New technologies are transforming all aspects of moviemaking - from how films are financed, produced, and distributed to ultimately how they are enjoyed. Wired exposes the top players in Hollywood 2.0.
Throughout the 20th century, filmmaking evolved from a nascent industry into a centralized system of stars, studios, and theaters reaching into neighborhoods around the country and the world. Call it Hollywood 1.0. Today, new technologies are exploding this old model and transforming all aspects of moviemaking - from how films are financed, produced, and distributed to ultimately how they are enjoyed. We're watching the birth of Hollywood 2.0.
Here Wired highlights 25 players bringing the 21st-century Hollywood to life. This is an entertainment world where computer-generated actors are competing with flesh and blood. Studios are not studios: feature films are created on desktop computers for less than US$1,000. Theaters are not theaters: the cinema experience is being transferred to theme parks and onto massive video murals that will forever change our cityscapes. Film is not film: celluloid is going the way of vinyl records as movies are distributed digitally. And Hollywood is not Hollywood: the industry has gone global as fiber-optic cables allow simultaneous work on the same movie by creatives working from Cannes to Calcutta.
Few dispute the immense impact that 20th-century cinema has had on the lives of almost everyone on the planet. Hollywood 2.0 promises to deliver a similar impact - by very different means. Here's a peek at what's to come.
The First Posthuman Talent Agency Michael Rosenblatt, Ivan Gulas - founders, Mirage Entertainment Sciences
Considering all the struggling actors in Hollywood, it's no wonder that the first talent agency for synthespians is causing the latest Glittertown buzz. Ever since Michael Rosenblatt, cofounder of Atlantic Entertainment Group, and Harvard clinical psychologist Ivan Gulas (from left below) founded Mirage Entertainment Sciences in Boston last January, the active marketing of computer-generated actors has moved from idea to reality. Their first brainchild is a blond and buxom beauty named Justine (right), modeled after the wife of scientist and artist-in-residence Mark Sagar. Gulas, who specializes in the correlation between human emotions and expression, brought Justine to life with a CAD system called Life F/x. The program, which grows out of software used to re-create human cells for medical imaging, adds a new level of photorealism to animation. "We're even able to wrinkle skin so it behaves like real tissue," Gulas says. With such fine detail, it's understandable that human actors fear a digital Demi Moore might one day push them off the screen. But Rosenblatt insists that he's not in the business of replacing actors. "Were just expanding the repertoire of creativity," he says."After all, why do we have Mickey Mouse instead of a guy dressed up in a mouse suit?"
- Rachel Lehmann-Haupt
Stereo Is Dead, Long Live Internet Audio Elizabeth Cohen - president, Audio Engineering Society
Face it: your last experience with "CD-quality" audio on the Internet was reminiscent of listening to an old AM radio. That burns up Elizabeth Cohen, a tireless crusader to improve the sound of audio online. "Music is in the transportation business," says Cohen. "But unless we get the audio issues sorted out, the Internet is never going to deliver an immersive entertainment experience." Her task is to galvanize disparate forces - from slick music execs to techies and entertainment providers - and get them moving in the same direction. She seems uniquely qualified for the job. Cohen is a PhD who is as comfortable discussing acoustic transmission protocols as she is raving about the percussive intricacies of the Grateful Dead. Her task is to enhance, from start to finish, the quality of audio delivery. She's pushing an agenda that includes the emergence of advanced Internet backbones for broadband sound transmission (she's a big fan of Internet2), the move to six-channel discrete audio ("stereo is dead," she says definitively), and the creation of electronic payment schemes for audio-based applications. "We must rally to get the quality of audio we need and, frankly, deserve." Sound advice.
