Coffee With Jordan Cronenweth

Jordan Cronenweth, ASC

The new motion picture release of Blade Runner 2049 is out in theaters now, and it's got me thinking a lot about the 1982 original directed by Ridley Scott and famously photographed by the late cinematographer Jordan Cronenweth, ASC (his credits include Rattle and Hum, Peggy Sue Got Married, Altered States, Zandy’s Bride, Brewster McCloud). 

Which also has me remembering the time, many decades ago, when I had the chance to spend two days on the same film crew with Mr. Cronenweth. 

I was a working member of the Colorado film community during the middle 1980’s and started out as the video assist technician. “Video Assist” was infamously pioneered by the late filmmaker Jerry Lewis to facilitate both directing himself and performing in the same movie. The process involved a small black-and-white video camera mounted onto the body of the 35mm movie camera. Since motion picture film required overnight processing and printing before anyone could see the actual image, it became standard practice to rely on this low-resolution television signal from a “tap” on the film camera’s viewfinder. Such a poor electronic proxy was adequate to review actors’ performances or rough check framing and composition, but that was about it.

Photo: John Brawley

My job as the “video assist operator” was to hook everything up, string the cables around the set and make sure all the various TV screens worked, including a feed to a separate corral for account execs, client reps, visitors and other bigwigs with their own TV monitor. It let the various elite visitors see what was going down without looking over the cameraman’s shoulder or disturbing the director. Whenever the film camera moved to a new set-up, I was first to untether the video electronics from the cinematographer’s Panavision or Arriflex camera, pull all my wires out of the way, move to the next set-up and then (at the very last moment) reconnect everything so those executive hanger-ons in the peanut gallery had something to look at again.

Photo: Ogilvy / Mather for Maxwell House

Mine was a minor technical contribution to be sure, but it allowed me to stand beside a number of famous Hollywood cameramen who would earn good money between big features by shooting high end commercials for network television. One sponsor was Maxwell House, which for several years during the middle 1980s ran the ad campaign featuring fictional Hal and Duke. 

The high concept revolved around a young photographer wandering across country with his faithful golden lab retriever. The director on these commercials was Leslie Dektor for the Ogilvy and Mather agency, and one of their shoots brought Hal, Duke, and the Maxwell House production team to Colorado. Cinematographer for this spot was none other than Jordan Cronenweth, who only a couple years earlier had lensed the original and now iconic Blade Runner.

Photo: Ogilvy / Mather for Maxwell House

Somewhere outside Aspen, the agency’s storyboards would find Hal (in reality, the LA soap actor Rick Gates) and his dog Duke (portrayed by Tramp from the famous animal trainer Frank Inn) visiting a mountain log cabin bathed in early light of dawn. Morning sunshine, of course, always means coffee time.  As the cinematographer Cronenweth brought most of his camera package and crew from Hollywood but trucks of lighting, grip and support gear were hired out of near by Denver. I was on roster to wrangle video assist set-ups for the two day filming schedule. Since the lights and support were “local” the chief lighting technician was an experienced Colorado veteran who owned a notable lighting services corporation that famously served the Rocky Mountain film industry. We’ll call him “Ken”.

Day One was all exterior shots involving just Hal and his dog, with Day Two booked for a mountain cabin interior where Hal and Duke would stop for a visit and savor the required cup, allowing for the prerequisite “that’s good coffee” ahh-ha tasting moment, wrapping with the traditional “hero shot” of a Maxwell House can placed by the fireplace. While the primary crew worked outdoors the first afternoon, Ken and team prerigged lights for the cabin’s interior. Early the second morning, I was there when Mr. Cronenweth first walked in to check the cabin lighting setup.

Cronenweth during that period was a giant among Hollywood cameramen, often referred to as “the cinematographer’s cinematographer”:

Photo: Warner Brothers Studios

This reputation was not lost on any of us local technicians and Ken had worked above and beyond coming up with a lighting set-up designed to impress this iconic director of photography... the cabin's interior sparkled with key and fill and back lighting.

