IT’S DIFFICULT TO THINK OF A BETTER FILM released in the past year
than Hunger. The directorial debut of video artist Steve
McQueen, it traces the events of the 1981 Provisional Irish Republican
Army hunger strike in Northern Ireland’s Maze Prison in which Bobby
Sands (played by Michael Fassbender) starved himself to death, along
with nine others, as the world counted the days. Given McQueen’s
background in visual arts, it’s not surprising that Hunger isn’t
a straight historical drama, instead taking an elliptical, visually
beguiling look at the grim realities of men living in filth and
destroying their bodies to fight back the only way they can. McQueen
makes clear the toll the brutal prison regime took on the Protestant
guards as well. To top it off, the film hinges around a 17-minute-plus
single-take scene of Fassbender’s Sands and a priest played by Liam
Cunningham performing a virtuoso duet for boyo patter and grim moral
rhetoric.
When it first hit the film festival circuit in 2008, Hunger won several shelves full of awards, including the Toronto Film
Festival’s Discovery Award, the Cannes Film Festival’s Golden Camera
for McQueen and a British Independent Film Awards Best Actor trophy for
Fassbender. Riding a wave of rapturous early reviews, it was picked up
by IFC Films for distribution in the United States and opened in New
York and Los Angeles in December 2008 — just in time for Academy
Award consideration.
Assuming successful runs in the two biggest and most discerning
movie markets in the country, Hunger would ordinarily have
rolled out to art houses in bigger markets, then smaller markets all
across the country; if it did well, it might even elbow its way into
some mainstream multiplexes. But Hunger tanked in New York and
Los Angeles — maybe shriveling hunger strikers and trembling
guards were a bit too much as the recession deepened and the holidays
approached — so it never made it to many markets. (It screened in
Cleveland this summer.)
But Hunger did wind up having a local run, of sorts, this
spring via Comcast Cable. For the past two years, the Independent Film
Channel (IFC) has been making titles such as Steven Soderbergh’s
two-part bio-epic Che, gritty Italian crime drama
Gomorrah and Israeli/Palestinian drama Lemon Tree available on demand via its cable-TV arm at around the same time they
hit theaters. For $6.99 — a good bit less than the going rate at
most movie theaters these days — you can sit on your couch and
watch movies that have yet to make it to the local art-house theater
and may never.
Americans’ love of big popcorn movies seen on a big screen on
opening weekend — especially summer weekends — is so well
established and so lucrative that it’s hard to imagine the basic model
changing any time soon. In fact, the blockbuster business is only
getting bigger, with more mainstream filmmakers embracing overwhelming
technologies such as 3D and IMAX. But at almost any level of
film-viewing below the Terminator Salvations and
The Hangovers of the world, all bets are off.
The rise of the Internet has created a world where, if you can type
a title, no matter how old or obscure, into a search bar and hit
return, you can track down a DVD copy, legitimate or otherwise, for
delivery to your door. The proliferation of broadband means that
attaching the word “torrent” to your search may lead you to a site
where you can just download a bit torrent of the movie straight to your
laptop. And that’s just the unofficial traffic in films: In addition to
video-on-demand (VOD) offerings like IFC in Theaters, there are
companies like Netflix that specialize in delivering DVDs to your
mailbox, or now, through a broadband connection, directly to your TV.
And web-streaming of full-length feature films with decent picture
quality is on the rise.
In short, film lovers have become increasingly accustomed to wanting
more and being able to get it, often whenever they want, if they can’t
get it legitimately, many don’t let that slow them down. As consumer
desires and expectations expand, companies ranging from movie studios
to online retailers are trying a slew of new technologies and
approaches in an attempt to adapt and arrive at the Next Big Thing in
home entertainment, whatever that is, before the rest of the pack. It’s
too early to tell how this will shake out in 10 years time, but film
nerds will win out, as will some format or delivery system probably in
the works right now. And just as some will win, others will lose.
