Hollywood 2010

At the start of “Fight Club,” the camera pulls slowly back through tendrils of viscous protoplasm, which presently resolve themselves into cells and ganglia, then bone, skin and hair, until the audience perceives that it has moved backward through a man’s brain and out the front of his head. Whatever one may think of the Brad Pitt film, its first 2,260 frames are a bravura act of movie making. The opening seems as real as the finest photography and no less remarkable because it was created, 100% of it, inside a computer by a digital craftsman, Kevin Mack. At 95 seconds, it is the longest and most complex shot that the special effects firm Digital Domain has ever created. Requiring no film and no conventional camera lens, it is a dramatic representation not only of the human brain, but of the future of Hollywood movie making. In movies, says 39-year-old Mack, “the computer can do anything.”

For an industry that has been riding high for most of this century, Hollywood has been remarkably free of religious wars over technology--unlike, say, the personal computer business, which has spent its entire life span battling over Windows vs. Macintosh. But for 70 years Hollywood has made pictures according to a single standard that allows almost any movie to be shown anywhere in the world. That is about to change. Hollywood, like the rest of the world, is going digital.

In an astonishingly short time, it has become industry convention that the sort of movies we enjoy today (via light projected through strips of sprocketed polyester) will be created and screened tomorrow via data files, digital ones and zeros instructing computers how to assemble full-color images onto mats of millions of tiny mirrors.

There is scarcely a studio where “digital” is not an all-purpose byword to designate the limitless future. Directors envision a world where no effect is out of reach, whether it is a color mix that cannot be achieved in a film lab or the creation of a lead character who might exist only on planet Arcturus 4. Studio chiefs look forward to beaming their latest features via satellite to thousands of theaters at once, eliminating the economic risk inherent in striking 4,000 color prints (at $1,500 per) of a film that might bomb at the box office. It’s a world in which every screening of every film is as pristine as the first; no longer will each showing invest a print with a new layer of scratches, dirt and heat damage. No longer will teenage projectionists run the fourth reel before the third, and studios will learn instantly, via electronic feedback, whether a theater owner is secretly running midnight shows and pocketing the proceeds, or illicitly moving an underperforming release to the smallest, darkest hall in the megaplex. Did a film bomb on Friday night? By Sunday an entirely new cut can be showing in 5,000 theaters.

To some of its fans, digital technology offers the prospect of empowering the struggling artist. If there are filmmakers of genius who have been kept from the public by the studio system’s stranglehold on distribution, digital may be a great emancipator: Theoretically at least, nothing will stop a young director with a $1,000 high-quality digital camera from shooting a feature, editing it electronically and streaming it over the Internet to an eager world.

Harbingers of this future already have arrived. The first public digital screenings of commercial features took place this summer at specially equipped theaters in Burbank, Hollywood and a handful of other locations: Digitized versions of “Tarzan,” “An Ideal Husband” and “Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace” were projected via competing systems designed by Texas Instruments and Hughes-JVC. The showings drew capacity crowds and are the talk of Hollywood today, even if they failed to prove that electronic cinema is ready for prime time. The images on screen were as free of jiggles and blur as a music CD is of pops and warps, and impressed many observers with their clarity. But others were disappointed by their color and resolution, especially when compared with film prints of the same pictures. In any event, the exhibitions were overseen by squadrons of professional engineers and backed up by regular analog movie prints running in sync, lest the delicate systems fail. That’s not a formula that could be replicated easily in a rollout of a new technology to America’s 30,000-plus movie screens. Nevertheless, the assumption that digital files one day will replace images on film is so widespread that even executives at Kodak--arguably the company most at risk in this millennial transition--acknowledge the obsolescence of their core business. “One day I can see it all being digital,” says Jerry Pooler, digital effects supervisor at Kodak’s Cinesite subsidiary in Los Angeles. How soon? “Less than five years.”

Digital technology’s impact on cinema can be divided into three categories. The first is “image capture”--what used to be known simply as photography. Then comes “post-production,” which includes editing and the laying-in of special effects. Finally there’s distribution and exhibition--the shipment of the finished product to theaters and its screening to the audience. Today it is in post-production that digital technology is most firmly entrenched. Where film editors used to physically cut and splice strips of film, most editors now work from a video, running it through an Avid Technology film editor that spits out a frame-by-frame log of cuts and splices that can be mapped to a master print: The editor never has to wield a blade. As for special effects, most of them--including sets, backgrounds, extras and (witness Jar Jar Binks of “Star Wars”) full-blown characters--already are created entirely inside computers and converted to high-quality video to be melded with filmed elements.

Lagging well behind post-production are the two extremes of the film process, photography and distribution, although digital image capture is thought to be closer at hand: Hollywood is abuzz over George Lucas’ announced plans to shoot his next “Star Wars” episode entirely with digital equipment, beginning next year. The real question mark for the industry remains digital distribution and exhibition, with issues that have not begun to be resolved. One is economics. Retrofitting movie houses with digital projection systems will cost $100,000 per screen or more. Unless the result is picture quality so vastly superior to today’s that audiences will go out of their way to sit in a digital theater, exhibitors will refuse to pay the freight.