Jordan stood and looked at the set up, taking it in, sizing up the photographic possibilities. After a long pause he suggested one light may not be needed and Ken’s crew took it away. “And that one, too” he said.  Slowly, gently, methodically Cronenweth whittled down the floods and fresnels, striking them all from the set. Finally, Jordan asked Ken to bring up one monster brute fixture... and position it outside of the cabin, shining in through the open door. By now, all of the first day’s pre lighting effort had been almost completely removed, a complicated and sophisticated pre-rig stripped nakedly down to this one giant arc fixture. 

 “Aim it on the cabin floor,” Cronenweth requested quietly.

Ken hesitated just a bit, confirming the request even as a couple grips moved to comply. “Really, on the floor?” Jordan nodded, and asked for a large piece of white foam board placed on the floor, bouncing the strong light beam upward from below the camera lens. Suddenly, the cabin’s interior fluttered to life. Make-believe sunlight perfectly evoked the mood of a mountain morning. It was simple, sublime and magical.

Commented Cronenweth almost as an aside, “Light doesn’t always need to come from above.” “Let’s shoot,” hollered the assistant director.

Photo: IEC, Jordan Cronenweth, 1935-1996

Jordan Cronenweth passed away in 1996 at the age of 61, a victim of Parkinson’s disease. But he’d given me one of several defining moments in my own eventual career arc toward Director of Photography. With that one light he redefined the compass direction our cabin set faced, to the east... because only that orientation would catch the nearly horizontal early rays of dawn. And he demonstrated the power of really paying attention to lighting's sources.  Though we may spend nearly all of the day with the sun high overhead, there are still transitory moments where nature handles things differently. Where the light doesn't always come from above.  He showed me the power of motivating your sources. 

But you must first be aware, and pay attention to your natural surrounding to notice this. And I got a chance to observe his approach to working with the crew, even if they were local hires. Witnessing him request and never demand. Learning about previsualization, how to see the composition first in your own mind and then work on the set with your team to paint that by adding light and shadow.

And how that just like a god, you can do it all with only using one light... if you know where to place it.

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Boy, Interrupted and the Sumatran Monkey Trap

I’m sensitive to moments.  Special moments that carry significance and weight.  Bizarre moments almost unreal in their experiential influence.

Once on a movie set, I had a true out-of-body experience when a high-strung freelance make-up artist absolutely laid into me, verbally ripping a new one when I asked an innocent question regarding my lighting and how it was affecting the star’s makeup. Even as the verbal tirade progressed, my consciousness floated up above the stage floor and into the lighting grid where I found myself staring back down at the confrontation between me and that irate cosmetologist.

Photo: Lambert and Company

Such “special points in time” mark lessons or conceptual breakthroughs, those so-called “learning moments” too good to miss.  They need not be carefully structured and don’t always require a classroom.  Some of the best ones happen alone and in private, or at least when in some internal zen state where its impact blankets out all surrounding distractions.  I explicitly remember a few teaching moments from my own youth… why you never grab for a feral farm kitten or what happens when you stir acetone with a plastic milkshake spoon salvaged from some drive-in burger joint.
   
In my later years I instructed at the International Film and TV Workshops in Rockport, Maine; later at the Media Technology Institute in Golden, Colorado; and eventually as professor in the broadcasting program at Metropolitan State University of Denver. I know there are many different types of learners, and students who will do best within a specific approach to instruction.  Experiential learning is especially significant in the broadcasting field.

Although now retired, that’s why the following scene had such an impact upon me:

Photo: Whole Foods Market

Weekly shopping chores brought Lynne and me to our favorite local market, that natural and organic chain recently snapped up by online giant Amazon. The latent hunter-gatherer within enjoys these treks, where I can prowl produce and chart charcuterie. This store’s cheese section often has tasting bites available from small stainless steel dishes, with tongs for picking up the morsels without fingers.  It was there that I found myself second-in-line to try a bite of the Herve Mons Camembert. Directly in front of me in the tasting line was a small boy, perhaps first-grade, and a slightly older brother, both joining their mother in the grocery expedition. 

I’d actually run into this young tow-headed pair earlier in bulk foods, where the two youths grabbed a single plastic bag and busily filled it with scoops from each and every nut and chocolate bin in the section, while mother shopped elsewhere. Mentioning to these kids that each item was SKU’d and priced separately did briefly flit through my brain, but instead I elected to just observe.  When one morsel missed their bag and spilled to the floor, they were quick to snatch the treat and appeared ready to pop it directly into their mouths.  Instinctively, my brain stem evaluated application of the three-second rule, but instead I merely blurted aloud “nice catch, no waste” as they swallowed. They’ll learn later, I thought to myself.

