Lucas and the digital money train:
Why does digital keep coming back over and over again to haunt me? Oh yeah that's right, because there is a lot of money at stake.
The latest news in the Digital Cinema fiasco (I'm sure you all read about it in the L.A. Times) was a little get together that George Lucas organized to show the wonders of digital cinema. He invited all the big shots in directing. With names like Stone, Spielberg, Coppola and Zemeckis it was a regular who's who of the Hollywood elite. This should be the first clue to you all that a shell game is underway. When something is truly great, there is really no need to sell people on it but I digress. So he organizes this little screening to prove how digital cinema will be the way things are done in the future. What example does he choose to screen for his test? Does he use his mediocre "Star Wars Episode 2?" No, he does not. He uses "Monsters Inc." an animated movie that was made on a computer, CGI folks. A cartoon; made digitally and projected the same way. Monsters Inc worked to Lucas's advantage because it's devoid of all the subtle nuances of real life. This is nowhere near a fair test.
A fair test for this screening would have been a movie, shot on film and projected that way but he decided not to do that. The reason for this is, film, shot on film and projected on film, looks better than digital. At this time in history, film just looks better That is not to say digital isn't making strides but it's not there yet Not by a long shot. I feel Lucas's big push for digital comes from his desire to top all of his filmmaking buddies by going down as the man who started the digital revolution. As well, I am sure he has quite a few deals going with all the computer companies he does business with. You know, he uses a hell of a lot of computers over at ILM and Lucas Sound. I wonder what kind of deal he is getting on the equipment these days Hummm, that is best left for another article and another day.
One of George Lucas's mantras in his push for digital has been 'Film gets scratched and digital doesn't' and that is not the entire truth. One of the bib reasons that film gets those excessive amount of scratches is that projectors are not cared for properly. Knowing that most film projectors are not maintained well in theaters, what does Lucas want to do? Take a pretty simple technology like a film projector and replace it with this over teched, over priced, hunk of computer equipment called a digital project. Theaters can't seem to keep projectors working correctly, how on earth are they going to keep a piece of computer hardware going that could have a million and one things wrong with it? All these headaches can be yours at the low, low cost of $100,000 per screen.
Everyone knows that blue screen of death you get when your computer locks up and dies on you. Do you want that in the theaters? What about the 2 million little mirrors that have to work just right to get the image up on the screen? In a film projector you have just one bulb and a lot of theaters don't even use the right one to begin with. I can see all the tech fixes and bad software fixes to come in the future of digital projection. Cut rate video projectors being sold on a black market so the theater owners don't have to give a cut to Boeing or any of the computer companies looking for their share of the pie.
George Lucas may have his vision for the future of cinema; I have my own as well. I see a lot of these projectors, breaking down, having to go back to the handful of computer geeks who know how to fix these things and are backed up with 100's of other projectors. Then you add all the software upgrades, hardware going out of date after a year to 18 months, theater chains that are already bankrupt, no set standard, digital piracy and you have yourself a very nasty stew. One I would like to stay clear of for a while. Yes, Lucas has vision but is missing the big picture all together. Like a spoiled little rich kid who has to have it now, not caring that he is slowly burning through his parents money and making them broke.
What do I really think? There may come a time when digital is better than film, when film is too expensive, when the systems are in place, when the systems are cheaper, when Jupiter aligns with Mars but until that day comes, film is still better. If all the money that has and is being spent on creating digital cinema was used updating and making film better (Like the Maxivision 48 company was trying to do), imagine what a film print could look like. Sad to say, film equipment companies don't have the excess capital that computer companies do and at the end of the day, that is the only reason digital will win in the end. Money.
