I was truly blessed to have a father who retired relatively young, and as a retirement gift he bought himself a cinema theatre, to play with as a hobby. That was 1996.
The ‘90s were absolutely a golden age for movie production. Plots were original, fresh, new and actual. Motion pictures such as Apollo 13, Braveheart, Titanic, Forrest Gump, The English Patient — to mention a few — were able to talk to the heart of people through real and semi-real stories that everyone could relate to.
However, one of the biggest turns which enabled such a golden age was in the ‘80s, when Micheal Jackson released the MTV of Thriller. Although it was just a few minutes, the impact it had on the way cinematography was portrayed was devastating. Micheal completely reinvented visual entertainment by embedding a style that was never seen before.The creative spillover was a blessing for movie makers around the world. But then things went sour, and now we are flooded with the same movie one after another. There is no longer creativity in the industry.
Let us move a step back. Cinema is an invention dated 1891, when the genius named Thomas Edison invented the first projector. It took the new invention a while to gain traction.
In fact, until the end of the second decade of the last century, only the USA, Russia and Europe were producing movies. Scandinavia was particularly creative and productive... they still are to be frank.
But the real “boom” was in the ‘30s when both colour and audio began to be part of the majority of the production. At that point in time cinema screens started getting larger, from the original 3:4 ratio of Edison, to progressively wider screens to accommodate more people in the cinema theatres.
That became the main competitive advantage compared to the home video experience, that until recent years — with the introduction of 16:9 ratio — was simply displayed at home a “less visible area” than what the cinema theatre could show. In the ‘30s it is calculated that up to 65 per cent of the US population would have gone to watch a movie at the cinema at least once a week.
When my father bought the cinema theatre it was a — somehow — similar market, and yet still completely different compared to what we experience nowadays. For instance, I remember that home videos were brought home via VHS cassette, which was a very primitive and highly compressed way of displaying motion pictures.
Official VHS of movies would have appeared on the shelves of the video stores around 6 months after the cinema release. Also, there was no such a thing as pay per view or video streaming.
Lastly, the largest majority of cinema theaters in Italy were 1 cinema 1 screen, as opposed to the multi screen cinema theaters — plus food and beverage — that we can experience now. My father kept the theater for 10 years, and in 2006 gave up to a market that was totally different.
DVDs were at times released even before the movie hit the cinema and pay per view — together with the mass adoption of the Internet — turned everyone’s couch into a private theatre.
During that decade I found out that the industry was based on blockcbuster’s distribution. I recall that in 1997, upon signing the contract to show one of the major Italian Christmas productions — Fuochi d’Artificio by Leonardo Pieraccioni — my father had to agree to take 20 additional minor productions from the same distributor. It was obviously a numbers game.
Since there are only 52 weekends in a year, and Fuochi d’Artificio was mandatory to be showcased for 3 weeks in a row, the other 20 films would have taken up nearly half a year. In many cases we were paying off cash for the minor production so that we did not have to show them and keep the weekend busy with a movie that very few were interested in watching.
We would have just paid a fee to the distributor that was equivalent to having shown that movie with a nearly empty theatre.
Then instead of that minor production, we would have shown another major production through another distributor.
I wonder how the industry has evolved now, since I cannot inspect it from an insider perspective any longer. But as part of the audience, there are literally a handful of movie productions that are taking up the largest amount of screentime.
Superheroes are pretty much half of what is watched around the world. Endless sequels make the audience numb to the facts that most movies have the same plot, development, character archetype and scene structure.
Producers have tried to innovate the cinema experience with 3D several times in history, but always failed to make it mainstream. Streaming services like Netflix keep producing series and documentaries endlessly. There is no real innovation in cinema. There is no longer creativity in movie productions.
stefano@virgilli.com
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