The Future of Movies

They are defeating the meaning of the screen.—Charlie Chaplin, reacting to the development of “talkies”

Now here’s a challenge that comes along in a big way every few decades, whenever the nature of cinema appears poised to undergo some sort of seismic transformation:

Look into your crystal ball now and predict the future of motion pictures—we can’t really call it “film” anymore and have that be a legitimate term, can we?—even if that seems like a daunting task. After all, it would be tough to make a less accurate prediction than (the great) Chaplin made about how sound would defeat, rather than enhance, the storytelling power of the movies.

I have a few ideas of my own about how cinema will change. None of them involve 3-D.

Customization, Commerce, and the Rushmore Royalty

If Apocalypse Now director Francis Ford Coppola has his way, his new horror movie Twixt will be seen differently by different audiences—because Coppola has apparently engineered some process by which he (and perhaps others later, in his place) will “DJ”—that’s dee-jay—the experience of watching the film by changing up scenes and live musical accompaniment on-the-fly.

That’s taking the Clue gimmick of alternate endings to a new high (or low, depending on how you look at it, as Spalding Gray might have put it) in the age of digital presentation, and it bears more than a casual resemblance to the sort of gee-whiz showmanship of the William Castle variety.

Coppola’s experiment has been called a new form of “interactive cinema,” and that’s true to the extent that a director (director/programmer?) would have his or her own fingers on the button of their film, exerting control and influence that would all but negate the term “final cut.” However, a continuing relationship with a now not-finished film, after what may have been frustrating years of development, exhausting pre- and post-production, while a clever and fun idea, may not be something many directors other than Coppola would be all too eager to embrace. (UPDATE, from the future!: Twixt kind of vanished from sight; but you can soon see it, in its straightforward form, on home video)

Interactivity will have a greater place in the movies, though. I predict it will take shape instead by affording the audience/buyer a greater degree of control over existing films, and later, custom-built cinema. These experiences won’t replace traditional movies, but some of them will hew closer to the practice of gaming…and some of them will incite hot controversy.

We’ll see the day when a filmmaker releases all the raw footage from a film project and invites audiences to assemble it themselves, using software far simpler to manage than Final Cut Pro (something approaching the simplicity of iMovie, I guess, though I’ve never had the pleasure of trying that out). Projects for this purpose would naturally be made with this end in mind, with actors being directed to offer strongly different interpretations in different takes. Years ago, I thought Stanley Kubrick might have been the one to do this (mainly because the sheer volume of his footage would have made one hell of a box set), but his extreme desire for total control probably should have persuaded me to pick a different auteur.

Francis, whattaya think?

The SIMS-ation of cinema is something I can picture developing over time. Sure, it might be sacrilege, but someone, somewhere, is going to develop the technology to successfully erase Bogie from Casablanca and insert, say, Russell Crowe, or Kate Winslet in the place of Ilsa. Or both. It’ll be a different blasphemy than a standard remake, but a blasphemy all the same, to some. (This would make my mention of Tom Cruise “giving the Errol Flynn performance” in The Adventures of Robin Hood possible) There may well be actors, however, who will be just fine with cashing a check or two by taking a theme-parkish, Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid-style ride through Curtiz’ classic (and others) for the thrill of delivering their performance opposite Ingrid Bergman’s, as if they were really there.

(Does this sound like it’s violating the basic nature of acting? Many thought the same thing about movies when they were first invented. And no doubt many actors feel compromised by green-screen. Or acting opposite a man in a jumpsuit plastered with mo-cap beads. There will need to be a text to supplement Stanislavsky’s An Actor Prepares. Maybe call it An Actor Evolves.)

For that matter, we can just capture the basic three-dimensional information of a contemporary performer’s appearance, head-to-toe, along with a deep database of vocal and expressive “choices” catalogued from their previous works, and use that information to plug them into the old classics. There was quite a rumor for awhile that George Lucas was buying up the “rights” to the images of deceased actors, with intentions of forging “new” performances from dearly departed stars. Think it can’t happen? You’ve seen the Fred Astaire Dirt Devil commercial, haven’t you?

The technology could not only be used to reinvent new and existing movies endlessly (and thus provide an ever-constant revenue stream for each reinvention), but take something of a Being John Malkovich shape in Second Life-style games players could cast with their favorite stars. Actors hesitant to license their image for these purposes might change their minds if it were to represent a decent royalty every time they got downloaded into a game.

As for commerce in general, I suspect it won’t be too long before “product placement” becomes far more streamlined, at least for home viewers. Each and every product worn or used, each location, every piece of music, you name it, down to production elements like stock footage, title fonts, FX work, could eventually be catalogued/tagged so that a viewer could call up a drop-down menu that will offer links for learning about or purchasing when the item in question is selected.

Lastly, I have something that’s a little out-of-the-box, not so much a prediction but something I pitch as a sure thing: call it The Rushmore Royalty.

Remember the movie Rushmore, and the scenes depicting hero Max Fischer’s staging of plays based on Serpico and Apocalypse Now (or was it more like Platoon…I suppose “Heaven and Hell” was a hybrid of both, and then some)? With Coppola’s dream of “democratizing cinema” becoming more true every day, why not follow Broadway’s lead and begin to institute a system of licensing rights for amateur productions, similar to the way in which high school and community theaters are able to mount endless productions of The King and I and Godspell?

Just go ahead and make it affordable—not to mention legal—for amateur filmmakers to shoot and exhibit their own Spider-Man epic, or their own Freddy Krueger film. Create a tiered system of royalties to reflect the profit meant to be generated over time. Make “fan fiction” a legitimate and moneymaking enterprise. Much like the choice of paying for either the piano or full orchestral score, studios could offer prices based on whatever elements the amateur producer wanted to procure: script, music, FX, etc.

Maybe there will be bigger and bigger screens. Shooting at 48 or 60 frames-per-second rather than 24? Glasses-free 3D? No more film cameras and no more celluloid? That’s all well and good, but the changes in movies I’m really looking forward to are the ones coming we don’t quite expect, being made possible by the technology being developed right now that will be put to use in unexpected ways.

The future of movies is hurtling forward like a runaway train. I can’t wait to see it.

POSTSCRIPT, from the future (June 19, 2013): Future me here, reaching back to add a small postscript to this piece that first appeared on MovieFanFare some time ago. There have been some major names in filmmaking making a good bit of noise–much of it less than positive–about what they see as the future of the movies. During one of his “I’m retiring” speeches, Steven Soderbergh delivered a keynote address at the San Francisco International Film Festival, which was either optimistic or pessimistic, depending, again as Spalding Gray might have said, on how you look at it; Steven Spielberg and George Lucas made headlines with their recent discourse that predicted both the apocalypse-of-movies-as-we-know-them and a set of prognostications foretelling a kind of cinematic Singularity…

But my favorite recent post about the future of the movies comes courtesy of Russ Collins, CEO of the Michigan Theater in Ann Arbor, which came as a response of sorts to the Spielberg/Lucas talk. Read what he had to say here. I’d like to give this guy a big hug. Plus, I think he’s right.