The Coming Golden Age of Stereoscopic 3D Movies: A Revolution, or "Oh Grandpa, I don't want to see those dumb "flat" movies!"

For the past two weeks I've been kicking myself for never having published an essay about my plans for using IMAX as a vehicle for action feature-films over 20 years ago.

I had seen North of Superior, a 1971 IMAX film, in the original curved-screen theater on Ontario Place in Toronto. In that amazing moment when the tiny first image in the film expanded to the full six or seven story height of the screen, and it felt like the building was about to tip over, my vision of the future of the cinema was born.

I wanted to make a James Bond film in IMAX. All of the exposition scenes would have been in horizontal strips across the center of the big, square frame or, perhaps, in smaller, multi-screen sequences ala Charly or the Johnson's Wax film, To Be Alive, of the 1964 World's Fair. But when Bond took to the air, or launched a car chase, the huge screen would be filled with swooping action shots, all sixty or eighty vertigo inducing feet high.

Of course, it occurs to me now, I didn't tell anyone because I didn't want them to steal this incredible idea, so -- until this summer -- you've never really seen a motion picture before in quite this way.

But, somehow, Chris Nolan used some diabolic mind-reading device (this is the science fiction age, isn't it?) to suck this idea out of my brain when I was sleeping or drinking coffee in Zabars or at some other moment when my guard was down, and incorporated it into The Dark Knight: The Imax Experience (as the execs at IMAX like to call it). The entire opening bank-robbery sequence, the climax, and interspersed aerial shots of Hong Kong and other cities were shot in full-sized IMAX, but all those endless exposition scenes were left in normal widescreen format in the center of the frame.

Well, it is small comfort now to say that I was right and it works just great, exactly as I imagined it. But in the long-past interests of secrecy, I never published the notion, and my film producing career never deposited me in the catbird seat long enough to realize the dream, so it's victory served up cold. The Batman team did a great job, but, of course, I would have done it better -- and sooner -- if only someone had listened to me and handed me the money.

There were, come to think of it, real discussions with George Lucas and Gary Kurtz about doing The Empire Strikes Back in IMAX during 1977 Not only did I try to twist their arms to do it, but, Gary told me years later, IMAX had secretly approached them and begged them to do it. What stopped it from happening were the limitations of photomechanical special effects: they would have looked terrible blown up on a screen that big. There were so many photographic generations, that the grain levels would would have looked like dancing basketballs enlarged on the giant screen.

Well, enough sour grapes and regrets.

Here's my new prediction.

Having tried for nearly 8 years now to put together my two new top-secret IMAX films, the steepness of the slope toward that goal is painfully apparent. So, I won't reveal the secret films, but I will tell you what I see in my Movie Crystal Ball.

It's summed up in the sobriquet: "Oh Grandpa! I don't want to see those dumb flat movies!"

When I started putting together an IMAX-3D feature film nearly a decade ago, I envisioned the arrival of a new cinema, a stereoscopic, dimensional one.

The invention of holograms seemed to promise 3D movies with no glasses that could float in the air in front of an astonished audience, but despite Joseph Losey's announcements to the contrary in the mid-1970s, no technology to produce that has materialized beyond some tiny, optical-laboratory experiments that never panned out.

Let's be clear for a moment. The term "3D" has been co-opted by graphic artists. The term has come to be used to refer to graphics that have a "round," rendered look. This is the "look" of WALL-E or The Incredibles or any of dozens of PIXAR animated films or the CG (computer graphic) rendered special effects in live-action films produced by Industrial Light and Magic.

But it was originally coined to designate movies or images that had true, stereoscopic, in-depth, pop-out-of-the-screen images viewed, usually, with either Polaroid or anaglyph (red/green) glasses. I've been calling this sort of three-dimensional movie S-3D or 3D-S to differentiate it from the diluted 3D term in common use for video-games. It's just possible, however, that over a period of several years -- if stereoscopic 3D becomes pervasive -- that kids will simply substitute 3D for the "new" stereoscopic version without missing a beat. But I'm guessing that a newer term will take root.

There have been several previous historic eras of stereoscopic photography. One lasted from the late 19th Century into the early 20th Century and was composed of "stereopticon slides" seen in a special hand-held viewer. There were some experimental 3D movies as early as 1894, but they were few an far between. In the 1930's there was minor upsurge in anaglyph 3D short-subjects shown as novelties using red/green glasses. In the 1950's, however, there was a serious "second-wave" of 3D pioneered by Arch Oboloer's Bwana Devil, a twin-projector, polaroid glasses feature-film thriller that sold out theaters and kicked off a two year frenzy of 3D movies that fizzled out just as Alfred Hitchcock's brilliant Dial M for Murder hit the screens. Let's call thsi the "First Golden Age of 3D Movies."

The "Second Golden Age" dribbles into existance from Arch Oboler's The Bubble (1966), Andy Warhol's Frankenstein (1973) and really takes root through the late 70-s and early 80s with a seemingly endless series of Grade-Z horror and western films all of which used what is call "over and under" single-projector 3D projection. This wave ended rather more abruptly than it started.

Around the same time and in parallel, the original IMAX corporation developed a15x70mm two-camera 3D process which was and still is the most stunning presentation of moving stereoscopic images that we have today. However, these films were almost exclusively travelogues and science-related films, not dramas or deliberate forms of escapist entertainment.

The late 1990s saw the development of a new variation on 3D projection that utilizes a digital projector and an LCD screen to project alternating left eye / right eye images that are viewed through special circularly polarized glasses (that make it possible to tilt your head without losing the 3D effect). Walt Disney Pictures has embraced this technology and has released several films (Chicken Little, Hannah Montana, Meet The Robinsons, and others) using a version similar to the Real-D system.

Not to be left out, Dolby has developed a reliable, non-polaroid method that utilizes incremental differences in the frequency of color light which is much brighter and clearer than the Polaroid methods.

So here is my prediction and, hopefully, you've read it here first.

We are on the eve of the Third Golden Age of Stereoscopic Movies. This one, I believe, will be nearly permanent, and I've even gone so far as to predict that 30% of all new movies in the next few years will be produced in stereoscopic 3D. And eventually, ALL movies (and television) will be in 3D as well.

