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.
