A Film Producer Finds the Message Is Her Medium

From sound that surrounds to pictures from pixels, the new technologies of the ‘90s threaten to change our entertainment and our arts.

The past week has been an especially high-charged one for the digital thinkers of the world.

Three on-line computer services, one American, two international, connected their subscribers to the Library of Congress and its exhibit of previously secret documents from the former Soviet Union. On your PC, notes from the secret police.

Then “Batman” returned, enhanced on movie screens like no film before by visual special effects and a heavily touted new generation of digital sound.

Sony announced re-recordable audio CDs, a major move in sound retailing, while the Philips company said it plans to compete with a digital version of audiocassettes.

And then there’s the “Show Biz Expo” at the Los Angeles Convention Center, a trade show and conference through today that specializes in state-of-the-art entertainment devices. As a tribute to technology, it’s an under-one-roof shopping mall for the people who make movies, TV shows, music videos and recordings and this year, for the first time, the people who stage live theater.

Film producer Gale Anne Hurd gave keynote dignity to the affair. Her message was not exclusively about all the wonders of technology. She’s concerned about the messages, the stories, as well as the high-tech messengers. She’s concerned too about the “shoe box” low-tech theater houses where special effects usually end up as special defects.

Hurd, in her 15-year Hollywood career, knows something about cinematic effects, having produced the two “Terminators” along with “Aliens,” “The Abyss” and “Alien Nation.”

But more recently she has demonstrated a bent for simpler movie-making, such as “The Waterdance,” Neal Jimenez’s current film about the disabled, and next month’s “Raising Cain,” a “romantic thriller” that her husband, Brian De Palma (“Carrie,” “The Bonfire of the Vanities”), directed.

Whether big movie or small movie, it’s the story, not the technology, that counts, she says.

Although she continues to explore “the cutting edges of all the new technological processes,” she says, films without real stories have no interest to her. Stories first, she says.

“Technological things,” she says, “are ways to achieve a visual and aural experience that must first be dictated by the screenplay. There are movies that have been made that seem to have been started the other way around, to be just an assortment of special effects and nothing more. That’s exploitative and certainly not in the best interests of the audience.

“I’m looking for a happy medium, to bring to the screen compelling stories that are character driven, whether they involve special effects, science fiction or just basic filmmaking.”

That’s why as an independent producer she’s set up something different: two production offices under her one management.

There’s Pacific Western Productions, which makes big movies for big studios, such as “Raising Cain,” which was shot largely in Northern California locations near Woodside. She and De Palma have first-look deals with Universal for these kinds of projects. At the same time, Pacific Western is developing two screen stories this year with Disney and TriStar that will use a strong dose of special effects.

And then there’s No Frills Films, where “The Waterdance” and the earlier “Tremors” came from. No Frills is a production company for independent and usually new filmmakers with compelling stories and no thoughts of big budgets.

Budgets. That’s another of Hurd’s favorite subjects, one synonymous with most high-cost technologies.

“Look what we did with ‘Raising Cain,’ ” she says. “It was budgeted at $12 million. We’re bringing it in at $11 million. And that was with a full union crew.

“How do you do that? First, we’ve learned a few tricks along the way. And we believe in sitting down with our production people and planning carefully where we’ll spend our money. Then we keep watching costs.

“Most films cost too much. It’s time that budgets are set that meet the financial demands of the world we live in. No one can keep making movies that cost a fortune and that bankrupt studios. If the big studios could hold their budgets to $12 million to $15 million each, they could make many more movies. You don’t have to spend $40 million to sell $100 million in tickets.”

Hurd believes that state-of-the-art equipment such as that displayed at the “Show Biz Expo” could produce bottom-line state of the budget, and perhaps even bring about improved audio and visual equipment for the theaters where her stories are played out.

Until that time, she says, there are occasional surprise bonuses that come with the new technologies.

Safety, is one, she says, pointing out that the stunt cables that were attached to Arnold Schwarzenegger in the opening sequences of “Terminator 2,” when he jumped from the banks of the Los Angeles River to the concrete flood control channel, were never seen by audiences. They were digitally erased by computers.

Computers have been known to do the reverse, to make things appear, such as those once-secret documents from the once-Soviet Union at the Library of Congress. Computer owners who subscribe to such modem-driven services as America Online, Internet or Sovset could take part in a pioneering use of the technology, not only being able to look closely at 25 of the documents but last Thursday participated in electronic dialogues with Russian experts on the secret papers.

It is a development that James H. Billington, the librarian of Congress, has called a “library without walls,” the first time, he says, that any institution has offered “direct electronic access to the contents of an exhibit.”

It is a techno-vision of the future that Hollywood dreamers might want to call up, a future with multiplexes without walls?