Hooray For Hollywood

My favorite genre, presuming there is a specific type of book I would automatically pick up in a used bookstore, is the Hollywood expose.  Not the over-heated fictionalized biographies of Frank Sinatra or Barbra Streisand but the melodramas that take place in a palm-lined, dream-world of West LA, collecting types and accomplices inside and outside the gates of the studios, and depicting misguided sexual unions, stirring up dashed dreams and broken promises and lying agents in an always sunny, often depressing, hard-edged and hardboiled beat prose.

The genre bloomed early in the 20th century, fomented by the grousing of those East Coast writers like Ben Hecht coming to the promised land to make their fortune writing for the talkies (and who probably saw themselves in the water reflecting the bright sunshine).  It culminated in the ’40s with “What Makes Sammy Run?” (introing Sammy Glick) and “The Day of the Locust,” (pace Homor Simpson) both dark turns that illuminate the unspoken Faustian deal that seems to lurk at the heart of fame.  The genre had found a new lease and angle in the early ’60s, with non-classics such as Allison Lurie’s “The Nowhere City” (specifically about outsiders) and Fitzgerald’s “The Pat Hobby Stories” (also pointedly about an outsider (and first collected in 1962, perhaps finally of its time)) leading the way towards a more existential outlook that suggests while no one is innocent no one is particularly guilty either.

Maritta Wolff’s “The Big Nickelodeon” (1963) seem inspired by “Peyton Place” more than any real thing and her reluctance to go full-bore in the milieu she must know existed – she was invited to Hollywood to write screenplays after the success of her “Whistle Stop” – is mitigated by her valiant attempt to introduce a wide and decadent swath of characters – from divorcees trying to break into the movies to rentboys parking cars on Sunset to cops finding bodies on the beach.

That same year “The Surprise Party Complex” by Ramona Stewart follows a trio of young women in various states of denial and undress having moved to Hollywood and trying to negotiate auditions, parents who don’t believe in them and horny next door neighbors.  Mentioned earlier, Allison Lurie’s “The Nowhere City” (1965) elevates the corruptible outsider to literature following two small-town rubes who move with big dreams of success (or in the case of the wife, not) and how expectations and morals are confounded by intangible seductive powers more in the air and due to fate rather than to any malicious antagonist or force.

Wolf Mankowitz’s “Cockatrice” (also 1963) focuses on an anonymous assistant to an arrogant big-time producer who will steal talent, ideas, and girlfriends to make a picture and a name for himself.  You become what you despise.  What makes this one more insightful may be that Mankowitz worked with Broccoli and Saltzman during the beginnings of the Bond franchise. Yet even this insider expose has more winks than tooth.  He’s along for the ride as much as any of the girls he beds.

Something happened in the late ‘50s and early ’60s.  TV had officially been declared not-a-fad and Universal was bought by MCA, the biggest deal involving talent, land, a back catalog and the potential to rewrite the future of show business before or since.  20th Century Fox, meanwhile sold 3/4s of their lot to developers giving rise to Century City for $43 million.  The worst real estate deal in history and making public the voracious appetite of the glass teat, the money at stake, the careers made and broken and only brightened the allure of a career in show business.

Part of this also has to do with the economics of paperback books being widely available and exploiting a cultural unease after the Eisenhower ’50s before the sex-and-nothing-but trade supplanted these innocent tomes.  But these cycles of books, a clutch of forgotten potboilers that seemed to peter out around 1970 as Hollywood players felt more comfortable not hiding their confessions behind fictional names and projects (“Play It As It Lays” being the avatar of the milieu of behind-the-scenes disasterpieces), freeze in amber a cultural moment in which Hollywood was incredibly alluring, dangerous, innocent of its faults, and success was still possible.  Make no mistake, in none of these books does anyone succeed on sheer talent or without selling out their most closely held morals.  At the conclusion of at least one, characters lay dead in a burning mansion.

But the “watch out – don’t let this happen to your daughter” panic of the 1930s and ’40s books (including those hammerhead noirs by West and McCoy) have softened as more and more writers realize that the business of show is as disfunctional as any paper-printing corporation.  No one’s in charge, and no one’s stealing any daughter’s virtue that isn’t already for sale.