Theater owners maintain that the real savings from going digital, at least at first, will be reaped by the studios, who no longer will need to strike and ship costly prints. But the studios argue that theater owners will have many opportunities to earn profits from the new system and should at least share the cost of conversion. “We look at this as an overhead expense no different from any other the exhibitor has,” says James C. Tharp, a distribution executive for DreamWorks.

And money is only one of multiple hurdles that could delay things. The riddle of how to get the digital bits composing a movie safely from studio to movie theater is still unsolved--will studios simply send DVD-like discs through the mail, or will they distribute their films electronically by satellite? Either way, the studios are panicked at the specter of large-scale digital piracy. It’s one thing for a college kid to download pirated movie prints from the Internet, as is already common; most are copies of tapes shot by hand-held cameras smuggled into theaters, and thus hardly can compete with the experience of watching “The Matrix” on a big screen. But what happens if a hacker taps into a bit stream on its way from studio to multiplex, or someone steals a first-run DVD print? Then the digital buccaneers will have their hands on a version every bit as good as the one going up on thousands of screens around the country. Theoretically, the disc or transmission can be encrypted, but whether any encryption is really foolproof is an open question. “This issue hasn’t even begun to get a hard look,” says Mark Christiansen, head of operations for theatrical distribution at DreamWorks SKG. “I think digital cinema is coming and I think it’s inevitable. It’s just a little too early to see how it’s going to work.”

What most cinema professionals agree on is that the transition to digital could be the most dramatic technological change Hollywood ever has faced, even more important than the passage from silent films to talkies in the 1920s. Directors and cinematographers would have to give up much of the vocabulary of filmmaking that has been learned and internalized over the last 70 years while absorbing a whole new technical syntax. The change already has widened employment opportunities for a new breed of studio technicians -- like Mack, designer of the “Fight Club” sequence.

Mack began his Hollywood career making miniature models for the special effects of “Airplane II” in 1982. After working as an artist on about 15 features over the next 10 years, he contributed digital effects to a movie for the first time in 1993. It was “Surf Ninjas”; Mack’s work involved painting a digital matte (a portion of background to be inserted into a larger scene) using a mouse and an Amiga computer (hopelessly antique by today’s standards). “I was in the right place at the right time,” he recalls. “I’m kind of a technology zealot. I’d been doing music using computers for years, and using computer graphics since before it was suitable for visual effects.”

Through the early ‘90s, filmmakers treated computer graphics, or “CGI” (computer generated images), with what might be termed attentive skepticism. The quicksilver villain of “Terminator 2” was an astonishing effect, but it stood out clearly as an effect. No one was sure that such digital sleight-of-hand could be used to integrate an organic creature into a live-action shot. Then came 1993 and “Jurassic Park.” Steven Spielberg’s dinosaurs gave digital effects the closest thing to a papal imprimatur that any film technique could receive. It wasn’t simply that CGIs were being employed by a first-class filmmaker, but that it was done so effectively. “That proved that organic creatures could be done in the computer,” Mack says. He himself helped move the technology ahead: At Digital Domain he contributed effects to “True Lies” and “Apollo 13.” When “Fight Club” director David Fincher explained his idea for a tracking shot that moved through the disturbed brain of the Edward Norton character, Mack knew the fanciful setting could be constructed not from physical materials or even from scanned illustrations of actual brain tissue, but from mathematical algorithms replicating the patterns of organic growth--all inside a computer.

It’s not surprising that Hollywood conversations about the transition from film to computer often comprise equal parts nostalgia and anticipation. “There’s some chemical magic that takes place in a film emulsion that produces an organic-looking image that digital doesn’t,” says Micheal J. McAlister, Cinesite’s senior visual effects supervisor. “The way light strikes an object and creates a halo or glow, the way it responds to smoke. . . that will never be replaced. But even to attempt to hold back the tide is to identify yourself as a dinosaur.”

Fighting this tide is a small (and dwindling) band of Cassandras. One is film critic Roger Ebert, who last June devoted an entire segment of “Siskel & Ebert at the Movies” to an appeal that Hollywood reconsider its headlong shift to digital projection. “Hollywood has not spent one dime on basic research [into digital projection],” he says. “Digital projection looks great--I love my DVD--but I don’t think it’s film.” One of the concerns of the go-slow camp is that aspects of the film image may exist that are invisible to the naked eye, yet affect our subconscious or emotional response to the moving image. “Does the digital image affect the mind the same way as film?” Ebert asks. “Film creates a reverie state and video a hypnotic state. People will look at TV indefinitely, but they want to know what time a movie’s going to end.”

Many cinematographers also are uneasy about the compromises demanded by digital cinema. “Digital is a great tool to create images,” says Dean Cundey, who shot such special effects classics as “Jurassic Park” and “Apollo 13.” “But it’s a double-edged sword. You hear people saying ‘It’s almost as good as film.’ Well, in the past we’ve always tried to improve the film image. Now everybody seems to be settling for less.”