- James Daly
Rent Movies on the Web Stuart Skorman - founder, Reel.com
As the king of the East Coast's Empire video chain, Stuart Skorman became famous for movie-matching - a crude paper system that linked a list of films to his customers' preferences. Today Skorman, 48, is pushing movie-matching into cyberspace. Through his Web site ( www.reel.com ), you can not only get movies delivered to your door, but also access an online system called Reel Genius that asks you to rate flicks from one to ten, then builds a customer profile. Skorman admits he's a sucker for action movies, but Reel.com is aimed at the art-film crowd. His store in Berkeley, California, stocks 35,000 rental titles and has more than 80,000 titles for sale. "Most video stores are centered around products - we're centered around information," he says. Seven-day rentals start at US$3 plus $6 postage; films arrive in two to three business days (overnight is also an option). Skorman says that in the next five to ten years technology will allow film fans to download movies instantly, directly into their TV or PC screens. And you can bet Reel.com will be one of the first video-on-demand outlets at the starting gate.
- Rachel Lehmann-Haupt
Desktop Filmmaking Stefan Avalos, Lance Weiler - filmmakers
In an era of monstrous budgets and costly postproduction, Stefan Avalos and Lance Weiler (from left below) are boldly going where no filmmaker has gone before: to the desktop PC. For US$900, the Rushland, Pennsylvania, directors created The Last Broadcast, a feature whose production incorporates everyday programs - including over-the-counter editing and image processing software - while commenting on the omnipresence of the same technology.
"We wanted to do something for about the cost of a home stereo system and without begging for money," remembers Avalos. The mockumentary - a gritty Thin Blue Line-meets-Blowup investigation of two public-access TV show hosts murdered in New Jersey - took less than a year from conception to première, a schedule unheard of for feature films. Promoted from their Web site (www.tebweb.com/lastbroadcast/) and projected in DVD, The Last Broadcast will tour colleges and art theaters early next year.
- Colin Berry
The Network Is the Production Studio Larry Kasanoff - CEO, Threshold Digital Research Labs
In Hollywood, geography can turn production meetings into logistical nightmares. Take Threshold Entertainment's current production of Beowulf, starring Christopher Lambert. The director is in London. A few digital designers are in Paris. The second unit is somewhere in the hills of Romania. And don't forget the visual-effects house in Santa Monica, California, where dozens of digital artists wait anxiously to start working on the footage. Not to worry. Using Sprint's DRUMS network technology, Larry Kasanoff has electronically united his far-flung crew - and created the first virtual worldwide digital production studio. "We need something that's faster than FedEx," says Alison Savitch, president of Threshold Digital Research Labs. "We have artists located all over, so our production never stops." After downloading the footage from a T1 line, users at any location can instantly play back the sequence. A small camera and microphone hooked up to a PC allows videoconferencing. And an onscreen whiteboard with a series of paint tools lets users make notes as they talk. "We knew it would help us work with people who are across the world, but didn't realize how much we would use it to communicate across town," says Kasanoff. "Going into Hollywood to look at a shot used to take half a day. Now, it's a phone call." - P. J. Huffstutter
21st-Century Zoetropes Gerard Howland - designer
For a century, motion pictures have provided a predictable two-dimensional experience. Gerard Howland will change that. His latest project is a 360-degree, 3-D full-motion theater that will serve as the centerpiece of the US$200 million German host pavilion for Expo 2000. Howland was also the brains behind General Motors's extraordinary Infinite Theater at the 1996 Summer Olympics. It contained a large room walled by 40-foot mirrors. On the floor a 70-mm film was projected, taking guests on a thrill ride through the skies and underwater. Both projects reflect Howland's goal of taking cinema out of the theater and into "entertainment environments." Everyone from The Walt Disney Company to The Rolling Stones employs his fantastic ideas, blending them into theme parks, stage sets, casinos. Not surprisingly, Howland's background is in opera set design. "I've always liked large spectacles," says the urbane British expatriate, who runs The Floating Company in Sausalito, California. His projects are driven not by linear narrative, but by the visceral thrill of the story. "That's what this business is all about - ideas, spectacular ideas."
- James Daly
Remastering the Classics James Katz - film restoration specialist
One might suspect that the classics of cinema are lovingly preserved in climate-controlled studio storage facilities. Wrong. Thousands of movies are haphazardly neglected, turning into vinegar in shoddy warehouses. That's where James Katz (pictured) and partner Robert Harris come in.
