A classic film as seen on Apple’s handheld iPod Touch: “It Happened One Night,” starring Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert (1934). Oh, yeah, and popcorn!
COMES NOW the Wall Street Journal’s entertainment writer, Joe Morgenstern, to publicly worry that movies’ unique magic has been dealt a mortal blow by technology like Apple’s iPod Touch that allows people to watch films on a palm-sized screen instead of a theater screen, as God Himself must’ve intended.
In a column titled, “‘Pod People,” Morgenstern observed the certain death of the theater-going experience as we know it:
The YouTube generation has already begun to lose the theater-going habit… and has embraced the notion of video on iPods and cellphones, as well as on computers. (Indeed, the iPhone has a YouTube icon on its home screen.) Now feature films are available too, thanks to Apple’s new online push.
Horrors! Except it’s not true.
Like many a Luddite, Morgenstern is quick to blame new technology (YouTube, in this case) for some ill that is more likely a result of fossilized thinking and good ol’ fashioned greed.
In The Making of American Audiences, author Richard Butsch explains how American audiences have asserted control over their own entertainment behavior since Colonial times.
The fact is, the decline of movie-going started long before YouTube, even long before the Internet was a geeks-only domain. The book, The Making of American Audiences, published in 2000 (Cambridge University Press), tracks a steady decline in movie theater attendance from its peak of 4 billion paid admissions a year in 1946. By 1963, paid admissions had declined to just over 1 billion. Conventional wisdom blamed the introduction of television, though the rise of suburbanization may have contributed as well. Whatever the specific causes, however, it’s clear that Americans began a long retrenchment from the public sphere right after World War II. Author Richard Butsch explains:
The surveys, public discourse, and [movie] industry statistics establish an association of declining movie attendance with rising television use. People who had televisions did go to movies less. The only question is whether it was because of television. Both purchasing television and reducing movie-going may have simply been two among many factors in a larger social and cultural shift reflected in leisure choices toward home and family and away from community and public.
So rather than examine the underlying question of why people are consuming so much more of their entertainment on mobile devices, Morgenstern instead waxes whiny over how those devices destroy the medium he loves.
First, he gets confirmation that these darn kids today don’t “get it”:
To be sure I wasn’t fretting about a trend that didn’t exist, I asked the 20-something clerk who sold [the iPod Touch] to me if people were actually watching full-length movies, as well as TV shows and videos, on such diminutive gizmos.
“Oh, sure,” he said. “I do. It’s much better than going to a theater. … The people around you in theaters drive you crazy these days. They’re all texting and making phone calls, or checking their email on their BlackBerries. When you watch a movie on an iPhone with good headphones it’s an immersive experience.”
So that’s the extent of Morgenstern’s “confirmation.” One twentysomething’s opinion. Actual research also blames things like soaring ticket prices, the high cost of refreshments and, oh, guess what? Bad movies made by greedy movie studios that don’t provide a lot of diversity in their offerings. So it’s not just The People’s fault, Joe. We can blame The Man, too.
And who does provide movies that appeal to more than just the teenage boys who drive most of the movie theater business? Companies like NetFlix and the movie rental stores that actually respond to the wishes of a much wider variety of consumers, not just to bottom-line, quarterly earnings-driven wishes of studio executives. NetFlix and other video distributors have actually gotten into the movie financing business because studios, still more worried about opening weekend grosses at the theaters, aren’t producing enough diverse content to fill the voracious needs of an audience far more extensive than than teenage boys.
You see, Joe, people still want to see movies. They still love spending money to see films made by people who love making movies. It’s a shame that those people aren’t in charge of Hollywood’s studios. But the appetite is still there; it’s just not going to be satisfied in the venue of Hollywood’s preference.
I can’t deny that technology plays a role in all of this. Though the extent of its influence may not be clear, television has had an impact. So have other consumer electronics — the videocassette recorder, smaller TVs, TiVo, video-capable computers, DVDs, and high-definition TVs.
Speaking of HDTV, Morganstern may decry the advent of portable video, but he fails to see it in the broader context of the advent of affordable HDTVs. TVs in homes are getting bigger, and the resolution of the movies they watch there — again, voraciously — now rivals that of the films offered on theaters’ big screens. The seats are also more comfortable and the popcorn’s a helluva lot cheaper. And don’t underestimate the value of the pause button when your bladder asserts its needs.
People do care about seeing movies on big screens, Mr. Morgenstern. Just not the ones you frequent. And I make that assertion as a filmmaker who loves seeing great movies on the Big Screen just like you do. But what’s gotten me so riled up by your WSJ column is that you’re missing the point by blaming the victim.
The movie industry, the television networks, commercial radio — every industry that tries to control audiences’ behavior can only do so until technology offers us the ability to get our entertainment on our terms, not theirs. And the companies that get that are the ones that become winners.
Back in the heyday of the VCR, the concept of video rentals won out over movie studio paranoia not merely because consumer electronics companies brought their lobbyists to bear against the studios’ legislative schemes. Butsch explains:
It was the day-to-day decisions of customers at thousands of mom-and-pop stores that had the greatest effect. Audiences acted in their own interest, not collectively but as individual consumers. Nevertheless, they had their way despite the wishes of the major movie studios.
Butsch’s book asserts that it has ever been thus. At every major turn that gave consumers more choice over their own entertainment, corporations have tried to make an end run around them. The advent of the VCR, with its revenue-endangering recording capability, was countered with early videodisc players, which offered much higher sound and picture quality, but without the ability to record, and therefore, share (illegally, the studios have always claimed) content with non-paying customers.
Guess what, though. If higher sound and picture quality were really determining features, Betamax would’ve beat out VHS in the videotape format wars. VHS won because you could get more content onto one tape than Betamax would allow. Sound familiar?
Economic success in the movie industry is going to come to those who go to where their audience is rather than to those who continue to try to force viewers to go where the studios want. Same is true with television, now threatened with the same kind of audience declines that it is thought to have imposed on the movie industry in the 1950s and 1960s. TV viewership continues to dwindle as consumers have gained more and more control over where and when they watch their video entertainment.
Even Botsch could see this when he wrote his book nearly a decade ago, when the Internet was just a little series of tubes. Back then, he speculated:
In the late 1990s, there are some suggestions that the trend may be changing and that people may be reducing their television use for the first time. Some have claimed that younger viewers seem to be abandoning television altogether, perhaps for the Internet. But it is too early to tell where this will lead.
Hear that, Mr. Morgenstern? Long before YouTube.
Morgenstern does wind up his Luddite rant with one important, unexamined observation that goes to my point:
What’s more, the downsizing of images will work inexorable changes in content. … Ponder this: Some Hollywood writers, recently returned to work with a contract that provides for new media, are now busily writing for cellphones.
The unstated assumption? That this is a Bad Thing. Well, it doesn’t have to be. Those writers are responding to the reality that you can make money by responding to your audience rather than trying to control them.
I don’t want to see the end of making movies fit for the big screen anymore than Morgenstern does but waxing nostalgic and insulting technology that the audience wants isn’t the path that saves filmmaking.
Sidebar
Note: I believe links to online Wall Street Journal articles disappear after a couple weeks, so the original article is available via this PDF (360K).