And they all use ripe metaphors as their entrypoints – the cockatrice is a fanciful dragon/griffith with a colorful plume and a poisonous bite; one of the characters in “Surprise Party Complex” keeps expecting someone to bust in and yell “surprise!” – the reward for always being ready, always photogenic, on the constant edge of expectation; “nowhere city” and “love-jungle tigress” speak for themselves.

The ’80s would bring the breezy Jackie Collins beach reads that seem strangely unplugged from show business reality we’d learned by that point from TV.   And the Leonard and Ellroy meta-noirs “Get Shorty” and “L.A. Confidential” (both 1990) are more affectionate pastiche than scathing attacks.

In spite of the dark heart of most of these books, they seem at the time to be ceding the post-depression anxiety of an earlier age and embrace the Kennedy era and go-go promise of the ’60s.  By the end of the decade UHF would increase the # of channels on the dial to over 50.  A new world in which the possibilities have become a foregone conclusion and resistance is futile.

These are sexy yet moral, chaste and yet trashy.  Deliciously seductive, in spite of good intentions they can’t quite keep their hands to themselves.

_   _   _   

A version of this post appeared on my other writing-centric site, On Or Around Roger Leatherwood.

Who Wants Nostalgia Anymore?

Over to the right there, in the margin is a link to one of my favorite film sites. See it?  Lower, in the Film Sites section.

To SwanArchives.org, which is devoted to the 1974 film "Phantom of the Paradise," and it is the best site for any film, official or otherwise, EVER.

The guy who runs it (Ari, whom Paul Williams wants the trust of) became a fan of the film after seeing it on a double bill (with "Young Frankenstein" no less and there's no better argument for the great loss we've suffered culturally by not wanting to see 2 films in one night anymore), and he began to collect the various emphemera, stills, international posters and magazine articles related to the film over the next 20 years.  In the era before VHS and DVD and their attendant behind-the-scenes features this was the only way to capture the experience of a film vicariously absent having a copy yourself (which he would also purloin, a 16mm print intended for the college rental market). In the process he amassed over 400 items, including previews, radio spots (on reel-to-reel tapes), lobby cards, concept drawings and even outtakes from footage abandoned in a lab.

Yeah.  A goddamn archive, more complete than any other, devoted not only to one film but to an entire production and marketing process of a typical cult, mid-level hit from the '70s.  That it's a sci-fi musical with elements of horror, rock 'n' roll, and directed by Brian De Palma who would go on to much greater things adds to the delicious fortuitousness of his foresight.

In 2006 he put photos of his collection online and wrote over 20,000 words on the production, themes and complicated subtext of the film.  A labor of love and the sign of an obsessive fanboy stuck in the past but us beggers can't be choosers and he's done a fabulous job, bringing the joys of the film to a new international audience - and arguably increasing the long-term value of the film for those who own the rights.  There is no better discussion of aesthetics and a critique of the industrial process of building and marketing such a complicated and nuanced piece of popular culture, putting it into context.

Thing is the rightsholders don't seem to care.  They held no archival material for the film and when a French company wanted to put out a DVD they had to go to Ari for the trailer to put on as an extra.  20th Century no longer held such obsolete objects.

Ari's efforts, exhaustive and extensive, bring up important questions about how archives and curation will manifest in a new digital age.  From an age in which films came and went over the course of a few weeks - often only to be found on late-night cable after their initial theatrical runs - "Phantom" now lives online in a comprehensive deconstruction, including a history of last minute edits to erase the "Swan Song" logo illustrated by outtakes, and a careful chronology of marketing campaigns and film quotes.

The archive is no longer behind closed doors.  The curator is now the tourguide, leading you through a primrose path of materials arranged just so.  And he's a stone amateur.  He makes no money on this and has set up shop in the inner sanctum of archivology without permission.  20th Century Fox and Harbor Productions don't even mention the film on their websites, and although Ari posts image after image of their intellectual property they seem to have ceded all archival responsibility to him.