The two specialize in restoring Hollywood's most famous large-format films. Among their successes are Vertigo (below), Spartacus, Lawrence of Arabia, and Rear Window (due in 1999). Katz and Harris apply photochemical techniques similar to those used when the film was first shot, processed, and printed. "We adapt new technology to the original method," Katz says, "but the bottom line is we completely rebuild the negative." First the Hollywood veterans comb the world looking for surviving prints, then orchestrate an ensemble of film labs, optical houses, negative cutters, digital sound specialists, and movie buffs to help in the recovery. They also bring in original stars like Tony Curtis and Peter O'Toole to rerecord dialog. It can take years to complete a salvage, and cost US$1 million per picture. Despite lofty praise for the finished work, many studios balk at paying for the restoration. The two cringe at the cinematic classics that may be lost forever. It would be nice, says Harris, for the industry to "give a little back to the audience that's paying for all those BMWs."
- Jackie Bennion
Director to Watch Luc Besson - filmmaker
French director Luc Besson brings to the screen a new international cinematic dialect that pairs up- to-the-minute digital artistry with sci-fi morphing of the familiar and fantastic. In his most inspired scenes in the recent 22nd-century epic The Fifth Element, he portrays New York City as a multilevel maze, an eye-splitting 3-D metropolis where restaurants hover up to your skyscraper's window a mile above the sidewalk, and flying taxis weave through traffic to evade cops. Besson, 38, has decorated his 15-year career with standout works including the offbeat Subway (1985) and the original and stylishly superior La Femme Nikita (1990). He's done thrillers, spy flicks, otherworldly epics. Dense and ambitious, the director's bouillabaisse is flavored with pinches of Gilliam, Burton, Kubrick, and Lucas. From costumes to casting to postproduction pyrotechnics, Besson invites us to savor the craft of picture-making.
- Colin Berry
Hot Gossip: Aint-it-cool-news.com Harry Knowles - online publisher
There are a lot of publicists in Hollywood who'd like to see Harry Knowles go away. Knowles liberally dishes insider dirt at his Web site (www.aint-it-cool-news.com/), sidestepping Hollywood's tight information flow with gossip on everything from directors' personalities to script rewrites. Knowles tracks his 600 or so daily emails in a black notebook, marking them as either "came true" or "didn't come true." Ain't It Cool - a line borrowed from John Travolta in Broken Arrow - is required reading/viewing in filmdom. It was the first to post reviews from a July screening of a working print of Titanic, as well as photos of the monsters in Starship Troopers. The site gets up to 400,000 hits daily. Not bad for a 25-year-old who helps his dad sell movie memorabilia and works out of a childhood bedroom in Austin. Ain't It Cool is heavy on the exclamation points, but Knowles says it all comes from his intense love of movies. "I bring back the feeling you had when you were 12, and nothing was more cool than cool movies."
- Lessley Anderson
The News Goes Graphic Alexei Tylevich - art director, Channel One News
Alexei Tylevich may have the single biggest influence on teenagers' expectations of cinematic style. Instead of pimping for the latest Spice Girls album on MTV, Tylevich creates conceptual art that reaches millions of high-schoolers via Channel One, a daily classroom news service. "The best graphics come out of the most powerful news stories - they are my inspiration," says Tylevich, who immigrated from Belarus at 17, and earned a BFA from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. He and his staff of five have an acute appreciation of the egolessness of illustration, the mutually enhancing symbiosis between a story and its art. Tylevich's visuals hit with the rapid delivery of the slickest music video. A black-and-white intro for a 12-minute heroin documentary, for instance, opens with an overhead shot of a drain bubbling with blood. The montage moves to a closeup of a syringe filling with the dark liquid, but this syringe is not marked by millimeters, but days of the week. Fade columns of words; in the center is the word self, surrounded by tangents of the self - time, work, live, future, home, now, past, real. The word self suddenly burns bright, then evaporates in a cloud of smoke. A final fade to the word heroin, scattered like dirt over a black drain hole. The deadly story of smack, told in less than 15 seconds.
