The Next Step in Digital Video

Sunny Holiday comes to movie screens on Friday courtesy of George Lucas’ much ballyhooed digital-video technology. But don’t expect a mythic action hero. Sunny, a sleazy karaoke singer at the center of the Polish brothers’ new movie “Jackpot,” is several galaxies removed from the special-effects-laden world Lucas envisioned six years ago when he coaxed Sony to develop a high-definition, digital-video format that would challenge the supremacy of 35-millimeter film.

Michael and Mark Polish shot “Jackpot” on the same model cameras Lucas used to make “Star Wars: Episode II.” A year before the Lucas opus opens, “Jackpot” will give moviegoers their first chance to see just how close digital video can come to looking like film.

Shot in the San Fernando Valley last summer for $400,000, “Jackpot” is the downbeat tale of Sunny (Jon Gries), a soap salesman-turned-fake-country singer who travels the country with his manager Lester (Garrett Morris) hoping to hit the big time by belting out George Jones ballads at seedy karaoke clubs.

Director Michael Polish and his twin brother, Mark, who wrote the script, initially planned to shoot “Jackpot” with low-end digital video to lend their story a home-movie feel. But when they saw tests demonstrating Sony’s then brand-new 24P camera, the parallel between medium and message proved irresistible. Says Michael, “We wanted to do ‘Jackpot’ on 24P because digital right now is a wannabe medium--it’s a great format to comment on the subject of the karaoke singer. ‘Hey, these guys are imitation singers. This is imitation film.”’ Adds Mark, “24P is striving so hard to be film. But yet ... “ he muses, “it’s like watching a karaoke singer: You wait and see when he exposes himself as not being that [singer], as he imitates that voice. When people come to see 24P they’re gonna wait for that moment where they can say ‘OK, that’s video.”’

Those moments will be harder to spot in “Jackpot” than in previous movies shot on digital video. That’s because the new 24P format’s 24 progressive frames-per-second rate exactly mimics the 24-frame rate of 35-millimeter film. Standard “30I” digital video, on the other hand, produces 30 “interlaced” images per second. When converted to film, 30 frames worth of information are jammed into 24 frames. In the process, some image information is lopped off, resulting in “stuttering” and unnatural blurs of color called artifacts.

How convincing is the new high-definition (hi-def) format? Michael Polish says audience members at a Seattle Film Festival screening earlier this summer were taken aback when informed the movie they had just seen was shot on video. “I’d say 99.7% won’t figure that out. Very few people have that eye.”

The Polish twins are holding forth over glasses of iced tea in a Leon’s Steak House in North Hollywood. At this booth, several “Jackpot” scenes were shot using only natural light streaming through the window.

In most cases, full lighting was required, the brothers point out. Still, capturing any film-worthy images using available light was an unexpected perk. There were other key differences. Working with two prototype Sony CineAlta HD video cameras outfitted with Panavision lenses, Michael says he worried that the smaller crew and less imposing video cameras might demoralize his actors with the notion that they weren’t making a “real” movie. A peek at the full-color, what-you-see-now-is-what-you’ll-get-later playback monitors made converts of his performers. “When I’d show the actors what they’d just done in the monitor, they’d go, ‘All right!’ This was something they wanted to be a part of.”

Being able to instantly assess how a scene unfolded, without waiting 24 hours for “dailies” to be printed and screened, enabled the Polish brothers to make snap decisions, strike sets and move quickly to the next scene. They shot “Jackpot” in 15 days.

In the brothers’ first movie, “Twin Falls Idaho,” they also played Siamese twins. Michael’s account of that movie points up some of the distinctions between film and digital formats. “As the twins, we couldn’t move too easily. We needed this kind of rich, painterly, tableau look. Film also romanticized the images, and made things softer. If we could go back in time and use the 24P camera to shoot ‘Twin Falls,’ I wouldn’t have been fully comfortable, because the digital video is almost too perfect. I would have started using [effects] to blend things out or make things softer, to take that edge off of it. Film has a warm quality and video is very hyper-realistic; it has a crispness to it that probably turns most [cinematographers] off to a certain point.”

From an economic standpoint, digital video allowed the Polish brothers to shoot “Jackpot” fast with small crews. The real eye-opener, though, is how much cheaper tape is than film stock. A 52-minute digital-video cartridge costs about $75, versus about $4,000 for 50 minutes of 35-millimeter film stock, including processing and transfer costs.

Lucas has stated that those differences trimmed about $12 million off his “Star Wars II” budget. For a small-budget project like “Jackpot,” the savings are less dramatic, but every bit as important.

