The Movies’ Digital Future is in Sight and it Works

The New York Times, November 26, 2000

This was the top-of-the-fold lead article on page 1 of the Sunday Arts & Leisure section for Thanksgiving weekend in the year 2000, and jumped to a full page inside. It proved controversial for reasons I’ll explain.

I got hooked up with the Times in the fall of 1998 when A&L editor John Rockwell became enamored with audio/video tech and tasked a lieutenant with finding someone who could write a basic home-theater how-to for a fall movie special. I was the senior editor at Home Theater magazine and was assigned the story by one of Rockwell’s assistant editors, who had seen my unconventional reportage about shopping in San Francisco for a DVD player equipped with the controversial Divx pay-for-play system. This was followed by an assignment in the summer of 1999 to visit two New York area movie theaters doing experimental digital screenings of Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace, which George Lucas had converted to a digital master to help prove the viability of digital projection. Finally, they reached out to me to do a major feature about the arrival of digital cinema, which was just blossoming into something commercially viable.

I reported and wrote the story, working arduously with Times editors and fact-checkers. It was a thoroughly researched piece that I came to realize, only in retrospect, had a major flaw. While it laid out in detail the present state of the technology for both image capture and projection, and aired the challenges that faced the rollout, it failed to fully voice the concerns of Hollywood filmmakers who felt that the tech was far from ready for prime time. The article was driven mostly by opinions from the pro-digital Lucas, whom I interviewed at length, and the studios and distributors who stood to gain the most financially from the move to digital. But it only mentioned in passing the concerns from moviemakers about what was obviously a sea change technology, and didn’t quote even one anti-digital creative from the, “whoa, hold your horses” camp. It didn’t help that the article came out with a headline (not of my doing) declaring that the future was essentially here and a subhead that read “With Hollywood leading a stampede to revolution, it won’t be long till the film industry is filmless”—an overstatement, to be sure, and one who’s citing of “Hollywood” failed to reflect the directors and cinematographers. The article was further accompanied by an inflammatory lead illustration that amounted to a blood red filmstrip with the words “The End” filling each frame.

The piece didn’t share anything that hadn’t already been reported in the trades, and technically I had followed the assignment to the T in bringing readers up to date on where things were headed. But the Times’ strong, public declaration was too much for the DP community, which practically hung me in effigy in their online forums and wrote angry letters to the paper. In fairness, although the 2K-resolution digital cinema projectors (essentially 1080p) were reasonably suitable for roll-out, digital capture was still in its infancy, particularly in its capacity to harness the full dynamic range of film. It took another five years before official digital cinema equipment standards for capture and exhibition would be finalized by the industry, and more than ten years before digital cameras were widely accepted for shooting major productions. In any event, it was a great journalistic lesson learned the hard way: never overlook or dismiss any party or interest group in the periphery of your subject matter without full assessment, and always be ready to follow the story where it takes you, even if it’s outside the purview of the original assignment or not obvious why it might matter.

A final postscript: A couple or three years after this story was published, I was flipping through the TV channels late one night and landed on a PBS documentary about digital cinema. Suddenly, director Oliver Stone appeared on the screen, declaring something along the lines of (and I’m paraphrasing) “Despite the pronouncements of certain major publications, digital cinema is a giant step backward!” I instinctively jumped up and pointed at the screen. “Holy s–t!,” I exclaimed to no one present, “he’s talking about me!”