It used to be easy: Movies were smart, and television was dumb.
Movies were a special communal event, and television was part of humdrum home life. Television had commercials, and movies did not; television was episodic and open-ended, while movies told a single story. Movies could be entertaining but also high art; television might be groundbreaking or provocative, but art never entered the conversation.
No one watched television on a first date or majored in television studies, and the only movies you could watch while ironing were long gone from the theaters.
Now it's not so easy. Televised series often have just as much artistry and significance as any film, and both forms come in so many shapes and sizes — and are available on so many different sorts of screens — that it is increasingly difficult to tell them apart.
The high-grossing "Captain America: Civil War," for example, is now considered one of the most successful movies ever.
Yet while I was watching it the day after it opened, I saw a television show.
Watch Kenneth Turan's review of the documentary:
Watch the "O.J.: Made in America" trailer:
For a long while I have had what felt like a workable definition of television, one adaptable to a changing world of proliferating platforms. It was generous —� �including everything from Vine videos to decade-long network dramas — and it was also fundamentally exclusive: Television, to my mind, was everything that wasn't the movies.
That definition has become less workable of late. It may, in fact, be on the verge of becoming useless.
We can discuss the blur between movies and TV, but what about the medium of virtual reality. What to make of that ? High-profile directors and early adopters are hailing its immersive possibilities as a new cinematic language. Yet VR is watched in short bursts, far from a movie theater. Some studios even group VR under home entertainment — the same division as the bargain-DVD bin. These are categorizations that flummox even people in Silicon Valley. And when Silicon Valley is flummoxed, it's time to worry.
VR could change not just the material but how we watch it. Because by viewing virtual content, we can also watch virtually. The idea of gathering around a television screen at home and the notion of meeting friends at a theater have been the two methods of consuming entertainment socially, our yin and yang of escaping the mundane.
But VR means we'll be able to do both without doing either. Apps already exist that allow friends and family members across an ocean to watch together, and these are going to get more common as VR becomes more popular. (If you have a teenager in your life, you've likely already seen how this can work with video games.) The notion of a distribution platform like film or television commanding a certain type of viewing will evaporate with VR. The iPhone has given us entertainment any time. VR will provide entertainment anywhere with anyone.
Video games have long found inspiration in films. The reckless carnage in the "Call of Duty" franchise, for instance, has regularly been justified as turning a summer blockbuster into something more playable, more interactive.
It goes both ways.
The popularity of digital effects has lent many films a game-like sheen. Critics of the action-first plots of so many superhero films could argue the works often look more fun to play than watch. Think of, say, the cartoonish set pieces of "Avengers: Age of Ultron."
But another player has interrupted the love affair between games and film.
Now it's television, specifically our on-demand, binge-watching age, where many recent games have found motiv ation.
Here's why home video and Don Hertzfeldt are underrated, and virtual reality isn't all that revolutionary.
What is a film? The question is not a new one. Not by a long shot.
Though the question seems especially pertinent right at this moment — with ESPN debuting its 7 1/2-hour documentary "O.J.: Made In America" in theaters, doing whatever it takes to qualify the series for the Oscars, film's greatest honor — in fact, this kind of platform fluidity is really nothing new.
There's the case of 1964's "The T.A.M.I Show," short for Teen Age Music International, the fil med record of a once-in-a-lifetime concert at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium that was released into theaters.
The upcoming crime drama "The Night Of" would seem like a prototypical cable show — commissioned by HBO, airing for eight episodes, designed as summer appointment viewing.
Yet look beneath and a film beast stirs. "The Night Of" was co-written by Steven Zallian, an Oscar winner, and stars John Turturro; neither has ever been a key figure on a TV series. Every episode was directed by Zallian — highly atypical for a TV show. The scripts were also all finished before a single moment was shot — unlike much of television, in which writers often stay just an episode or two ahead of production.
If any doubts existed about the project' s film nature, they were wiped away during a visit to "The Night Of's" post-production facilities in New York. Zallian was about to celebrate his anniversary working on the piece, all before the public has even caught the first glimpse of what he was doing. That's creeping into auteur territory.
It's far from the only project that dances across the film-television line. A documentary about O.J. Simpson, a nonfiction take on the celibate Laker A.C. Green from Will Ferrell and Adam McKay, and Chloe Sevigny's more fictional story (one hopes) of a girl who turns into a cat -- all are examples of projects you couldn't, for all the jewels in Blake Lively's closet, slap with a traditional definition.
The Sevigny piece would seem to be a film -- it's made by veteran movie producers and debuting at the Cannes Film Festival. But it's a short, almost like a mini-TV episode. And it will receive its commercial debut on the women's news-and-lifestyle website Refinery29 -- a space not known for cinema
Is it better to have your movie in a theater or to stream it on Amazon, Netflix or other services? For filmmakers, it's a tough decision these days.
When it comes to actually getting a movie in front of an audience, filmmakers face an array of choices that can seem both thrilling and confounding, as deep-pocketed Internet services like Netflix and Amazon and other digital players have aggressively pushed into the movie business and upended long-held ways of doing business.
Here are five prominent films that showcase the choices filmmakers face about how to distribute their work.
As Netflix continues its aggressive push into the movie business — bringing A-listers like Will Smith [1] , Brad Pitt [2] and Angelina Jolie [3] onboard the streaming bandwagon and spending big money to acquire films at festivals like Sundance and Cannes — Chief Content Officer Ted Sarandos lays out his ideas for how the Internet can save Hollywood.
References
- ^ Will Smith (www.latimes.com)
- ^ Brad Pitt (www.latimes.com)
- ^ Angelina Jolie (www.latimes.com)
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