FLICKERING OF THE BIG SCREEN

For the industry experts who addressed last week’s convention of theater owners in New Orleans, it could not have been easy finding good news to pass along. Exhibitors, facing runaway sales in the competitive video home entertainment industry, are suffering through one of their worst slumps of the last decade.

Nevertheless, one speaker--Charles Kinsolving of the Newspaper Advertising Bureau--suggested a silver lining.

After reporting that by 1995, 70% of American homes will be equipped with VCRs and 65% will have cable, he said--get this--that “thanks to VCRs and pay cable, America is again becoming a mass movie audience!”

This is good news if you work for the electric company, which is supplying the fuel for this surge. But if you run a movie theater, it’s hardly cheering to note that more people than ever are watching movies somewhere else.

Kinsolving’s theory is that by seeing more movies at home, people will be so smitten by the medium that they’ll actually go to theaters more often than they do now, a notion contradicted by results from the same Newspaper Advertising Bureau survey he was quoting.

Among VCR owners interviewed, 41% said they go out to movies less now than before, and 57% said they would rather wait for a new movie until they can see it at home.

And even more depressing for exhibitors: Although 77% of frequent moviegoers (those who average a movie a month) said they would rather go out to see a movie than watch one on TV, one-third acknowledged going to movies less since buying VCRs.

Pretty soon, we’ll have to stop referring to that area of our home as the family room and start calling it the Bijou.

If anything, the cloud hanging over America’s theaters is darker than it appears. The general attitude at last week’s convention was that the year’s box office is in a slump because Hollywood is in a slump; things will get better as soon as the movies get better.

But that hasn’t slowed business at the more than 20,000 video shops around the country. Most of the movies that spun down the theatrical toilet during the first half of 1985 have sprung back, healthy as frogs, on videocassette.

Kinsolving’s new “mass movie audience” will risk $2 or $3 on almost anything for home viewing (at video-store prices even “Dune” is a bargain on TV), but to get them to a theater. . . . Well, maybe it’s time to bring back dinnerware and door prizes.

People have been predicting the obsolescence of movie theaters since television first flickered into view in the late ‘40s. The industry survived that crisis through wide-screen epics and 3-D, and later by taking the dramatic subjects and sexual candor beyond television’s censored reach.

Then came the multiplex, one of the deftest illusions ever played on consumers. Here, we are given the opportunity to see more than one movie under inferior circumstances while having to park only once.

The multiplex, epitomized by those 14 squash courts constituting the Beverly Cineplex, saved a lot of theater owners’ businesses, and actually caused an increase of 4,000 screens in the last 10 years. But it is now aiding the enemy.

There’s no point in trying to show a wide-screen epic in most of these theaters, and a person can now carry home all the dramatic and visual candor he wants from the video store. Or he can buy a satellite dish and vacuum it out of the sky.

By 1995, said Kinsolving, 6 million of those outsized mushrooms will dot the American landscape.

Finally, as one visiting sound engineer pointed out to the exhibitors in New Orleans, the technology for home systems has passed the theaters by. Anyone willing to spend the money on stereo equipment can enjoy better sound at home, with rented tapes, than they’ll hear at almost any theater. And though TV images are smaller and far less forceful, at least they’re in focus.

Soon, even the TV images may be better. There is a move in the industry now toward increasing the standard film speed from 24 pictures per second to 30--not to accommodate theaters, but to enhance the product for the coming era of high-definition TV.

That is a revealing gesture, and part of the general malaise of Hollywood. The studios have become so sensitive to the aftermarket potential of films--to their sudden ability to reach millions of infrequent moviegoers at home--that they’re beginning to program as if they were doing TV.

It is not coincidence that many of the young production and marketing executives at the rapidly changing studios are network graduates.

Hollywood is not having a bad year because it got out on the wrong side of the bed Jan. 1. The overall quality of films has been dropping steadily in recent years, but a handful of annual blockbusters aimed at teen-age repeaters left the opposite impression at the box office.

(It’s an ironic twist of greed that since “Star Wars,” the studios have spent most of their time, energy and resources on movies aimed at the 12- to 17-year-olds who account for only 20% of all moviegoers.)

There is one thing theaters do have over home viewing, and it’s the one reason they will survive even this assault. It’s the sharing of a good movie--in the dark, with a friend next to you and strangers all around--that produces the real magic. Everything else is information.

But where are those good movies, and what do we do while we wait for them?

Visit the video store and check out some tapes . . . pre-1985, to be safe.