LOS ANGELES -- Will the term "film" become obsolete?
That's the debate among moviemakers, distributors, and theater owners following George Lucas's announcement last week that he would release an all-digital version of The Phantom Menace on four screens and shoot Episode 2 of the Star Wars prequel entirely with digital cameras.
Lucas believes that all-digital productions are the most economic solution in the long run -- especially when compared to the high cost of printing film negatives, shipping heavy canisters around the world, maintaining antiquated projectors, and ultimately watching the product disintegrate with time.
"The change [in moviemaking and distribution] is going to happen," said Jeff Blake, president of Sony Pictures Releasing. The company's sister Sony affiliate is developing a digital camera for Lucas.
"And it may happen a lot quicker than a lot of people think."
In Lucas' vision, the studio of the 21st century will shoot its motion pictures with digital cameras that interface seamlessly with computers creating special effects. The studio would then beam the movies via satellite to theaters, where they would be downloaded to digital projectors. The movies could then be permanently archived in digital archives, not dusty film vaults.
It is a revolution in filmmaking, and Lucas is clearly at the helm.
"I can't think of a better time to be in the motion picture business," Lucas told attendees at last week's National Association of Theater Owners ShoWest conference in Las Vegas. If Lucas has his way, that process may be well under way by around the middle of the next decade, when Episode 3 is expected to be released. That generous time frame would allow studios to begin seriously adopting the technology and theater owners to convert many of their existing houses to digital -- or build new ones.
It's difficult to argue with his track record.
With the original Star Wars trilogy, Lucas revolutionized computerized special effects, fostering the growth of the modern event movie. With Industrial Light and Magic, he has created the industry's dominant special effects house. From the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park to the morphing sequences of Terminator 2, ILM's creations have populated many of the highest-grossing films of the last two decades.
Lucas' Las Vegas demonstration puts a "final Good Housekeeping seal of approval" on digital motion picture technology, said Michael Targoff, chief executive of Cinecom Digital Cinema. Last week in Las Vegas, the firm showcased its new system for transmitting, downloading, and projecting digital films.
Others aren't so sure, and cast back to the unfulfilled promise of another high-priced technology.
"I remember going to a conference five or six years ago where they said that HDTV would be in everyone's homes by now," said Marci Davies, senior vice president of marketing for Cineplex Odeon.
"That certainly hasn't happened."
While impressed by digital movie technology, the executive at North America's largest theater chain wondered whether she'll be able to afford it. She figured that a digital upgrade of the entire Cineplex chain could cost as much as US$290 million -- a tab that she says she said she can't yet justify.
For his part, Cinecom's Targoff said that his company is now raising second-round financing to cover most of each theater's conversion costs, while keeping the theater's payments to little more than the interest it would pay on capital improvements.
Then there's the piracy issue. Digital movies mean that counterfeiters have at least the potential to make perfect copies of every movie Hollywood produces.
"What makes you think that the same guys cloning cellular phones at LAX aren't going to be doing the same thing with Star Wars?" said Robert Gibbons, spokesman for Eastman Kodak's professional imaging group. Kodak has supplied film for about 90 percent of Hollywood's feature films.
The phantom of counterfeiting haunted Fox's presentation of a two-minute trailer from Episode 1 at ShoWest. At that screening, 20th Century Fox distribution chief Tom Sherak begged attendees to keep their eyes open for people in the audience attempting to videotape it.
In the end, studios and theater owners may inevitably switch over to digital. The reason: They simply can't justify hanging on to antiquated distribution systems as they build state-of-the-art 24-plexes.
"Right now, we're loading 60-pound cans of films on trucks to distribution centers that put them on trucks to deliver in the middle of the night to theaters," Sony's Blake said.
"There's an urgent need to totally change the distribution system."