The crucial factor is the roll out of the infra-structure. There must be enough theaters capable of showing stereoscopic 3D for the studios to make money from it. The final obstacles to digital projection in commercial theaters are crumbling and it's likely that the majority of non-museum movie theaters will be converted to digital by 2015.

What's required here is the "3D Blockbuster." This must be the equivalent of The Jazz Singer in 1927-28. It was the first successful sound film (not the first sound film). It was the one that brought audiences to the theater and established synchronized sound as THE way to show movies. (Grandpa, I don't want to see those "silent" movies.) By the early 1950s color film had established itself, and black and white had largely vanished as a motion picture (or television form) by the 1980s. (Oh Grandpa! I hate those black and white movies!). In the 1970s, the desire to see Star Wars with stereophonic sound forced theaters to install Dolby Stereo systems by the thousands and established Dolby as the sine-qua-non of motion picture sound.

The result must be a critical mass of theaters capable of showing digital, stereoscopic 3D with stereophonic sound. How many theaters is this? There are an estimated 40,000 movie theaters in the United States. Perhaps there are triple that number in the whole world. I can only guess that it must be 1500 or more. That bears some resemblance to the early installed base of Dolby Sound capable theaters in the 1970s.

So where are we in 2008? Well, almost every multi-plex movie theater has at least one digital projector, and hundreds of them have the LCD panel necessary to show 3D, and more of those theaters are going online everyday. Various conversion projects are announced that promise thousands of 3D equipped theaters by Spring of 2009.

Now we need the "Blockbuster." There are two main candidates. Avatar and Star Wars.

Star Wars? Yes. As I type away here, Real-D is slaving mightily converting all six Star Wars movies to stereoscopic 3D. There is a computerized process that automates this, and the results (visible in the converted 3D version of The Nightmare Before Christmas released two years go) are stunning. Knowing the Lucasfilm perfectionism, this will the the ultimate in 3D conversions. Make no mistake, this is high-quality: Much better than mere cutting edge "colorization" of black and white movies.

When the first of the 3D Star Wars hit screens in, purportedly, Spring of 2009, every theater in the world will want to participate in this license to print money. There is no doubt that the promise of this goldrush will push reluctant venues to convert to digital so that they don't miss out. There was talk of having the 3D Star Wars released in 2008, but, clearly, this has been moved back because not enough venues were on board.

And then there is Avatar. James Cameron of Terminator and Titanic fame has, apparently, like me, dreamt of doing a 3D movie for much of his life, and Avatar is it. At 300 million plus dollars, it will be not only the most expensive 3D movie ever made, but also the most expensive movie of any kind.

According to the IMDB, Avatar is "the story of a wounded ex-marine, thrust unwillingly into an effort to settle and exploit an exotic planet rich in bio-diversity, who eventually crosses over to lead the indigenous race in a battle for survival" Hmmm.... could be kewl. Given how expensive it is, it had better be very kewl. We'll find out in December of 2009, all things being equal.

It goes without saying that eventually Steven Spielberg will want to make a 3D movie. The animated TinTin (now in production) is touted as being that, but Steve will want to do a live-action film, his own Creature from the Black Lagoon or It Came From Outer Space.

Everyone in Hollywood, eventually, from Peter Jackson to George Lucas will want to get in on the action. And that, I'm suggesting, will form the basis of the "Third Golden Age of 3D.

Only this time, I think it will stay with us.

There are already patents filed for 3D television sets. I did my own developmental work on a lenticular system, but others have already built prototypes of similar systems that are operating on the streets of Germany right this minute. I've seen them demonstrated, and they are, though crude, very impressive. Spielberg himself has invested in a 3D-TV system of unknown design.

There's the sequence, then:
- Critical mass of 3D capable theaters
- The 3D Blockbuster
- Follow-up and copy-cat movies
- A home-television based aftermarket.

All of these elements are in the works and, barring unforeseen events, will come to pass on a discernable schedule.

"Awww Grandpa! Do we have to see that flat movie? I hate flatties."

"No Dear. You don't. Grandpa is just finishing up converting Citizen Kane to 3D for you. And we're doing Gone With the Wind and Casablanca next month."

And, let me tell you, the tools for Grandpa to do that already exist. I predict that the 3D handwriting is on the wall, and I guess I just wanted the satisfaction of -- at least once -- having a prediction like this in print before it happens. Then I can say, with impunity, "I told you so."

It's not as good as being able to do it myself, but then, if Cameron's movie does well, someone who reads this will come to me and give me my big chance.

I'm here and waiting!

And, of course, when the Hologram revolution finally arrives in 10 or 20 years, when some physicist finally works out a way to mould and bend light waves without benefit of a screen, the next Golden Age will begin. Maybe some of us will be there to witness it all as this pattern repeats itself once again.

WALL-E. Some film-making reflections.

By now you've either seen WALL-E or read something about the film (or WALL-E himself). Much has been made of the story-telling style of this unexpectedly remarkable film, so it might be worth swinging the flashlight around and attempting to illuminate another part of the picture.

It's facile to say that WALL-E is an homage to, say, Charlie Chaplin since no characters say much of anything until 40 minutes or so into the 98 minute movie. It's a bit more than a Chaplin homage, I'd venture: Motion Pictures as a form had no synchronous dialogue to speak of from the inception of movies in 1894 until 1928 or so. Deprived of "spoken" dialogue, thousands and thousands of films found a way to tell stories through body language, motion, facial expressions, editing, intertitles and the Stanton and Reardon screenplay is absolutely in the classic tradition of the so-called silent era. You have to watch the movie to tell what's happening. This is not illustrated radio (in the way that most modern television shows are which enable you to know what's happening even if you're in the other room cooking dinner and can't see the TV set). This is true "visual" story-telling.

What's stunning about this simple and quietly touching little fable (if one can stretch the definition of "fable" to include robots along with anthropomorphic animals) is the economy and richness of the script. There's hardly any wasted motion here, no fat in the meat, as it were. A second viewing reveals how wonderfully a detail pays off at the end. For example, each and every one of the "mad" robots released by the blast from EVE's disconnected arm plays a specific (and comic) part in the final chase scene. Rich in forwshadowing, the storyline shades in character, emotion, motivation all through tiny details: WALL-E's collection of his favorite garbage, the spare parts library, a tilt of his eyepods or twist of a mechanical wrist, and ultimately the precious videotape of Hello Dolly.

