Following up on something I mentioned in last night’s rambling entry on the movie business, I’ve found an interview that director Steven Soderbergh gave to Wired magazine about his plans to release his new film on DVD, HD-cable TV, and in theaters all at the same time. Relevant to my purposes:

WIRED: Why did you decide to release Bubble in all formats at once?
SODERBERGH: Name any big-title movie that’s come out in the last four years. It has been available in all formats on the day of release. It’s called piracy. Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings, Ocean’s Eleven, and Ocean’s Twelve – I saw them on Canal Street on opening day. Simultaneous release is already here. We’re just trying to gain control over it.

 

So this is a way to combat piracy?
It can be. Warner Bros. has talked about going out with low-cost DVDs simultaneously in China because piracy is so huge there. It will be a while before bigger movies go out in all formats; in five years, everything will.

 

Will people keep going to theaters?
Always. You’re going to see attendance plateau a bit, but it’s still the number one date destination. That’s never going away.

I find this interesting because, first of all, Soderbergh agrees with me that theatrical exhibition is not going to vanish, and it’s always nice to have a pro back me up. But I’m also intrigued by his reasoning that a so-called “day and date” release strategy will help to curb piracy. Now, for the record, I think all this concern over piracy is just Hollywood working itself into a tizzy over something that isn’t that big a problem. I suspect that no one living outside of New York or LA has ever seen the kind of operation that Soderbergh is referring to — we certainly have no sidewalk-huckster equivalent to Canal Street in Salt Lake, at least not one I’m familiar with — and I don’t know anyway who has ever purchased a bootleg tape or DVD of a film that is otherwise available for viewing. (Copies of films that are otherwise unavailable — as in out-of-print or never released on home video — are another matter.) Regardless of how widespread the problem actually is, however, the industry has certainly convinced itself that it’s a problem, and the resulting hysteria is creating some genuine inconveniences for the average movie fan, starting with those overwrought anti-piracy PSAs that are now running before the feature in some theaters and scaling up from there. If Soderbergh’s simultaneous release scheme can soothe the industry’s fears in a simple manner that doesn’t involve all kinds of restrictions on the consumer end of things, then I say it’s worth a try. And maybe, just maybe, it may even lead to some improvements, both in how the industry is doing things and in what it’s producing. And besides, there are always movies that I’m interested in seeing but which don’t demand the big-screen experience, for one reason or another; now maybe I won’t have to wait so long to see them. It’s going to be an interesting experiment, if nothing else.

I am, however, less supportive of one of Soderbergh’s other ideas:

I’d like to do multiple versions of the same film. I often do very radical cuts of my own films just to experiment, shake things up, and see if anything comes of it. I think it would be really interesting to have a movie out in release and then, just a few weeks later say, “Here’s version 2.0, recut, rescored.” The other version is still out there – people can see either or both.

I gotta say, I just don’t see the appeal of multiple versions. I hear a lot of talk about them from circles that combine an interest in technology with an interest in entertainment media — the Boing Boing crowd, for instance, which thrives on news of end-user remixes, mash-ups, and other altered versions of pre-existing art — and, of course, we’re all familiar with the director’s cuts, extended cuts, restored versions, unrated versions, and special editions that turn up on DVD. But with very, very few exceptions, I never like the revised versions as much as the original release version. (The only exceptions that come to mind are the Lord of the Rings Extended Editions and Francis Coppola’s recent recut of The Outsiders, all of which drastically deepened their respective stories. However, you can make a pretty good argument that even these rare, successful cases suffer from new problems that weren’t there before the tinkering. There are added scenes in the lengthened Return of the King, for example, that I think actually harmed the film.) And that’s just talking about the variants produced by professionals; I have even less interest in the versions generated by amateurs, no matter how talented they may be, because they had nothing to do with the original production of the film.

Perhaps my inflexibility on this is just a sign of my advancing geezerdom, but I am deeply troubled by the increasing fluidity of our culture’s art, as well as by the fact that so many younger people actually prefer it this way and are pushing for even more “interactivity.” Everything that surrounds us these days is impermanent; worse, it’s all deliberately made to be disposable, consumed and then thrown aside. Personally, I like to think that there is some continuity somewhere, even if it’s only in something as superficial as watching a movie I loved in high school and knowing that it’s the same movie I saw in high school, with the same run-time, number of scenes, thematic emphasis, and now-outdated special effects. Even better, I like to think that when I watch a movie made in 1942, it’s the same movie that an audience of 1942 would’ve seen. This doesn’t mean I’m opposed to restoration, or the inclusion of deleted scenes on DVDs for archival purposes, or even necessarily to remakes. I just think the original package ought to remain unaltered.

At least Soderbergh, to his credit, says he’d like to see both versions remain available to the audience. That’s what really gets to me about all these recuts — when the director’s cut comes out, the original cut usually falls into oblivion. (George Lucas, I am talking to you!) And that’s just wrong…