A few months later, in January, one of the companies that makes the raw, unprocessed film stock, Eastman Kodak, filed for bankruptcy.
In an interconnected ecosystem, a change in one species causes a ripple effect throughout. "It's all intertwined," says Chris Kenneally, director of the Keanu Reeves–produced documentary Side by Side, which examines the industry's switch from film to digital. "The same companies that make the film that goes to theaters are also the same people that make the film that goes into the camera on the set to shoot it."
PHOTO BY JENNIE WARREN
Jan-Christopher Horak with an Oxberry 16 mm/35 mm wet-gate optical printer
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Digital projection, Kenneally continues, will push photochemical film out of existence, because the labs that make the film stock won't outlive the huge loss of income.
The mood in the post-production sector is pervasively grim. "Everybody's nervous," says Ross Lipman, a film restorationist who regularly encounters a wide cross-section of industry types, from curators to technicians. "Everybody's kind of looking around to see if somebody's found a way to survive this transition. Because it's like you're walking around a field of battle, and people are just dropping right and left around you."
As one projectionist at a large multiplex put it, "It's spooky."
While money is driving the conversion, money could well be its undoing. The ultimate pricetag of digital equipment is hidden to exhibitors right now. Little expenses add up. Take xenon bulbs for projectors, which retail for $600 a pop. To save costs, penny-pinching theater owners used to run bulbs beyond the recommended time. In a 35mm projector, a blown-out bulb is no big deal. But a digital projector, in Vinny Jefchak's words, is "real delicate shit."
If you use the bulbs too long in a film projector, "Maybe you have a broken reflector," explains Shawn Jones, an engineer at the lab NT Audio. "You clean out the broken glass. But if a bulb explodes in a digital projector, it tends to break a lot of expensive pieces."
Within the warranty period, the manufacturer fixes the machine for free. But if a bulb explodes outside that time, the exhibitor is on the hook. As a result, bulbs must be changed three times more frequently in digital projectors.
While studios are initially kicking in money to help theaters buy new equipment, as that digital equipment ages, exhibitors will bear the cost. And digital is notoriously temperamental. Jones' lab, for example, has already gone through two DCP-compliant projectors in three years — in both cases, through no fault of the lab's. (By contrast, the Simplex XL 35mm projectors at New Beverly are going strong at 60 years old. Like all analog projectors, they use an intermittent sprocket, a cog and a pivot — the same basic gear as a sewing machine.)
With so many rival entertainments, movie attendance is at the lowest it's been in nearly 20 years, according to the National Association of Theatre Owners. In the past year and a half, U.S. box office receipts plummeted half a billion dollars. Coupled with the larger consumer trend, the expense of digital could be a disaster.
"In five to 10 years," notes one lab technician, "this is all going to unravel in a big, bad way."
Digital Worries
In 28 Days Later a man in a hospital gown walks down the middle of a deserted London street. He passes empty buildings, overturned double-decker buses. A breeze shuffles bits of trash around in the morning sunlight. He is alone. The zombie apocalypse has struck.
That scene, the movie's most memorable, might not have existed if not for digital cameras. Director Danny Boyle couldn't afford to shut down London traffic for more than an hour. But because digital cameras set up more quickly than film, the crew was ready to shoot — with six strategically placed cameras — within minutes.
Many directors prefer digital cameras because of their speed and portability. Boyle's director of photography, Anthony Dod Mantle, went on to win a Best Cinematography Oscar for Slumdog Millionaire, the first digital motion picture to do so. He refused to take cumbersome 35mm film cameras into the Mumbai slums, opting for smaller, lightweight digital equipment to capture the place's bustling urgency and flow.
The constraints of film, however, force artists to master their craft. An old-school cinematographer like Freddie Young, for instance, could shoot on a film camera with no digital monitor to check his progress — and walk out at the end with Lawrence of Arabia.
No wonder, then, that directors like Christopher Nolan worry that if 35mm film dies, so will the gold standard of how movies are made. Film cameras require reloading every 10 minutes. They teach discipline. Digital cameras can shoot far longer, much to the dismay of actors like Robert Downey Jr. — who, rumor has it, protests by leaving bottles of urine on set.
"Because when you hear the camera whirring, you know that money is going through it," Wright says. "There's a respectfulness that comes when you're burning up film."
Cinephiles talk about there being an organic quality to 35mm, as if it were a living creature. "There's literally an inner life," Wright says. "Every single frame is different on every single print. You feel that when you're watching it. I'd be alarmed to see that go away."