WALL-E himself is something of a simpleton, as one might expect from a robot intended to compress garbage, yet it's that incremental step up from "mechanical device" to "lonely being" that slides unnoticed past our critical inclinations that makes this whole thing work. The "acting" of what is literally a box-shaped garbage scoop on tank treads is amazing. Reduced to minimal cues to emotion, the animators have been forced to express character through the simplest forms of mime. Marcel Marceau would have been proud of them.

Nothing more than "boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back again" in schematic construction, the plot is woven intricately with the sort of science fiction detail that has -- until now -- been nearly impossible to create on the motion picture screen. I found myself thinking that the late Robert Sheckley, a seminal writer of speculative fiction in the 1940s and 50s would have loved this film. His stories were, twice, made into films (Freejack and The 10th Victim), but without the richness of modern CG graphics. One evening, about a year ago, I found myself watching an aerial shot of dozens of sailing ships gliding an 18th Century Harbor in Pirates of the Caribbean and realizing in that moment that virtually anything we can think of can now be shown on the huge motion picture screen in dazzling detail (soon to be followed by the same thing in stunning stereoscopic 3D). Now, here's WALL-E, the quintessential 1940's science fiction story fully realized in awesome reality 30 or 40 feet high in full color. [It breaks my heart that Ray Bradbury and I will never have the chance to bring The Martian Chronicles to the screen (as it should have been long ago) using this technology to re-create the retro-science fiction vision of the book. But that's a topic for another time.]

Few modern films have the simple, direct originality of WALL-E's screenplay. It has become de-rigeur to overload films with sizzle and flash and to leave the meat in the refrigerator. Young directors and editors, intoxicated with AVID and other non-linear editing systems, overdose with two-frame jump cuts simply because it's so easy to do so, and ignore the needs of telling a good story clearly. Not so here. This film plays out with effortless clarity. This has inexpicably become a nearly lost art. Somehow Hollywood has allowed its current product to become synonymous with "expensive computer graphics." Even the wonderful Star Wars series has gotten a bit too cozy with the aesthetics of computer games instead of the stories of DeMaupassant and perhaps this has led American filmmaking closer and closer to the slippery slope of entertainment based solely upon spectacle.

This, like the movie, is an essay theme worth re-visiting. Fine pieces of jewelry invite the owner to pick them up, turn them in the light, and discover new beauty over and over again.

In the end, WALL-E transcends its own technique and its very origins in digital bits and fractal equations. It's a softly whispered tale of loneliness, dreams, and loss. But most of all, it is a story of hope. Hope for the future, hope for mankind, hope for friendship and companionship, hope for the warm loving touch of a hard, cold mechanical hand.

And in the stunning climactic moment when the technological equivalent of fingers intertwine with passion and life, no words can express the fullness of the relationship between a square, clanking robot and a shining, white, flying egg with arms, and the promise that we, too, will survive our own pollution, technology and human follies with hearts -- filled like theirs -- with love.

Cultural Patriotism

Cultural Patriotism is the patriotic support of your country through culture and art.

What better route to international progress?

KinDzaDza You-Tubed

KinDzaDza has been YouTubed.

This is not the ideal way to see this film. But it may be the only way at the moment.

KinDzaDza Part One

WALL-E

Do you suppose that WALL-E is really named after Walter Elias Disney?

Window Kitties

Window kitties come and go. They are a big city phenomenon, mostly, but they probably exist in the burbs as well. Discovering suburban window kitties, however, is more problematical: it would involve cruising in a car or walking endless miles and peeking into windows as an unwelcome stranger. Cities allow us to peek into windows with impunity, and cats to peer out at us without censure.

One day these special cats are resting on a second floor window sill and following your progress down the street, the next they are somewhere else taking care of business: lunch, litterbox, or nap.

We usually don't know who they belong to, these window kitties. The owners are seldom seen with their paws on the sill next to their furry friends. They are behind the scenes, out working to support the litterbox, luncheon and nap.

There's something comforting about a window kitty looking out at you. It's through a window in winter and sometimes through a screen in the summer. It is someone who notices you walking down a New York side street when there is no one else around. Of course, they can't call for help if there's a problem, but window kitties have been known to meow a less-than-tentative hello toward faces they find familiar.

Not everyone likes them there, those window kitties, those finding them aloof and mysterious and impenetrable and their eyes piercing through to things that are too private. Many dogs have a goofy, friendly, street-level way of saying hello that's more immediate to a certain temperament.

Window Kitty One lived on a ground floor and vacillated between two bamboo decorated windows on West End Avenue. One could easily be at eye level with her when her eyes were open (usually not for long). But one day, the bamboo shutters covered with rice paper, were closed and Window Kitty One become invisible.

Window Kitty Two lived between Broadway and Amsterdam and you had to look up to her. Sometimes she'd mew hello through the screen because she was only by the window in the summertime. In the winter she probably had a warm spot somewhere inside.

Now Window Kitty Two is gone with her owner to some other place. Some other apartment. Some other city.

If It's Not in Google, Does It Really Exist?

Woe be unto those who were born before Google took over the world.

Alas! I learned to read books and newspapers and magazines. And -- gasp! -- I talk to people!

Not so, apparently, those who grew up with the Internet fully in place.

For the past two years, I have been trying to have the IMDB list a film I made in 1969. It's a real film, trust me. It's called Solstice, and it was shown at film festivals. Some of the people who made it became "famous." I even have a 16mm print of it, and, if you still don't trust me, I'll arrange to meet at a mutually convenient dark street corner and let you hold it in your hand, and I might even project it so that you can see that the images printed on the celluloid add up to a real living breathing "movie."

The faceless gatekeepers at IMDB (the Internet Movie Database to the rest of you) don't believe me.

"We can't find it in Google," they tell me.

"Well, that's because Google didn't exist in 1969," I tell them.

"Yes, but we can find most anything important in Google," they retort. "How about the distributor?"

The distributor was the New York University Film Library. But. They don't exist anymore. And they don't have a website. Maybe they never had a website.

I tell the faceless drone at IMDB this.

"But we can find anything important on Google," they repeat. "If it's not in Google, we can't add it to the database."

So what's the problem? Do they think I'm lying? Do they think the reel of film I'm holding in my hand is some sort of hallucination? Do they want a bribe? Probably not the latter, because they are too cowardly to tell me who they really are let alone supply an address to mail them a bribe. I'll have an easier time meeting you on a dark street corner to show you the actual film than to find out who or where these folks are.

