few days ago I attended a Writers Guild of American screening of the new Woody Allen film, Match Point, which was followed by a question-and-answer session with Mr. Allen himself.
Allen is one of my favorite filmmakers—I even like his un-funny movies—and should be yours, if only for Sleeper, his 1973 sci-fi masterpiece, the only deliberately funny sci-fi film I can recall.
It's the story of Miles Monroe, the nebbishy owner of a health food store who is mistakenly frozen, then defrosted 100 years in the future, when he is told by a cigarette-smoking doctor that science has now proven that steaks, potatoes and fried foods are really good for you. There's more genuine sci-fi in that moment than in whole seasons of some series that shall, for this moment, go unnamed.
These Heinleinian moments aside, Allen is famous for championing what are now classical media—Gershwin music, the films of Kurosawa and Bergman, the stories of S.J. Perelman. So it was no surprise that, when asked if he would ever authorize the release of outtakes or alternate versions of his movies, or do commentary for them for DVD, Allen simply said, "No. The film exists as a film." He didn't want to alter the experience of sitting in the dark with an audience, or laughing at home in your living room.
But it got me thinking about the experience of sci-fi films.
It's the pictures that got small
This is a particularly timely question in Hollywood. Studios, writers, directors and intelligent filmgoers are looking at the relatively flat performance of the summer blockbusters—many of them derived from sci-fi or fantasy premises—and asking, "What happened?"
Of course, the quality of some of the releases may have something to do with the lack of audience response. But I'm finding—and hearing—that the experience of going to a theater is less attractive. The prices are high; every theater now seems to be hidden inside a mall, where parking and crowds are an annoyance; the moviegoer is bombarded not just with previews that are guilty of over-sharing, but with ads; the completely overrated Dolby THX sound systems and digital projection seem geared to teenagers who are still in the process of destroying their hearing (as opposed to those of us who damaged it as disc jockeys 30 years ago).
Then there's television, which used to be a completely different medium, where entertainment was absorbed in a room with family (not an audience of 200 strangers), interrupted by the ringing telephone, smart remarks and other background noise (not the appreciative silence of an ideal movie crowd) on a small, squarish screen (not the huge rectangular vista available in better movie palaces).
Bottom line—movies were larger than the viewer. The viewer was larger than television. No one talked back to or over movies; everyone conversed with television.
Not any more. Over the last generation, movies have shrunk, television has gotten bigger, and sci-fi gets most of the blame.
TV aims to be DVD-friendly
It started with Kubrick's 2001, the first feature film that actually demanded repeat viewings. I was going to movies when it was first released, and everyone I knew had to go see it again—if not for the sheer experience, then to try to figure it out.
A decade later, Star Wars put a more accessible spin on the repeat-viewing phenomenon. You didn't go back to the theater to see Luke and Han and Chewie because you didn't get the story—you just went back for the experience.
These big tentpole movies ... the comic-book and sci-fi franchises ... have to be seen more than once, or the studios don't make money.
One way to trigger repeat viewings is to issue the movies on DVD with outtakes, new endings, commentary and all sorts of "bonus" features.
Gone are the days when you saw a movie once—had the experience—then moved on.
Television has always relied on repeat viewings. For 50 years, networks supported themselves by airing reruns of episodes. With the rise of dozens of competing channels, that economic model ceased to function. Networks are now caught between competing demands, airing original episodes while at the same time satisfying the viewers who don't have, or can't operate, TiVo. Thus the new aftermarket in DVDs of entire seasons.
But series are now being designed to be DVD-friendly from the beginning.
Look at Lost, the tip of the spear on the penetration of enhanced experience TV. The clever writers and producers bury all sorts of easter eggs into broadcast episodes: You have to TiVo them—or buy the DVD—to have the complete experience!
Isaac Asimov had it right
The delivery system itself is mutating, typified by the physical size of a television screen—stand in front of it, stretch out your arms, and you still can't cover it. (The shape is now closer to a feature film screen, too.)
Your television can double as your computer screen.
You can have bits of episodes zapped to your iPod.
And just this week I heard an ad for a new Sony "his and hers" television, one that allows Viewer A and Viewer B, at different ends of the couch, to see different programs. (Audio is delivered via headphones so far, but no doubt there will soon be narrowcast sound systems. ...)
What's next? Direct neural inputs like those I first read about in a Larry Niven story ("Death by Ecstasy") back in 1968.
The experience changes. ...
Or does it?
While writing the script for Sleeper, Woody Allen took Isaac Asimov to lunch. Asimov later downplayed any possible influence on the subsequent movie (though Allen acknowledged The Good Doctor as one of Sonja's long list of lovers in his next film, Love and Death.), but I can't help thinking that he and Allen weren't far apart in their visions of the future:
In an essay in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Asimov speculated on the ultimate entertainment device—something that would be totally interactive, portable, cheap, delivering information at the user's rate.
It was a book, of course.
Michael Cassutt has written lots of television, much of it sci-fi (Twilight Zone, Max Headroom, The Dead Zone) as well as novels, short stories and non-fiction. He is still taller than his television, though not by much and not for long.
