that phenomena. As that film broke box office records after its June release, it became known before the summer was over that the film would be available on video by Thanksgiving. Previously, there was a six-month window, minimally, between theatrical and video. Real church and state stuff. You see, not all of the exhibitors had forgotten about the threat from TV. But the amount of revenue that came from the Batman video release was staggering, and that cemented the schedule. Audiences would soon realize that every movie would be in pay-per-view and video by the next season of the year. "Save that one for video" became even more ubiquitous in movie conversations than "Thumbs up." That line that Mike Todd and so many others were trying so hard to draw in the '50s was getting thinner and thinner.

Even beyond indies vs. studio films, there became a schism at the studios. There were "normal" movies and then there were the blockbusters. And those blockbusters weren't just about quality. They were about size. Without thinking about it too specifically, the studios had created another movie format of their own. Though Jaws and Star Wars started the blockbuster mentality at the studios, it was Batman that took it to the next step. Occasionally there would be an Independence Day, which probably would have been huge with a lot fewer effects. But more often, we got movies like Twister, in which there was no movie at all except for the effects. And while we mock those films, the Twisters of the world would probably have been exactly what Mike Todd would have wanted to roadshow in Todd A-O. Spectacle. Size. Different.

But even as that was happening, the exhibitors suffered yet another problem. Because of the huge early weekends' draw of these movies, the studios were demanding a higher and higher percentage of the box office revenue in those first weeks. Jurassic Park set that bar at 90 percent for the studio and 10 percent for the exhibitor. But that was okay. It was a balancing act. The exhibitors couldn't do any better selling less popcorn for a movie that they could get at 70 percent on the opening weekend. So they agreed. And as things so often happen in this business, it became the norm for the blockbuster. But they forgot--not for long--that the length of a movie run was being shortened every year by the video release, which was creeping nearer and nearer. Star Wars ran first-run for a year and a half. These days, a solid 8-week run is a long one. There's Something About Mary is thought of by most as one of the leggiest runs of the last five years this side of Titanic. It did 15 weeks at over $1 million a week. It reported grosses for 20 weeks after that, most of which was second run, but that accounted for only $7 million of the $176 million domestic take. More typically, The Mummy did $146 million of its $155 million domestic take in seven weeks, just around the same time they finally got to a 50-50 split with the studio on box office revenue.

So, what did exhibitors do? They invested billions in infrastructure across America and across the globe, redesigning the theatrical experience to deal with the evolution of the business. They designed multiplex theaters that had smaller seating capacities but which retained the bigger screens that distinguished the moviegoing experience. Not only did that allow moviegoers to have a theatrical experience every time, but it allowed exhibitors to raise the seat count for blockbusters without losing quality. (Of course, we did lose the quality of the huge screens of the past.) They tried out stadium seating in Europe and Australia and found that people really liked it and so, they brought it here. (For the record, Roger hates it, explaining that the design seating most of the audience at angles that cause eye and neck strain.) Theater lobbies, once notoriously boring, have become more dense and interesting in an of themselves. (And yes, even though they are ads, people do love trailers and clever standees.)

"David Poland's Overwritten Column Fest Continues"