A thousand other films from before 1980 did not make it to a new generation of fans and didn't enjoy an obsessive teenage nerd with time on his hands to collect every related element or magazine mentioning its makers and stars.  They weren't borne during the internet age of dedicated websites.  If they never showed on late night TV or made it to VHS they're invisible to us now.

If not for Ari this one would be lost as well.

*   *   *

Postscript 5/3/13: An extended article I wrote about Ari's website and its archival ramifications was accepted by the esteemed online journal Bright Lights Film Journal, and just appeared in the May 2013 issue here.

Film Is Heavy

Side By Side, the 2012 documentary that compares digital film-making process with celluloid aesthetics and the cultural repercussions of this, seems to locate the shift to the moment in which Avatar, How To Train Your Dragon, and Alice In Wonderland all did boffo in 2010 and changed the industry's perception, profit potential, and go-big-or-go-away attitude.

Barely real himself Keanu Reeves interviews various movers and shakers in the push to digital, from godfathers George Lucas and James Cameron (arguably sounding more like IT guys than film directors, and can actually get companies to build new cameras for them) to relative unknowns like Bradford Young and Lena Dunham who are using the democratizing effect of ubiquitous digital equipment to capture more than has been able to be captured before.

The film, measured and fair as it goes, sounds practically like the authorized version, and like most authorized versions is at only 6 months old already out of date (film is deeper in the grave than suggested - Kodak would shortly file for bankruptcy and stop making film) and reveals darker undercurrents than the participants quite recognize.

There is painful little (but enough) lip service to how digital materials can possibly manage to survive past a couple years without aggressive curation and constant cloning and migration.  (Christopher Nolan is quoted as saying "There are no meaningful archival digital formats" and I believe Michael Ballhaus says everything we're working on will be gone in 50 to 100 years.)  Rich filmmakers who have the infinite support of studios like David Fincher and George Lucas and Stephen Soderbergh and Cameron (or so they think) are sure their works will be kept and preserved, that digital looks much better, and that the cameras are so much smaller and lighter.

Another hidden subtext of Side By Side is how the realm of cinema production turned many of its practitioners by necessity into technical experts, taking some power and aesthetics (earned or not) from cinematographers and directors and the art of patience (per Scorsese) into the hands of IT gurus.  When the IT guys are calling the shots (I'll say figuratively) different decisions are made and different money is spent.

The film avoids the pointless argument of which is "better," and Keanu as avuncular (if barely real) host and producer keeps the proceedings engaging and conversational with only a minimum of hand-wringing.

It is not a film about the democratization of art (although that's mentioned).  It is not about the aesthetics of hand-held or 3-D (although a lot of cinematographers are talked to).  This is an extended discussion with serious filmmakers about their decisions regarding how they will be making films from now on and as such is skewed toward those who have had the resources to take full advantage of the shift.  It's heartening to see that Reeves at least sought out Lars Von Trier and David Lynch, although they both don't seem as interested in talking about their technology as their stories.

And even Mr. Fincher admits that much of his commercial work from 20 years ago is orphaned on obsolete tape technologies that can no longer be played back.  If that's okay with him I guess it's okay with me.  But for the 1000s of other filmmakers who have less resources than him, what are they to do when the studios don't answer their calls?

Master

 

Paul Thomas Anderson has done an audacious and a foolish thing.  He shot "The Master" completely in 70mm (a rare event for a narrative, having last occurred in 1996 for Branagh's "Hamlet"), and it opens in a very limited engagement of 70mm prints, a total of 8 or 9, in which actual 70mm projectors had to be installed in the theatres.  

Theatres can't show 70mm anymore.  This format is absolutely obsolete and has been for 15 years.  I'm not sure people realize this.  Anderson's box office mojo is not near the level of Christopher Nolan's, who shoots on 70mm as often as he can (at least for the action sequences) and calls it IMAX, but the general audience is confounded by what that actually means, nowaways often only meaning that the screen is bigger.  While the negative may have been 65mm (plus 5 for the soundtrack) actual 70mm IMAX projection is rare and appears in only specialized venues; while the quality is more impressive than 35mm (and has what can only be described as "impact" far beyond normal digital imagery) the dilution of the IMAX brand by IMAX themselves who are trying to spread the brand has muted the general audience's appreciation for the gesture. 

