The Return Of 3-D

Five AM and done with sleep. What better time for some Jackie Paris. The above "Tis Autumn" is from his greatest album, "The Song Is Paris". 1962.

I'm perplexed by the re-emergence of 3-D. Not just the why of it but the reality of it. Seriously? 3-D? This isn't a hoax? It's the twenty-first century and we're going to wear the glasses again? Or have they found a way to do without them?

Read the following and tell me what year we're in.

"The panic within the movie industry has never been more palpable. Concerned that a new medium will finally empty out movie theaters, studios and exhibitors have seized on the new three-dimensional process as more than a gimmick-a new way for audiences to experience motion pictures. And one that can only be experienced in theaters."

No--not 1952. Now. 2007. How boring. I still don't know if we have to wear the glasses. The new medium then was television. I suspect the new medium now is youtube.

I went to a 3D festival last summer at the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood and caught a few films. Although I have fond memories of the Three Stooges in 3D, this time I was disappointed. It seemed to me that the better the movie, the more distracting the process was to it. Specifically "Kiss Me Kate", a very underrated MGM musical version of the Cole Porter show, was utterly not in need of a "third dimension". I felt myself wanting, after the film, to get my hands on a nice DVD transfer and watch it the way it was meant to be watched.

In my home--the virtual cinemateque--on my fifty incher.

But it led me to think about 3D and here's where I got to.

Movies are naturally in 3D. Without the glasses.

When we watch film, we assume a third dimension. Our brain adapts to the reality of the image--implying the depth rather than noticing the lack of it.

And that, in a nutshell, is why 3D always stayed a gimmick rather than becoming a neccessity that filled a void. Nobody had ever watched movies and lamented the lack of a third dimension. Indeed if 3D had never been invented, it wouldn't have been missed. (Not that it was terribly missed after it was invented.) Though its fun to see a 3D film now and then, I never find myself watching a "flat" movie and wishing it had been shot in 3D. Frankly, I'm relieved to take the glasses off. I always pretend I'm going to save them. I never do.

The movie industry, in its charmingly panicked state of disarray, has once again seized on a gimmick to guarantee that theatrical exhibition of movies will remain a going thing. The theories as to why it failed in the past--for instance, that the movies that were shot in the process simply weren't good enough--don't really hold water. (There was a New York Times piece that rehashed a lot of this in the past few weeks.) Indeed, the best of the third dimensional movies--Hitchcock's "Dial M For Murder"--wasn't even released using the process. As if the studios saw the writing on the wall and realized that with a good story and Grace Kelly, you didn't need to work so hard to add a little depth.

The last 3D phase lasted about three years (not quite, given the glut of films that were shot in the process but released flat). How long will the new phase last? Given that our attention spans are seriously shorter, I can't imagine more than a year. A few films will be done in 3D. The ones that will work best will be for kids. The glasses will still cause headaches. This time the headaches will lead to pile of lawsuits. End of the return of 3D.

So now we have a plan for our documentary.

"Tis Autumn: The Search For Jackie Paris" will be released theatrically by Outsider Pictures in New York. The date currently hovers around early October. That we are being exhibited in a good old fashioned theater for a week (or more?) neatly places us in two somewhat dissonant camps: the top percentile of independently made films as well as the retro-release category. Because as we all know, while a theatrical release is always preferable, it is not mandatory any more. There is no shame in going to straight to DVD--as long as the movie has found a home where it can in turn be found by those that are interested.

Unless, of course, you have aspirations toward being recognized by AMPAS. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences steadfastly clings to the notion that the communal viewing experience is essential to the art (and I suppose the preservation) of the cinema. Sid Ganis, the President, has publicly urged people to continue to see films as they "were meant to be seen--in theaters" (I'm paraphrasing, but he couldn't have said it all that differently.)

I'm a proud member of the Academy, having been nominated for a short that I made in another lifetime. I like the free Christmas time movies and I make sure to vote every year, except when I forget to. That said, the Academy's rules for qualifying non-mainstream films for award potential (i.e. shorts, docs etc.) are flabbergasting, irrational and subject to change every year. But I see why they do it: every year the movie business not only gets more fragmented but becomes MORE RELIANT ON THE ACADEMY TO RECOGNIZE AND APPROVE A HANDFUL OF MOVIES AS CONSUMER WORTHY.

Though they didn't ask for this job, the Academy--which began as a loose knit group that threw Hollywoods only formal awards party once a year (remember that it wasn't even broadcast for its first decade and a half)-- has now become the ultimate arbiter as to what selection people should make when dealing with films that are not necessarily designed for the basest commercial purposes.

