The big sleep that awaits the big screen

THE only thing about Hollywood that is an ironclad certainty is that it will change. That’s its nature. Predicting just what will happen next, however, is any fool’s guess. With that caveat, I’ll put on my fool’s cap long enough to predict the end of movie theaters. I’m not the first to say this and I don’t think theaters as we know them will disappear all at once, but it will happen. When technology and money conspire all you can do is try to get out of the line of fire.

DVDs, the silver discs that are keeping Hollywood afloat, are not only cheaper to make (by far) than theatrical prints, but they require relatively simple technology to use. The ever-narrowing gap between the date of a theatrical release of a film and the subsequent release of that same picture on DVD is the key. Soon enough, the releases will be simultaneous -- in theaters and in what’s now called home video, either on a disc or in some form of pay TV -- all over the world or at least in whatever countries can be signed up. The one-day gross will be gigantic. Piracy will be defanged (though we won’t entirely be rid of it.)

The studios don’t own theaters and haven’t since the 1940s, when the Supreme Court told them they had to sell them all -- the so-called consent decrees. As it stands, the studios have to make deals with the exhibitors. The studios drive hard bargains, but their power is nothing like it will be when they not only make the film but also manufacture the device you need to watch it.

Theater chains are still profitable. There’s at least one company (Entertainment Properties of Kansas City, Mo.) that continues to build multiplexes. Wall Street likes the stock, so in the short run we’ll continue to see theater construction. Eventually many of those buildings will be converted to churches or perhaps branches of Costco. Home screens will get better and the digital quality of the discs will become richer and finally indistinguishable from 35-millimeter film stock. Some theaters will remain, but projected cinema will eventually become something that’s done at museums.

For an international company that makes movies and the various home electronic contraptions that can show them, this will be irresistible. The situation that will result will be eerily similar to the days before owning theaters and producing the movies to show in them -- vertical integration, in business-speak -- was outlawed.

Theater chains will have to figure a way to get in on it, or go out of business. And future generations will not have the communal experience of sitting in a high-ceiling, church-like room with a few hundred strangers, watching giant gods and goddesses cavort. Also, no matter how improved those home screens become, they will never be on the heroic scale of the ArcLight or the Chinese in present-day Hollywood. That means that the studios will stop making movies on the scale of “The Aviator” in favor of pictures with the visual flair of a sitcom.

There’s yet another wrinkle in the piracy war. The president recently signed a bill that makes it a felony to use a camcorder in a movie theater. The laws of aesthetics should have outlawed this barbaric practice long ago. Some idiot sits in a theater and makes an illicit copy of what’s on the screen and sells the result, which is blurry and sometimes has people walking in front of the camera. The price of getting this law passed is that businesses are now permitted to sell special “cleaned-up” tapes and DVDs of commercial movies.

If you’d like to have a copy of, say, “Charlie’s Angels” but you don’t want to see the ladies jumping around semiclad (for myself, I can’t think of any other reason to watch that thing), you’ll be able to buy a censored version you can show to the kids. The companies that do this point out that the uncensored version is still available and that they are only offering an additional choice. The studios accepted this deal to get the first part of the law passed.

The directors screamed. My first response to their anger was to agree -- this is a ludicrous turn of events. But on reflection, I thought about all the censorship of that sort the studios have embraced. Special edited versions of their movies for airplanes. Years of film butchery for TV showing. The horrors of “colorizing.” The directors lived with all that without much more than a whimper. Cable TV changed expectations. People are used to seeing movies as they were released. The writers haven’t been up in arms over this one. I guess screenwriters have grown used to their work being mauled by philistines and presented in their name.

I was on a panel about Hollywood fiction at the Times’ book festival a few weeks ago. The questions from the audience were smart and reflective. I, on the other hand, seemed bereft of my marbles at least once. In response to a question, I was nattering on about a book of mine that began life as a script. I made my well-honed and oft-repeated remarks about turning failed scripts into novels -- “you put in ‘he saids’ and ‘she saids’ and then add some trees.” People laughed and then as I was about to tell them the title of the novel in question, I drew a blank. I couldn’t think of the name of the thing.

I sat there for what seemed two or three minutes but was surely no more than 15 seconds. Various titles of mine flipped through my mind like cards on a Rolodex, but it just wouldn’t come. I felt unhinged. The audience was uncomfortable. Later, a friend who was there said she was about to shout it out -- oh, that she had -- when it crept back into my brain. I announced it and then shut up for a while and let the other panelists speak. The book, if you’re curious, is “One of Us,” a novel set in Egypt in the 1930s. Hollywood isn’t in it, but it did begin its life as a script.

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David Freeman is a screenwriter and the author most recently of the novel “It’s All True.” This is one in a series of pages from his diary.