Weekly Reel, April 26
News, Lawrence of Arabia, Hitchcock Posters
First with some news: (these were particularly hard to find because of the flood of “news” articles hyping the Oscars).
Predictably, Gen Z (Americans aged 14-24 surveyed by Deloitte) doesn’t watch TV or movies at home, even less than Millennials as it keeps trending down each generation. The survey question: What is your favorite entertainment activity? For the answer “watch TV shows or movies at home”:
Gen Z: 10%
Millennials: 18%
Gen X: 29%
Boomers: 39%
As is seen here, each generation reduces their at-home TV/movie consumption by 8-10%. This means that over the next decade, as Boomers exit and Gen Z enters the job market and has more disposable income, then DTC streaming content will continue to rise and the apps that are competing for domination now will certainly reap the financial rewards later.
As streaming services continue to rise, that means commercials become less valuable for advertisers. Therefore, they’ll turn to product placement technology to digitally add products into already existing media, including classic films, as well as continuing to use product placement in the big blockbusters. What kind of retroactive product placements would you like to see? Why not go full troll with this idea, like putting a giant billboard for Evian in the desert of Lawrence of Arabia? We may as well have fun with destroying films outside of the original long-dead creators’ control.
Retro-Review: Lawrence of Arabia (David Lean, UK, 1962)
Just last week was the first time I watched Lawrence of Arabia not on the big screen of a theater, at least consciously, because I’m sure I would try to erase any memory of seeing the film on a screen under 1,500 square feet (that’s about 139 square meters for you Euros.) To put it simply, the film almost completely changes its focus/meaning away from the theatrical screen.
If you look at the picture of the desert above, you can barely make out the characters riding camels in the mid-ground. And that’s just for objects in the mid-ground. Of course the purpose of the image is to display the engulfing nature of the landscape, but on a large theatrical screen the characters need not be sacrificed. Small yes, but more like the size of a basketball than an ant. In the film they could achieve this through the use of Super Panavision-70 Cameras, which could project a 70mm print in the theater (the size of which we would more or less refer to as IMAX today). They and the other epic films of the 1950s to early 1960s utilized this large frame film stock and stereo sound because of the competition from television, which was a relatively new but increasingly popular medium. In short, the films had to go for big-loud.
With that thought it mind at the time of its production, Lawrence of Arabia was shot specifically for this aesthetic: sweeping shots of the landscapes and actions scenes accompanied by an equally sweeping orchestral swell that strongly affects the theater-viewer. I remember seeing the film twice at the Castro Theatre in San Francisco and being glued to the image, especially feeling the desert heat because of the amount of light/heat needed to project all that sandy white color onto a large, reflective white screen. Here is how Roger Ebert described a similar feeling with this film:
There is a moment in the film when the hero, a British eccentric named T.E. Lawrence, has survived a suicidal trek across the desert and is within reach of shelter and water, and he turns around and goes back to find a friend who has fallen behind. This sequence builds up to the shot in which the shimmering heat of the desert reluctantly yields the speck that becomes a man - a shot that is held for a long time before we can even begin to see the tiny figure. On television, this shot doesn't work at all - nothing can be seen. In a movie theater, looking at the stark clarity of a 70mm print, we lean forward and strain to bring a detail out of the waves of heat, and for a moment we experience some of the actual vastness of the desert and its unforgiving harshness.
Along with the nearly four-hour running time including an overture and intermission, this is why Lawrence of Arabia feels more like an event than a film, which can’t simply be reduced to a laptop or television screen. Whereas the big-loud films of today rely more on spectacle and grandiose, generic good v. evil stuff, Lawrence uses the desert’s vastness as another character. One that guides Lawrence to find his own identity somewhere between British officer-colonialist and primitive Bedouin. It’s therefore more important to see this rather than whatever megapolis Iron Man is zipping and zooming through.
Since this film has so much ground to cover, here is an article by Deep Focus Review on Lawrence of Arabia, which, as the website title suggests, takes a deep look at the film from its initial inception through to its release, and everything in between from a production-how-it-was-made point of view.
Article: Alfred Hitchcock in His Posters by Adrian Curry
In his latest issue for Movie Poster of the Week on Mubi’s online publication Notebook, Adrian Curry looks at Hitchcock and the many publicity posters for his mid to late-career films. Movie poster nowadays seems trivial, but six decades ago they were vital in selling foot-traffic box-office tickets and informing the public what kind of film it was (i.e., who was starring, directing, or producing it). One of the publicity tactics that Hitchcock used for Psycho fused poster and clever marketing of Hitchcock’s directorial mythos:
But maybe one of its boldest moves was to dictate when people could and should enter a movie theatre to watch a film. Peter Bogdanovich talks about attending the first press screening of Psycho: “As you went in Hitchcock’s voice was blaring on loudspeakers saying ‘Nobody will be allowed in after the picture starts and please don’t reveal the ending.’”
From the dawn of cinema, up through the 1950s, audiences would apparently come and go as they pleased, often entering a film half way through. It seems absurd now to have to state the obvious but for Hitchcock it was essential that audiences watch Psycho from the beginning. (As Hitchcock explained it in an interview “The reason was because the leading lady Janet Leigh was killed off a third of the way through and I didn’t want people whispering to each other ‘When is Janet Leigh coming on?’”). And so these exhortative lobby posters were printed in tandem with the regular A-style theatrical posters which focused on Janet Leigh in her underwear. As Walter Murch says: “It changed the way films are exhibited.” But it also changed the way that Hitchcock movies were promoted.
It’s not that Psycho was the first Hitchcock movie that required audience attention from the get go—it goes without saying that every movie should be watched from the beginning—but the fact is that in 1960 Alfred Hitchcock was the only filmmaker in the world to have the recognition value and the clout to make such an extraordinary demand. Of course as well as putting paid to the Janet Leigh whisperers, the whole thing was really a marketing gimmick: making audiences wonder what they might miss at the beginning of the film is a way of making them want to see the film at all. And the severity of the request (“Any spurious attempts to enter by side doors, fire escapes or ventilating shafts will be met by force”) is obviously tongue-in-cheek.
Coming off his success in the 1950s with Vertigo, Rear Window, North by Northwest, The Man Who Knew Too Much, etc., Hitchcock’s image as the ‘Master of Suspense’ became his own best marketing trick, which he liked to play around with and employ the occasional troll:
The press book for the film came with a special bulletin on “The Care and Handling of Psycho” which stressed the unusual but potentially boffo policy: “We cannot over-emphasize the proved efficiency of these ads in selling tickets and enhancing the importance of Psycho.” But it wasn’t just the no-entry policy that was a game-changing promotional master-stroke, it was the use of Hitchcock himself as the star of his own campaigns.
If you’re a fan of Hitchcock or interested in old, international film poster art, then this article and its poster collection will be of interest. (And with the usual online click-to-another-slide/page-to-see-the-next-image garbage layout!)