Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, March 27, 1994 TAG: 9403280147
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: D2 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Take, for instance, a coming, glittering achievement in the distribution of movies. In California (where else?), Pacific Bell and a Texas company are hoping to send digitized movies over phones lines and fiber optic cables to about a dozen outlets this fall. The most immediate goal is to cut distribution costs dramatically, and increase access.
Which is great.
But the technology that allows film images to be scanned digitally and sent over phone lines also will make it easy for film studios to, say, revise the ending of a box-office flop and send out the new version quickly and cheaply. Movie-making by great, big committee.
Of course, studios now test market pictures and order revisions according to audience response. But this practice is at least limited to the time before the film is distributed widely - because it'd be too expensive to send several new versions to all the movie houses.
Now, according to a report in the Christian Science Monitor, some artists in the movie industry - writers, directors, actors - are worried the artistic integrity of their work will be threatened more and more.
Excited futurists foresee a time when there will be 50 screens at a movie theater instead of five, and multiple versions of each feature to choose from. This can amount to a convenience - your choice of seeing a dubbed foreign flick or one translated by a computer.
Or it can be a copout. Don't like sad endings? Punch up the version of "Cleopatra" in which she clumsily drops the asp and it slithers away before she can kill herself.
Movies are often frivolous, light entertainment. But some play more important roles. How many children, given a choice, would watch "Old Yaller" go mad and be shot when they could select, instead, a kinder, gentler movie in which the noble dog makes a miraculous recovery and lives on happily with his beloved human family?
Given such a choice for every sad movie - and, with the spread of technology, every sad book, every scary fairy tale - all fictional sorrow could be banished. Children would be forced to learn to cope with tragedy all at once, in real life, when there is no way to change the ending.
Challenging adult films likewise can present visions of worlds that may be foreign and disturbing to us, but that reveal a reality we would have no other way of seeing. Americans hardly need another means of cocooning themselves in the warm and fuzzy to avoid facing the harsh and unpleasant.
Which only serves as another reminder that technology is potentially good. What counts is how we use it.
by CNB