In This the Endo of the Themed Album?

The theme album has been such a staple of the rock era that there’s good reason to believe you’d see pigs fly before it lost its power. So you fans of prog-rock epics and elaborate theme albums may be distressed to hear that there will be a pig flying today over the Capitol Records tower in Hollywood.

The 40-foot inflatable example of porcine marketing is a stunt by the record label to herald the Nov. 6 release of “Echoes--The Best of Pink Floyd,” the surreal British band’s greatest-hits package.

Pink Floyd didn’t invent the idea of an album laced together by theme, recurring imagery or musical bridges between songs. The Beatles, the Beach Boys, the Who and even Frank Sinatra had earlier albums that could arguably be considered for that distinction. But Floyd mastered the form with the musical sagas of “Dark Side of the Moon” (1973) and “The Wall” (1979), and this, its first greatest-hits collection, is a departure for the band conceptually.

It’s also another brick in the wall separating today’s modern music scene from the theme album as popular creative statement.

The huge success of the “Now That’s What I Call Music” series--offering a jukebox-style compilation of hits by various artists--and the emphasis on chart-friendly stand-alone singles throughout the pop world is undermining the album concept, artists and studio pros say. It may get more pronounced in the years to come if digital download via the Internet becomes a music purchase system of choice and more and more consumers turn their home computers into jukeboxes.

Steve Lillywhite, a producer who’s worked with the Dave Matthews Band and U2, says CD technology is part of the issue as well: The ability to quickly skip through or shuffle songs has created a generation not necessarily in tune with whole album listening.

“People buy the album for one song, and then they go straight to that song,” Lillywhite says. “The technology is empowering to the listener, and we’re moving forward into this interactive way and you’re going to have more and more people looking for songs to make their own CDs. The future of the whole concept of the album could be forgotten, really.”

Showcasing Films That Travel Well

Christian Gaines knows that many Americans are fearful of traveling abroad these days, but the director of the American Film Institute’s international film festival thinks he has the answer to any local cineastes with jitters: AFI Fest 2001.

AFI’s 15th annual festival kicks off Thursday at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood with the U.S. premiere of Sony Pictures Classics’ “Dark Blue World,” Czech director Jan Sverak’s tale about Czech pilots who flee their homeland during World War II to join the British Royal Air Force.

On Nov. 6, the festival will showcase director Ray Lawrence’s Australian thriller “Lantana” at the Pacific Theatre in Hollywood. The Lions Gate Films release, which stars Anthony LaPaglia, Barbara Hershey and Geoffrey Rush, tells the story of a police detective who is consumed with guilt about cheating on his wife, who becomes embroiled in a missing-persons investigation.

The festival also will pay tribute to Oscar-winning director Ang Lee (“Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon”) on Nov. 9 at the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood with a montage of his films and an onstage conversation with Lee. “I’ve been a huge admirer of Ang Lee for years,” Gaines said. “One of the things he embodies is a cross-cultural spirit. You don’t find many filmmakers who switch between genres like he does.”

The festival will close Nov. 11 with the world premiere at Grauman’s Chinese of the Lions Gate film “Monster’s Ball,” director Mark Forster’s hard-hitting Southern drama about a family of prison executioners and an interracial love story starring Billy Bob Thornton, Halle Berry and Heath Ledger.

In all, AFI Fest 2001 will showcase 114 films, including six movies that are official Academy Award best foreign-language selections: “Dark Blue World,” “Elling,” “The Experiment,” “Italian for Beginners,” “No Man’s Land” and “Pauline & Paulette.”

“We are trying to put together a kind of discovery festival that contains a lot of jewels and hits from previous festivals this year,” Gaines said, adding that this year’s festival drew 1,768 film submissions, a 25% increase over the previous year.

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Complied by Times staff writers