Are Movie Theaters the Real Dinosaurs?

In the all-digital future of Michael A. Hiltzik’s “Hollywood 2010” (Nov. 7), filmmakers “would have to give up much of the vocabulary of filmmaking.” I protest. The raw material of movie-making--character, story, acting, pacing, blocking, camera, lighting, editing, music--all remain the same. Only the tools change. It is in the dark cinemas that 100 years of moviegoing will be discarded.

At $100,000-plus per screen, only major markets will convert to digital projection. Ticket and concession prices will rise; moviegoers with fewer entertainment dollars will be priced out of theatrical exhibition; first-run attendance will drop. Studios will defer digital-to-print transfer for the remaining conventional cinemas until after the “Sunday night final cut” dictated by opening-night response. Films that fail to find their audience in digital run will go directly to DVD without a film release. Small-town and art-house cinemas will be forced to convert to low-budget digital (the oversize Sony in your front room) when film prints are unavailable. Poor equipment and high prices will degrade the cinema experience. The audience will wait for video; cinemas will close. The “greater reach” promised by Bran Ferren will be played off the Internet on a wide-screen computer, and I will have to be in a major market to share a laugh or a cry with a hundred people I haven’t met.

In our zeal to embrace the future (or at least to not “identify yourself as a dinosaur”), let’s not forget to apply the test: Who will benefit?

Tom Connole

Hollywood