I've long thought anyone investing loads of money in a movie theater complex is insane -- given their economic, technical, and aesthetic obsolescence -- and the Washington Post story on Steven Soderbergh's experimental "day-and-date" project exemplifies this. Soderbergh is on the creative forefront not only of the medium, but of the film industry's very structure.
On Friday, Soderbergh and his producing partners, Internet
entrepreneurs Mark Cuban and Todd Wagner, will release "Bubble"
simultaneously in theaters, on cable and satellite television and on
DVD, the most visible example of an emerging model that could
seismically shift the way Hollywood does business.
The project site is here. As a form of resistance, large chains are refusing to carry Bubble. Since we can't even get Capote locally, I'm thoroughly underwhelmed by the tut-tutting about day-and-date. In a Wired interview, Soderbergh explains:
Name any big-title movie that's come out in the last four years. It has
been available in all formats on the day of release. It's called
piracy. Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings, Ocean's Eleven, and Ocean's Twelve - I saw them on Canal Street on opening day. Simultaneous release is already here. We're just trying to gain control over it.
And the artificial barrier between a film's release and a DVD release is just part of the problem. From this, I would like to see the continued decline of the megaplex dinosaur, since I think that people will continue looking for a dynamic theater experience afterward, and will increasingly look for the smaller, independent boutiques to find interesting cinema.
The theater experience isn't always pleasant. Theater owners need to
address that. There are often problems with projection; tickets and
concessions are expensive; theaters aren't always clean; people talk
during the movie. They're making it easy for people to stay home.
I became enamored of Soderbergh's innovative style after the brilliant, distinctively postmodern K Street came out on HBO. I wish they had been able to keep up that project's momentum, since it was like irony-crack for a political junkie; and their ability to instantaneously weave in the emerging political controversies was a thing to behold.
On the creative front, Soderbergh will continue to inspire. From Wired again:
I'd like to do multiple versions of the same film. I often do very
radical cuts of my own films just to experiment, shake things up, and
see if anything comes of it. I think it would be really interesting to
have a movie out in release and then, just a few weeks later say,
"Here's version 2.0, recut, rescored." The other version is still out
there - people can see either or both. For instance, right now I know I
could do two very different versions of The Good German.
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