Recently in Exhibition Category

(Photo by Russell Yip, SF Chronicle)

Since I learned Monday that my friend Bingham Ray had died of a stroke at Sundance, I've been tweeting random memories of him. He was 57, but we first met in 1984 when he was 30 and I was 27. In the years I knew him, he worked at New Yorker Films, Alive, Samuel Goldwyn, Avenue Pictures, October Films (which he co-founded with Jeff Lipsky), United Artists, Sidney Kimmel Entertainment... I can't keep track of them all, but I hadn't spoken to him since he moved west in November to head up the San Francisco Film Society. What I can't fathom right now is that I won't be running into him, as I could be sure I would, at a film festival or his office if I happened to be in town, or calling or e-mailing him on a whim... What I treasure most are the things I've been spontaneously remembering and tweeting about, like:

* Bingham Ray was a New Yorker. When he first moved to LA he took the bus [on Santa Monica] to [work at] Goldwyn -- the only passenger who wasn't a Beverly Hills maid.

(He learned to drive and got his license.)

* Great memory: Spontaneous BBQ lunch w/ Bingham Ray, Jeff Dowd, RTJ, K. Murphy, Julia Sweeney & me at the (tiny) 2000 SxSW Film Fest.

(This was one of those coincidences that wound up becoming a treasured afternoon. I remember being so happy to have these favorite people from different yet overlapping parts of my life for so long -- I'd known "The Dude," Richard, Kathleen and Julia since the 1970s -- all together at one table! You just never know which moments are going to stay with you indelibly.)

Reed Hastings sent me an e-mail Sunday night -- did you get one too? -- that began:

Subject: An Explanation and some reflections

Dear Jim,

I messed up. I owe you an explanation.

It is clear from the feedback over the past two months that many members felt we lacked respect and humility in the way we announced the separation of DVD and streaming and the price changes. That was certainly not our intent, and I offer my sincere apology. Let me explain what we are doing....

Oh, Reed. You don't owe me an explanation -- or any reflections -- and you know it. You're just doing exactly what you said you were doing when you made that announcement in July that you now say was lacking in "respect and humility." Only now you're doing it in a way that reeks of condescension and disingenuousness. Not an improvement.

A couple months back, I noted here that Netflix had already announced on its tech blog that it was going to discontinue mobile app support for managing DVD/Blu-ray queues. When you announced, at the same time as your price hikes, that the DVD/Blu-ray-by-mail business would be reconstituted as a separate division, it didn't take the sharpest taco on the beach to figure out what your next step would be, and now you've announced it. Netflix wants out of that business that relies on the nearly bankrupt Postal Service. OK, we get it.

You may have seen this Art Warning from the Avon Theatre in Stamford, CT. It's been flying around on Twitter and Facebook the past few days (I RTed it from Christopher Misch at Next Projection) and people have had all sorts of reactions, from "How sad that this is necessary," to "How hilarious that this is necessary," to "Is this necessary?"

Austin Dale of indieWIRE interviewed the Avon's programmer, Adam Birnbaum, who said:

There was a small but vocal minority of patrons who walked out of the film, but there were a few individuals who were fairly nasty and belligerent towards the management staff, demanding their money back. There have been a significant number of people who were fascinated by the film and there were plenty of individuals who have written to us to tell us that they thought the film was a masterpiece.

I grew up in a time (the 1960s and 1970s) when commercial, technological and artistic conventions accustomed us to listening to music on LPs and watching movies in theaters. For the most part, we listened to one side of an album at a time (eventually, CDs -- although more easily programmable -- would play 70+ minutes of uninterrupted music, which changed song-sequencing priorities). And we saw movies from start to finish. I'm too young to remember the original ad campaign for Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho" in 1960, but later on (when I got my hands on some original lobby cards -- those were the 11"x14" images displayed with the posters at the entrances or in the lobbies of theaters) I noticed it was built around the apparently novel pitch that audiences had to see the movie from the start.

Now, if, like me, you were in college (or university, as they say back East) when Alvy Singer (Woody Allen) in "Annie Hall" announced that he had to see a picture "exactly from the start to the finish," and you thought that made perfect sense, it seemed bizarre to imagine a time when people had to be encouraged to show up before the feature started: "No one... BUT NO ONE... will be admitted to the theatre after the start of each performance..." (It turns out Paramount had done something similar with Hitchcock's "Vertigo" just two years earlier: "It's a Hitchcock thriller... You should see it from the beginning!") As the proprietor of the Opening Shot Project, which emphasizes the importance of the first shot in setting up and framing certain films, the idea that somebody would watch a movie without having seen the beginning is incomprehensible to me. Why cheat yourself of the joys of discovery and development? Or just knowing what's going on in the story?