This problem exists in spades on Wikipedia.

One of the main criteria for deleting facts on Wikipedia is how many entries about the "fact" the so-called "editor" can find when they Google the fact.

We have started an important new not-for-profit called the "Digital Nitrate Prize." Suffice it to say that this is a major service to film preservation: it will encourage the full preservation of the original beauty of real motion picture film in the inevitable transition to digital preservation and projection.

However, the "editors" at Wikipedia won't allow us to have an entry about the Digital Nitrate Prize. In fact, we're now threatened with being banned if we try to add it to the online encyclopedia!

There is, of course, the issue of who these "editors" are. Well, the answer is that I have no idea! Nor, I believe, does anyone else have any idea who they are. They are, one supposes, over weight nerds with some vaguely positive form of autism who can sit in front of their computors 24/7 and try to reject facts from being posted in Wikipedia.

To their credit, let me surmise that there must be the internet equivalent of the unwashed masses who would like to see their Great Aunt Minnie listed in Wikipedia who need to be deterred. I'll give them that. There are too many Aunt Minnies in the world for us to read about all of them in Wikipedia. The logistics of telling one Aunt Minnie from another Aunt Minnie makes my brain spin.

But benevolent not-for-profit cash prizes that will save the world's film heritage? How does that parse out?

These guys go by names like "NightRider" or "SlashAndBurn" or "UpUrFactz" and other cute names. I'm supposing most of them are guys because girls don't usually call themselves "DemonKnight," they prefer the internet equivalent of "FlowerDemon" or "DestroyerInPink."

I discovered yesterday that they get "points" for editing. If they make 100 edits, they get to display a little cute graphic on their page.

So "DemonKnight" wants to have this little graphic on his page and is vaguely incapable of doing real research. (We can safely assume that "DemonKnight" has never read a newspaper and plays X-Box simulaneously with editing WikiPedia. Perhaps there's a Nintendo version of Wikipedia that allows you to censor articles using a game controller). How does he do this? Well, you get points for deleting articles. Delete one article, one point! Delete 90 articles, 90 points! Delete 500 articles and you get an even bigger, gaudier graphic. Wow!

And what research does "DemonKnight" do? You guessed. He puts Digital Nitrate Prize into Google and counts how many times Google finds it. There must be a magic number, but we don't know what it is.

But apparently, if it's under 10 or so hits, or God Forbid, no hits at all, it doesn't exist. The fact of there being a board of internationally famous film archivists involved and discussion in the field about it doesn't seem to matter. It's not in Google, and it doesn't exist.

"Google ergo sum!" "I Google, therefore I am!" Take that Rene Descartes!




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LINKS
[Links for The Digital Nitrate Prize: http://www.answers.com/topic/digital-nitrate-prize ]

"Tuh" The New Word In Town

Unfortunately, I've done this myself, so rest easy.

The English word "to," a common and much beloved preposition, has been transmogrified into "tuh" when it is spoken outloud in sentences by an increasing number of Americans (and perhaps those in other countries as well, but I'm not sure because my sample is too small).

It's still spelled "to" (as if it were to be pronounced that way, too), but it is mostly pronounced tuh.

"I went to the store" comes out as "I went tuh the store."

This is not just another case of saying "nuclear" as "new-cue-lar" as one of our current politicians is so fond of doing. No, it is a little hard to keep your tongue moving properly when you say "nuclear" especially if you are not too fond of reading and spelling. Those who say "new-cue-lar" tend to spell it nucular, so they have an excuse. (In case you are confused, it is pronounced "new-klee-are" or something very much like that.)

But this new "tuh" thing is some sort of creeping tongue laziness. We can all see how it's spelled, for heaven's sake. It' s a two letter word composed of "t" and "o." It's hard to mess that up.

It's supposed to be pronunced like "two." They are homonyms, right? 'Two=to' when it comes to pronunciation. That should be easy.

"I want tuh go out tuh the movies."

"Did you take the book back tuh the library or did you give it to you dog to play with." Now there's one where they are differentiated. I think.

Perhaps "to" is pronounced correctly when we want to emphasize it. "Did you give it to her or did you just leave it on the table?" I'll bet you'd say "to" as "two" in that sentence, wouldn't you?
Not that I have any way to know, but when you are reading these sentences to yourself in your head, are you saying "to" as in "two" or do you misprounounce it in your mind as well? I tend to think "to" (as in "two") when I read silently to myself and while I'm typing this.

But, as I previously confessed, I (ahem) do sometimes utter the dreaded "tuh." "So I said tuh the guy that he oughta give it back tuh her! And he told me tuh shove it."

And perhaps you will, too.

Fewer And Fewer Fewers

Fewer and fewer of us use "fewer" as a word. It has been replaced by less.

Modern folks would say "less and less of us use "fewer," but that's wrong, not that you'd know it by listening to anyone else but me and a few of my foolish (or is that "few-less"?) friends. It annoys me to hear otherwise intelligent announcers on, say, NPR, saying "fewer" less and less, if at all. Every day, in fact, there is less use of few.

The difference, for those of you who are too young to remember or just don't or didn't care, is that "less" is for "amounts" of things and "fewer" is for numbers of things or people.

Here're the examples.

• There is less water in the short glass than in the tall glass.
• There are six people in the blue car and four in the red one. The red car has fewer people in it.

No one would say "please put fewer sugar into the pie," but no one seems to have a problem saying there are less people in that line than in this one.

That, I guess, is how language changes. It seems to become less precise and much less useful. (Intuitively, one does know that you wouldn't say "fewer precise.")

Is it just laziness on the part of the average person? Or is the difference between "fewer" and "less" just too hard to learn?

I have fewer and fewer ideas about it and less and less time to try to figure it out. Or is that less and less ideas about it and fewer and fewer time to try to figure it out? Nahhh... it's the first one, don't you agree?

Subway Gum

Years and years ago, they sold gum on the subway platforms in New York City. I don't chew gum any more, but I do see the ghosts of the gum machines.

There were little, flat, square, glass-fronted machines attached to the steel beams that hold up the underground ceilngs at Times Square. You put in a penny and pushed or pulled a lever and out slid chewing gum.

