AFTER writing a column last fall about people's growing disaffection with movie theaters, I received a letter from a theater owner who said this doomsday attitude has been around so long that he'd read a piece in Variety back in the 1950s by a theater owner named Mitchell Wolfson defending his business against premature burial.
I know the story well. Mitchell Wolfson was my great uncle. He and my grandfather, Sidney Meyer, ran a chain of movie theaters in Miami for half a century, so a love for movies runs pretty deep in my veins. But as I told the theater owner, there's more to the story, which has particular relevance to the quagmire that theater owners -- and Hollywood -- find themselves in today.
In the 1950s, as today, theaters were under siege, their audience being lured away by a dazzling new technology. Today's competition comes from the Internet, computer games and home entertainment centers. Then the enemy was television. "How do you compete with free?" theater owners moaned, the same mantra we've heard from record executives complaining about unauthorized file sharing.
My response has always been the same: You've got to embrace the future. Maybe I feel so comfortable preaching this particular gospel because I remember what Sid and Mitchell did when faced with the scary new technology of their day: They took a big chunk of their theater profits and started Miami's first TV station. Not only didn't it ruin their original business, but when their company was sold off after their deaths, the TV station was far more valuable than the theater chain.
Unfortunately, when it comes to embracing new technology, most people in showbiz are in deep denial. In his recent state of the industry speech at ShoWest, Motion Picture Assn. of America chief Dan Glickman offered the tired bromide of a "Got Milk"-style campaign to promote theater attendance. National Assn. of Theater Owners chief John Fithian gloated over the failure of "misguided experiments" in same-day release of movies on DVD and in theaters.
But perhaps the worst combination of denial and hypocrisy was on display at the Oscars, when Academy President Sid Ganis touted the theater experience, saying, "I bet you that none of the artists nominated tonight have ever finished a shot in a movie, stood back and said, 'That's going to look great on DVD.' " Ganis is a genuinely decent man, but it's hard to imagine a more egregious instance of Hollywood's "Do as I say, not as I do" elitism. No institution has more fiercely protected its right to watch movies on DVD than the academy, whose members are treated to Oscar screeners every holiday season, while we get a lecture about how we should settle for endless pre-show ads and overpriced popcorn.
As it turns out, the New Yorker magazine on the stands the week of the Oscars featured "Capote" director Bennett Miller (one of those "artists nominated tonight") in a big two-page ad for a new Intel system that pictures him in his "streamlined home theater/media room, which he uses to download and view movies."
Even worse, NBC and several other knuckleheaded media companies have threatened YouTube.com, the wildly popular website that features short clips culled from TV shows and home videos. Last month NBC ordered YouTube to pull "Lazy Sunday," a "Saturday Night Live" sketch that had become an Internet sensation. Whether the NBC move was driven by uptight lawyers or a desire to force Web surfers to view the clip on the network's own site, it was yet another paranoid misreading of the Internet, whose ability to expose the clip to millions of connected computer users would give a much-needed boost to an aging TV comedy franchise.
In its obsession with quarterly earnings, the industry has failed to notice that movie lovers -- led by young males, once the most loyal members of the tribe -- are being transformed into media consumers, siphoned away from movie theaters by a growing assortment of more involving electronic toys. If you need more evidence, read the fascinating recent survey conducted by OTX, a leading movie research firm that found that under-25 males, the earliest adopters of new technology, saw 25% fewer movies in the summer of 2005 than in the summer of 2003. Even worse, young males now rate theatrical movies No.7 among weekend activities, behind everything from surfing the Web and playing computer games to (ouch!) going out to dinner.
"There's an attitudinal shift in our culture," says Kevin Goetz, who heads OTX's West Coast media and entertainment division. "In the last 10 years there's been a 500% increase in what the average digital consumer spends on entertainment, but that increase is going to iPods, cellphones and computer games, not more theatrical moviegoing. People have so many other things to do with their time that they view the prospect of going to the movies very differently than 10 years ago."
