Our friend Kevin Kelly was at that Mark Cuban panel at the TCA featured in the vague WIRED post mentioned earlier, and he sent along some further context––and quotes!
Apparently, the panel’s essential purpose was to promote Humboldt County, a SXSW vet and now a Magnolia release which will debut on VOD three weeks before hitting theaters in September. Also on the panel was Humboldt co-star Peter Bogdanovich, and talk about an odd pairing. On the one hand, you’ve got mogul Cuban making his cocky techno-evangelist pitch about how business travelers held captive in hotels are dying to charge their corporate cards $12 for the chance to see films like Flawless and Finding Amanda.
Then there’s old Pete, still an active theatrical patron himself (“Sex in the City was amazing because it was all women. I was the only guy in the theater, and the women loved it, and I loved that the women loved it”), but conscious that it’s an experience that’s diminishing for a reason (in part because trailers are “unbelievably violent, fast, crazy, noisy garbage.”) And he acknowledges that even if, for him, nothing’s going “to replace the experience of seeing a movie on the big screen with an audience,” alternate philosophies of distribution “seems to be working in terms of getting people to see the films.”
I wish I had been there. Excerpts from Kevin’s transcription of the even follow after the jump.
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Maybe this really is the year of “product suggestion”, a term coined recently by Risky Biz blogger Steven Zeitchik after noticing the subtle hint of a McDonalds logo on the driver’s helmet and race car in Speed Racer.
Following that, we now have Pixar suggesting iPods and other Apple products through its new animated film Wall-E. If you take a good look at the sleek robot character Eve, you might be reminded of the typical Apple product design, and apparently it’s not so coincidental. Wall-E director Andrew Stanton told Fortune magazine of Eve’s development and the benefit of having Steve Jobs as your umbrella:
“I wanted Eve to be high-end technology - no expense spared - and I wanted it to be seamless and for the technology to be sort of hidden and subcutaneous,” Andrew Stanton, Wall-E’s director, told Fortune. “The more I started describing it, the more I realized I was pretty much describing the Apple playbook for design.” It is, of course, not the first time a product has inspired a film character - think of the murderous HAL 9000 robot in “2001: A Space Odyssey,” based loosely on big IBM mainframes of the day.
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Apple has reportedly struck a deal with several major studios to release downloads of their films on the same date the titles are released on DVD, and I can’t tell whether or not Jeff Wells is being facetious when he says that this plan will “obviously…really hurt DVD retail, which will in turn diminish the sense of community we all get from going to DVD stores and poking around the aisles and talking with the checkout guys.”
This is not a facetious question, I actually want to know: Is that an experience that anyone has had recently? Assuming you don’t live in New York and frequent Kim’s? It’s been my understanding that for awhile now, most people get DVDs from a) Netflix; B) a chain store like Best Buy, Virgin or Borders; or C) any number of online retail sites. So the idea that this could damage an existing sense of DVD store community seems wrongheaded, because that hasn’t that “community” already long ceased to exist?
As for the idea that this will hurt DVD sales considerably, the Apple downloads will carry Apple DRM, meaning they’ll only be playable on iPods, Mac computers, and AppleTVs. There are an awful lot of home theater junkies who will refuse to watch movies on computer screens, and I’m just not convinced that most of those guys own AppleTVs. I am the only person I know who owns an AppleTV.
So Wells had to be joking, right? To quote Chris Matthews, as Wells himself has been known to do: “Ha!”
