The Godfathers Of Film Take On 3-D*
Scorsese, Coppola and Spielberg are coming out with 3-D movies—just as audiences are showing less interest in the pricey format.
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By MICHELLE KUNG
When Francis Ford Coppola's first 3-D film, "Twixt," premieres next month at the Toronto Film Festival, audiences will be provided with 3-D glasses, but they aren't supposed to wear them for the whole movie. The legendary director of "The Godfather" movies, mindful that the funny spectacles can be uncomfortable for some viewers, decreed that an image should flash on the screen telling the audience when to put them on and take them off.*If you have a pair of 3D glasses, put them on and click into this image.
Photo Illustration by Sean McCabe. Zuma Press (Coppola, Scorsese); Getty Images (Spielberg)
This fall, however, three godfathers of American cinema—Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese and Mr. Coppola—are releasing their first 3-D films. If their movies fall short, skepticism about the format could continue to spike. Or 3-D could clear an important hurdle—respectability.
"You now have some of the greatest filmmakers in the world stepping into the format to tell their stories," says Jeffrey Katzenberg, DreamWorks Animation chief executive and 3-D's most indefatigable evangelist..
The most closely watched 3-D film of the three may be Mr. Scorsese's "Hugo," due out Nov. 23, about a French film pioneer in the early 1900s. The director is known for gritty, critically acclaimed drama—not the format's usual turf.
3-D By the Numbers
- $18 vs. $13.50 3-D ticket price vs. standard price for 'Captain America: The First Avenger' in Manhattan, a 33% difference.
- 38 Number of 3-D releases this year.
- 28 Number planned for next year.
- 70% of U.S. ticket sales for 'Alice in Wonderland' on opening weekend last year were 3-D.
- 43% of opening-weekend sales for 'Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2' this summer were for 3-D tickets.
James Cameron, whose "Avatar" is the highest-grossing film ever and represents 3-D's apogee, believes that films like "Hugo," which don't rely on spectacular special effects to wow audiences, could benefit the most from 3-D.
"If you have a film that's an intimate dramatic story...the incremental improvement in 3-D is profound," Mr. Cameron says. Mr. Scorsese's stature could make 3-D "not just a circus for the masses, but a legitimate part of the cinematic art form."
As movie studios continue to lose money amid declining DVD sales and a murky Internet future, many have looked to 3-D films—and their premium-priced tickets—as a cavalry rescue charge.
Paramount Pictures and Columbia Pictures
'The Adventures of Tintin,' combines 3-D with the 'capture' techniques used in 'Avatar.'
Most moviegoers flocking to the latest "Harry Potter" this summer—57%— were content to see it in 2-D. By contrast, 3-D tickets made up 70% of the domestic seats sold for opening-weekend showings of "Alice in Wonderland" last year; that percentage slipped to just 45% for "Green Lantern," "Kung Fu Panda 2" and "The Smurfs." Overseas, where 3-D was introduced later than in the U.S. and the novelty factor could be helping, demand remains high. "Avatar" reaped 75% of its total gross from 3-D.
The three elder statesmen of the cinema are dabbling in 3-D at different stages of their careers. Mr, Scorsese, 68, is revered by young filmmakers and cineastes but never had much commercial success until recently. Despite making some of the most iconic films of the past half century, Mr. Coppola hasn't had a box-office or critical hit in years, and "Twixt," a gothic thriller about a third-rate writer (Val Kilmer) who gets mixed up in a murder mystery in a small California town, is still seeking a distributor to get it into U.S. theaters after its Toronto festival debut. The film also stars Bruce Dern and Elle Fanning.
Mr. Spielberg is still ubiquitous, with an abiding interest in special effects and children's material. His 3-D effort, "The Adventures of Tintin," coming out Dec. 23, is based on a comic book and will have the splashy release his films are accustomed to.
The Hits and Misses of 3-D
The 3-D films with the highest and lowest domestic grossesThe Hits
'Avatar' (2009): $760.5 million
'Toy Story 3' (2010): $415 million
'Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen' (2009): $402.1 million
'Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2' (2011): $343.1 million
'Alice in Wonderland' (2010): $334.2 million
The Misses
'My Soul to Take' (2010): $14.7 million
'Drive Angry' (2011): $10.7 million
'Hoodwinked Too! Hood vs. Evil' (2011): $10.1 million
'Battle for Terra' (2009): $1.6 million
'X-Games 3-D: The Movie' (2009): $1.4 million
Note: For films that opened at 1,000 theaters or more. Figures include both 2-D and 3-D screenings of the films. Source: Hollywood.com Box Office.Hollywood studios are heavily invested in the format, though, greenlighting a rash of projects in the post-"Avatar" frenzy of early last year. Roughly 30 3-D films are slated for release in 2012, including "The Amazing Spider-Man" and "The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey." Versions in 3-D of several older movies are headed to theaters, too, such as "Titanic" and the first in a series of "Star Wars" re-releases. Movie theaters have also poured money into 3-D, installing new projectors and screens. A nondigital theater costs about $70,000 per screen to convert, plus a 3-D add-on of $20,000 to $30,000 if the equipment is purchased rather than licensed, according to the National Association of Theater Owners.