So Anderson, beyond Nolan (who merely marshals the means to create a more impressive experience), is reviving and embracing an archaic and obsolete mode of production as well as of distribution, practically limiting the access through an enforced technological scarcity of the platform, insisting (or allowing?) the film (at least for now) to only be presented in theatres that can show 70mm.  This understandably will serve the film better than any wide release ever could and in the process demonstrates a Luddite insistence to carry the analog torch even past some of the film-brat generation you would have expected it of; Spielberg, Scorsese, and De Palma seem to have made peace with the tension between digital production and analog content with their recent attempts to revive or reflect on "the old days."  (Lucas link goes here.)

The striking aspect of "The Master" is that this in no way an "IMAX" movie (a pure spectacle or gravity-defying documentary) or even in 3-D, but rather a (-n ostensively) conservative historical fictionalized biopic - a period piece in which cultural details and the question of physical existence in struggle with some larger higher (in perhaps more than one sense) or spiritual (dare I call it) virtual meaning play a critical part in its subtexts.  In the era in which digital is perceived as clearer, cheaper, easier, better; doesn't scratch or fade or break, moving the industrial headlong to this mode of distribution (and distribution is what it is ultimately about, not content, not warmth, not flicker or scratches) creates an anxiety not just for how films are made but how they move and resonate in the larger culture.

You can't steal a 70mm print.  You can't stream it or hack it.  It is performative, like all films that run through a projector at a measured speed over sprockets in order and show, one time completely before starting again, in many respects an index of the performances that the original negatives captured on set to be conveyed in pieces put together just so.  As over 75% of all theatres in the US are now converted to digital and will reach 90% in 2 years, film prints are the scarce objects Hollywood was built on and are so anxious about they embrace filmmakers who try to eulogize or mythologize their passing, their meaning, a murky past receding so much faster than we can grasp (ergo, "The Artist" (a clumsy if good-natured remembrance) and "Hugo" (more mediated that nevertheless seems (if inadvertently) corrupt).

"The Master" exists initially and solely as 70mm prints, as sacred object that must be carefully handled, shepherded, installed and displayed, and moves the discussion from on the screen to in the booth.  It's no longer just a story of a seduction, free will, power, or something more personal about power (or what ultimately lurks within the text), but instead a meta-textual performance of nostalgic hubris, a kind of elitist Marxism.  The fact that Joaquin Phoenix stars whose recent career is a kind of performance art itself adds to the irony.

The aggressively analog nature of "The Master" can be perceived as a last gasp, just past the "use by" date, of the film print as spectacle and a defiant gesture against digital and its conveniences, forcing audiences (at least those who remember (or imagine) how things used to be) to go to the work rather than having it delivered to them, to meet the artist (at least) halfway. 

It's a masterstroke.  And Anderson has reached the point in his career where we no longer doubt his decisions but instead must discover their intent.

And I anticipate with a certain amount of dread when some hapless projectionist inadvertently puts a perfect yellow-red scratch down the middle of one of these $50,000 70mm beautiful objects and the blogs fire up again about what the value/cost/aesthetic trade-offs are with film vs. digital distribution.

That scratched print will become the single most famous and important film print/ philosophical relic of the 21st century.

10 Best Older Films I Saw in 2011

Some of my favorite bloggers (and blogs) are currently digging into their memories to unearth some of the best older films they saw in the last year (rather than the best of last year's rather bland selection). Having decades to chose from (and being inspired by a sad line-up of passings in 2011), I have discovered that my own list has an average date around 1975, which is part just catching up (while the archives are still unearthing and releasing legacy and catalog material) and part pure coincidence.



Harry In Your Pocket (1973)

A smart and low-key caper film about a cool-as-nails pickpocket (James Coburn) written and directed by Bruce Geller (creator of "Mission: Impossible"), I tracked this down because of Michael Sarrazin, who plays the kid with an agenda. Nice Seattle locations too.

