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A Second Chance for 3-DTrilogies are done. CGI is ho-hum. Now Hollywood directors are tapping into the third-dimension—starting with Angelina Jolie in Beowulf. Wired 15.11, November 2007  BEOWULF USED TO BE a Hollywood punch line, the cry agents uttered when confronted by arty screenwriters with an idea: “Oh God, just tell me it’s not Beowulf!” So it was a particular triumph when two such scribes, indie filmmaker Roger Avary and graphic novelist Neil Gaiman, took the stage at Comic-Con last summer to introduce … Beowulf, Robert Zemeckis’ 3-D retelling of the primordial Anglo-Saxon monster epic. “It’s the oldest story in the English language,” Gaiman proudly declared as he introduced the only reel that had been completed. “Told,” Avary put in, “with the most modern technology available.” Wearing special glasses that looked like the shades Tom Cruise wore in Risky Business, the audience sat rapt through scenes of menace and mayhem that rivaled anything in The Lord of the Rings. But the spine-tingling moments weren’t when Ray Winstone, playing Beowulf, thrusts his sword at the audience—a 3-D cliché from the ’50s. They came when he faces Angelina Jolie, the digitally enhanced mother of the monstrous Grendel, in a dank and forbidding cave. Jolie makes for a stunningly seductive sorceress, which makes it all the more shocking when her features morph momentarily into a death’s head. A 3-D sword can make you duck, no question. But 3-D is even better at sucking you in—into the endless shadows of a cave, or into the vortex of a shrieking face. The following day, the screenwriters were ecstatic. “It was like a third eye opened up in my forehead,” gushed Avary, who was already plotting out Beowulf when he wrote Pulp Fiction with Quentin Tarantino a decade ago. “It’s so large and extraordinary and hyperreal that I can’t be anything but giddy. When I left the theater, I wanted the rest of the world to look like that.” Hollywood is betting that will feel the same way. More than 50 years after its first run, 3-D is staging a comeback—this time in digital hi-def. Once a nausea-inducing fad, it’s now touted as the biggest gun yet in Hollywood’s ever-growing arsenal of effects. When Beowulf comes out in November, it will premiere on nearly 1,000 3-D screens—the most ever. nearly every studio has a 3-D project on its production slate. DreamWorks Animation president Jeffrey Katzenberg has announced that all releases from his shop from 2009 on will be in 3-D. New Line is working on a live-action 3-D remake of Journey to the Center of the Earth. Twentieth Century Fox plans to release Avatar, James Cameron’s first feature since Titanic, in 3-D. “It’s a bigger quantum leap than talkies,” declares Fox co-chairman Jim Gianopoulos. “Talkies were an evolution of the medium. This is a complete transformation of the medium.” In the early ’50s, when Hollywood first pinned its hopes on the third dimension, studio chiefs were desperate to win audiences back from television. So they tricked out a run of B pictures—Bwana Devil, It Came from Outer Space, Vincent Price’s House of Wax—with what was then the latest gimmick. It worked for awhile, but the novelty faded because the herky-jerky analog technology behind it sent moviegoers home with throbbing heads and queasy stomachs. Now, Hollywood is once again up against new media—videogames, the Internet, home theatre systems—and struggling to dazzle a moviegoing public accustomed to multi-million dollar computer generated effects. But this time, the move to 3-D is being driven by a handful of blockbuster directors, Robert Zemeckis and James Cameron chief among them. “They’re all feeding off each other,” says Steve Starkey, the Oscar-winning producer who’s been Zemeckis’s partner for two decades. “Jim dreams in 3-D, but they’re all pushing it.” The push began years ago, when Cameron, flush with profits from Titanic and bored with conventional moviemaking, began developing a stereoscopic camera system to shoot undersea documentaries in 3-D for Imax. Then, when Zemeckis was making an Imax 3-D version of The Polar Express, Peter Jackson stopped by his facility in Santa Barbara and was wowed by the way it sucked you into the picture. Zemeckis’ friend Steven Spielberg became a convert the same way. Now, Spielberg and Jackson are planning a 3-D trilogy based on the Belgian comic book series The Adventures of Tintin; Zemeckis is planning a 3-D performance-capture version of A Christmas Carol, with Jim Carrey as Scrooge; and Cameron is deep in production on Avatar, which may be the most eagerly anticipated 3-D movie of all. For A-list directors like these, 3-D is a compelling for a number of reasons. The people who make industrial-scale spectaculars want their audiences to get the full wallop. That's something they can only deliver at the multiplex, and for the moment, at least, 3-D is something you can only experience in theaters. There’s an economic incentive as well, since Hollywood accounting gives directors a much bigger chunk of the box-office take than of DVD revenues. Most of all, however, 3-D is an entirely new tool for storytelling. Like light and sound, it can alter a mood or highlight a moment—once you learn how to use it. “It’s a new frontier,” Cameron declares. “Everybody’s doing it differently. Peter Jackson’s doing it his way, I’m doing it my way. There’s no right or wrong. But do you feel ill after a screening, or do you feel pretty good? We know how to achieve the latter.” Queasiness has been a problem because of the way 3-D works. Just as the perception of depth comes from seeing with two eyes, the illusion of 3-D comes from shooting with two cameras—in