Photo: Whole Foods Market

But, back to the present offering of cheese samples. Mom was some distance away, examining boxes of imported crackers and older brother was gleefully rearranging summer sausage price tags. Alone immediately in front of me, the youngest reached for a bite. Tightly clutched in his left hand was a large box of organic goldfish crackers, his selection for mom's shopping cart, and with his right hand he used the tongs to properly pinch one camembert cube.  But, you see, with both his hands occupied with clutching and holding, there’s no way to transfer the cheese from the tongs into his mouth.  I saw him pause.  This was going to be a learning moment, I thought. 

Instinctively, his right arm (with the captured morsel) started toward his mouth, which slightly opened but then closed again as his hand came to a stop.  I do give him credit, he’d been taught the sanitary pitfalls that come from eating with the serving utensil. But what to do?  He held the pale yellow bite, hesitating.  I watched, waiting to see how this crisis might resolve itself. I sensed his dilemma, the conundrum of the moment. Let go of the prized crackers to free up a receiving hand for the sample? Or forego the tasting altogether? 

In this moment, I flashed on the old tale of the Sumatran Monkey Trap.

Photo: SurprisinglyBrave.com

Common to many cultures (and centuries before Robert Pirsig repeated it in his tome on Zen and motorcycles) this fable describes catching monkeys without harming them. Basically, the process involves either a hollowed-out gourd or even a glass bottle, filled with nuts or sweets or other monkey goodies. The secret is the precise size of the hole in the gourd or the neck of the bottle. The baited container is chained down in a clearing and before long, curious monkeys appear. The boldest will slide their open hand down inside the bottle or gourd to grasp a handful of treats, but in clutching the prize their fist becomes too large to pull out of the container. Simian greed (a well known trait) prevents the animal from escaping because it refuses to drop the reward in order to pull it’s own hand out of the trap.

Photo: AZ Press

The monkey isn't incapable of learning from the experience, but the capture technique is so successful apes seldom get a second chance (although in Central America there's an old adage that translates roughly into “the experienced monkey doesn’t put his hand in a bottle.”)  But human children are active learners, able to set simple goals, to plan and revise. Cognitive development involves acquisition of perceptions regarding structure, numerical order and basic physics. Cognitive development requires remembering these outcomes to understand and solve future problems. 

Back to the emerging learning moment unfolding in front of me...  I could see him pause to process. You could almost hear the gears spinning in his monkey brain. He leaned back a bit, as though distancing himself from the puzzle might help. He was on the precipice of a primordial learning moment. His head cocked quizzically.  Silently, I connected and sent encouraging mental vibes. “Your choice will matter. You must decide, and in your decision comes self-actualization. Yes, little dude, yes!” 

And then… “Here honey, give me the box.” 

His mother steps in, dutifully saves the day, blindly rescues the child but hopelessly destroys the developmental moment.  Yet, I don’t blame mom.  Perhaps she just instinctively did what moms must do.  I applaud how she allowed what might have been a domestic chore to become instead an experiential field trip. And this was imported fromage he wanted to try, not an effing Velveeta brick. In context, her boys were actually quite well behaved in public.  

Photo: Capital City Pediatric Dentistry

But I was struck how hovering at a distance, holding back and silently observing from afar needs to be one of the parenting tools. Cognitive learning opportunities often come in moments of intellectual, if not physical, solitude. That’s when it’s both your decision and your consequence. The parental rescue of “here honey, always let me help” has its place... but like the glow of electronic device screens or the hysterical disclaimers from product warning labels on the most innocent of products... caution too can be sometimes overused.

That’s what I learned.

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Blood Relations and My Brush With Obscurity

This blog gets personal … in the original context of the term.
   
My fractured career arc took me through newspapers into radio, over-the-air television, film and video production with side trips including rock-n-roll tours, lighting direction, facility design and even university professor. Starting in high school with live event theatre, I always favored the shadows backstage more than the spotlight out front. I tried both sides of the curtain but always found myself most comfortable as one of the uncredited backstage workers, part of the crew behind the scenes. Most often earning little acknowledgment and even less program credit.  We were a loose family of craft persons, stagehands, grips and carnies all toiling in obscurity, driven by love of the business more than rather meager paychecks.