In other words, if you make "Saw" you're not in need of AMPAS opinion. (If you made 'Saw" you probably are not in need of much of anything right now.)

But if you're in the (apologies to Terry Southern) "quality film game", you're aim is simple, clear and elusive; an Oscar nomination. Certainly big companies with slickly oiled PR machines can work the room hard. But if you're making a film that will not really have much of a life unless recognized by the Academy, the need for their acknowlegement becomes a lot bigger.

To be nominated for an Oscar, you need to exhibit theatrically for a given window of time in a given number of cities.
( I wont go into the particulars--anyone interested can probably find out on the AMPAS website). This can be done digitally, although there is no true digital standard by which all theaters project thereby making it a hell of a lot more work to exhibit digitally than it might otherwise be if we would all jump on the same bandwagon and make the big change that's been endlessly discussed over the past several years. Nonetheless, if you manage to make the final round of Academy consideration, you are still required to deliver TWO 35MM prints to the Academy. Presumably this is for viewing by Academy members in the Academy theater. Assuming that this is the case, the Academy installing a proper digital projection system in their theater would save the handful of independent filmakers who make it this far something like $30,000--which they may or may not even have.

It's not the Academy's job to save filmmakers money, though. And maybe this arcane rule serves a larger purpose. Keeping the pool of contenders small. Fine. But what if the best short or best documentary is not actually being seen and/or recognized simply because there isn't the money to go to 35mm?

That would be a classic tail wagging the dog. The strange thing is that the tail has become 35mm film.

Virtual Cinemateque

Here's what my world looks like now:

I've got sattelite radio playing in my office--over my direct-tv hooked-up fifty-inch screen. (The system is used primarily for radio listening. I currently watch two or three movies a week and perhaps an hour of 24 hour news rant a day. But the radio is on pretty much the rest of the time.)

There are three movies currently in theaters that I would like to see. But since I work out of my home-office (and my day therefore is necessarily focused on what I have to get done professionally) the idea of going out and paying to park and walking around a mall and sitting through trailers I've already seen or didn't want to see to begin with doesn't sound like time well spent. (One of the misconceptions about working "for yourself" is that you get to do whatever you want with your time. The truth is I do much less outside of my work than people with nice normal out of the house type jobs do.)

And: the movies that I want to see are not 'event' movies. So, yes, I admit it: without an audience waiting to enjoy the movie with me the idea of adding two hours travel/parking/trailer/getting home time to the two hour running time of the film isn't attractive.

Instead I spent one hour on youtube and saw: Oscar Petersen at Montreaux in 1980, Sarah Vaughn on TV in the 70's, Steve Allen giving a tour of Birdland (a great old Broadway jazz institution) from a show in the early fifties and a Laurel&Hardy short ("They Go Boom"--1929-rarely shown). And I caught up with some recent Comedy Central stuff.

Here's what the "Vitural Cinemateque" world might look like.

The same. Except that the three new commercially released movies that I can't find the time (or the will) to see will be available to download (via something resembling an i-pod I-would i-magine) to my fifty inch screen.

Result: more viewership for current work, possibly more interest on my part turning into better word of mouth for movies that I will not, at this point, see until they arrive on cable (at which point word-of-mouth is decidedly beside-the-point. Chee-rist, I love hy-phens.)

So where is the cancer in this scenario? In trying to understand the "Studios" (and they can hardly justify being called that word anymore now that they don't really produce their own films) and their inability to come to grips with the downloadable world, one wonders: is part of the problem that the "studios" actually believe that the virtual cinemateque might still a future only if they agree to negotiate for it? The future is here. Only it's not being delivered in an optimum fashion. Furthermore, the hijacking of the ancillaries by the video-equivalent of street thugs is being allowed to happen by an elephantine system in which lawyers argue with lawyers over lawyering (this has an interesting new term: "overlawyering") while technology and human desire to grow with technology is all but ignored.

The problem seems not to be "should we allow films to be downloaded." That's already happening. It's just not happening for consumers like me (relatively honest, relatively naive, somewhat lazy). And the money that could be being made for the artists involved in making the films is being left on the table.

In the May 14 issue of the New Yorker Magazine there is a review by Steven Shapin of a book called "The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900" (the books author is David Edgerton). The premise of the book--and Shapin's
article--is that innovation in technology is never, in and of itself, the whole story. Rather time, and the way in which humans eventually come to regard and use technology, tends to have much more to do with whether or not a given innovation is ultimately successful (i.e.--we can't imagine life without it) or merely a passing fad. Sometimes new mediums are not
even correctly understood for a good many years. An example is the telephone which, the article points out, was initially presumed to be a device only for use by the upper classes and one that could, if not monitored closely, lead to the end of interpersonal human contact as we know it.

Edgerton also coins a term to describe the tendency to overrate new technology, "futurism". Examples would be: one-hour around the world airships, underground housing, the paperless office, efficient nuclear power.

So which are the new technologies that movies face that will truly radically alter the experience? And which will drop into the dustbin of "futurism"?

A couple of widely held assumptions follow, along with responses (guesses) on my part:

"I-Pods will be the preferred method of viewing movies. The result will be that movies will get shorter because the attention span for watching anything on a small screen)is much shorter than other wise."

I hear this a lot. The "futurism" seems to be the assumption that i-pods (or similarly shaped and functioning devices) will be the preferred method of viewing. I-pod screens may be used to store and/or download films, but has anyone ever seen a fetish as extreme as the fifty-inch flat screen panic of the past year or two? The cheaper they get, the more ubiquitous they will be in our lives. Frankly, it is the i-pod that strikes me as the device that will change--in the way we use it--over time. Could it be an efficient storage device at best? And a backup viewing tool if the need arises?

As to whether the form--three acts, two hours--will change, I still cling to the notion that drama found this form--with slight variations in the number of acts and the general length-- thousands of years before the invention of the feature film and it has proven resiliant for a reason. This seems to be about the time needed to introduce a set of people, a problem and enough interesting complications and resolutions to make the catharsis--the journey--feel real enough and earned.

"Movie Theaters will stop showing anything but spectacle sized movies."

Again, the "futurism" here is found in the belief that a certain kind of movie will always be popular--in this case the "tentpoles" so trumpeted in the last few years (Spiderman, Pirates, Shrek, etc.) Movie tastes are fluid, dependent on the cultural zeitgeist of the moment. Ocne upon a time it was for musicals and westerns. Super-sized "quadrant" movies will probably look, in twenty years, awfully reminiscent of the early twenty-first century. Meanwhile the communal viewing experience will have evolved in another direction, another genre etc. Just as television provided an additional form of viewership and one that didn't compete in a direct way with the communal viewing experience, so will all forms of new media support and enhance the age old custom of humans sitting with other humans to watch humans act stuff out.

"Youtube" (or a similar service) will replace normal television as we know it."

This seems to me perfectly sensible and more than likely. And why not? What inherent goodness is there in the "old Europe" (to quote the disgraced but still amusingly quotable Donald Rumsfeld) model of TV watching, as it was developed -- essentially -- in 1948 and never really changed. (Even with cable and on-demand TV watching is still, one way or another, dependent on the programs being available at the service provider's discretion). What youtube has done is created a gallery of work that is accessible at any time. This one strikes me as the keeper--the idea that, once we get used to it, we will never be able to turn back the clock on.

In a recent NY Times artical, film critic A.O. Scott coined a term to desribe this phenomena. He calls it "The Virtual Cinemateque." (At least i think he coined it. If he didn't then the hell with him anyway--I have no desire beyond accuracy to do A.O. Scott any favors). As a major fan and user of youtube I can only look forward with real pleasure to anything of interest to me--no matter how old, new, obscure, popular--being available with a click. What will such a world look like?Probably not all that different than our world looks now. Movie theaters, flat screens, i-pods. The screen is the same as its function, no matter what its size.

And the fear that the future will be unrecognizable, as opposed to merely a varieation on the present, is probably as perfect an example of "futurism" as can be found. After all, are we all living in suburban space colonies as was predicted forty years ago in the revolutionary animated drama "The Jetsons?"

Here's a bunch of phrases, concepts and predictions that I've heard so often in the past few years that they no longer make any sense.

"Digital Projection will replace 35mm projections."

Why hasn't it yet? Because lawyers (for the distribution companies) and union leaders (for the projectionists) continue to argue over who should pay for all those screens to be converted, of course. If it were 1927 out (and I dearly wish it were), we would be saying the same thing about sound versus silents. The only difference between now and eighty years ago is that back then, with considerably fewer methods of speedy communication, thinks that got discussed actually became fact after a reasonable amount of discussion. One fine day in the late twenties, the pipe organs got thrown out and speakers got installed. And the changeover was complete. History can't get made unless people make it happen.

"Digitial video will replace 35mm film."

Why hasn't it yet? Because it mostly looks like crap. Or, at its best, it is still simply not as good as film. I say this having shot two films digitally. One, 'Tis Autumn', the documentary that this site is devoted to, made perfect sense as a digital project. Shot reams of tape with no cost concerns. Looks as good as any doc needs to. The other, "The Thing About My Folks", a father and son road trip movie with Paul Reiser and Peter Falk, would have been a hell of a lot better looking if shot on 35mm as it should have been. Faddishness on the producers part (and ignorance on mine) was responsible for wrongly shooting this on DV. Anyway, in spite of how much better it continues to get, video is video and film is film. Different looks, different pros and cons. And why does one form need to replace another? Co-existance is so much more civilized.

"With Final Cut Pro and DV cameras getting better and cheaper, everyone will make their own movie and post it on the web/youtube."

But with so many professional movies being uploaded to youtube, why watch something you've never heard of? My favorite youtube watches are the really early Laurel and Hardy shorts that somebody in, like, Denmark is patiently providing for the five AM's of my life. Also the loads of early talkie musicals which are mercifully shorn of their 'book' scenes (the drama
parts--which are always tough to get through) and reduced to their essentials--the tunes.

"We'll all download movies and stop going to theaters."

I don't want to be flippant about this--but please. The theater is a habit that since its inception has been threatened with
extinction--and I'm talking about the so-called "legit" theater, stage. The fact is, though, that communal watching of drama will never disappear entirely. And while I like my own movies to be seen in theaters (and I prefer to see certain movies with others in attendance) I can't ignore the fact that the audience for the kind of movies that I make (i.e.--NOT TENTPOLES) has consistantly been found on cable. So maybe that's just where that's going. Besides: there are plenty of movies that I would be delighted to download. Indeed, my chances of seeing something like the new Costner movie ("Mr. Something") would improve markedly it were downloadable and I didn't dread so much going alone to a mostly empty theater to sit through something that sounds iffy but promising.. Anyway this is nothing new. It's what's known as the "I'll see it on HBO" syndrome--only downloading the movie could potentially move the window up.

"Kids will grow up thinking watching movies on I-pods is perfectly normal."

I grew up thinking watching movies on a black-and-white Zenith television with frequent interruptions for carpet commercials and Cal Worthington and his dog spot was normal. Did it harm me? Probably. But I survive.

"HD DVD will be the industry standard and will further boost the importance of the DVD market."

Face it, this is the eight-track tape of modern technology. Indeed, the term HD has become as overused as "organic"--and as shady as the likeliehood that the salmon you buy at Whole Foods was truly "wild caught".

What I find especially tiresome about all this isn't the arguing, the wondering, the debating. It's the lethargy, the slowness with which--in the era of the fastest communication abilities imaginiable--the actual change is occuring. So is it the lawyers or the technology that creates the drag?

Question: if World War 2 were to have occured with the technology and lawyers now availble to us available then, would it ever have gotten off the ground?

Who was Jackie Paris? And what has he to do with the future of independent film?

Start with the name, which sounds like a crooner invented by Jim Thompson or some other hard-boiled noir paperback artist of the past.

But It was his real name (sort of). Jackie Paris (born Carlo Jack Parisi) was a hell of a singer who took the jazz scene of the 1940's by storm. He was young, good-looking, a hepcat's hepcat and a musician's musician. He sang, played guitar and tap-danced. He was completely at home in the world of the "new sounds" (be-bop) and in crooning the ballads of the era. He was a protege of the Mills Brothers, was Peggy Lee's favorite male singer, won the Downbeat Poll as best Jazz singer in 1954 and was consistantly ranked in the top ten male vocal lists throughout the 1950's.

So. Why haven't you heard of him?

To be honest, it's more suprising when somebody HAS heard of Jackie than when they haven't. The story of Jackie Paris is one of strangled career moves, labels dropping him, nightclubs not hiring him, bad timing, bad management and plain old bad luck. For many years, all I knew about what happened to him was that his last commercial recording was released in 1962 and that he died in the mid-1970's. I also knew that--in my opinion--he possessed one of the worlds most mysterious, enigmatic and attractive voices. The few recordings of his that I possessed made me a die-hard fan. In time I discovered that I wasn't alone. Whenever I found another fan of Jackie Paris, it was like two long-lost soul mates meeting again. "Paris-ites" as I came to dub this group of obscurity-loving vocal fans.

Jackie's life and career was a story that fascinated me for years--but one that I never thought I would become personally involved in. Until March of 2004 when, to my astonishment, I learned that he was not only not dead, but was launching a comeback in a nightclub in New York--The Jazz Standard on East 27th Street. I went. I met him. I told him how much I loved his work.

He in turn thanked me and told me that he was terminally ill and that it meant a great deal to him to see people coming out to hear him.

We started photographing him the next day. It was my intent to document his life--in plain sight of his death--and try to come to grips with who this artist was and what it was that happened to him along the way.

Enough. The movie tells the story. It took three years from the day we met Jackie to finish our film and it's finally being released this fall by Outsider Pictures. (We premiered, for the record, in Sundance '06. Check out the Variety review on the films website--he adds shamelessly).

And now the answer to the "future of independent film" part of the question.

One releases a "small" movie theatrically (a practice that continues despite almost universally catastrophic returns) for a simple reason: to garner good reviews that can be slapped on the DVD box. The financial loss in the theatrical run is implicit, expected.

But does it need to be? Surely every independent film has some sort of target audience. And that audience is unlikely to be found by placing hideously expenisve half-inch adds on the back pages of the Calendar or Arts And Leisure sections.

So what I propose is to test the waters here. Can the internet be used to drum up interest in Jackie Paris? He passed away in the summer of '04 and the leaky ship called his career can be said to have sailed in the early 1960's. But I have a mission--and that's to finally find the audience for this brilliant, unhearelded and hipper than hip singer--a guy who Billy Vera called "Chet Baker Times Ten". A guy who I think was the real influence behind Mel Torme. A guy who could out-sing Bobby Darin.

It wouldn't hurt if, along the way, the movie that we made--with our own funds, our own way--actually attracted an audience as well. I am, laughingly, a careerist at heart.

And the truth is that, as an independent filmmaker who has stayed too long at the fair, I find myself genuninely excited (for the first time in years) by the crossroads we stand at now. Among the many unanswered questions about the future-- what technology will be standard, where will we be watching film, how we'll be making money from it--the most important
from my viewpoint has to do with PROFILE. Because we make films--even little tiny indie films--TO BE SEEN. And it's my guess that the more specific--hell, the more snooty and rarefied--a films subject, the more advantages to finding viral methods of drumming up interest and awareness about the film.

I'll be adding music (mostly Jackie Paris, of course) as we continue this excercise in throwing good money after bad. To close, a quotation from Hunter S. Thompson. You know the one...

"The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side. "

Somehow the end of "The Sopranos" as we know it seems to me a reasonable excuse for this web-logs first post, since
back at the turn of the century the fate of one of my movies became breifly entangled with what is now known simply as
"HBO'S Flagship Series."

Briefly: when casting my film "Two Family House", our casting directors (Walken/Jaffe) started bringing in a lot of
talented Itailian-American actors who they had just started seeing for a show they were working on for HBO.
Since "TFH" is also an Italian-American based story, this was a no-brainer of no significance. In and out of our offices walked
John Ventimiglia, Vincent Pastore, Michael Rispoli, Sharon Angela, Katherine Narducci, Elizabeth Bracco. Just about everyone
but Gandolfini. The word on the street was that the show was excellent but probably wouldn't last out its original commitment (thirteen episodes?)

Less than a year later I woke up and found myself and my film tied to a phenomenon. "Soprano's" became what is
irritatingly called an "instant classic." The crossing of my movies cast and theirs briefly
gave our movie some real street cred and after we won the Audience Award at Sundance and were bought by
a distributor, it was 'The Sopranos' connection that everyone was most eager to exploit.

Happily, the actors who appeared in my movie (Rispoli, Narducci, Pastore, Matt Servitto etc.) had no issues
prevailing on David Chase and James Gandolfini for a little support. They generously showed up at screenings.
Gandolfini gave me a very Italian kiss in front of People Magazine. (I wonder who has the negative of this pic.)

Did it matter? Well, yes and no. It certainly did to me, but like most independent films made in this day and age, TFH
had to wait until its cable and DVD bow to make any real impression. (This despite maddeningly good reviews. One
has to really be "ready" for show-biz to stomach these disconnects.)

A final note before getting to the business at hand (which, in the case of this web-log, is another Italian-American,
the one and only and maddeningly obscure Jackie Paris and my new movie about him). The final scene in what I
truly hope is the final episode of 'The Sopranos' is, for my money, the most delightfully perverse and ultimately
sublime wind up that could have been imagined, the cinematic equivalent of the old aphorism: "when you have to
cut, it's best to cut quick."

Having shamelessly reused an old connection to a headliner to establish a little footing, I'll move on to the stated
purpose of this weblog in upcoming posts: my passion for music and the music of Jackie Paris; the movie that I made about him that is coming out this fall; and a general sort of look at the digital universe as it appears before my not terribly
sophisticated eyes and how I think it will all shake out and ultimately benefit the so-called "little" films.

Meanwhile...