- Heidi Kriz
Disney's Big Brain Bran Ferren - executive VP creative technology/R&D for Walt Disney Imagineering
"If you can think of it, it will happen," says Bran Ferren, with such glee in his voice that you have no doubt he is telling the truth - and in a great position to make it happen. Ferren has assembled a crack team of computer scientists, engineers, architects, writers, and artists to advance the art of storytelling. Ferren, 43, avoids specifics about Disney's mysterious Glendale, California, division, but insiders say Imagineering is working on projects ranging from elaborate ride films to new fantasy theme parks like DisneyQuest, a 100,000-square-foot center opening in Orlando next summer and Chicago a year later. Ferren's 140-plus member staff spans 65 professions and includes some of the sharpest minds in high tech - people like AI pioneer Marvin Minsky, computer interface innovator Alan Kay, and Danny Hillis, a key figure in designing new kinds of supercomputers. He also has Disney's marketing muscle. "Technologies are changing, but people's basic needs are not," he says. "What it takes to touch their hearts has remained constant for thousands of years."
- Dan Ouellette
Impresario of Online Film Festivals Bart Cheever - producer, D*Film
Empowering people with technology - it sounds quaint, but that's just what Bart Cheever does with D*Film, a real-world and online exhibit showcasing digitally produced minimasterpieces. Cheever's year-old operation highlights filmmakers who use technology to reconceptualize Hollywood. Some emanate from unlikely sources. Staceyjoy Elkin's eerie Amend, for instance, explores the balance between rationality and passion - but was created with decidedly unsexy software designed to map mathematical algorithms. Part of Cheever's unmaking of Tinseltown includes revolutionizing film distribution. "It's not hard to conceive of a time when you can shoot a film, edit it in your living room, put it up on your server, and anybody who wants to can stream it," he explains. Because these movies don't need to recoup millions of dollars at the box office, they can be distributed online to niche markets. Despite his affinity for the avant garde, Cheever is no cinematic snob. "What it comes down to is the artist's vision," Cheever explains. "Technology is just a tool." - Jennifer Kabat
The Harvard of Animation Mark Simon - professor, digital animation department, Sheridan College
The high demand for computer-generated effects has created a new talent broker in Hollywood. Just as NBA coaches look for the next Michael Jordan in the ranks of high school basketball players, studio recruiters stay in close contact with Mark Simon of Sheridan College in Oakville, Ontario. Simon, 45, heads one of the most highly regarded schools of computer and classical animation in the world. Sheridan graduates include Steve Williams (Jurassic Park, T2, Spawn), Dennis Turner (Twister), James Strauss (Dragonheart), and nearly a quarter of the employees at ILM. Other Sheridan alumni create mind-blowing work for Digital Domain, Disney, and DreamWorks. "I always stay for the credits," notes Simon, "to see what my former students are doing."
The secret behind Sheridan's success, he says, is the school's almost Darwinistic approach to teaching: "We push students; we don't just rubber-stamp diplomas." But the ones who make it through the rigorous one-year program can virtually write their own tickets in the fiercely competitive f/x business.
- Anne Speedie
Movies on Demand (No, Really) NetShow 2.0 - audio/video streaming application
The dream of full-screen feature movies on the PC comes a lot closer with Microsoft's NetShow 2.0. The audio and video technology allows a single server to transmit hundreds of nonconcurrent streams of the same movie - Jane can watch Men in Black at 7:00, for instance, while her coworker Dick starts the flick at 7:04. A 28.8-Kbps modem is expected to adequately handle most feeds. The first version of NetShow was a dog when it was released in September 1996. But Bill Gates has since gobbled up the competition. This past summer Microsoft bought Vxtreme and its compression technology, then licensed Progressive Networks' RealAudio and RealVideo. Meanwhile, it has signed up more than 40 companies (Intel and Adobe among them) to support its Advanced Streaming Format technology over competitors backed by Oracle, Netscape, and others. Microsoft has also partnered with VDOnet, ITV.net (an Internet TV station), and AudioNet to get NetShow up to snuff. Add a fearsome distributive muscle and you have a de facto standard waiting to go.
- Jennifer Sullivan.
Representing the New Elite Tom Atkin -executive director, Visual Effects Society
Directors have the Directors Guild of America. Actors have the Screen Actors Guild. But the visual-effects community has never had a professional fraternity - until now.
