THE CUTTING EDGE: COMPUTING / TECHNOLOGY / INNOVATION : Do You Feel Interactive? : Clint Eastwood CD-ROM May Be a Turning Point in Industry
The occasion was a CD-ROM demonstration at Georgia, the exclusive restaurant on Melrose Avenue. At the podium was a techie from Seattle. On the screen was an interactive retrospective of Clint Eastwood’s career. And at the bar was the debonair film icon himself--blushing bright red.
The techie, Kelli Curtis, who spent the last year digitizing Eastwood’s life, had clicked 1960 on the timeline, and suddenly the air was filled with the star’s voice crooning “Rowdy/Cowboy Wedding Song” in a flashback to his little-known singing career.
“There were things I would just as soon they hadn’t delved into,” Eastwood said at the CD-ROM “premiere” Monday night. “But it’s very impressive what they’ve been able to do with the technology.”
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After two years of hype about the supposed convergence of Hollywood and Silicon Valley, “Eastwood,” the CD-ROM produced by Seattle-based Starwave, may represent a turning point of sorts in the fledgling multimedia industry.
Dozens of lesser-known stars and several of Hollywood’s more celebrated techies such as George Lucas and Steven Spielberg have dabbled in the interactive world. But Eastwood is the first major film star to lend credibility to the new medium with a project of his own.
“High-tech” is not a term that springs to mind when considering Eastwood’s work, and fans who know him as the Man With No Name will not be surprised to learn that he is not particularly technologically inclined.
“I have a computer in my helicopter,” Eastwood said. “That’s about it.”
Still, when Starwave approached him nearly two years ago with a demonstration of what the CD-ROM might look like, Eastwood was intrigued by the interactive format.
“In a straight documentary, the director would have told you the story as he saw it,” he said. “With this technology, it unfolds the way the user wants it to.”
Starwave, one of Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s multimedia companies, has set out to prove to Hollywood that technology can create compelling entertainment. The firm is also producing CD-ROMs with rock musicians Peter Gabriel and Sting.
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And Starwave Chief Executive Mike Slade says the task--at least in the case of the Eastwood CD-ROM--was more daunting than he had anticipated.
Storing the data that eventually was pared down to fit on two discs required a whopping 40 gigabytes of disk drive space--about the size of an airline reservation database. And design concepts, such as animating the movie stills that serve as the gateway to movie groupings such as “Cops” and “Westerns” turned out to be illegal.
“We found out taking a picture of Gene Hackman [co-star of “Unforgiven”] and moving it around was not OK,” says Slade. “Next time we’ll be a lot farther along on the learning curve.”
The merging of the two cultures, it seems, also has a ways to go.
“I definitely feel like a software guy at a Hollywood party,” said Curt Blake, Starwave’s vice president for legal affairs.
The two-disc title, which cost about $1.5 million to produce, includes two hours of clips from each of Eastwood’s 53 movies, an hour of exclusive interview footage, glimpses from the past--such as Eastwood’s appearance in a 1957 milk commercial and “Rawhide” segments--and a trivia quiz.
And because it’s interactive, fans can hear Dirty Harry tell the bank robber to go ahead and make his day--over and over and over. They can also hear Eastwood comment, “I must have heard that line 10,000 times in the two days after the movie came out, and I began to think, ‘You know, this could get old.’ . . . But I guess it’s better to have had a few lines like that in your lifetime than to have had none.”