The downside comes “on the back end,” explains Michael, because “you still have to make release prints.”

“If you were just able to distribute a movie digitally,” says Mark, “that’s where you’re gonna save your money.”

The business model for digital distribution and projection may be a few years down the pike, but that hasn’t stopped Lucas’ hi-def video format from emerging as a low-cost production alternative to film. Several feature projects are currently being produced entirely on 24P. Robert Rodriguez is using 24P cameras to make “Once Upon a Time in Mexico.” Jersey Films recently wrapped “How High” for Universal Films under Jesse Dylan’s direction. “Boys Don’t Cry” producer Eva Kolodner is shepherding three 24P projects for New York-based Madstone Films, while indie director Brad Anderson (“Next Stop Wonderland”) sees his first 24P feature, “Session 9,” starring David Caruso, opening in Los Angeles on Aug. 19.

High-definition video clearly offers economic perks, but what about quality? Is 24P digital video really, as Lucas and company proclaim, as good as film? The consensus in Hollywood seems to be, not yet. Cinematographer Allen Daviau, whose credits include “Avalon,” “Bugsy,” “Empire of the Sun,” “The Color Purple” and “The Astronaut’s Wife,” says “It will be more an evolution than a revolution. For certain things, hi-def is very good. If somebody were shooting ‘Top Gun 2,’ you could fly a jet around for a couple of hours without having to reload the camera. There are certain others where it’s just not as good as film. People tend to get very excited about the image they can see on the monitor and so on, but in terms of the basic quality of the image that you’re putting down, you’re gonna have to go a long way to beat what film can do.”

Still, Daviau is intrigued by the format.

“It’s another tool. It will become another stylistic choice rather than just a technical choice that directors can turn to.”

“Requiem for a Dream” cinematographer Matthew Libatique, on the other hand, has no interest in using digital video any time soon. “From a technical standpoint,” he says, “I don’t see how you could look at digital video or hi-def and see it as a replacement for film in any regard, even 16-millimeter film. In overcast light, you could maybe pass digital off in many cases as film, but once you get into a situation where you have a lot of contrast, it just doesn’t have the [tonal] latitude.”

Libatique says every demonstration he’s been to devolves into a conversation about commerce, not art. “The people who are advocates of the technology, I don’t think they look at film the same way I do, or cinematographers do, or many directors do or many viewers do. They look at it from a strictly technical standpoint, how it holds color, how it resolves. But there’s something innately beautiful about film that video can’t replace, or at least hasn’t replaced to this point.”

Not surprisingly, given his company’s $100-million investment in the new format, Lucas’ longtime producing partner Rick McCullum says that critics of 24P technology are either afraid of change, embroiled in industry politics or generally locked into old ways of thinking.

When it is pointed out to him that many movie makers believe film still offers superior depth, richness and detail, McCullum says, “When people actually see ‘Star Wars II’ next summer, this [debate] will all become a moot point. Everybody will be able to say, even if they don’t like the movie, that this is clearly indistinguishable from film.”

At the same time, the format is finding favor among several A-list auteurs who are experimenting with 24P’s silky almost-film texture for thematic effect. Over the next few months, observant audiences will see digital-video footage spliced into several major releases. [Sources say Michael Mann shot portions of “Ali” in DV.] “Gattica” director Andrew Niccol, who wrote “The Truman Show,” uses snippets of 24P footage in his upcoming “Simone,” a futuristic tale of a digitally-generated diva starring Al Pacino and slated to open early next year. Joel Schumacher, who in recent years has turned from “Batman” blockbusters to smaller films, incorporates bits of digital video into “Phone Booth,” also set for release next year.

Not that Schumacher is a total convert. “The concept of shooting in digital video is a gritty, sort of guerrilla rock ‘n’ roll idea, but the end product looks smooth; everybody starts to look like [TV] anchor people,” he said. “When we did tests for ‘Tigerland,’ what we found is that digital sort of pretties everything up. In looking at the old Vietnam footage, it was really that old, grainy, 16-millimeter feel that we tried to reproduce so that’s what we did there. And with ‘Phone Booth,’ we were going to do digital video also, but we found the same thing there. So we mixed 35 millimeter with video, normal video, digital video, and some other tricks of the trade. We mixed a lot of things together. I guess what I’m trying to say is, everything is a great tool and digital video will find its place.”

Even the Polish brothers aren’t fully convinced. Their next project, “Northfork,” begins production in September. They’re shooting it the old fashioned way--on film.