Of course, along the way we’d work with actors, toiling within pretty much the same “don’t know your name, but hey there again” status.  Aspiring performers in supporting roles, bit players, dancers, uncredited extras and stand-ins.  Artists making a career working without becoming famous.  Cast or crew, I could relate. 

That’s why it was a mind warp to recently discover a blood relation kin who’d spent the 1930s through the 1950s in Hollywood, scratching out a living as an actress, extra and bit player. With a click she appeared, right there in my family tree as my second-cousin, a couple generations removed.  Her name was Yvonne Bowman.

I uncovered Yvonne’s existence while working on genealogy and building out my family history using that big subscription research service, that “A-word" company you see advertising on holiday television commercials.  My genealogy hobby started back about five years ago, so I already had the family members of my father’s maternal grandmother, my great grandmother Mary Anna Jensen (1869-1937).  One of her contemporaries was her brother Albert Jensen, whose own family included three sons and four daughters, one of which was Della Grace Jensen (1893-1973).  I’d researched that Della married one Lee Bowman in 1911 near Tulsa, Oklahoma and the couple gave birth to two daughters – Bessie Ann, born in 1913 and Yvonne Della, borne in 1915.  Unfortunately, mom and dad divorced around 1923, with Yvonne and her father moving out to Hollywood.

By the 1930's Yvonne Della Bowman was living in Los Angeles and finding small, uncredited screen appearances as a dancer or crowd extra. Thanks to the American Film Institute Online Database, I unearthed one very brief credit for Yvonne in 1936's 20th Century Fox musical “Under Your Spell” starring Lawrence Tibbett and Wendy Barrie, marking the first effort by German immigrant Otto Preminger directing an American film.

At some point in promoting her career, Yvonne posed for a portrait -- known in the trade as a “head shot” – and spent hard-earned coin going straight to Hollywood master photographer Max Munn Autrey.  Autrey was the real deal, becoming famous with his images of stars Charlie Chaplin and Clara Bow.  Working primarily for 20th Century Fox, he later joined Witzel Photography in downtown L.A. before opening his own studio in 1932, Hollywood Filmograph at Sunset and La Brea Avenue:

And did any copies of his long-forgotten portrait of one obscure Hollywood bit player actually survive?  Yes!  And thank you, internet:

Yvonne Della Bowman, 1915 - 1996

Most motion picture studio production files from the era are long lost, although other clues popped up, including a couple of production stills from the 1939 Paramount release “Honeymoon in Bali” starring Fred MacMurray, Madeleine Carrol and Allan Jones. I’d searched Google for any reference to “Yvonne Bowman” and an original studio press release was on eBay, with identifying caption: “Those Honeymoon In Bali UUUUUMFFF Girls… They’ve got what it takes!”  Of course, this was late 1930s when scandalous costumes meant full-length sarongs and off-the-shoulder shawls. Yet there was cousin Yvonne, second from left. The movie was now over 70 years old, I wondered if the studio bothered to renew the film copyright, and guess what … Paramount dropped the ball. “Honeymoon in Bali” had entered public domain which of course meant someone, somewhere, had uploaded the entire flick to YouTube.  

And I was right.  I pulled down the YouTube file, and scrubbed through every scene.  Then at one hour and twenty minutes, as Madeleine Carrol’s character returned to the island to confront Fred MacMurray, her character’s march to the grass shack is interrupted by three “native” Bali islanders crossing the road. The second woman, balancing basket on head exactly like in the studio press photo is my second cousin, twice removed, Yvonne Bowman:

Percy Lazelle, 1907 - 2000

She briefly made the newspapers when she sued a California horse stable following a riding accident, only to have the defendant die just as her case came to trial... all this thanks to my subscription to Newspapers.com.  Yvonne married a Hollywood dancer and talent agent named Percy Lazelle (real surname "Muehling") in 1941. “Perk” achieved minor notoriety as an extra with non-speaking bit parts, including a small role as the attorney’s clerk in the 1945 Oscar winner “Mildred Pierce.” TV work included "Alfred Hitchcock Presents" and "The Red Skelton Show." The couple eventually retired from La-La Land, splitting time between Arizona and California, where Yvonne passed on May 26, 1996.