THERE ARE ALWAYS PEOPLE looking for something they don’t have, and
Mike White is one of those people. A lifelong film fan, he is the
editor of the film ‘zine Cashiers du Cinemart and an occasional
contributor to Scene sister paper Metro Times in his
hometown of Detroit. (He is no relation to the
actor/screenwriter/director of the same name, or the former Cleveland
mayor.) White has spent years amassing a huge assortment of VHS tapes,
laser discs and DVDs of his favorite movies, often illicit copies of
obscure films that had never been available on home video. In the early
’00s, within the network of fans and websites devoted to such films, he
began to make copies of some of his rarest items for other people.
“I had quite a collection and just tried to help folks out with
finding obscure films,” he says. “After a while it got to the point
where I was sending out so many tapes that it didn’t make any sense to
keep doing it for free, so that’s how superhappyfun.com was born.”
Through superhappyfun.com,
White and a partner sold DVD-Rs of hundreds of otherwise unavailable
titles — everything from Japan-only films by shockmeister Takashi
Miike to Change of Mind, a rare 1969 exploitation film in which
a white man’s brain is transplanted into a black man’s body. And it
turns out that it wasn’t just cult-y titles that people who stopped by
the site wanted. The full-length version of 1976 TV movie Sybil, starring Sally Field, proved to be a popular request, as was Follow
Me, Boys!, an obscure 1966 family film starring Fred MacMurray.
Of course, a “popular” film for superhappyfun.com might sell a few
hundred copies. White says the site never brought in more than “pocket
money … It might have helped pay for [acquiring] the movies
themselves.” But then, unlike organized pirates who churn out thousands
of shoddy copies of hot new releases, White was focused on films, not
profits. “I tried to be the most ethical bootlegger I possibly could
be,” he says. “My whole idea was that I wanted to be put out of
business, in that all of the movies that I carried were available
legally and easily for folks to get their hands on. It wasn’t to my
chagrin that I would pull a title because it was coming on Criterion
DVD, it was like, ‘OK, finally. Instead of a 12th-generation copy, here
it is on DVD for everyone to see.'”
White gave up his part in superhappyfun.com in 2008, in part
because of a conflict with his partner, in part because of “checking
the mail every day to see if I had any cease and desist orders —
after a while it got to be a little too unnerving.” But the trade in
bootleg copies of obscure films on the web continues, with sites such
as Just for the Hell of It (j4hi.com)
and Shocking Videos (revengeismydestiny.com) going
strong. “Business is still pretty darn good out there for folks,” says
White.
“Our goal is to not only put those people out of business, but
hopefully in jail,” says George Feltenstein, senior vice president of
marketing for Warner Home Video Theatrical Catalog. But even
Feltenstein acknowledges that “the best cure to piracy is to make the
product available. It all exists because there’s demand.”
To that end, in March Warner Home Video launched the Warner Archive,
a new retail program that has the potential to revolutionize the way
studios deal with their film libraries and movie fans score copies of
their undersung favorites.
For the past 23 years, Feltenstein has overseen Warner Home Video’s
catalog business, releasing and marketing thousands of older titles
from the vaults of Warner Bros., MGM (through 1986), RKO Pictures and
other classic studio libraries — more than 14,000 titles in all,
stretching all the way back to 1914. He’s been steadily bombarded with
requests for titles that haven’t yet appeared on VHS or DVD. Even with
what Feltenstein describes as Warner Home Video’s “aggressive” mining
of its catalog — which includes everything from A Charlie
Brown Christmas to Zabriskie Point — there have always
been people willing to pay for obscure titles that it made no financial
sense to release.
“Generally, we tend to need to break even at retail at around the
20,000-unit mark,” says Feltenstein. “And if a title can’t make that
threshold, it would make the likelihood of a retail release [very
small].” The demise of stock-everything retail chains like Tower
Records and Virgin Megastore has made releasing catalog titles even
tougher.
Cue the Warner Archive. Via the program’s web page (wbshop.com/archive) consumers can now
click on one of nearly 200 titles and counting from the Warner Home
Video library and buy a DVD copy of the film, individually burned and
packaged in a standard DVD keep case with printed cover art. While
Feltenstein might find it hard to justify authorizing the manufacturing
of 20,000 units of vérité-style ’70s heroin film Dusty
and Sweets McGee or Christopher Strong, Katharine Hepburn’s
1933 leading-role debut, being able to sell individual copies on demand
for a profit represents a win-win for consumer and studio alike.