One kind of gum -- Beeman's Pepsin Chewing Gum -- came wrapped in a little piece of translucent white paper. It was flat and a little powdery when you folded back the wrapping. It wasn't quite soft, but not as hard as the pink slabs of bubble gum that came wrapped in every pack of baseball cards sold up until the 1970s. YOu could tell the difference between the pink gum and the baseball card because the gum shattered when you bit it and the cards didn't.

The other kind of subway gum was Chiclets. Those came two to a little yellow box that you had to open before the pieces slid -- white, shiny and pepperminty -- onto your tongue. The cardboard had it's own particular dry, gray taste for the moments that it rested on your tongue before the gum dropped out. Chiclet shells crunched under your teeth then the same way they do now until your teeth mix the shell into the chewy part and all the sugar and mint gets used up.

Under the gum machines were little metal baskets to catch the paper wrappers and little yellow Chiclet boxes. Usually the paper actually ended up in the container.

But the chewed gum was dropped willy nilly, helter skelter all over the subway platform and trampled until it formed hard black blobs on the cement.

Someone in administration probably removed the gum machines because of the troubles scraping the dried gum off of the subway platforms. The thousands and thousands of pennies the gum earned must not have made up for the labor of cleaning.

Ironically, that's the only part of this tradition that's survived: The hard black blobs.

I'm sure they're not the black blobs of my childhood, those were cleaned up or paved over long ago. But they look the same and have the same uneven feeling under you feet when you walk over them that spoils for a moment the smoothness of the cement.

I miss those machines. That was all of the fun: You put in a penny and out came gum. Pennies don't generate that much joy these days. I do so miss those machines.

KinDzaDza - Lost Masterpiece

No one outside of the former Soviet Union has ever seen this. More's the pity. If you find a way to see the rest of it, let us all know.

Capitalism...its crazy! - Google Video

Tiger

Tiger mutters.

Tiger's not really his name because most cats in New York Chinatown don't have names. When we asked the wizened owner of the Mott Street pharmacy what the cat's name was he stared at us blankly for a moment then said, "Tiger." Tiger catches rats, so his name might as well be "Tiger" even if it's not.

"He catches lots of rats in the alley," the pharmacist says barely in English. Tiger is a lanky cat. His legs and body are too long and so is his nose. If you look down from above, his head seems almost as long as a puppy's, not flatish like most cats.

Tiger likes to sleep on an old, metal-frame restaurant chair that sits on the floor surrounded by lucky bamboo plants in front of the pharamacy counter, but he looks up when we walk in and meows a "hello" in proper 'cat.' After a stretch and a good chin scratch (chin held up agreeably for convenient scratch access), he will begin to mutter the day's business.

"Mwow. Mwow. Mewp. Mmmowp. Mmmowp." he says. "Those tourists walk in here looking for Lord knows what and nearly step on me. Mewp. Mmmowp. Mmmowp. Mowww. Who do they think they are anyway?"

We think that the Chinese don't feed their cats. They expect them to eat all the rodents they can catch. Mouse buffet or something. Tiger doesn't show the well-fed tummy of apartment cats.

"Mewp. Mmmowp. Mmmowp. And that little girl... . She bumped into me! Can you imagine? And giggling to her friends the whole time. Mooowwwwpppp!"

He's like an old vegetable stand attendant cursing to himself about those crazy "gwai lo" who don't really know what a water chestnut looks like before it's peeled.

Tiger rubs against my left leg and looks up expectantly.

"How's hunting? I ask him.

"Mewwwwwwwwwwwwwp. Moww. Mmmmmppp! I've eaten all the rats in the back already."

He has a long half-healed cut on his ear.

"The rat was bigger than him!" The pharmacist offers. "Real big! He's brave!"

Tiger washes his ear and rubs against my leg again.

"We've got to go," I say.

"MMmmmmowwwp. Grmmmowp. Mewwwwp."

One more well-placed chin scratch and Tiger jumps back onto his chair. He purrs in Chinese and mutters to himself about the tourists as he finds a proper spot on the worn plastic. In two blinks he is asleep. His tail hangs off one side of the chair, his too-long head and too-long neck dangle awkwardly off the other side of the chair as though the empty air was a pillow. He mutters in his sleep and dreams proudly about the vanquished rats.

Cool Clock Confluences

No mathematical activity is more fun than when numbers seem to line up in a mystical way. Watching a car's odometer turn over from 299,999.9 miles to 300,000 miles is a major numeric event.

So it was that on June 6, 2006 (ummm... that's 6/6/06 in case you weren't paying attention) I noticed several significant times of the day:

1:11
2:22
3:33
4:44
5:55
and last, but not least, the longest one: 11:11.

I wasn't around for both the AM and PM version of these, but that does double the list.

What does this all mean?

Not a thing that I can see, but it is sort of cool to watch these times appear on a digital clock and stare at them for 59 seconds until your eyes water and they pass into eternity.

Summer Dot: Sudoku System

Having watched dozens of friends and acquaintances scribbling gazillions of jumbled numbers all over their Sudoku puzzles, I've decided to reveal my hitherto "secret" Summer Dot Sudoku system.

I haven't figured out how to either make or post a diagram, so you'll have to use your imagination a little bit, but it's not hard.

What is this all about?

It's a simple, neat way to keep track of which number could/should go in each empty Sudoku square without writing numbers all over the place: It uses dots instead.

First, draw an empty 3 x 3 square with 9 empty boxes. It should look just like any of the 9 square units that make up a 9x9 Sudoku puzzles.

For reference, fill the squares with numbers from 1 to 9
Minus the lines, it will look something like this:

1 2 3
4 5 6
7 8 9

Now draw another empty 3 x 3 square. Imagine that the _ is really an enclosed box

_ _ _
_ _ _
_ _ _

Suppose you want to represent the number 5 with a DOT instead of the number 5. Where would you put it?
Did you answer "the middle square?" Yep!

_ _ _
_ * _
_ _ _

How about 8?

_ _ _
_ _ _
_ * _

So any number can be represented by a DOT (represented by *) in the appropriate square.

Instead of trying to write down all the actual numbers that can go into a square, just put a DOT in the appropriate spot within the empty square. This works best with large Sudoku puzzles with large squares or with a very fine point pen that lets you make little tiny dots.

It takes a little practice to become accustomed to reading the dots as numbers:

*_ _
_ _ _
_ _ _

= 1

_ * _
_ _ _
_ _ _

= 2

and so on.