The financial markets are skeptical. Share prices for 3-D technology companies like RealD, the biggest supplier of 3-D projection systems and eyewear in the U.S., are significantly down. "Consumers are pushing back," says Richard Greenfield, an analyst at brokerage firm BTIG. "They're tired of 3-D, both from a price perspective and from a physical-comfort perspective." He adds that consumers have come to a key realization: A bad film in 3-D is still a bad film.
Nonetheless, many moviemakers are talking like wide-eyed film students at the prospects. At a preview presentation for "Twixt" at Comic-Con, Mr. Coppola said film was still a young art form.
"How dare anyone think all [film] has got up its sleeve is more 3-D where the ticket prices go up?" asked the 72-year-old filmmaker. "Cinema is a baby. Of course we're going to see wonderful innovations come."
Lenny Lipton—a pioneer in stereoscopy, the technical name for 3-D—says that the entry of 3-D into theaters today differs from the way consumers were introduced to previous cinematic innovations. Mr. Lipton points out that while audiences today can opt to see a 3-D film in 2-D, audiences in the 1920s had little choice in the matter when sound was added.
"You saw a movie the way it was made," he says. He also points out that adjusting to the equipment can be difficult. Like 1950s-era Technicolor cameras that were the size of refrigerators, today's 3-D rigs can be awkward to operate and require specialized training and accumulated experience to be able to produce creatively shot 3-D films.
"Three-D is experiencing growing pains," Mr. Lipton says.
Three-D advocates say the best cure for that is more big-name filmmakers embracing the technique. Next year alone will see stereoscopic films from 3-D first-timers like Ang Lee directing "Life of Pi" and Ridley Scott on his new "Alien" movie, "Prometheus." Mr. Scott recently said at Comic-Con that he enjoyed the process so much, he would "never work without 3-D again, even for small dialogue scenes."
Mr. Scorsese took "Hugo" from "The Invention of Hugo Cabret," a children's novel inspired by the life of early film pioneer Georges Méliès. His 11-year-old daughter and fellow "young people" suggested he make it in 3-D. Actors Jude Law, Emily Mortimer and Asa Butterfield (as young Hugo) were cast.
It was particularly well suited to the format because it was set in a 1931 Paris train station, Mr. Scorsese says. Between "the machines of the trains, the mechanisms of the clocks [in the train station] and the projectors of the cinema," the film seemed to "cry out for the extra element of space and depth."
Mr. Scorsese hired Vince Pace, Mr. Cameron's director of photography on "Avatar," to build the 3-D camera systems for the film. Mr. Pace says he began working with Mr. Scorsese's crew early in the process and flew to the London set 10 days before the start of principal photography. One of his main goals, he says, was to alleviate the crew's anxiety about using 3-D—an unease that affected even Mr. Scorsese.
"There was a lot of concern about the 3-D in the beginning," Mr. Pace says. (All Mr. Scorsese would say on this subject was, "I worried about everything.") Mr. Pace says he walked Mr. Scorsese and his cinematographer through the mechanics of shooting certain scenes in 3-D. Directors have always worked with multiple dimensions through lighting and camera angles, he told them. Three-D is just a new way of capturing the same thing, he says.
During production, 3-D monitors were placed around the set so the filmmakers could constantly tinker with the look of the film. Some films that skipped this process, because they were rushed or added 3-D to 2-D after the film was shot, were panned for bad visuals.
Mr. Scorsese took to the format, and it became a running joke for him to say, "Don't skimp on the pâté," as a reference to keep pushing the depth of 3-D in various scenes, says Demetri Portelli, the "Hugo" stereographer. Mr. Scorsese also screened several older 3-D titles for his cast and crew, including Alfred Hitchcock's "Dial M for Murder." He used the film mostly to study how actors appeared in the frame to the audience.
He says he realized that 3-D combines theater and film together. "The actors become like a moving sculpture," Mr. Scorsese says. "This brings it out, particularly in the faces of the actors, the drama."
Paramount Pictures and GK Films
Mr. Scorsese's 11-year-old daughter told him to make 'Hugo' in 3-D.
Mr. Spielberg says in an email that the decision to make "The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn" in 3-D was inseparable from deciding to make the film using "performance capture" for the first time. That technique was used in "Avatar" and in the current "Rise of the Planet of the Apes."
"I felt safe letting this medium be my first foray into the 3-D world," Mr. Spielberg says.
During moments of particularly intense on-screen action, he wrote, increasing the depth of the 3-D imagery helped "increase the excitement." He then would "narrow the effect" as the action slowed.
Mr. Scorsese, ever the film historian, recalls that when color first came in during the mid-1930s, "it was looked upon as a selling point but not for serious films...the two-color technicolor was used for outdoor films, and particularly for musicals." It took years for color to become the standard.
"There's no reason why, for lack of a better phrase, "serious films" couldn't be done in 3-D," says Mr. Scorsese. "There really is no reason for it except for technical limitations. As far as audience acceptance is concerned, it's just a matter of time until things get a little more easy in terms of glasses versus no glasses and other issues."
"You'll see," he says. "It's going to be quite extraordinary."
Write to Michelle Kung at michelle.kung@wsj.com
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