“All these little nooks and crannies in our library, they become
viable,” he says. “At some point, every one of our 6,800 feature films
and multi-thousand television shows, short subjects, cartoons —
anything in our library — will be available to the consumer
ordering through the Warner Archive collection.”
The Warner Archive also offers on-demand downloads of the films for
a lower (but not much lower) price. So far, Feltenstein says, download
sales have been “basically a blip on the radar — the overwhelming
majority of purchases have been for DVD.” He declined to discuss actual
sales figures, but concedes, “It would be foolish to believe that
downloads from our library are not going to be a growing aspect of our
business.”
JUST AS PEOPLE HAVE ADAPTED to the idea of listening to a downloaded
digital bundle of compressed 1s and 0s as an album, so have people
begun to adapt to the idea of watching movies on a computer screen, or
even the tiny window of a cell phone or MP3 player. Apple currently
sells or rents thousands of films through its iTunes online store, and
Amazon has followed with its own video-on-demand selection of 40,000
titles. Netflix offers a streaming library of some 12,000 titles, all
free to its 10.3 million mail subscribers (up from 6.3 million in
2006).
“We think DVD rental by mail will continue to grow for five to 10
more years,” says Steve Swasey, Netflix’s vice president for corporate
communications. “But ultimately, 15, 20 years from now, it’ll all be
streaming, and we believe that we’ve got a great stake in the ground
for that.”
Indeed, if anything is holding back an explosion of movies streaming
over the Internet right now, it’s that in most broadband households,
the Internet ends at a computer. But streaming is creeping ever closer
to being as easy and appealing as flipping on the tube. A company
called Roku manufactures a small black box that, for about $100,
transfers streaming web video from Netflix or Amazon to your TV set.
Perhaps even more decisive, Microsoft’s Xbox 360 videogame console
performs the same trick. More than 11 million Xbox 360s have been sold
in the United States, and according to Swasey, Microsoft has reported
that more than a million Xbox owners have used the console to watch
Netflix streaming.
The titles Netflix offers on streaming tend to be “catalog” films
— older films, foreign films, TV episodes, not the current hits
— and, at 12,000 titles, a fraction of its DVD and Blu-ray
library of more than 100,000 titles. “When we buy the DVD, we own the
DVD, but we’re licensing the streaming content differently,” says
Swasey. “This is new and it’s evolving. It’s a whole new economic model
for the studios.” In some cases, he says, Netflix doesn’t have a title
for streaming because of expense — The Dark Knight doesn’t
come cheap for any licensee in any form — and in other cases,
it’s a matter of studios not wanting to compromise other licensing
deals.
Those who hold the rights to films seem to be holding back online
streaming somewhat too. In November 2008, Efe Cakarel launched the
Auteurs (theauteurs.com), a
website that’s a combination online streaming art-house theater and
social-networking nexus. (“We want to … take foreign, classic and
independent films to the people — and the people are on Facebook
and Twitter,” Cakarel writes via e-mail.) The fledgling site has formed
partnerships with gold-standard DVD imprint the Criterion Collection
and the World Cinema Foundation, and hosts an impressive array of
curiosity-stoking contemporary films from all over the world. But so
far it offers a total of 500 films for paid streaming.
“The big film studios who own a lot of the classic films still make
a lot of money from TV deals and are afraid that doing smaller online
deals will erode this lucrative source of income,” writes Cakarel. “For
undistributed films, rights holders hold on to the illusion that niche
films have the potential to make them rich when released in the U.S.
market and ask for unrealistic prices to show their wonderful films
that are destined for small audiences.”
So far, the Auteurs can boast 240,000 unique visitors a month and
more than 80,000 registered users, though, as Cakarel acknowledges “not
many people have paid for streams yet, but these are the early days for
feature length .”
Cable television — the other fat pipe of information flowing
into many American homes — has been offering movies on demand and
recent film releases on a pay-per-view basis for years. With the growth
of VOD and the wane of theater screens devoted to independent and
foreign films, IFC Films launched its IFC in Theaters program two years
ago to make its films available on VOD via the IFC Channel to coincide
with their theatrical releases.
“We found that it was very successful in terms of the way we were
releasing,” says Arianna Bocco, vice president of acquisitions and
production for IFC Films. Not only does adding VOD offer “two revenue
streams for all the marketing and publicity we [do] at the time,” she
adds, it creates “a wider outreach and wider footprint.”