Patterns of missing numbers emerge very quickly.

If a given square can hold 1, 5, 7, 8 it would look like:

* _ _
_ * _
* * _

with the four dots in the appropriate spaces.


2, 6, 8, 9 would look like:

_ * _
_ _ *
_ * *

As you fill in other squares and use up a "missing" number, simply erase the DOT (if you are using pencil) or draw a thin line through it if you are brave and do Sudoku with a pen.

Any questions?

Happy solving!

Major Dundee "Restored?"

(April 2005: Film Forum, New York City)

Major Dundee is still lost somewhere on the border between Texas and Mexico. A stunning endeavor to rescue him was mounted by Columbia Pictures recently, but despite fine work work and high-minded idealism, Sam Peckinpah's early film still verges upon the inaccessible and incomprehensible.
One thing is clear, Major Dundee may -- even in a mangled state -- be one of the finest attempts at portraying war in all it's dirt drenched, emotionally maladroit, morally untenable, politically muddled and ethically impossible reality. Where Kubrick's Paths of Glory pinpoints the damned if you do, damned if you don't dilemma of the common soldier caught up in the ego-driven machinations of the highly placed perpetrators of World War I, what's left of Peckinpah's attempt to show something similar never quite focusses on enough tangibles to be either emotionally engaging or clearly provacative intellectually.

It is to the intellect, in fact, that this lengthened by 12 minutes version of Dundee seems to appeal the most. There are fine moments that start to take hold -- the Confederate soldier ordering a restrained, dignified black soldier to take off his boots -- but they never seem integrated into the sweep of the entire motion picture.

At this point in history, it becomes nearly impossible without major research and apologies to determine who or what's at fault. Sam Peckinpah's personal problems were well-known and as his drinking problems took hold, his grasp upon story and drama loosened. For my taste, his best films are Ride The High Country and The Wild Bunch: here the story is clear and everything hangs in its proper place along the tales told.

But it's hard to even determine to what Major Dundee aspired. There are three credited writers. If this were a comedy, having 9 writers would be more appropriate, even de rigeur. But on a drama, more than one writer spells trouble, especially when the writer listed in third place is the director himself. The echoes of ringing lines from "Ride The High Country" ("get the ball rolling" or Warren Oates refusing to bathe) attest to some desperation or lethargy in scripting.

The climax, however, has an unexpected emotional punch: not the battle itself, but rather the abrupt, inconclusive ending itelf. Having barely survived a vague sort of victory over the French, the tattered remains of Dundee's troops simply ride up a hill into Texas. There're no medals, no triumphant music, no romantic closeups of those "brave" few lucky enough to get away with their asses still attached. There's only a straight cut to the end title cast list. That's it. Chilling in the right sort of way, and a confirmation of an intention to show war in a dispassionate, raw way.

Brecht espoused a kind of intellectual distance between his plays and the audience. The "verfremdung" effect, he called it, the "alienation" effect. One was supposed to attend the theater, smoke, eat, chat, ponder while the play was going on. The better to absorb the political ideas that Brecht wanted you to learn.

It's hard to believe that Peckinpah set out to accomplish just that, but too much of the movie exists in the mind trying to fill in the missing parts: who was Dundee? what did he want? what was really going on inside of him? who were all these people anyway. Yes, they are all outcasts, misfits, criminals, but only the horse thief seemed to have any personality beyond stereotype.

Nonetheless, it's hard to not admire the attempt. At any time in Hollywood history, a production that has the balls to try something a little different is the clear exception to the rules. Even Heaven's Gate which is much more of a disaster than Major Dundee and undoubtedly has less at its heart and soul than Dundee does even in this purportedly restored, but still mangled version, needs to be given some credit for "chutzpah." But the proof of the pudding is that -- even at full length -- Heaven's Gate doesn't work and attests to spending money on sizzle (authentic 19th Century roller skates that no one in the audience can even see) instead of steak. Dundee has more meat on its bones, but the bones appear -- from the evidence at hand -- to be a bit rickety.

Orson Welles A One Man Band

What I most remember about meeting Orson Welles was that he was big and also smiling. I managed to go up to him after a talk he gave at the Director's Guild of America in Hollywood sometime in the very early 80's. He showed some black and white excerpts from "The Other Side of the Wind," and I remember that he said something to the effect that if you took the boxoffice grosses of all of his movies including Citizen Kane and added them together the total would barely come up to the budget of a modern film. That was 15 years ago. And he was right.

In 1975, I was working on a documentary about American Comic Book and Comic Strip artists and I wanted to include an interview with Orson Welles. According to Jerry Siegel, the original delineator of The Joker in Batman comic books and a neighbor of mine, the guys around the comic book offices back in the early 1940's were big comic book fans! This included people you've probably never heard of, but should have, like Will Eisner, and some you have heard of, who you probably should ignore, like Bob Kane. Anyway, these guys liked to go to the movies. And they especially liked real moody black and white cinematography of what came to be thought of as the Gregg Toland school of perhaps even "noir" later on. They'd go see a movie, then come back to the office and draw it into their comic books. If you want to bother to look at the very early Batman and Detective Comics, you'll see it all there: shadows, dutch angles, silhouettes, you name it.One day somebody came back from a certain movie and told everybody else and they all went to see it and they came back and verbally slavered over it and drew it into their comic books. It was Citizen Kane of course and you can see the influence of that, too, especially in Wil Eisner's work up to the present day: both graphic style and story-telling style. Check out Dropsey Avenue or A Message From God.

So, now. Somebody actually talked to Orson Welles around about that time and found out that he (and apparently Gregg Toland) loved comic books. That he had been an avid reader of Detective Comics and Batman and had deliberately made Citizen Kane look like that. !!!!

Peter Bogdanovich was nice enough to give me Orson's home phone number in Los Angeles, and said "Call him up. Either he'll answer the phone or he won't." So I did. And Orson never answered the phone.

This evening I watched a lovely documentary about Orson's "declining" years down at the Film Forum, and thankfully there were more than the 5 people there that a friend reported a few days ago. Most of the audience was young. They laughed at the jokes though, and they were attentive. Not as many as I laughed at. That's because I'm older and more jaded and have more tire marks from Hollywood across my back than they do, but perhaps I'm putting on airs.

