April 29, 2004

The only real news on Wednesday was Comcast finally abandoning its rather absurd bid for Disney.

That meant that the anti-Eisner forces had to find a way to spin this victory as somehow negative. And sure enough, but Wednesday night, The New York Times' Laura Holson's story was headlined "Comcast Abandons Disney Big, But Pressure on Eisner Remains." The story, which reads as though written by Roy Disney on a sedative, proceeds to recap every negative Eisner argument while managing, mysteriously, to avoid any of the positives.

For example, "a revolt at next year's annual meeting is already brewing," which makes the remarkable reporting leap of assuming the status of the company eleven months in the future.

For example, Holson recounts how Eisner joined the company in 1984, becoming "the face of The Wonderful World of Disney on Sunday nights, chatting up Tinkerbell as he introduced shows" and indeed, acknowledging his leadership in rebuilding the company. But when it comes to hard figures, the only one that seems to be relevant is Eisner's billion dollar income over the course of 20 years at the company. The is nary a mention that most of that money came from stock options that were valued based directly on Eisner's success. According to a Forbes article from 1991, Disney was worth less than $2 billion when Eisner was hired and is now worth over $60 billion.

For example, Holson cites a decline in animation due to competition from DreamWorks and, get this, Pixar. With due respect to Pixar, Disney did a lot to build the Pixar brand. And with due respect to the bottom line, Disney has made tons of money off of Pixar, while cutting back on in-house production, as one slot has been filled most years by Pixar.

For example, in a paragraph about troubles in "the late 90s," not only does Holson hold up The Alamo as an example of trouble at the live-action movie division, but completely disregards last year's record-setting live-action year. Moreover, she later dismisses the strong first quarter performance this year by commenting that there was nowhere to go but up from last year and somehow suggesting that DVD sales from Pirates and Finding Nemo don't really count… which is crap.

The irony about all of this is that I have long been a critic of Eisner's unwillingness to create a real succession plan. I am critical of the far more key TV mistake, way beyond not making The Apprentice, which was to let in-house producer Jerry Bruckheimer take his TV shingle to Warner Bros., which is the difference between ABC having the top rated show in the nation (CSI) and another Top Ten hit (CSI Miami) in its line-up or at the very least, sharing in the profits of those shows, which will earn many multiples more than The Apprentice can even dream about in the long run. And I am perfectly willing to question the success of Touchstone's adult product, which has not worked as well as the youth-targeted stuff at the studio in recent years, save the Shyamalan films.

But I object to piling on here, just as I did when the New York Times decided that they were going to be under Mel Gibson's feet throughout the Passion controversy. If you want to tear into Eisner, be my guest. But make the case and make it strong.

Why isn't The New York Times very interested in Kirk Kerkorian bleeding $1.4 billion out of MGM before selling the librar…. uh, the company to Sony or whomever ends up bidding the most?

Why isn't the New York Times hounding Fox for Mooseport, Girl Next Door and Catch That Kid?

We've had a few months of "New Paramount." Where is the New York Times, pressing for results… or even the announcement of a single major project representing the new attitude?

I'm not saying that these stories must be done by The Times or anyone. But the New Yorkers seem to be getting off on beating certain people to death lately. And right now, Eisner is a target. How about a story about what some execs would do with Disney instead of just lighting fires under Eisner every time the temperature cools a little? Please?

ALSO: Peter Chernin, who will not be running Disney or anyplace other than Fox for a while, gave voice to what many of us have known to be true for a while. At the Milken Institute Global Conference on Wednesday, he said, "There are probably three or four movies coming out in the next six months that had $200 million in negative costs alone and probably another $100 million to market. At least one is going to go down, and you're going to see a new era of $175 million-$200 million writedowns. It will rock the industry to its foundations."
I'm not sure that the $200 million writedown is coming quite yet. But the DVD business is not forever going to be as powerful a floatation device as it is now.

Meanwhile, Sumner Redstone continued to voice the rather bizarre notion that the trouble with Paramount is that they haven't been in the $100 million movie game enough… suggesting that Paramount could become the first company to have one of Chernin's $200 million writedowns.

If you want my analysis of Parmount's biggest problem, it has been making movies that should be $40 million risks for $80 million, meaning that many of the titles lose money and the ones that succeed never make big profits. In my opinion, no studio should be greenlighting more than two $100 million movies in any year… three if there is a franchise title in play.