Russell at the BBC (1962-1968)

In the year that also saw the passing of this great lion, it was great to catch up on Ken Russell's earliest work for the BBC during the '60s, released in 2008 on a 3-DVD set. He was as mad and as willing to test the bio-pic boundaries and good taste as he was to the end. His first pairings with Oliver Reed are already ripe with promise.

Murder a la Mod (1968)

While all the belated love seemed to flow to De Palma's initially dismissed "Blow Out" (1981) after a 2011 Criterion release, the real revelation was this "extra" included almost as an afterthought. A seminal and early mystery puzzle-box shot in black and white with a fractured narrative, sometime overbearing art-house pretension, and a game William Finley, it demonstrates De Palma's enthusiasm for film's playful power and his willingness to stretch narrative for the sake of effect.

Get Carter (1971)

The original (and I really have nothing against Kay's 2000 remake) captures a crime-soaked London and the corrupt and defeated early '70s mentality invading films on both sides of the Atlantic at the time. Michael Caine is opaque, tough, and mesmerizing in what comes across as a street-punk "Point Blank."

Variety (1983)

Bette Gordon's neo-noir/ feminist indie film follows a young woman who gets a job in a porn theatre near Times Square and starts delving into the lonely men's personal lives, as well as her own awakening sexual curiosity. Written by Kathy Acker and with a jazzy John Lurie score, the film rocks an early Luis Guzman and Will Patton; this snapshot of NY is deliberate but ultimately haunting.

The Chapman Report (1962)

This little-seen melodrama from George Cukor based on an Irving Wallace bestseller occasionally airs on TNT (thanks for the heads-up, Joe B.) and has the best elements of the time - middle-class suburban malaise, sex kittens, over-the-top psychological mumbo-jumbo dialog, and a great sense of design. Delicious trash.

The Stabilizer (1986)

I also have the Gentleman's Guide to Midnite Cinema (GGTMC)'s efforts to thank in directing me to this amazing Indonesian gem of crazy action, nonsense plotting, and non-stop stumbling fun. This is the kind of thing that makes me miss the straight-to-video days more than anything.

The Driver's Seat (1974)

Speaking of delicious trash, I caught up with this mid-period Elizabeth Taylor Euro-thriller which has Andy Warhol in a cameo and features Liz in full histrionic glory muddling through this existential trainwreck.

Alex In Wonderland (1970)

Paul Mazursky's follow-up to his "Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice" (1969), released through the increasingly essential Warner Archives, is his inside-Hollywood sophomore effort with a delightful Donald Sutherland as an independent film director struggling with being co-opted by the studios. It also out-"8 1/2"s Woody Allen's "Stardust Memories" (1980) in part by scoring a cameo of Fellini himself.

Sex Drive (2008)

A cult film in the making, this hilarious, rude and (of course) sweet-hearted raunch comedy reminded me of the old days of "Savage" Steve Holland and David Wain's "Hot Wet American Summer" (2001). Directed by Sean Anders (co-writer of "Hot Tub Time Machine" (2010) among others), I enjoyed Seth Green as an Amish mechanic and the film's effortless ability to go for the joke - and stay on it far past the limits of taste when it's working.

The Deconstruction of Hugo Cabret

Big movie theatre chains aren't just opening larger and larger megaplexes, to take over your independent film-viewing choices and the cultural landscape. They're also closing older, less popular venues as they become obsolete, out of fashion, through competition or through fashion.

I happened to notice today while walking in town that the Avco Center Theaters in Westwood, owned by AMC since the '90s, was closing. This was a state-of-the-art glass-front triplex built in 1972 that showed all the "Star Wars" films, etc., until multiplexes took over. The new 15-screen AMC Century City 1 mile away killed any chances the Avco Center would last much past its lease expiring.

So I went in and saw "Hugo" on this theatre's last day open. This is the new Martin Scorsese picture (although you could hardly tell) based on the book "The Invention of Hugo Cabret," about a boy around mid-1920s Paris (the date isn't clear) who lives in the clocks in the main train station and has a broken robot his dad worked on he's now trying to fix. There's a grumpy toy-shop owner who makes knick-knacks and a sinister police officer who got crippled in the war and has a metal brace on his leg. The film actually isn't about Hugo so much as that toy shop owner, who ends up being the forgotten and bitter George Melies, whose artificial and magical constructions of films fell hopelessly out of favor, and how the boy, his father's incomplete robot, the magic and the keys and the clockworks, all tie in to help "fix" things - and mal-functioning people - and the past and their broken hearts.