When I went up to him 15 years ago, I think I wanted something to rub off. I didn't know just what to say, and I believe I shook hands with him. Maybe not, but I think I did. I was awed, and in retrospect I felt a little like the guy in the color excerpt from "Wind" who goes up to John Houston and says "I'm Joe Blow." And Houston replies, "Of course you are." I'm sure I identified with Welles. Maverick. So did all umpty hundred people in the audience at the interview shown in the film. Oddly, they all probably wanted to be him. I know I did. I haven't gotten close, but I've suffered some of the same indignities. It's just that the detritus of my life isn't quite as interesting as the detritius of his. And the biggest thing I ever did, is awful tiny compared to the smallest thing Welles pulled off.

New York City, December 23, 1996

Ryan's Daughter

David Lean can hardly be accused of pandering. He wrote once in a late 1940's essay that it went without saying that an important purpose of the cinema was to give a momentary dream to young people on Saturday night dates: for "her" that she was beautiful, exquisitely dressed and adored, for "him," that he was handsome and had conquered."her." And so they wrapped arms about one another and drifted away for two hours. There was no cynicism in it, however, or Brief Encounter certainly would not exist. And, of course, there is Dr. Zhivago, kind of an ultimate Saturday Night hug movie. And Ryan's Daughter.

Through the good graces of a good friend, I got to see a screening of a (relatively) uncut 35mm Anamorphic print of Ryan's Daughter just a few days ago.Before you put this down for fear of some ravings about techie things, I'll come back to it later. Romantic as it is, this film never sweeps you away like Zhivago. Instead, it has a kind of raw tragedy and raw sexuality that is both uncharacteristic of Lean and in many ways ahead of its time for mainstream movies.

So then, what's wrong with this picture. To begin with, it was filmed in 70mm. My recollection of seeing it at the Granada Theatre in Buffalo, NY in its uncut roadshow version projected through the original hand-ground Todd-AO prototype projection lenses, is of a truly stunning and glowing motion picture.

But to every one of my four companions in an almost deserted theatre during opening weekend, it was boring beyond belief. My girlfriend at the time was so bored, she wanted to leave and we had a terrible fight about it afterwards. I was, on the other hand, fascinated by it, and the glow of the film is almost unshakeable in my memories.

That is the first thing that is missing from a 35mm print: the incredible visual detail and the stunning play of light from a 65mm negative projected with the proper lenses on a slightly curved silvered screen from a 70mm release print. Every color is crisp. Every grain of sand is visible. Every mote of dust in every glory of sunshine. Wow.

The second thing is the sound. 70mm mag stripe had seven channel stereo (or perhaps it was six channel stereo, who's counting.) Five channels behind the screen so that the dialogue would move across the vast image with each character as they spoke. Then one (or was it two?) surround channels for scenes with huge waves crashing against the beach. Long since abandoned for the modern super surround systems where all dialogue is mixed to the center channel and the three front channels are basically used to have the sound of a car move from right to left and the surrounds for helicopters flying all over the place (pretty kewl actually), the original stereophonic systems were very focussed on human speech: where it was and who was saying it. Sometimes this got disconcerting when cutting between over the shoulder shots and having dialogue pop back and forth from right to left. That's why it was abandoned.

But in its glory, you couldn't beat it for dramatic scenes!

It's a pity, then, that this recent screening was of a 35mm print (and with no stereophonic sound either) because one of the big losses was of visual sensuality. It is like a different movie then, making you focus on the characters and dialogue and less on the image. A companion remarked that he had rediscovered the film on television, and I realized that it would probably work very well there with its big close ups and medium shot conversations.

That, in fact, is what is so uncharacteristic about Ryan, and why, I think, it don't all hang together. Compared to Brief Encounter or to Odd Man Out or The Rising of the Moon there is virtually no intimacy in the film, and the only characters who are shown in intimate settings are Sara Miles and Robert Mitchum. Nothing is ever revealed about the private lives of anyone else! And it is all played out against the most gorgeous landscapes ever revealed on the screen!

It is a thin story on a huge, huge, huge, huge set. Trevor Howard's is virtually the only character written with both the size and the subtlety to match the huge rocks, crashing waves, and desolate countryside. Setting a romatic tragedy against emptiness cries out for some internal life in the characters. And stunning art direction won't fill that hole.

Imagine that Rose was brilliant as well as beautiful and think what a tragedy that would have been. Instead, we have a woman craving, unknowingly, for a good fuck, for the big "O." Albeit that a woman's sexual life was ignored and to some extent consciously repressed those many years ago, that the story takes place in Ireland (home of the Irish Sex Manual -- filled with 200 blank pages) amongst Irish Catholics, it strikes me that it is not tragic enough that she simply be deprived of physical fulfillment. There is not enough history to the characters to make this compelling: who was Rose's mother really? where did her Dad come from? is it enough only to know that the British won't let the young people work and that all they have to do is to hang out on the main street and look at each other lustfully and make fun of the town fool? It seems to me that these are characters that are conceived of as monolithically and simplistically as the rocks on the seashore.

But, Lean and Bolt manage to pull this out of the fire somehow. Having seen this film now around 4 or 5 times in various incarnations and butcherings, I've never fallen asleep, nor have I ever felt like I was wasting my time. This is not damning with faint praise. Even Lean is entitled to come a cropper. And bad Lean is pretty good. Nonetheless, I think that the only way to appreciate what they meant to do is in the original 70mm format with sound intact. Then all the pieces are in place. It's all very well and good to see the strengths of the story as they reveal themselves (at proper scale) in the P&S TV version, but Lean set out to tell a mythic story with mythic sized characters on a now mythical sized screen with technical systems that seem sadly to be lost in time. Let's bring it all back in IMAX with all its visual and aural beauty and all of its dramatic blemishes.

New York City, December 20, 1996

Theatre Epilogue Epilogue

It's only a week later, but as I walked home from the final Freeman Dyson lecture, The Amsterdam Theatre had changed again. Each letter of the name A M S T E R D A M was finished. They blinked on in turn, first A, then M until the whole name was spelled out. There are little frills of lights around the letters that blink, too. Beneath the marquee, little yellow bulbs run in a loop that disappears into the infinity of a correctly placed mirror inside the still unfinished lobby, each flickering yellow glow chasing the next around and around and around.