There’s awesome impact that comes with sitting here at my iMac, well into the 21st century, and using the internet to discover and connect with a distant relative who, two generations before me, had also struggled to survive in the entertainment industry. Then as now, it was a life of just showing up and doing the job, making a living but never getting famous. My computer feels kinda like a cyber time travel machine.  In one brief moment, sitting in my home office, I connect across three-quarters of a century and identify with a late fellow traveler and blood relation in this crazy business.

Here’s to you, second-cousin Yvonne. 

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Hold My Avocado

One college broadcasting class I taught was "Electronic Media and Society," a survey course of communication, platforms, how each developed and in some cases such as the telegraph, what new medium came along to kill or replace it.

Image provided by fhwa.gov

Central was whether a specific technology was built on “point to point” or “point to many” communication.  The pony express was exclusively point to point.  Same for the original postal service and for dial-up telephones.  All sharing a goal of delivering one specific message …  call it “content”... to another single receiver or customer.

But other media emerged from “point to many” where one message or packet of information was for general consumption to anyone who could pick it up.  We all got the same content. Think of smoke signals, printed books and newspapers, old-style billboards, broadcast radio and over the air television.  One message going out to anyone who had the decoder to receive it ... whether electronic device or just plain old human ears and eyeballs.

What made the emergence of the Internet so disruptive to mass communications was that for the first time in history, one medium had the technology to be BOTH point-to-point AND point-to-many at the same time.  I can send a private email to my aunt in Des Moines, while a vertically integrated international corporation can multicast simultaneously to hundreds of thousands of recipients around the globe.  The carrier for both …  the medium of communication …  remains the Internet.

Image provided by standardrepublic.com

Flash forward to this week’s announcement that Disney is firing up its own over-the-top streaming service, with Mouse House pulling all their branded content from Netflix starting in 2019.  Disney’s not alone in jumping feet first into streaming.  In just the past couple weeks, we’ve seen similar announcements from cable’s AMC, ESPN, Fox’s FX distribution arm, along with CBS All Access.  Let’s not forget skinny bundles already coming from Dish’s SlingTV, AT&T’s DirecTV Now, and others.  Verizon’s trying to get their similar streaming service off the ground but can’t even sign up enough broadcasters to kick off their effort, just revealing yet another launch delay until sometime “after the fall season.”

Many of these new over-the-top offerings are available without any commercials.  No ads.  Out, damn spots.  Abandoning the old dual-profit profile that grew them fat and complacent.  For Comcast, Charter, Cox, Spectrum and others, this must evoke the shock and awe of raising a spear while spotting Daenerys and Drogon sweeping down onto the open battle field.

But cable companies were already on borrowed time, as a secession of subscribers and cord cutters demonstrate and their exodus comes down to greed on the part of MVTD providers. I don’t really need to define "greed." You’ve experienced it. Rising customer fees, dismal service, force-feeding unwanted channels as packages and ... greatest of all ... the dreaded “dual stream revenue” model, where access for which we pay a premium is riddled with additional endless ads and commercials, sold and inserted by our very same cable provider. Charging us for watching, and charging the advertisers for getting watched.

Image provided by areasbestbusiness.com

Yes, some channels earmarked “premium” are an exception to glut advertising, as with HBO and Showtime, but watching them brings another access fee on top of your regular monthly charges.  Surcharge on an already inflated invoice, just to be not held hostage to endless hucksterism and crass hawking.  Anyone remember that cardinal consumer rule, “the more a thing is advertised the less you actually need it” ?

The point here is that we as the consumer base demonstrate an encouraging new spin on two aspects of an old profit model:

       (1)    Abhorrence for traditional advertising, with it’s intrusive and offensive command and control dominance over our viewing experience

       (2)    Actual willingness to fairly compensate the content providers in exchange for what we want to watch, when we want to watch it

Image provided by produceclerkshandbook.com

What the major cable and satellite providers promulgated up to now was no different than the supermarket forcing me, as a customer, to only buy overripe avocados in bulk when I just wanted one for tonight’s meal.  Charging for a bundle of alligator fruit that I’ll never be able to consume, with most going bad and getting tossed unused. And expecting me to come back and buy the same terrible deal, week after week!

