Cinema is Collapsing? So What Are You Gonna Do About It?

posted by Jett Loe

(My thoughts on the below were cross-posted at Current – to read Current readers responses click here)

Don’t know about you but I was excited to hear that Francis Ford Coppola thinks cinema is collapsing:

“The cinema as we know it is falling apart,” says Francis Ford Coppola.

“It’s a period of incredible change,” says the director of “The Godfather” and “Apocalypse Now.” “We used to think of six, seven big film companies. Every one of them is under great stress now. Probably two or three will go out of business and the others will just make certain kind of films like ‘Harry Potter’ — basically trying to make ‘Star Wars’ over and over again, because it’s a business.”

Coppola, 70, sporting a dark suit, is being interviewed in the Lebanese capital Beirut, where his latest movie “Tetro” opened the Beirut Film Festival after premiering at the Cannes Film Festival this year.

“Cinema is losing the public’s interest,” says Coppola, “because there is so much it has to compete with to get people’s time.”
The profusion of leisure activities; the availability of movies on copied DVD and on the Internet; and news becoming entertainment are reshaping the industry, he says. Companies have combined businesses as customers turn to cheap downloads rather than visit shops or movie theaters.

“I think the cinema is going to live off into something more related to a live performance in which the filmmaker is there, like the conductor of an opera used to be,” Coppola says. “Cinema can be interactive, every night it can be a little different.”

Course we should pay attention when Coppola speaks on the future of cinema.

His prediction of ‘electronic cinema’ was absurdly prescient and his early-80′s insight while shooting ‘One From the Heart’ of what would happen when box office totals started appearing in newspapers, i.e. “this would turn the movies into sports” was so spot on that it chills me now to think of it, (how else to explain the championing of crap, of films like G.I. Joe and Transformers unless you look at them through the lens of sports – to fanboys these films are their teams, so of course they have to be defended and praised in the face of what I guess we used to call ‘good taste’).

Anyhew I was excited – of course it’s apparent that current cinema going culture and cinema production itself is in crisis:

Hollywood film output likely to fall by a third

but having this old lion of the hey-day of U.S. Cinemas Golden Age vocalise what’s happening helps focus the mind on the problem ya know?

Here’s some interesting parts of the mix:

• Collapse of funding sources leading to reduction in number of traditional commercial films produced.
• Proliferation of multiple devices to view ‘cinema’, (Phones, MP3 players, computers, and all the variants in between); should media be deliberately designed from the ground up to be seen on multiple devices? Read this fascinating interview with the always worthwhile Cory McAbee for his thoughts on the matter re his new multi-platform series ‘Stingray Sam’; (of course it’s not just the traditional ‘movie business’ that’s collapsing – all recordable media production is going through wrenching change – here’s a similar example of McAbee’s model from the world of publishing: Cory Doctorow kicks off a unique publishing experiment.
• Dramatic reduction in the cost of producing cinema:  we’ll be discussing the film ‘Gaia – Daughter of Chaos’ on an upcoming show, (disclaimer – the film was a sponsor of last week’s ‘Where the Wild Things Are’ episode); ‘Gaia’ was shot on a budget of $28,000 and it looks fantastic – just as fantastic as ‘Where the Wild Things Are’ which came in at a price-tag of over $75,000,000.
• Dramatic reduction in non-traditional movie distribution costs – YouTube, Libsyn etc.
• Of course if producing and distribution is cheap then what’s the real problem in getting your film seen – ahhh, marketing – with an infinite amount of content out there how are will the audience for your pic find out about it?
• Cinema conventions seeping into everyday life:  when I approach my car at night it’s interior lights fade up. When I exit its lights fade down – it’s as if movie grammar itself were leaking into the real world; my OS does the same thing – it’s gentle fades and dissolves resemble nothing more than avant-garde cinema of the past.

Ok – so with all this going on I ask you Dear Reader – does cinema have a future and if so what is it?

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 21st, 2009 at 12:01 am. It is filed under Blog, Directors, Jett Loe, On Filmmaking, Technology, The Changing Cinema. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.