Lucas on film technology

[Ani-Chay Pinn]

This is a pretty interesting article....

www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr/film/feature_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1001524471

I laugh when people make predictions on what things will be like in the future because no matter who they are, they're almost always wrong. But Lucas is also talking about things he's already done with movie technology, and they're pretty cool.

I think the technology is what is driving him toward the Star Wars TV show project. I really, really, really hope he's going for a new distribution technology, something that will really undermine the major networks. I'm not fond of TV networks.

Oh, and I do hope he gets a good team to write/direct/preform/produce/etc the SW TV project, too. But that's almost secondary to me; if Lucas undermines TV networks, I'll be very happy no matter what the TV show actually looks like.

[Vek Eldar]

I read this article last night and was discussing some of the high points with a friend of mine. While we both agree that Lucas' assertion that simultaneous theatrical and home release could stop piracy is a little on the--shall we say--optimistic side, we both like the idea of the simultaneous release (proposed by Mark Cuban, owner of my Dallas Mavericks!). People will continue to pirate because someone will always be charging for products and pirates want to figure out ways around paying for stuff; it's the same as it was when my father was recording LPs onto cassettes using a tape deck back in the late 1970s.

But I think that the idea of simultaneous release is a great idea. After working in a video rental store for so many years (and, fortunately, finally quitting there to get on to bigger and better things) I met a lot of people who preferred to just stay home and watch movies there. I heard a lot of different reasons why people don't go to the theater anymore:

• They've put too much money into a high end home system to go spend money in a theater where the image quality will probably be inferior to what they have at home on their widescreen HD monitor.
  
• They don't like dealing with the idiots in the theater who don't know how to behave themselves.
  
• Another reason I kept hearing was the expense. If you take a family of four to see a movie in the theater, and if you assume ticket prices are $7.50 per person, that's $30. Add to that prices for soda, candy, popcorn, the gas to get to theater, etc, and you end up with a pretty expensive evening. Of course, one could also argue that after throwing down a couple grand on a high end home system, paying a movie theater sixty-some-odd dollars might not be such a bad idea. The fact is, however, that people are taking this home theater thing pretty seriously.
  
• Finally, if a person chooses to spend all that money on an awesome home system, I think that they should be able to have access to the newest titles for home use. People don't have to wait to watch sporting events or wait for video games, so they shouldn't have to wait to bring movies home either.
  

I think that Lucas is right when he says that people won't stop going to the theater. It's the same reason that they continue to go to symphonies, ballets, operas, and sporting events. Football is his big example here: at home, you have a much better presentation and you're warm, but there is just something about being at the event, even if you're cold and can't read the numbers on the players' jerseys.

That being said...I'm not sure that I buy his idea of pay-per-view movie watching. If it were pay-per-view on demand like some cable networks are doing, maybe, but I don't know. After all, the whole "TV-meets-internet" thing really hasn't caught on like people thought it would. I also think that his idea that DVD is going out of style is a little limited; if that were the case, there wouldn't be this huge industry war between the BlueRay and HD-DVD factions. And even though you can purchase and then download copies of computer games through legitimate on-line retailers, I prefer to have the physical DVD sitting around my desk somewhere. To be fair though, the pay-per-view thing might work, if only because people might be willing to pay $2 for a movie, rather than buy a DVD for $24.99 that they might only watch a couple of times.

Anyway, time to get back to work--it's the whole "You've got less than a month left in the semester so we're going to give you as much work as possible despite the Thanksgiving break because we can!" crunch. Oy...

Out.