*

Almost everybody. In a low-rise building in an industrial park in the horse country of San Luis Obispo County, plunked down amid the largely vacant fields between the airport and the 101, Dean Goodhill is mounting a private war for Hollywood’s soul. His weapon is a film projector that he believes will revolutionize the filming and showing of movies. That’s still somewhat down the road: The current version, which he uses to demonstrate his “MaxiVision 48” film system to anyone he can lure to San Luis Obispo, is a jury-rigged affair, high-tech electronics sprouting from a base cobbled together from old parts and a coffee can. Goodhill (who pioneered digital editing on “The Fugitive,” for which he shared an Oscar nomination) maintains that there is a cheaper way to improve the screen image than equipping every hall with a $100,000 digital projector. His proposal is to improve projection by improving the projector itself--the basic technology has barely changed in half a century--and by shooting movies at double speed, or 48 frames per second. To prove his point, he screens a 22-second clip shot at 48 frames on the Panavision Corp. property in Tarzana. It shows an actor strolling down a path, past a white picket fence, as a panel truck drives by. But where a similar clip shot conventionally exhibits the blurred horizontal motion that cinematographers have put up with for decades, Goodhill’s is startlingly clear, even to the point that the viewer can read the writing on the truck as it passes.

All he needs now is about $30 million to complete a prototype projector that can run both conventional and MaxiVision film (at a conversion cost of about $10,000 per theater). But persuading Hollywood powers to give MaxiVision a serious look has been almost impossible. Even many filmmakers who have been impressed by Goodhill’s demo still see it largely as an interesting “interim” process.

Already the prevalence of digital effects has turned some traditional creative relationships in Hollywood on their heads. Animation and live-action, for example. “Traditional animation used to be the unique synthetic world in movies,” says Lance Williams, a computer graphics expert who worked with DreamWorks animation before moving to DreamQuest, a digital studio owned by Disney. “If you want to fill Lake Michigan with milk, it’s trivial in animation. If you want to do it in live-action, that’s quite another matter.” Live-action filmmakers have moved much more readily than animators to embrace digital effects. Part of the reason surely must be that, as Williams hints, digital technology can accomplish things in live-action that animators simply can execute by hand. But it also is true that digital effects tend both to overwhelm traditional animation and to expose its technical flaws. The vibration suffered by film running through a conventional projector--the technical terms are “jitter” and “weave”--blur the image enough to obscure the imperfections in a hand-made drawing. The crystalline image of digital projection can give the audience a microscopic view of those same flaws. “There are artifacts of hand-drawing you can live with in film,” says Dan Philips, digital effects supervisor at DreamWorks Animation. “The more digital you are, the more things there are that are wrong, that are no longer tolerated.” Animators are going to have to learn to coexist with this phenomenon the same way recording engineers learned to work around the peculiarities of digital sound.

Meanwhile, “there’s an aesthetic challenge to rein in the new tools,” Philips says. In effect, filmmakers are going to have to outgrow the temptation to do things just because they’re possible--a lesson Philips learned when he was a digital artist responsible for the stunning computer-generated ballroom scene in Disney’s “Beauty and the Beast.” Even to his own eyes, the scene strikes a jarring note today. “That ballroom is exquisite,” he says, “but it doesn’t look like the rest of the movie.”

In a sense, of course, all concerns about the quality of the digital image, and the need to contrive new techniques, are secondary to Hollywood’s ultimate aim: to enthrall an audience with a narrative.

“I have fundamentally reinterpreted entertainment as ‘storytelling,’ ” says Bran Ferren, an engagingly bearish man who serves as director of research and development for Walt Disney Imagineering. To Ferren (whose office in Glendale is stuffed with artifacts ranging from a wide-screen Sony digital TV to an array of cast-iron screws and bolts), the governing issue of technological progress is whether it allows a compelling story to more efficiently reach an ever-larger audience. That’s the vector that led from live theater to cinema, from cinema to television, and arguably from cinema recorded on progressively more fragile and degraded film stock to cinema recorded as digital bits. If the transition means giving up certain inchoate qualities of film in exchange for greater reach, to Ferren that is a fair bargain and by no means an unprecedented compromise. The medium of narrative expression, he argues, has never been the crucial factor in the relationship between storyteller and audience.

“Filmmaking is not about ‘film.’ When my predecessors at this company killed Bambi’s mother, you probably cried. Now, why would you cry that a series of drawings died? It’s because ‘emotional resolution,’ as distinct from ‘technical resolution,’ is determined by content and the skill of the storytelling. If you’re a master storyteller you can create the most frightening monster . . . in the dark.” To Ferren, the main point is that digital cinema, once it is embraced by filmmakers and rolled out to a critical mass of movie houses, will bring a more consistent and ultimately less-expensive form of entertainment to the audience. “There will be an awkward period and there will be missteps,” he says. “But digital cinema is a given.”