As the effects industry grew far beyond its boutique origins, the need for unity finally drew these artists out of dark labs and away from their clay models. In January, Tom Atkin pulled together some of Hollywood's best tech names and helped spawn the Visual Effects Society, a mix of established and young talent who work in everything from animation to CG environments - "the future of filmmaking," says Atkin, a former marketing guru at Sony Pictures. The nonprofit, 70-member trade organization works throughout California, and has held seminars that preach the importance of not only artistic vision, but body wellness. Those planning to step behind the lecture podium this year include ILM's Dennis Muren and Batman & Robin effects supervisor John Dykstra. "We must make sure these people are healthy today and 20 years from now," Atkin says. "We can't afford to lose another one to carpal tunnel."
- P. J. Huffstutter
The Next Walt Disney John Lasseter - filmmaker, VP creative development, Pixar
Having been stunned numb by effects-laden movies over the past year, it's nice to see that one director doesn't view rendering apps as the raison d'être for big-budget bombast. Technology doesn't drive his high tech movies - the story does. And whether it's Buzz and Woody from Toy Story or the one-man band from the Oscar-winning Tin Toy, Lasseter's digital denizens have the spring-loaded loopiness of the finest Bugs Bunny cartoons from director Chuck Jones. (The moment in Toy Story when Mr. Potato Head rearranges his snap-on features into a cubist mishmash and notes, "I'm Picasso," it's clear this ain't just for kids.) Lasseter, 40, never forgot his animation roots, which began when he was 5 and won a US$15 prize from a local model shop for his crayon drawing of the Headless Horseman. "The fact that we use computers is secondary," he says. "But Hollywood loves flash. In the days of Cecil B. DeMille, it was thousands of extras - today it's computer effects." He's now at work on A Bug's Life (below), scheduled to hit theaters next autumn, and Toy Story II, expected on video in late 1999. Both will adhere to Lasseter's Law: Flashy f/x may get people into the theater, but the essentials - plot and character development - are what keep them in their seats.
- James Daly
Real Big Video Willie Williams - video designer
He's already a legend in the music biz, having choreographed the mind-blowing stage set for U2's PopMart and Zoo TV tours. But the ambitions of Willie Williams go far beyond the hyperkinetic rock-and-roll circus. Williams, 38, is a painter on a grand scale. His medium of choice: monstrous high-definition video murals. Williams predicts that within five years, large buildings - particularly in splashy urban sprawls like Las Vegas - will serve as mutable canvases for electronic muralmakers. The cityscapes of the future, he says, "will not be defined by the architects, but by video editors." Look for Williams to create these masterworks. He and fellow video artist Catherine Owens will offer a taste of what's next when their audio/video installation 15 Seconds in Pop shows at New York's Guggenheim Museum SoHo in late October. A larger exhibit, featuring a 3-D video sculpture, opens at the Bilbao Guggenheim in Spain next spring. Williams admits there's a danger this video movement could devolve into cheap commercialism. "It would be an incredible waste to see all the beauty of video wasted on a tacky ad."
- James Daly
Starting Point for Start-Ups Jon Goodman - executive director, EC2
Jon Goodman likens the University of Southern California's business incubator Egg Company 2 (EC2) to Akira Kurosawa's film Rashomon. In the Japanese classic, several narrators recount varying versions of a whodunit, resulting in a more richly textured movie. "We offer access to different points of view," she says. The two-year-old project, which is part of USC's Annenberg Center, provides a starting point for start-ups - many entertainment-oriented - that have a brilliant idea, but little business acumen. EC2 provides a 900-square-foot office near the fabled USC film school that includes everything from sophisticated technical equipment and janitorial services to lawyers, accountants, marketing people, and venture capitalists. "That leaves us free to concentrate on other headaches," jokes Stuart Levy, founder of Mixx Entertainment, the start-up behind MixxTV, a pilot magazine program on Japanese pop culture. More than 300 companies vied for EC2's 10 slots. "Our hope is the future of communications would be filled with less garbage and less noise," Goodman says. With EC2, many of these projects might just get a chance to hatch.
