This morning’s general session was a presentation by Scott Kirsner, a columnist and contributing writer to a variety of publications, including Wired, Business Week, Boston Globe, New York Times and Variety. He is also the author of “Inventing the Movies” and “The Future of Web Video.”
Scott showed an 1894 kinetoscope clip (Ciecedo with Pepe) to illustrate the attitude of Edison and Eastman about technology. For Edison, the kinetoscope, a “peep show machine” that played back moving images, was a much more appropriate use of the technology than film projection (such as the Lumiere brothers’ cinematographe technology). Back then, Edison said…
“We are making these peep show machines and selling a lot of them at a good profit. If we put out a screen machine, there will be use for maybe about ten of them in the whole United States…Let’s not kill the goose that lays the golden egg.”
Next, Scott showed a clip from the Jazz Singer, the first “talkie,” or motion picture with sound. Back then, an MGM executive argued that “Sound is a passing fancy.” Of course, sound soon became the norm in movies.
Similarly, color in motion pictures started slowly. The Technicolor company started in 1915, but it would take years before color would be widely adopted. The prevailing thinking at the time was that color was just a gimmick and wouldn’t last. Douglas Fairbanks stared in one of the first feature-length color movies; afterwards, he said he would never do it again. But the fledgling Disney company adopted color, as did the producers of 1939’s “Gone with the Wind.” This was the “tipping point,” and soon color technology became widely adopted. In part, Hollywood embraced color in order to give it an “edge” over the new medium of television (which initially was in black and white).
William Castle’s “The Tingler,” starring Vincent Price, illustrated the 1950s thirst for gimmicks in movies. Theaters would install small buzzers under every few seats and activate them at key moments during the film. Scott called Castle “The King of Movie Gimmicks,” and argued that he was successful because he focused on the fact that people went to the movies to be entertained, to have a fun experience.
Scott noted that in 1982, Jack Valenti, president of the Motion Picture Association of America, said “I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone.” Within a few years, the sale and rental of movies on video was a significant revenue stream for Hollywood.
When digital video editing systems were first introduced, many traditional film editors refused to adopt them. But again, the technology would prevail. When 1996’s “The Piano Player,” the first feature-length film to be digitally edited, won an Academy Award for best editing, it was clear that digital editing would replace the “cut and splice” film editing of years past.
Disney at first pooh-poohed the digital animation work of Pixar, convinced that the technology would never achieve the quality of animation that Disney prided itself on. Of course, a few years later, Disney wound up buying Pixar for billions of dollars.
Quoting George Lucas: “When confronted with something new, [preservationists] come up will all of these reasons why it can go wrong, and they don’t come up with any reasons why it’s the right thing to do.”
So what can we learn from these examples? In Hollywood, and every industry, there are three kinds of people: the innovators (who want to push the state of the art), the preservationists (who want to conserve traditional ways of doing things), and the sideline-sitters (who just sit and watch from the sidelines to see what will happen).
Innovators typically don’t spend enough time trying to understand why people resist change. They tend to underestimate the importance of persistence, and the value of having the right connections. Having a better mousetrap isn’t enough; you need to get people to embrace it. And you need to push for change while honoring the traditions of the past.
This was an interesting and engaging presentation, with plenty of good examples to prove his point. I think he may have been “preaching to the choir” a bit, since most of those in the audience were probably already familiar with the tension between tradition and innovation. But it was good to ponder some of these specific examples from the history of Hollywood.