Image provided by californiaavocado.com

Blame or praise iTunes and Apple Store and Amazon, but the millennial generation accepts the business model that if priced fairly, good content is worth the purchase.  This means cable and dish companies have to resist old business habits that created corporate addiction to supplemental advertising profits and allowed them force feeding us quantity over quality as a customer retention technique.

Take this little guacamole parable and replace the "avocados" with "video programming content" and it demonstrates how big cable companies and their profit-above-principle policies created a consumer demand for simpler services like Netflix and Hulu and Amazon Prime Video.  And why streaming newcomer newbies like Disney and AMC and Fox must eventually respect the profit model of fair price for unsponsored content, and in quantities we as customers can actually use.

Here, Comcast … hold my avocado.

Siri, Where's My Movie Seat?

I grew up with this concept of “first come, first seated” at music concerts and softball games and at the movies. It was unwritten etiquette for many public events. Assigned seating? That was for mass-commuter airlines and live Broadway theater events.

But most of the movie chains like AMC, Cinemark, Century and Landmark converted to the practice over the past year. It’s upsold in some theaters as “VIP seating” but more commonly called “reserved seating” when done online. But why, to what end? I’d never considered that red-eye flight to Chicago or shelling out to see the touring company of “Phantom” in the same league as going to the movies. The whole concept of sit-by-the-numbers to see “Justice League” struck me as conceptually itchy.

Now, I know the movie theaters are struggling to keep their profits. Anyone who’s media aware understands that Netflix and Hulu and other streaming services are giving Millennials their entertainment fix in a new way. Sure, there are pressures on the industry -- big studios make their greatest share of money from a smaller selection of films, and movies are burning out at the box office more quickly. There was a recent article in Bloomberg pointing out the number of screening days it takes movie to earn 90 percent of its total box office haul keeps shrinking — for top films that figure stands at about 30 days, down from 40 days just two years ago.

Movie theaters have met challenges in the past, as when network radio exploded in the 1930’s and consumers could sit at home in the living room and hear superstar performers for free. Or in the 1950’s when the same effect, this time with television, sent movie theater attendance plummeting. 

So movie theaters today need to get more people in the doors more rapidly. After all, herding and crowd control are now a mainstay for the airlines, why not apply that model to entertainment?  Make the customers (1) book themselves in advance; (2) pay premiums for seating options. Columnist John Kelly, writing in The Washington Post, details how online ticketing pushes more of the transaction costs back onto the consumer -- including printing the ticket and processing the transaction. Can you say "United Airlines"?  Topping it off, we have to pay a “Convenience Fee” surcharge for this dubious honor.

But that same Bloomberg report pointed out that switching to reserved seating may make it harder to sell out shows — if customers see that the only seats left are those in the front row, they may put off buying tickets to shows they otherwise would see. Instead of the old model — going out with several friends on a Friday night, but finding out you can’t all sit together after buying tickets at the box office — instead you can find out when you book online and decide to do something else -- maybe come back next Tuesday night.

Reserved seating doesn’t mandate booking online in advance, old farts like me can still walk up to the ticket window on a whim. But this reserved seating system only works if EVERY seat is reserved, including walk-up point of purchase. So now the cashier gestures me to a tiny LCD screen full of boxes and rectangles and tells me to pick my seats from those still available. The tiny icons don’t translate spatially, and if I’m with Lynne then it becomes something to discuss because we make decisions together. All this means lines move slower as patrons ahead of you hash out all details of this seat versus that seat. If the movie’s not sold out, this kind of delay is just plain aggravating for those of us in the queue.

And If you’re willing to buy online and reserve ahead of time, then you’re no longer motivated to arrive before the show starts. Getting a good seat used to mean showing up early. That doesn’t work for Millennials, they prefer the assurance of walking into the theater at the last minute and having the seat they've selected waiting for them. Does this make one feel like a VIP -- when you can call "dibs" and later stroll in and sit down just as the studio and distributor logos hit the screen? Apparently so, since it’s called “VIP seating”.