I fear that what we are going to see in this summer is that CG fatigue is a serious problem for studios that are about to learn a hard lesson that there is no longer any such thing as bigger in the CG movie game. Fox's The Day After Tomorrow seems to be the one CG-driven movie that found a new gimmick this summer... the weather as bad guy. We'll see how it goes.

READER OF THE DAY: NOT THE AMERICAN IDOL writes a follow-up: "Remember when I said that the question of whether the new 4k formats equal the resolution of 35 is complex and has many partial, overlapping and sometimes contradictory answers? Well, NOT SEVEN, BUT UP planted his foot squarely in the middle of it when he said that Pixar determined that the resolution limit of 35mm film is about 1600 lines. This is both untrue and, to the degree it's meaningful, misleading. Camera negative 35mm has enormously more resolution -- in fact, some of the latest stocks are capable of capturing 6k, and 5k is the general rule -- but several factors usually prevent a good deal of that resolution from reaching the theater.

First, release prints are generally several generations down the line from the original camera negative. There's usually at least one interpositive and one internegative between the camera negative and the release print, so there are generational losses. Second, release prints are generally made with contact printers in which the internegative is pressed directly against the print stock and light is shined through the internegative to expose the print while they're both run through a gate at high speed. This frantic arrangement, rather than a slower and more careful one, is used to churn out prints as quickly and cheaply as possible. The emulsions aren't perfectly flat, there's jitter, the two layers of film slide against each other a bit, the drive sprockets on the printers aren't mechanically perfect, there's sometimes damage to the internegatives from repeated use... it all contributes to substantial resolution loss. Third, release prints are made with high-contrast stock which sacrifices a fair amount of shadow and highlight detail. And fourth, many theaters have soft lenses and jittery projectors which kill even more resolution.

So the 1600-line resolution SEVEN UP is talking about is something of a worst-case (and outdated) estimate of how much detail actually survives all the way onto an average (or below-average) movie screen. Even staunch video advocates will generally admit that a decent modern theater will deliver around 2000 lines from your average print nowadays.

Does that mean there's no point in starting off with an image with more than 2000 lines of resolution (or 1600, if you're going to be unrealistically pessimistic)? Hardly! Just for starters, the better the initial image, the better the final image can be, even if it's reduced in resolution. (Just look at the wide variations in image quality on DVD releases for a vivid illustration of this principle.) Then there's the fact that the stocks used for striking prints have improved dramatically and can improve a lot more yet. Furthermore, we can always hope for (and support) improved reproduction methods. (It would certainly cost exhibitors a heck of a lot less to improve their film projectors than to replace them with digital equipment!) As a movie journalist, I assume you've seen plenty of carefully-struck prerelease prints, prints which weren't sloppily mass-produced. The difference in quality between some of those and and the cruddy prints which are rushed out en masse to fill thousands upon thousands of screens can be shocking.

One of the ironies of the 1600-line figure as used by Pixar is that as soon as their image enters the analog world, it degrades too. That's one reason FINDING NEMO looked so much crisper and more detailed when projected digitally than it did on film. It was in its native format. Unfortunately, digital projection still has something of a video feel to it because of the way it reaches the screen, unlike film, with which each frame is projected in its entirety all at once. This is a solvable problem, but one that few people (other than Roger Ebert) seem to be acknowledging.

On the bright side, by keeping information in the digital domain, high-resolution digital projection (IOW not the craptastic low-res garbage systems currently out there) could make it easier to bring more resolution all the way to the movie screen, even if the source image is only captured at, say, 4k, instead of 35mm film's 5-6k, but even that opportunity is uncertain. The data storage requirements for a hypothetical 4k digital distribution system would be massive and would inevitably prompt distributors to use heavy-duty compression, and compression, if used without a light enough hand, can take Godzilla-sized bites out of image quality. I had the misfortune to see MATCHSTICK MEN digitally projected, and it suffered from color banding and visible, chunky pixels -- and that was on one of today's low-res rigs. It was sickening. That's not the future I want for movies.

BTW, I most emphatically would describe the LOTR films as "soft" -- Charmin soft, and with a smeary coating of lotion on top. The effects look hazy, foggy and unreal, not sharp and distinct.

E ME: What do you think of write-downs and beat-downs?