What new restoration wonder will come next?

Wednesday, March 5, 1997, New York City

A New Hope: A Movie Theatre Epilogue

In the wonderful novel "Time and Again," Jack Finney's hero "thinks" and "emotes" himself from the still unchanged Dakota Hotel into the Central Park of the 19th Century. It is a feat of time travel unmatched in the high tech realms of modern movie science fiction. It is a feat of time travel that we all do quietly in our souls late at night or when we are sure that no one else is looking. We find those memories in our hearts that are brought back by the sight of a knick knack in a store window, or the scent of mustard on a steamed hot dog, and we are transported instantly and totally to another time, another place and we live there fully until the barking car horns bring us back in time before we are run over. We blush and blink it off and hope that no one saw that "look" on our face when it happened and then keep walking uptown or down taking little tastes of the still warm dream while it lasts.

On Wednesday, February 19, I attended a lecture by Freeman Dyson the noted, revered, and wondrous mathematician cum physicist, at the New York Public Library on 42nd Street.

Afterwards, head full of the history of science, the pacifism of Tolstoy, and the vagaries of Napoleonic educational methods, I wandered West on 42nd Street.

It was after 8 and it was dark as I walked through the desolation of the blocks between Sixth Avenue and Broadway.

I drifted back to my childhood and college days and the afternoons and nights spent in the myriad dirty piss-smelling movie theatres that lined 42nd Street watching movies and movies and cowboys and more movies. The memories shimmered hazily in the empty lots and little stores that live inside the shells of the old 10 cent movie houses.

Then I crossed Seventh Avenue and it was there.

Someone had brought back The Amsterdam Theatre. We all know it was Disney and we all know that our Mayor gave it to them on a silver tray, but there it was, glowing out of the shuttered strip between Broadway and Eighth Avenue. It was clean and lit up and looked for all the world like you could hand them a quarter and walk in and see a movie. It looked like the marble halls and marble men's rooms would smell like opening night. That the screen would no longer be torn, that the cherubim would have their gold leaf smiles buffed up once again. I peeked in past the gates and the inside was still unfinished, but the boxoffices were there and the marble floor was fairly clean and the marquee itself had every light bulb back in place only waiting to blink in some mystical snake-chasing-its-tail sequence.

And the best part was that as I walked down into the subway, it didn't disappear. It's still there, and even though it won't be used for movies, it promises to re-open in June and I can't wait.

Monday, March 3, 1997, New York City

Something There Is That Doesn't Like A Movie Theatre

Unlike Prufrock and his coffee spoons, I measure my life in the demise of movie theatres.

When I first moved to New York's Upper West Side, there were eleven separate sand-alone movie houses.

There was one tiny one at 72nd Street that showed art films (and I've forgotten the name, Embassy 72, perhaps), the Loew's 84th Street (a movie palace in the Grand tradition replete with balcony), The New Yorker at 89th Street, The Symphony, The Thalia, two now nameless full size United Artist Theatres between 96th and 97th Street (former and badly faded movie palaces with work lights visible through the screen during the entire show), The Metro, a nameless theatre that showed mostly Mexican films with Cantinflas and others, the Edison (the oldest movie theatre in New York and actually built by Edison), and the Olympia.

The 72nd Street Theatre made way for a furniture store, the New Yorker was trashed for an apartment building, the two United Artists theatres became another housing complex, the site of the Mexican theatre sells discount hand towels, and The Edison has become a Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet. Tom and D.W. Griffith would have been thrilled.

Of the rest, the gorgeous, gold-leafed, velvet curtained Loew's was torn down completely and rebuilt next door and now houses six shoebox theatres (the Loew's SexPlex as we in the know call it), these days The Symphony Space (nee The Symphony) shows films once a week, the Thalia passes into and out of private hands for several months at a time and has recently shown very fine African films before it went bust one mo' time, The Metro is twinnned, and so is the Olympia. So, if we count generously, there are now twelve movie theatres where once there were only eleven.

Clearly, clearly, clearly, it ain't the same.

I walk through the neighborhood seeing their ghostly marquees beckoning me. The upper West Side -- not Times Square -- was the heart of movie theatres and even of production in the 1920's and 30's. The tattered remains of the theatres call out to you if you look closely beneath the supermarket signs: the decorated arches that once soared over marquees, the wall-mounted hooks where the supports for the marquees were once attached are all still there. The huge inside spaces got divided up for groceries.

One foolish day Robert Frost visited me at my typewriter (when I still had a typewrite) and wrote this down for me.

Something there is that doesn't love a movie theatre
, That sends a wrecking crew onto it,
And spills the marquee onto the street;
And makes the aisles into sidewalks.
The work of moviegoers is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have not left one seat without gum,
And they would spill coke on every cushion,
As they cheer the heroes on.
It is the wreckers I mean,
No one sees them come or hears plans made,
but at Summer Holiday Movie time,
we find them there.
I let my friend know across the park;
And on a day we met to watch the sweating crews
And see the heavy cranes smash in the walls.
We stand across the street as we watch
To see the rubble that once held in magic
And kept out distorting light and noise.
We have to use a spell to watch the destruction without tears.
"Stay as you were when our backs are turned!"
We wear out our minds with calling back the dreams.
Oh, just another kind of nostalgic game,
Over on our side of the street.
It comes to little more.
There where it is, the contractor doesn't need an antique theatre.
He is all progress and higher rents.
Our memories of lush adventures will barely survive
Enhanced by popcorn and thirsty throats.
My friend says, "Good theatres made good neighbors."
A scent of Spring is still in me, and I wonder If we could put a notion in builders' hearts.
Didn't good theatres make good neighbors?" I'd ask them.
"Weren't they a wondrous palace to lure us from lonely rooms?
Before I built a high rise, I'd ask to know
What hand-painted ceiling I was tearing down and throwing out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn't love a movie theatre,
That wants it down."
I could say "greed" to the builders,
But it's not greed exactly, and I'd rather
They said it to themselves.
I see them there
A blueprint and sales prospectus grasped firmly
One in each hand like an old stone savage armed.
The builders move in darkness as it seems to me,
But not one of celluloid visions and the sounds of wonder.
My friend will not be consoled.
He is sad still to think the thought.
He asks again, "Didn't good theatre's make good neighbors?"

Monday, March 3, 1997 New York City (poem circa 1980, New York City)