All very neat, and the "big finish" as it were is a showing of some of Melies' original films, here found and for an audience, color tinted (as they originally were) in digestible bits and brand new eye-pleasing 3-D.

It's really a film-nerd film - no wonder Scorsese signed on - and beyond the obvious lavish attention to period and authentic posters and film-making trompe-l'oei, the backgrounds of Paris and grand 3-D setscapes are all so obviously fake, camera moves and snowflakes generated artificially way after the fact, Sasha Baron Cohen's mannerisms hopelessly sitcom, set in a train station of the imagination paying lip service to artistic landscapes and potential lost to the ravages of progress.

The subtext, barely hinted at in the book and absent from the film, seems to be an anxiety over how the industrial revolution both enabled and limited our ability to move in unfettered directions. In the late-era Westerns the "coming of the railroad" signalled progress - new modes that sped the domestication of the outlaw and the end of the West. This film's texture uses all manner of technological legerdemain to fetishize the display of gizmo-logical prowess; I think it's unconvincing, if unintentionally so.

A miles-long CGI zoom-in over the rooftops of Paris into the train station is less impressive than that dolly behind Ray Liotta through a real club down real stairs in "Goodfellas."

The heartbeat of the story is Melies' inability to remain resonant and relevant. Tarting him up with 3-D and color tints seems insincere if not downright dishonest. It seems the very opposite of how Michel Hazanavicius took on his similarly themed "The Artist," and how odd that Scorsese, one of our few remaining and working "old school" directors, employs up-to-the-moment 3-D and rendering tools to make a sentimental and retrograde tale that is undermined of its analog joys and transgressive potential by those very tools.

And also ironic that I saw this in a theatre the last day it was open, closing after 30 years, a victim of progress and its own corporate parent's competition.




* photo by Hollywood90038 via Cinema Treasures.

Dead Trees

After 2+ years of working on this blog, I feel an argument or two has been made. Or at least alluded to.

In fact it's possible I never quite got to the bottom or the end of a thought, owing to the nature of blogging and that it is a continuous and personal series of entries closer to a journal than to journalism. I started this project as a way to investigate and track my own troubled relationship with film moving to a digital world. Online, virtual and without the physical, noisy and organic charms I grew up with. Yes, I'm talking about scratches and that vinegar smell.

I, along with much of the world, was conflicted and anxious about the loss of the indexical link between a performance and the photo-chemical artifact that ran through the projector, one at a time, once at a time and in order. In a rush to look forward we seemed to be more interested, as a culture and as an industry, in ease of delivery and portability, abandoning the hardship and commitment that discreet objects forced us to go through in the past.

Digital ubiquity translates into wider exposure for many new (and some archival) works, but when something is available so easily, doesn't it lose some kind of value? Being scarce is the benefit of physical objects, existing in only one place and as sacred as they are unique. Streams in the cloud, infinitely duplicatable and perfect, aren't anywhere at all.

These discussions are familiar to those who followed this blog, particularly from its inception around mid-2008 to early 2010. That span started with the rise of 3-D and film projectors being replaced in many multi-plexes to the triumph of "Avatar" and Netflix as a primarily streaming service.

I was studying archiving at UCLA and questions about the physicality of actual film, for preservation purposes, shifted to questions about the quality of engagement with digital audio-visual images, for cultural concerns.

Things moved fast in the last 36 months. And I graduated with a master's degree pointing towards some kind of library discipline. While I wrote about other topics such as history and teenagers, this blog has to a certain extent served its purpose, and as a way to draw a line around the initial motivation and close a chapter that remains very much open and part of an ongoing debate, I have chosen 64 of the earlier posts that follow and fill in the thread above.

Is digital the end of cinema, or just the end of film?