stereo, in other words. But if those cameras are even slightly out of synch, as analog cameras almost inevitably will be, the brain gets disoriented. With the stereoscopic camera system he developed with Sony's professional division in Japan, Cameron brought live-action 3-D into the digital age. With computer-generated 3-D—which Zemeckis pioneered in collaboration with the effects technicians at Sony Pictures Imageworks—the illusion of 3-D is achieved by rendering a second camera. Either way, viewers are watching dual images that are projected simultaneously, with polarized glasses that enable them to see one image with one eye and the other image with the other. But just as analog camera systems can easily get out of synch, so can analog projection systems. In order to show 3-D properly, theaters have to switch to digital projection systems—an overhaul they have long resisted. Finally, after years of arguing, the studios have agreed to shoulder most of the cost. The prospect of a big box-office take for 3-D films gives multiplex owners the motivation to pick up the rest of the tab. “Once theater owners realize there are enough huge filmmakers releasing 3-D content,” says Starkey, “digital cinema will expand, and 3-D will be everywhere.” A WARM FALL DALL IN MONTREAL finds Jim Cameron on an crowded soundstage at Mel’s Cité du Cinéma, checking out the shoot of Journey 3-D. Directed by Eric Brevig, a 3-D enthusiast who spent years at George Lucas’ Industrial Light & Magic, Journey is the first live-action feature film to be made with the current incarnation of the stereoscopic camera system Cameron has developed. Nearby sits a golf cart with a strange-looking apparatus on top—the optical units from a pair of souped-up Sony F950 hi-def video cameras, with a huge loop of fiber-optic cable connecting them to the camera bodies in a tent nearby. In 1996, when Cameron was shooting his first stereoscopic picture, the 12-minute Universal theme park attraction T2 3-D: Battle Across Time, he had a camera rig so ponderous that Arnold Schwarzenegger’s stunt double was forced to run at half-speed so the camera could keep up. Today, using his own system, the camera itself goes full-tilt—or at least, it’s supposed to. “This is an interesting beta test,” Cameron explains. For months, he’s been planning Avatar, a $195 million science fiction/ Affixed to the wall at the other end of the soundstage is the bottom half of an enormous, toothy, fiberglass dinosaur skull. Strapped inside are the star, Brendan Fraser, and two child actors. The script calls for the skull to be shot like a rocket from inside a volcano—and then just as quickly fall back in again. To capture this on tape, Brevig has decided to mount Cameron’s stereo camera on the golf cart, drive the cart at top speed toward the wall, and then shift into reverse to simulate the fallback. On cue, the cart hurtles forward. Fraser and the kids scream and thrash about. At the last possible instant, the cart halts abruptly and begins to pull back. All the while, the camera operator has been adjusting not just the focus but the convergence—the point at which the right and left camera eyes come together. To anyone schooled in analog 3-D, this is revolutionary. With analog film cameras, including the refrigerator-sized units used to shoot in 3-D for theme parks and Imax releases, directors couldn’t see where the dual images converged until the film was developed. As a result, shots had to be mathematically plotted far in advance. But with video cameras—whether the stereo rig developed by Cameron and his partner Vince Pace, or a rival system developed by ex-Cameron associate Steve Schklair of the Burbank firm 3ality—directors can see the convergence in real time and forget the math. “Jim’s edict is, Throw out the rules,” says Pace. “If it looks good onscreen, don’t tell me the math is wrong.” Cameron is a Hollywood renegade with dual identities: bankable director of blockbuster megahits when he feels like it, totally obsessive technology geek when he doesn’t. “After Titanic, I realized I could do what I’d always wanted to do,” he says. “Not in a self-indulgent sense, but I could take a break and do all the things I had turned away from earlier—when I wanted to be a scientist, when I wanted to be an explorer.” It began in 2000, when Cameron was writing a film for Imax 3-D about an expedition to Mars. He didn’t want to be weighed down by the Imax camera rig, so he started fiddling with high-definition video cameras with Pace, a videocam specialist and deep-sea diving expert who’d worked on his productions for years. “And then I decided, Hey, let’s not do a fictional story about exploration,” he recalls. “Let’s go exploring! So we went off on a five-year detour, and out of that came this toolset.” To finance their explorations, Cameron found someone else obsessed with 3-D: Cary Granat, president of Walden Media, a production company backed by Colorado oil-and-telecom tycoon Philip Anschutz. Granat, a longtime studio exec, had fled the teen horror genre after accidentally popping his Scream dailies into his daughter’s VCR on her second birthday. Perhaps as atonement, he hoped to pioneer 3-D as a new form of immersive entertainment—so he agreed to bankroll two underwater documentaries, Ghosts of the Abyss (2003) and Aliens of the Deep (2005). Next, Cameron met with Mitsuru Ohki, the head of Sony’s professional camera unit. Ohki had just developed the HD camera George Lucas was using to shoot Attack of the Clones, the Star Wars movie that would usher cinematography into the digital age. Cameron persuaded him to build a stereoscopic version based on Vince Pace’s designs. As soon as it came in, they went diving. While Cameron was shooting three miles below the surface, Zemeckis was pioneering performance capture on an LA sound stage. He was already well into production on The Polar Express when Imax asked if he’d consider doing a 3-D version. “We did a test,” says Starkey, “and we said, ‘Wow!’ We’d never seen anything so spectacular.” Audiences agreed: When the picture opened in November 2004, people stood in line to see the Imax version while regular theaters sat half-empty. Imax brought in a fifth of the picture’s domestic box-office receipts, even though it accounted for fewer than 2 percent of the screens it played on. But as long as 3-D was limited to a few dozen specially-configured Imax theaters, most people would never see it. At that point, the only alternative 3-D format was anaglyph, an inferior color-filter technology Robert Rodriguez had used to show his teen videogame picture Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over. Then Cameron discovered that the DLP projectors in digital theaters were capable of projection speeds so fast they could flash dual images all but simultaneously. That meant a stereoscopic movie could be screened using one projector instead of two—a must for theater owners. Cameron went to Josh Greer, the young exec in charge of 3-D at Walden: “I started saying, ‘Josh! Josh! Josh! 3-D! We can do it! We can have a projector in every theater in the world!’” Greer got so pumped he quit Walden and started his own company, Real D, to make it work. In March 2005, Cameron took his campaign to the theater owners. At ShoWest, the movie-theater expo in Las Vegas, Zemeckis, Lucas, and Rodriguez joined him onstage in 3-D shades to show footage from Ghosts of the Abyss and The Polar Express, plus “dimensionalized” versions of 2-D releases like Star Wars and The Lord of the Rings. Peter Jackson pledged his support via video from New Zealand, where he was working on King Kong. Lucas announced plans to convert the entire Star Wars epic—“that old group of films I did so long ago in a galaxy far away”—to 3-D. Not everybody was impressed: “It’s a fad,” one studio distribution chief told Variety. But proof is in the ticket sales, and Disney, then completing its first 3-D feature since 1953, was eager to find out. When Chicken Little came out in November 2005, it played in about 100 3-D screens. On a per-screen average—a key figure in Hollywood—those theaters did nearly three times the box office of conventional theaters. Sony’s Monster House, a performance-capture feature produced by Zemeckis, Starkey, and Spielberg, opened in July 2006 and did even better in 3-D than Chicken Little. Last spring, the 3-D release of Disney’s Meet the Robinsons accounted for more than a third of its $98 million domestic gross—even though it played on only 16 percent of its screens. And the 3-D treatment of Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas averaged more than $24,000 per screen its opening weekend—pretty impressive for a picture that was originally released more than a decade ago. So with Beowulf, says Starkey, “the question wasn’t, Are we going to do it in 3-D? It was, how many screens can we get?” By the time Avatar and DreamWorks’ Monsters vs. Aliens premiere in spring 2009, there should be 4,000 3-D screens across the country. Meanwhile, consumer-electronics manufacturers are eager to take 3-D to the hi-def home theatre market: Samsung has just introduced rear-projection DLP television sets with 3-D capability. So the question could soon become not, How much 3-D can we get? but, How much can we take? Beowulf came out of Comic-Con with major buzz, but eventually the thrill will fade. When it does, one of two things will happen. “Over time,” says Jim Gianopoulos of Fox, “there’s no reason why every film couldn’t be in 3-D, any more than you would make a silent movie.” Either that, or it could disappear all over again. Digital technology has eliminated 3-D’s most egregious side-effects—the nausea, the headaches, the irresistible impulse to flee the room. But one problem still remains: those glasses. The basic technology that would do away with them was patented in Sweden in 1908, but no one has yet figured out how to make it work—and by most accounts, it will be years before they do. Then there’s the question of what will happen when 3-D trickles down to filmmakers who aren’t at the level of people like Cameron and Zemeckis. What 92 percent of us find perfectly normal in life—seeing in three dimensions—requires a feat of illusion in art. “Bob instinctively shoots in 3-D,” Starkey says. “He sets up shots where there’s a convergence coming at you and it comes right off the screen”—like the train screeching to a halt directly in front of the camera in The Polar Express. “But you can do it improperly and make it feel gimmicky. I think, the subtler the better.” Hollywood, however, has never been much for subtlety—so when the schlockmeisters get hold of 3-D, get ready to duck. |
Close Enough To TouchA slate of eye-popping 3-D flicks is coming your way. Beowulf Paramount Robert Zemeckis reinvents the Anglo-Saxon epic as a sword-and-sandals monster movie. Journey 3-D New Line Cinema Jules Verne's sci-fi adventure Journey to the Center of the Earth gives James Cameron's stereo camera a test run. Coraline Universal/ Neil Gaiman's children's novel gets the stop-motion treatment, amped up by 3-D. Monsters vs. Aliens DreamWorks Animation The minds behind Shrek 2 and Shark Tale do an animated update on classic 1950s sci-fi. Avatar Fox James Cameron's splashy $195 million blockbuster wants to be the Titanic of sci-fi flicks. A Christmas Carol Walt Disney Robert Zemeckis gets in the Christmas spirit — now in 3-Dickens! |