After the lights go down and the show’s actually started, late comers are at best disruptive, at worst antagonizing, stumbling over seated patrons while trying to get to that one specific magic chair. For those of us used to the old first-come, first claimed model, mitigating this friction could take a while. Who referees disputes between latecomers who reserve seats online, and those traditionalists who would rather buy tickets early on site and hunker down in the best seats?

And those best seats are really getting the luxury treatment. Upgrading to plush recliner-style seats also means fewer seats fit into each auditorium. As Julia Humphrey writes at the Odyssey online site: “For what would normally be a row of about 12 to 14 stadium seats, around 7 luxury seats take their place. For each row of luxury seating, about one row of stadium seating is removed. So one row of luxury seating takes away the potential for around 20 more people. Those 20 people no longer have the opportunity to go catch a big blockbuster when they had the chance. Those 20 people are money lost for production studios and, assuming they buy concessions, a lost source of revenue for theaters.” 

Someone eventually will pay – theater chains, lead by AMC, will only wait about a year after upgrading theaters before raising ticket prices again to cover their remodeling costs and reduced capacity.

Sure, reserved seating can eliminate what the industry calls “holdout lines,” those long queues waiting outside the theater for exiting moviegoers to leave the previous showing. On the other hand, nearly 6 percent of overall revenue at AMC and Regal theaters comes from on-screen commercials before the movie starts. But without movie goers arriving early to snag the decent seats, no one’s there to watch advertising and commercials before the main show. Movie theaters are caught between wanting people to show up early (because they make extra money that way) and making it convenient (so that people don't decide just to watch things at home). Here’s the online sales pitch from one regional theater chain in the midwest:  “Avoid lines, arrive anytime knowing you have a great seat, sit exactly where you and your friends want, and reduce seat-saving anxiety by reserving a large number of seats for your family or friends.”

What’s scary? Theaters now have the technology to charge more for those seats with a better view of the screen or discount the crap seats. Or charge additional for seats with extended leg room, replicating the torture-based model used by most commercial airlines. And the software running the "seating and ticketing" operating system has all sorts of coded surprises in place, awaiting activation at some future date.  Ability to tier seating prices, charging more for the optimum sweet spots in the middle of the theaters.  Accept electronic tipping payments to employees and bonuses for cashiers for successfully up selling higher-tiered seats. Tracking and demographics. It’s not happening right now, but I’ve seen the screen shots intended only for theater managers and executives – check out the industry supplier RTS Ready Theatre Systems, if you don’t believe me.

With enough pre-sold reservations, theaters can dump those "dark" intervals in between screening times. With enough seats pre-purchased, let the poor schmucks arrive late and stumble around in the dark as features roll back-to-back-to-back. And what about the traditional loyal movie patron? With all seats reserved, if you play by their rules, then you’ve lost all control of mitigating obnoxious patrons who end up sitting next to you. What if someone tall sits right in front of you? It used to be easy to just quietly get up and move down a few seats.

Reserved seating might actually prevent me from deciding to go out to a new movie at the last minute, as most seats would have already been reserved. 

Is the escalated ticket price for perceived luxury worth this hassle? Hand me my remote, I’m staying home tonight.

Slack of Focus in a Sports Bar

Somehow, an epiphany on photography came to me while in a sports bar.

Not one to frequent such places, but one such establishment recently opened down the street. Promoting their “chef driven menu” two of us decided to stop by for happy hour. We were seated on the open-air upper deck, a view to the mountains on one side but a plethora of gigantic flat panel displays visible to the other. Several home theater-sized screens presented that day’s episode of ESPN’s “SportsCenter” studio-based sports talker.

I never watch this stuff normally. A couple years ago we cut the cord because Comcast, and later DISH network, kept forcing unwanted sports programming down our throats and escalating our monthly bill to cover their increasing programming fees. Enough was enough, we bought a Roku box with "no commercials" options to Hulu and Netflix. "Screw you, Comcast, always the United Airlines of cable consumer customer service."

But this kitchen was slow and the service lagged and my eyes drifted to the big screens. These things pushed all limits of current flat panel tech ... I have friends with driveways smaller than these monsters. Disinterested in the muddled verbal content of SportsCenter, my attention pulled me to the compromised clutter of the ESPN studio set design.