From an interview with JLG at Cinemasparagus, regarding the director's preferred distribution and exhibition method for his latest (and allegedly last) feature, "Film socialisme," which premiered a few days ago at Cannes and which can be seen in its entirety, backwards and compressed into 67 seconds, above:

I really would have liked to have a boy and a girl be involved, a couple who had the urge to show things, who were kind of involved with the cinema, the sort of young people you might meet at small festivals. They'd be given a copy of the film on DVD, then be asked to train as skydivers. After that, places would be randomly chosen on a map of France, and they'd parachute down into those locations. They'd have to show the film wherever they landed. In a café, at a hotel... they'd manage. People would pay 3 or 4 euros to get in -- no more than that. They might film this adventure, and sell it later on. Thanks to them, you get a sense of what it means to distribute a film. Afterwards, only you can make the decision, to find out whether or not it's able to be projected in regular theaters. But not before having investigated everything for a year or two. Because beforehand, you're just like me: you don't know what the film is, you don't know what might be interesting about it. You've gone a little outside the whole media space.

(translation: Craig Keller; tip: girish)

In the summer of 1981, Robert Redford gathered novice and veteran filmmakers together for the first of what has become known as the Sundance Institute's Directors and Screenwriters Labs. Eleven projects were chosen for the workshop (there are 13 for the 2010 program) -- which, over the last 29 years, has included such films as Paul Thomas Anderson's "Hard Eight," Quentin Tarantino's "Reservoir Dogs," Tamra Jenkins' "Slums of Beverly Hills," Darren Aranofsky's "Requiem for a Dream," Hany Abu-Assad's "Paradise Now," John Cameron Mitchell's "Hedwig and the Angry Inch" and Kimberly Pierce's "Boys Don't Cry."

That's the old news.

It's a movie. No, it's a ride. No, it's a movie and a ride! Variety reports that Koreans have been lining up for 4D "ride films," beginning with last year's "Journey to the Center of the Earth." The 4D, "five-sense" version of "Avatar" now features

more than 30 effects during the 3D film's 162 minute run, including moving seats, smells of explosives, sprinkling water, laser lights and wind. Despite the much higher $15.80 ticket price (an average ticket costs $6.90), screenings are regularly sold out.

"We (started to) prepared the 'Avatar' 4D ride last summer," says Tom Oh, prexy of 20th Century Fox Korea. [...]

"There is no 4D theater like ours around the world. CGV's 4D plex is the first in the world that fully offers five-sense experiences with a movie title," says Kim Daehee, publicity manager of CJ-CGV.

Coming: 4D versions of Chris Columbus's "Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief" and others.

Are we circling back around to flight-simulator theme park attractions built around movie "narratives," like Disney's 1987 Star Tours "Star Wars" ride? (Or, for that matter, like 1955's Peter Pan's Flight at Disneyland?) At what point does the experience cease to become a movie experience (as we've known it since the beginning of the 20th Century) and become a virtual reality simulation? The "ride movie" has nearly become a (sub-)genre of its own since "Raiders of the Lost Ark" perfected the form -- and movies are often based on video games or even amusement park rides ("Rollercoaster," "Pirates of the Caribbean"), so is this just another gimmick -- like William Castle's Percepto process for 1959's "The Tingler," or Universal's Sensurround for 1974's "Earthquake" (and other "immersive" disaster movies), or John Waters' Odorama for 1981's "Polyester"? Have we been here before (just another element in a cross-promotable "transmedia storytelling platform"), or is this something "new"? And, in any case, does it (or 3-D) satisfy the same appetites that have traditionally attracted people to movies? Now that they're retro-fitting existing movies for additional dimensionality, what would a 4-D Eric Rohmer movie be like? How about a 4-D "My Dinner with Andre" -- with the smell of real dinner? Would a 4-D Rob Zombie movie allow the audience to actually feel the pain of the victims onsceen?

Meanwhile, Wim Wenders is making 3-D movies in Italy...

(tip: Steven Santos)

The magnificent Alamo Drafthouse Cinema in Austin, TX, has the right approach. Exhibitors: take it from here. Hire bouncers. Big ones. (Photos by Mark G. Power, who is working on a movie called "Sacred Cinema," about great places to watch movies all over the world. It sounds fantastic.)