Bocco declines to offer any numbers, but does note that IFC in
Theaters was successful enough that, in March 2008, her company
launched IFC Festival Direct to bring to VOD new films that weren’t
going to be getting anywhere near a theater anyway, from Fear Me Not
— a Danish drama about a man taking part in an antidepressant
study and suffering from ever more sinister side effects — to
Faintheart, a British comedy about historical reenactors.
“You’re still spending money to release the movies,” says Bocco.
“But you’re really cutting out the most prohibitive costs of releasing
a film [theatrically], which is the ‘P&A'” — prints and
advertising. There’s some potential that if it does well on VOD that
the film could actually make some money for the filmmaker, as opposed
to what most films do, which is lose a lot of money.”
OF COURSE, THIS BRAVE NEW world of obscure DVDs ordered up with one
click and new films streaming instantly to your home doesn’t excite
everyone, least of all those who have done the most to support
discerning cinema culture over the past 50 years or so — namely
the art-house theater and the serious video store.
George Mansour, now 75, has been booking art-house films since he
was 30 years old, so he has witnessed the early waves of foreign films
shaking up these shores, the collapse of the old Hollywood studio
system and the rise of the independent filmmaker, the advent of home
video and the heyday of crossover “indie” hits. In addition to
consulting for New York’s famed Angelika Film Center, he now books 21
screens around the country. Asked if VOD programs like that of IFC
affect the business such films do at theaters he books, he answers, “I
think it does.
“Magnolia and IFC and companies like that are trying to have their
cake and eat it too — trying to have theatrical runs and also
have the money from on-demand,” he continues. “It’s fine for them, but
it is cutting into the grosses of the small, independent art houses. I
don’t know whether ultimately it’s going to be something that’s
self-defeating.”
Neither IFC nor Mansour will discuss numbers for box office or VOD
take, but Mansour cites recent IFC theatrical release The Girlfriend
Experience, Steven Soderbergh’s hotly hyped film about an escort
played by porn star Sasha Grey, as a film he suspects may have done
better at in art houses if it hadn’t also been available via VOD.
“Maybe if I were a little more Olympian about this idea [I could
say], ‘Well, this is a great way for someone in Lincoln, Nebraska, or
some cut-off rural area, to be able to access specialized movies,” says
Mansour. “But why not wait three months, four months? At least give the
theatrical run a chance for it to breathe and to generate grosses and
to keep the places that advertise and that make people aware of these
movies alive.”
“For the kinds of movies we release, I think there’s room for both”
theatrical release and VOD, says IFC’s Bocca. “And I don’t think that
the theatrical experience will go away, because it’s a social
experience. There’s so much more to it than watching a movie on a big
screen.” In the long term, she argues, “DVD has a larger chance of
being in jeopardy” as a format than the classic art house.
Streaming may be coming on strong, but Blu-ray technology has given
movies-on-disc a boost with its exquisitely sharp picture, rich sound
and boatloads of features. “I personally don’t see a great rush of
people who wanna build a collection of movies on their computer,” says
Warner Home Video’s Feltenstein. “But they want to have them to watch
on their 100-foot screen. That’s what Blu-ray offers.” And just as it
took DVD a number of years to catch on, it will take it a number of
years to die out, says Netflix’s Swasey. After all, he notes, “the VHS
tape is still clinging to its last breath of life. You still have
Americans with VHS players on their rack and tapes they just can’t part
with. DVDs are only 10 years old.”
Mike White just wants to watch more movies, and the format matters
less than the fact that he knows they’re out there, out of his
reach.
“What about all those films that still aren’t available on DVD and
were never available on VHS?” he asks. “Are we ever going to catch up
to that point? Or is that going to be version 4.0, where we actually
have that dream that we’ve all had — you know, it’s three o’clock
in the morning and I suddenly want to see The General with
Buster Keaton, and I can just go to my interface unit and punch a code
and there it is. It’s what they’ve been promising us for years. ‘Oh
yeah, we’ll have every movie in the world and it’ll download
immediately.’ You’ll turn on the chip in your head.”
This article appears in Sep 9-15, 2009.