- Evantheia Schibsted
Architecture as Entertainment Jon Jerde - architect
Architects get apoplectic discussing Jon Jerde. The Venice, California-based designer creates outlandish urban environments that usurp the languorous process of civic evolution. Jerde works with an overstated flourish, playfully blurring reality and artifice, as he lays the foundation of a new architectural discipline: experiential design. "I think of architecture as entertainment, and life as entertainment, and I'm not sure where to draw the line," he says. His wildest execution is The Fremont Street Experience (below), a covered promenade that revitalized downtown Las Vegas. The site attracts 25,000 visitors nightly, who gaze upward at a computer-generated animation and sound show projected on a screen capping the four-acre complex. Two million lights and 540,000 watts of sound make up the world's largest graphics display system. Jerde also created Universal CityWalk, a glitzy promenade in LA. Among those who Jerde consults during previsualization: filmmakers Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, and sci-fi scribe Ray Bradbury. Jerde knows that a veneer of theatricality can be unpopular - instead, he creates a middle ground between flesh and fantasy that's held together with steel and concrete. Cities as simulacrum. Space as entertainment.
- James Daly
Fiber to the Projection Booth Linwood Dunn - researcher
You'd think that a guy who started out hand-cranking movie cameras in the 1920s and pioneered modern f/x on King Kong and Citizen Kane might be a dinosaur in the digital age. But at 92, Linwood Dunn shows no sign of slowing. Dunn's latest research is in Electronic Cinema, a system for distributing movies to theaters via fiber-optic lines. Instead of producing thousands of prints at US$2,000 each, studios could digitally beam films into retrofitted theaters - perhaps as early as next year. Retrofitting isn't cheap, but there are big advantages. Beyond the expense saved on prints, electronic distribution could curtail losses from piracy through encryption technologies. How will the digitized movies look? It's debatable. Critics say they aren't as vibrant as celluloid films. Dunn disagrees: "The audience won't know the difference."
- Ron Magid
Editing on the Fly Richard Goodman, Jeb Johenning - developers, The Brainstorm film editing system
A few feet behind Alien Resurrection's "video village" - the cluster of monitors used to review each take - Richard Goodman (seated) is shaping the future of filmmaking. He, along with partner Jeb Johenning and their LA-based company Ocean Video, have developed The Brainstorm, a customized computer that takes the standard video feed from a film camera and puts it into a nonlinear digital editing system.
A simple idea in concept, but nothing short of revolutionary when implemented. The Brainstorm gives directors unprecedented on-set control by allowing them to view a scene backward, change the frame rate, replace a bluescreen background on the fly - then instantly see if their ideas work. Renting The Brainstorm starts at US$2,500 a week, but the payback in time savings comes immediately. On Alien Resurrection, that added up to tens of thousands of dollars per day.
By capturing and manipulating every shot, The Brainstorm is positioned for Hollywood's transition to all-digital film production.
- Sam Shank
Rendering Reality, Bit by Bit Paul Debevec - scientist/filmmaker
Thanks to Paul Debevec, 3-D models in movies will soon look a lot more like life. The Campanile, Debevec's gasp-inducing short, succinctly demonstrates his Facade modeling and rendering software. The three-minute film opens with the 26-year-old UC Berkeley PhD placing an architectural model of his school's Sather Tower next to the real landmark. The camera zooms in, sweeps around in an incredibly tight fly-by, and pulls out to a breathtaking bird's-eye view of the entire campus. Remarkably, the film used only 20 snapshots of the tower and campus to model the 3-D photorealistic scene, which can be navigated in real time. Using Facade, Debevec and his colleagues matched line segments in the photographs to the edges of basic geometric 3-D blocks - the software then snapped 3-D shapes into alignment with the corresponding structures in the photo. Lastly, the original photographic images of the buildings and grounds were texture-mapped onto the reconstructed geometry, and a virtual camera recorded the fly-by. Facade enables image-based modeling to be accomplished quite quickly - the film's 40 photorealistic buildings were modeled inside a week. And neither of the usual headaches of traditional 3-D modeling - acquiring architectural plans and hand-painting textures - were suffered.
- David Pescovitz