These ramblings, with a minimum of editing, have been arranged into a book self-published and available on Amazon, here. I deline* the fall of analog in movie theatres, the rise of digital, reporting on the discussion in the news of the day, dropping occasional topical digressions but including all philosophical musings on ruins, reception studies, and Ken Russell as it relates to archiving and librarianship, as appropriate and at a whim.

The collection, a curated distillation of what has appeared already here online, is printed on demand by the experts at Amazon, and is not yet available for your e-reader.

I thank you all for reading and for the support over the last couple years.

_ _ _ _ _ _

*the active plu-perfect tense of "delination."

Pictures From the Past

As I walk to UCLA almost every day, I'm reminded of the rich cinematic history of the area being used in films, including Paul Schrader's "American Gigolo" (1980), which I just recently rewatched.

The shots of Julian (Richard Gere) walking through a different-looking Westwood reminds me that a Hollywood film as "recent" as 30 years old still holds important historical evidence of how places have changed.

Weyburn Ave, approx. 10925





The Bruin Theatre marquee is visible at the end of the block:





In 1980 the window reflected a hardware store across the street:





Now a Red Mango yogurt place:



Alcove of the Bruin Theatre:

Google Had a Video?

UPDATE 4.24.11: Google has announced they will hold off on deleting their videos - for now.

- - - - - -

Google Video will be no more, as of May 13th. Post their announcement, the somewhat snarky commentary online suggests that if an online service that no one used anyway disappears, did it ever make a noise?

The digital echo we'll hear after the collapse of Google Video is unclear. Google Video simply didn't get the traction that YouTube, a very similar service, was able to (and Google went ahead and acquired them in 2006 for $1.2 billion).

One factor may be that Google Video started, in terms of toucan years, a decade or so too soon (a generation in computer years, early 2005 compared to YouTube's mid-2005. YouTube, if only due to lack of resources, developed more slowly and therefore organically). The selection hosted on Google was quickly and overpoweringly a motley amalgam of old and obsolete news and advertising clips, educational fillups and full-length documentaries with no other distribution or market value. That's why they were on Google Video. There was nothing compelling I ever found, and admittedly the low rate of return and high signal-to-noise ratio prevented me from ever searching very long or very deep.

In other words, the perception was that it was a bunch of junk. Obviously a last-stop channel. While the content was for the most part unique and unavailable elsewhere, it wasn't useful. Clips that users uploaded themselves were lost in the shuffle.

That made it at best quaint.

YouTube, by contrast, though also quickly filled with content that was not available anywhere else, but was also driven by that aesthetic, also offering simple discovery and tag tools - and the ability to participate without logging in or registering. That made it social. It was a destination. While Google Video was a one-way conversation, a replacement for the top-of-the-dial UHF public-access channels, YouTube was a two-way conversation, a new way to filter the content online, and indeed to contextualize it.

That also made it political.

Google hasn't been accepting uploads since May of 2009, and seemed to have quickly decided they were more interested in indexing video at other sites and pointing users there. As seems to be their value strategy, it's more useful to discover (and exploit) information about what people are searching for, rather than to actually host it. They've admitted they're finally ready to put us (and their tech staff) out of our misery.

They warn those who have content up to download it (and perhaps re-up it onto YouTube (they assume you already have).). In spite of amateur archivists rallying ad hoc to try and download the scarcer and "most interesting" of the over 2.8 million videos rumored to live there it's likely most of it will be gone in the digital shadow of the Internet.

How would one go about saving and archiving such a unique collection as that on Google Video? A dynamic collection formed by chance, demographics, and the tyranny of changing technology and audience interaction. Most poorly or mis-cataloged (sometimes on purpose to prevent finding it). And what does this say for the permanence of a corporation's goals, while professing to interconnect all the world's data, when some data is too needy to keep at the party.

Ultimately the longevity of all that data in the cloud is not in our hands. Imagine when YouTube becomes obsolete, or supplanted by some other service or upload/download service? Where will all that stuff go? Most of it may be transferred, and it may be automatic. But a lot will not be, and whether or not it's unique, important, curated or active will not have a lot to do with it.

Curators and archivists are not making the decisions, and the cultural fallout of an unknown, unique and now lost collection becoming extinct bears out two truths:

--Google Video was not the first chapter in what was supposed to be the new story of video on-line, rather it was the last of the older tale. On to new models.

