If Shakespeare were making movies today, he’d be one of few filmmakers making films as massive and bold as those of Martin Scorsese. In the same way Hamlet and Macbeth still resonate, the world will still be losing their shit over Raging Bull, Taxi Driver and Goodfellas hundreds of years from now.
As a film fan, he’s been a favorit of mine, ever since a friend introduced me to Raging Bull when I was a teenager. Over thirty years later, I still can’t believe what the hell I’m looking at. Every time I watch that movie, I learn new things about cinema, acting, storytelling and about myself.
So, you can imagine how fuckin’ excited I was when, in December of 2013, The Wolf of Wall Street was released theatrically. The reviews were solid across the board with a lot of comparisons to Scorsese’s previous works.
One thing about its release bummed me though: The Wolf of Wall Street was the first movie ever to be released exclusively in a digital format, with no film prints at all sent to theaters.
I’ve always been a staunch analog guy and hate when technology messes with what doesn’t need to be fixed. I hate the way most bands sound when recording on computers and compared to vinyl, I think mp3s sound like shit. In October of 2007, my local theater in Brooklyn announced they were switching to screening movies digitally, starting with Michael Clayton, the movie I was planning on seeing the same day they made the announcement. I figured I’d be puking up my dinner by the time the movie was over, but in the end, it wasn’t that bad. The movie was shot on film, so it still had that look. After fifteen minutes, I almost forgot it was screened digitally. Almost.
The real problem came when they started shooting digitally on top of screening digitally, culminating in most movies looking like a fuckin’ soap opera from the 80s. The digital look (or digital glaze I used to think to myself) was impossible to ignore. It was as if you were watching a movie on a computer, WHICH YOU WERE!
A lot of the magic had gone. