Nurturing digital cinema

IHT: "When Obi-Wan Kenobi and Darth Vader battled last week in dark theaters around the world, the force was not with digital cinema.

George Lucas, the director, filmed the latest "Star Wars" adventure, "Revenge of the Sith," expecting that the science-fiction epic would open in thousands of theaters equipped with digital projectors. As it turns out, there are fewer than 350 such screens, about 100 of them in the United States.

But even so, this could be the rollout year for digital cinema. Some European countries are pressing forward with almost intergalactic ardor, subsidizing digital projector giveaway programs with the aim of nurturing home-grown movies that can flourish alongside Hollywood blockbusters.

Theater owners who do not benefit from the same public bounty are moving more cautiously, waiting to see who will pay for digital technology that carries a price of more than €100,000, or $125,500, for a top-line projector.

This week, the Portuguese government is starting a test at four theaters that will receive free digital projectors in return for devoting some space to Portuguese titles in a country where box-office admissions have been slowing. In Ireland, the digital technology firm Avica Europe is moving to install 500 digital projectors by the end of the year to create a national network capable of downloading films by satellite.

Britain is showering almost £13 million, or $24 million, in lottery revenue on 250 theaters that over the next 18 months will receive digital projectors in return for pledges to show some British movies.

"There are fantastic movies made in Britain every year," said Ian Thomson, a spokesman for the United Kingdom Film Council, which is presiding over the program in a partnership with the commercial organization Arts Alliance Digital Cinema. "What we want to do is give the public wider access."

All of these countries, and others like Norway and the Netherlands, expect that digital movie distribution will cut costs of delivery by as much as one-third and offer greater flexibility to change and offer nontraditional features like documentaries and short films. Currently, 35-millimeter films are delivered in heavy metal containers. Each copy costs €1,000 to €2,500 and deteriorates with use, leaving visible scratches on the celluloid.

Initially, the digital films will be delivered on reusable hard drives, about the size of a thick checkbook, that are clamped to the projectors. As each system develops nationally, delivery will take place over cable or satellite, as it will in Portugal from a hub in Lisbon.

Theoretically, theaters would be able to shift their programming with the ease of changing radio stations since they are not limited by having a physical reel in stock. Digital cinema technology has spawned new service providers like XDC, a Belgian company backed by €9 million in private equity, which essentially guide theater owners from installation of the projectors through daily use.

In the last days of the Cannes film festival, XDC showed a digitally restored copy of "East of Eden" with James Dean that was so vivid that individual petals of daisies and mustard flowers were visible.

Bernard Collard, the company's general manager, is effusive about opportunities for additional revenue, from showing sporting events or several versions of the same movie.


"In the U.S., you have one version," he said, "but here we can have three or four versions, subtitled, dubbed, double subtitled."

But those benefits are not necessarily convincing for theater owners that have already invested heavily in 35-millimeter equipment that costs less than one-third as much as digital projectors.

Doubts persist even as a movie industry insider as powerful as George Lucas presses for a digital transformation.

In 2002, Lucas offered his first digital "Star Wars" movie, "Episode II - Attack of the Clones," and predicted that by the next installment, most theaters would be using digital projectors.

But by the time of the gala screening of "Revenge of the Sith" in Cannes, the movie's producer, Rick McCallum, was fuming about the resistance of theater owners. He appeared at a small gathering of digital cinema companies like XDC, Barco and Texas Instruments and bluntly attacked Jean Labé, head of the National Federation of French Cinemas, a trade group.

"Once Jean Labé loses his job, hopefully there will more digital theaters in France," McCallum said in an account reported in the Hollywood Reporter, a trade journal.

Antoine Virenque, secretary general of the International Federation of Film Distributors in Paris, defended Labé, saying the caution of theater owners was well-founded, given their investment in older technology.

"Number One, who is going to pay for that?" he asked. If the French government subsidized digital projectors for the 5,500 screens in France, Virenque calculated, the costs would absorb all of the nation's resources used to promote local film production for the next five years.

"I think perhaps that smaller countries will go quicker because it's easier to equip them," he said, adding that the French are avidly watching the British experiment.

Industry figures like Lucas and James Cameron, director of "Titanic," are not content to wait, and have been promoting the value and flexibility of digital cinema at movie industry conferences.

So has Morgan Freeman, the Oscar-winning actor and independent film producer, who last week played host during the Cannes festival in a specially equipped home entertainment room in the luxury Hotel Carlton with Intel, the technology giant. Their aim was to demonstrate that digital movies that can be downloaded at home are a viable and secure channel for revenue along with theater releases and DVDs.

Freeman said the movie industry was divided by its hierarchy.

"There's the studio society and the independent society," he said. "The studio can't rush into it because they're not controlled by their own decisions. They're controlled by their boards.

"The independent group is excited about this because it means that at some point they will be able to make movies and distribute them without having to go through studio machinery."

The ultimate result, Freeman predicted, was that digital cinema would make room for overlooked films because eventually viewers would be able to select and download titles from new digital channels offering a vast collection of obscure and popular movies.

"There are hundreds and hundreds of films made that we never get to see," Freeman said. "Think of how many film festivals there are around the globe, and many of these never see the light of day. Imagine if there was another way."

Elísio Oliveira, president of the Institute of Cinema and Multimedia in Portugal, said that his government's goal was to use digital technology to spark a revival of an old-fashioned movie concept.

"They're closing theaters in small towns. It's very expensive for them to get copies of films," he said. The Portuguese subsidies, which will finance a digital network of 20 cinemas, may be a chance, he said, to revive the small-town picture show."