Film Fund-amentals: Ain’t Like It Used to Be

 First published December 1, 2011

Sometimes news travels slowly. While we were celebrating Thanksgiving with friends, a guest at the table began musing about returning to his major passion, photography. He began thinking out loud about building a dark room. Suddenly it dawned on him. “What am I talking about?”

Yep. There’s no dark room. No film. No nothing. This man (like myself) was trained in the Stone Age when dinosaurs still roamed the Earth and Noah was building his Ark and you wouldn’t believe how hard we partied on the night we invented fire. But the Great Digital Flood has changed everything, and the world as many of us knew it no longer exists in oh so many ways. OK, to be honest this guy also still has a rotary phone, but that’s a different story.

The digital revolution has been a long time happening and it still feels like it all happened overnight. Last month, when it became clear that Aaton, ARRI and Panavision were no longer making 35mm movie cameras, some folks proclaimed the death of cinema. Well yeah, but not exactly. The actual honest-to-goodness film age is over. Even Hollywood is in the process of switching to digital. At the mainstream commercial level, the switch will still go slowly, but it is happening and the entire system from pre-production to theatrical distribution will soon be completely busted out of its analog cage.

Technically, the complete changeover to digital will make movie production cheaper. In reality, most likely it won’t. The reason isn’t really technical. It is rooted in the pathology of a mainstream system that has become so firmly rooted in large production figures that it simply can’t help itself. It’s kind of like the senior corporate executive who sort of understands the concept of pay inequality but then uses it as a justification for giving himself an enormous pay hike.

It is also a system that has become wildly obsessed with the commercial possibilities of VoD. In reality, online distribution is still in its infancy, and the real prospects of this approach (both good and bad) are still being explored (Todd Wagner’s remarks about VoD pretty much sum it up). But the tentative condition of this fledgling enterprise is not stopping various major players from barnstorming the digital zone like a pack of hungry hyenas.

Miramax is striking deals with Hulu in Japan and NetMovies in Brazil, as well as with Facebook, Netflix and just about anybody else with a website. Heck, just about everybody is hooking up with Facebook for distribution. It’s a virtual stampede out there.

Simultaneously, the major companies are busy trying to shut down half of the sites out there on the grounds of copyright infringement. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act is a very important, serious and extremely significant point of law. Well, it was until the boys at Warner got carried away with slapping takedown orders against any and all website domains whose URLs crossed their path. Operating much like the mortgage industry in the foreclosure scandal, Warner has admitted that it didn’t even bother to look at most of the websites to confirm if any of its copyrighted material was involved.

While Warner is taking a bit of an “oh, well” attitude to this situation (guess you can’t make an omelet without cracking all the eggs), it has been basically committing a major abuse of DMCA, especially the part of the act that requires the company filing a takedown order to first be certain that it is their material that is being used on the site. Warner insists that it has neither the staff nor the time to be all picky about whom they issue takedown orders against. So I guess their legal theory is: Why not round them all up? Who knows, maybe they’ll get lucky and bust somebody who’s actually committing a crime. Guess all is fair in the never-ending war against piracy.

But it really isn’t about a war on piracy. It is about a war for control of the digital universe. The digital process can make movie production, distribution and market access cheaper and more easily attainable to a broad range of independent filmmakers and producers. Hollywood knows that, and they’re not happy about this prospect. They’ve been actively working against the indie movement for years (since at least 2003, when the MPAA made the move with their infamous Screener Ban). The very real issue of piracy has been turned into one more tool in Hollywood’s attempt to devour online and digital systems for their own profit.

Which is too bad, because film is not dead, but Hollywood is dying. The commercial mainstream cinema as it is currently structured is over. Economically, the mainstream system is non-sustainable. Technically, it is becoming a major restraint to further technological development (take for example the latest installment from Techdirt on Hollywood’s legal attack against search engines). Artistically, it has become a vast graveyard of remakes, redos, reboots and other forms of regurgitation. Once in a blue moon, a genuine movie slips out. But this lunar event has become quite rare.

Which sort of winds back to where I started. Hollywood, like many of us, is confronted by a scene where everything has changed. Heck, some of us walk around half the time feeling like a modern version of the aging outlaws in The Wild Bunch, doggedly searching for a final score in a world we only half understand. Unfortunately, Hollywood has opted to play the role of the railroad men in the film. You know, brutally ruthless and outrageously greedy.

Too bad the suits can’t learn to mellow out with the simple final lines of the movie: “It ain’t like it used to be, but it’ll do.” It has become my daily mantra. Of course, I don’t work in Hollywood.