Can This Man Save The Movies? (Again?)

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Lucas, who thinks day-and-date is an inevitable step to fight piracy, also believes it won't hurt the box office. Moviegoing, he says, "is like watching a football game. Who in the world would go out in 20-below weather and sit there and watch a football game where you can barely see the players? Football games are on TV, and it doesn't affect stadium attendance at all. It's the same with movies. People who really love movies and like to go out on a Saturday night will go to the movie theater."

Some blame the shrinking theater audience on the narrowing gap between a movie's premiere in theaters and its debut in video stores--from six months a few years ago to about four months or less today. "With the window getting smaller and smaller," says Smith, "people don't want to leave the house. The audience is being trained that they don't have to run out to the theater to see something." For many viewers, especially adults, the kids who see the big blockbusters and the critics who review the little indie films have essentially become focus groups that help them decide whether they should see a movie--when it comes out on DVD.

The genius of late 20th century entrepreneurism was to get people to pay a lot for things they were used to getting cheap (coffee) or free (water). A quarter-century ago, Hollywood made most of its money from showing films in theaters. Now the biggest bucks come from DVDs and pay TV. Producers also got something for nothing by packaging recent and old TV shows for the DVD market. All those revenue streams give folks more reasons to stay home, encased in their all-media cocoons, in some cases chained to the desktop deity that can never get enough attention. Just as the computer helps them do many things that used to take them out--work, shopping, buying books, renting movies--so will it soon allow them to download movies to watch on it. As Smith notes, "It's tough to cram three or four people in front of a computer to watch something. But no doubt Steve Jobs is working on this."

If the Internetting or iPodding of movies does take over, that would be a strange revolution indeed. It's one thing to miniaturize phones and radios for easier use. It's another to reduce the 65-ft. movie-palace dream images of old--the ones revived for last week's Oscar show--onto a screen the size of Dick Tracy's wristwatch.

Directors say they frame a shot with the big--not the small--screen in mind. "I only paint on the one size sheet of paper," Spielberg says. "I make my movies for a movie theater, and I like to imagine how big that screen is. But I also realize on a laptop on an airplane or, even worse, on an iPod, they are never going to see that character, and an element of the story will be lost." Whatever is lost on the smaller screen, DVD has become, in Smith's words, "historically the final record of your movie. That's the one people watch over and over." Rodriguez has said that the "real versions" of his movies are the extended, unrated ones on DVD.