The set design itself not much, a very high-tech desk and behind it a matrix of very large flat panel displays, matrixed to show a cacophony of graphics and stats and athlete head shots and game clips, all dissolving and morphing like a sack full of cats. Fonts and and logos swirl and transmogrify faster than chameleons on amphetamines. All this as ESPN studio personalities sit and yammer among themselves. 

This was the premium content for which ESPN and Comcast so dearly bill each month?

Their studio production not a “set piece” in the traditional design sense, instead more a camera pointed at giant studio monitors displaying motion graphic content that could have just as simply been pushed out directly to viewer homes from the CG generator itself. ESPN was apparently insisting I watch my screen, fed from their camera pointed at another ESPN screen. Live human "hosts" reduced to clutter trapped between the studio camera and what that camera was REALLY capturing, which was simply more screens. The traditional background had become the conceptual foreground. It looked awful. There was no focus. Or more literally, the focus was everywhere all at once.

It made me long for the old days, when a big news set filled the television studio. Where space and distance could be used creatively and artistically, because physical laws of light, lens and optics never change. With larger lenses and bigger cameras (depending on the level and intensity of the studio lighting) at normal distances something is in focus, and stuff in front or behind is out of focus or “soft” visually. Having the background fuzzy helps visually isolate and reinforce the newscaster or anchor. It mimics our real life experience where our brain and eyes concentrate attention on what we want to see, and diffuse our perception of the extraneous stuff. 

But laws of optics also demand that as lenses get tinier and tinier, this depth of field effect grows less and less pronounced. With any lens miniaturized enough, EVERYTHING captured appears in focus and sharp. This may be a good thing for amateurs with smartphones, but bad for traditional esthetics and tasteful scenic design.

Today, small cramped studios with a desk with a panorama of flat panels immediately behind is a solution both quick and cheap. And cheap is the enemy of good. A stylish physical space for a television news or sports show does not come with an Ikea price tag. Designing and building physical walls and columns and arches and backgrounds requires human labor and craftsmanship ... to do it well is expensive. Once management commits to such an expense, those costs have to be amortized over several years. Make no mistake, even a bevy of 8-foot LCDs is cheaper than physical studio construction. Plus anything, any image, any signal, any graphic can electronically feed these screens. Want a completely different set? Boom, new graphics, done deal.

But with the LCD wall background only a few feet behind hosts and the guests, everything now sits within the same field of focus. Screens can’t be selectively soft because they’re too close to the talent. And besides, says the show’s producer, if we’re paying for all these graphics then by god, they’re gonna be sharp and not wasted as fuzzy, soft blobs floating somewhere behind the talent.  It’s become the new norm. Flat panels are versatile. Cheaper than physical set construction. Instantly changeable. What does it matter that the space and depth and selective focus that naturally go with it have disappeared?

Apparently it does matter. I ask you to consider that with great fanfare, Apple now offers with iOS 10.1 their “Portrait Mode” on iPhone models 7 Plus and higher. What does “Portrait Mode” do? It uses that regular “everything is sharp” iPhone photo from that nearly pinhole sized lens, and crunches it with software and algorithms to recreate the traditional depth-of-field effect. That same effect that happens naturally with larger lenses and formats now can be recreated via raw processing power. Irrelevant that what was once normally there now must be artificially restored because, as Apple puts it, “a beautiful new feature creates stunning photos … make your foreground subject sharp while creating a beautifully blurred background, also known as “bokeh” and previously only capable on DSLR cameras.” 

Wow. Just … wow. You don’t know what you’ve lost ‘til it’s gone. So now, the esthetic value of selective focus ... lost when lenses were miniaturized for smart phones ... can be restored or at least approximated via battery-draining computer processing. 

Will this mean that SportsCenter can invoke some semblance of artistic merit by applying software to “soften” the background and restore desirable beautifully blurred backgrounds to premium cable? Of course, the very same thing would happen automatically by just physically moving that wall of screens further away from the anchor desk. Moving the background so it’s actually “more in the background” allows simple optics to solve the visual problem.

But that’s the photographic revelation, that we’ve come to the point where an OS upgrade can insert what used to occur naturally. And until ESPN and all the other studio news and talk programs recognize their banal and disposable of pablum is merely filler between desperately overstuffed commercial blocks, then the larger problem of corporate focus will not disappear into the background anytime soon.