--The take-down of Google Video may be the introduction to another kind of tale (it'll probably be an e-book, actually), one that explores what happens to culture when our audio-visual objects are so ephemeral, fleeting, and out of our control that they can't be depended upon to be around (especially when they're rare and forgotten, especially when they stop existing anywhere else except a furtive digital upload years ago ) when - just in case - they are more important than suspected. To someone somewhere eventually.

A Dog In The Fight

Seems the landscape for what you watch and where you watch it is getting more dangerous by the week. New announcements counteracting and contradicting the previous ones fly as different companies are stepping on each others' toes to get to the customers anyway they can.

Comcast and Times-Warner announced their intent to go wide with TV Everywhere, a computer-based streaming service (press release here). They want to stay in the business of delivering the content no one is going out to theatres to see anymore, before Netflix or Hulu figure out how to completely own the space. (The studios are already nervous about Netflix intruding into the lucrative realm of more current programs rather than just those less attractive that are already available on DVD.) About a moment later the AMC and Regal Theatre chains announced their joint-foray into distribution, acquiring independent and orphan films not only to screen on their small under-utilized theatres but to distribute in other venues including video, cable, and any other method of wireless as well. (reported here ).

They've all come to realize the big sexy blockbusters don't assert their presence for very long in the old ways - they may open on over 4000 screens opening week but by the 2nd the gross has fallen 50% and there's a lot of empty seats. No one makes any money showing a movie to an empty seat. Seats don't buy popcorn (nor are they swayed by ads). Filling those seats with indie product, easily portable and translatable to the smaller screens, won't take up too much room and sometimes it plays for weeks - or months - demonstrating and proving the concept of the "long tail" with a minimum of outlay.

Now just last week DirecTV is fighting the old/new model with their own "premium VOD" (here). It's shaping up to be a dogfight and who wins will depend on whose dog is the biggest.

AMC and Regal have both declared they won't play ball with any studios that share their content on DirecTV's VOD model (intended to make films available for as much as $30 as little as 4 weeks after opening in theatres). AMC and Regal insist on keeping the theatrical model intact, in spite of their own dog in the race, their small yapping foray into on-the-fringe distribution of under-the-radar titles, a low-profile attempt to nibble at the crumbs the studios leave behind that can't be ignored.

AMC and Regal, the #1 and #2 largest theatre exhibition companies, have most at risk in the short term. Comcast and DirecTV are looking at the long term. No one knows what will capture the public's fancy with increasing amount of content being consumed on tablets and phones. Staking out their claim with talky independent films (which are shorter and scale "down" visually) may translate well from the empty screens at the multiplex to home, where AMC can still take 60% of the revenue.

Predicting what people will pay for is a fool's game. The LA Times article quoted above reminds us that this is similar to the fight over Disney's "Alice in Wonderland" last year, when Disney wanted to shorten the time from theatrical opening to DVD to 3 months. Marketing was no doubt trying to mitigate the likely dramatic fall-off of business for a title they predicted (and not without precedent) would have no legs.

They'd seen the movie. It wasn't very good.

Disney backed off when the theatre chains threatened to boycott the film, and subsequently and surprisingly, "Alice" continued to play to curious and hood-winked audiences, partially due to the confluence of 3-D still being new and unburnished by "Clash of the Titans" and "Piranha 3-D," the very fecundity of the idea of making Alice a sexually stirring post-adolescent in the remake, and the promising if half-baked potential of Depp as the Mad Hatter, a conceit ultimately not exploited in the film but no matter. "Alice" grossed $330 million in the US and $690 million more overseas, making it even more popular than those Pirate movies.

An early release of "Alice" to home video (in any format) would have quenched curiosity, shortened the run (over 4 months domestically) and suppressed the upper reach of its gigantic receipts.

Everyone is in a rush to bite the hand that feeds them, while the old saw that content is king still proves itself out, in potent and unexpected ways. The fertile potential of good films is the 800 lb. gorilla in the room that still drives people to what they want to see, wherever they have to go see it.