I’m going to go out on a limb with this post and make a prediction. Now in all fairness I must say that my clairvoyance skills have not exactly batted a thousand in the past, but this is a theory I’ve been working on for a while, and I’m reasonably sure that A) I’m right or B) I’ll be vague enough that I have plausible deniability if anyone ever calls me on it.
The story of American Zoetrope is an amazing one. For anyone not familiar with it I highly recommend a documentary called A Legacy of Filmmakers: The Early Years of American Zoetrope. You can find a copy on the 2-DVD Director’s Cut release of George Lucas’s THX-1138. I’ll let you discover most of the details yourself, but as a primer for my theory you need to know that at this time the studio system of filmmaking was collapsing. Jack Warner and the big studio barons were retiring and corporations were purchasing the studios. There was a shift from storytelling to marketing. Even before that, Hollywood was on the decline. People were not coming to the box office at the rates they had been. Cookie-cutter pictures with the same actors that everyone had seen for the past however many years just were not sparking an interest with the film-going public. Students at USC and UCLA were told to find other careers. Entire departments at the big studios were closing. It looked bleak.
Then Easy Rider landed in 1969. This was a film made completely independent of the studio system for $400,000 and grossed over $60,000,000 at the box office. Making a film outside of the Hollywood system was suddenly proven to be viable. Making a film outside of the Hollywood system was something that Francis Ford Coppola had always desired to do. It was something the George Lucas always wanted to do. So American Zoetrope was founded. Based in San Francisco, populated by young people, and making movies with a different point of view from the old Hollywood system of filmmaking.
I’m going to skip a lot of history now and just give the highlights. At a point when film students were told to drop out and get their money back, when studios were locking the doors and not making any new films, this was the same moment that Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Brian DePalma, Walter Murch, John Milius, etc. were all landing on the scene. Just at the point where it looked like Hollywood would crumble, the names that would define the next thirty years of filmmaking were taking the reigns.
I give that primer to say that I can’t help but feel we’re on a similar cusp today as we were in the late ’60s. Things are not as dire. The major studios are in no danger of shutting down. Christopher Nolan has proven with The Dark Knight that people will still flock to see a good film. But I think that the group of people who will define the next thirty years of filmmaking are out there, and we don’t know their names yet.
Related to all of this is RED Digital Cinema. Anyone who knows me knows that I’m a big proponent of RED technology. These people are making motion picture cameras that produce images at incredible quality and revolutionize the workflow. And they’re doing it at price points that are industry changing. They recently announced plans to build RED Ranch in Las Vegas, NV. RED Ranch is described by Jim Jannard (founder of RED) as facilities that support “design, engineering, manufacturing, sales, service and operations… plus a soundstage, restaurant, town center and limited housing on an 80 acre site.”
To me that sounds like a film studio. It sounds like Skywalker Ranch for this generation of filmmakers.
So, my appropriately vague prediction (let’s call it an educated guess) is that things are changing for the better in the motion picture industry. I can’t wait to see the films that haven’t been made yet. I can’t wait to be a part of that process.
Christopher Johnson, Director, Easy Water Films, L.L.C.