Big Picture

As many people are already aware, Cinedigm Digital Cinema’s co-founder A. Dale “Bud” Mayo has retired as chief executive officer and president of the company effective immediately. He will continue as chairman of the board of directors. A search for a successor has begun. I first met Mayo in person in the spring of 2005 at the midnight premiere of Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith. The event was held at Cinedigm’s own Pavilion Digital Showcase Theatre in Brooklyn, New York, which has five 2K-digital cinema screens and, at the time laid claim to being the largest 2K venue in the United States. Then, and now, that venue for that event seems fitting in so many ways for there is simply no question that Bud Mayo played a key role in changing the way exhibitors do business.

I was fortunate enough recently to see the digitally restored complete version of Fritz Lang’s 1927 silent masterpiece Metropolis at the Film Forum in New York City. Following its premiere in Berlin the 153-minute film was substantially edited and the complete film was thought to be lost forever. However, in 2008 Argentine film archivist Fernando Peña found the newly discovered footage, roughly 25 minutes in length, in the archives of the Museo del Cine in Buenos Aires. The film, which will be available on DVD later this year, has clearly stood the test of time and, after 83 years, merits its reputation as one of the great German expressionist works. I encourage everyone to see it while you can on the big screen. It’s playing around the country through the summer. There’s a link at the end of this article to the film’s website where you can find screening times and locations. But although I was caught up in the story throughout the screening, as I sat watching it I couldn’t help think about what Metropolis says about the motion picture industry in the digital cinema era.

You can hardly turn around these days without finding someone with an opinion – and usually a loudly expressed opinion – about stereoscopic 3D. The latest and most notable comes from respected film critic Roger Ebert who wrote an opinion piece in Newsweek magazine entitled Why I Hate 3D (and You Should, too). He makes nine key points in the article and calls them heresies; I call them lies because almost all of them are inaccurate or irrelevant at best and, at worst, untrue.

It was no surprise that stereoscopic 3D was the dominant topic of this year’s National Association of Broadcasters convention and, in particular, of the Digital Cinema Summit, which was held as always the weekend before the main convention gets underway. This is the year of Avatar and the Summit’s theme, after all, was 3D: Cinema & Home (as if all the S3D issues in both those markets are the same). What did surprise me was that seemingly every one of the thousands of exhibitors at the show had some 3D technology to offer and, in a troubling development, everywhere you looked you could find yet another person who claimed to be “a 3D expert.” To me those so-called experts are this spring’s production business equivalent of dandelions: often pretty to look at if you don’t know what they really are but in fact, at best, a nuisance and, at worst, something of a menace. And, as with dandelions, each new day seems to bring even more.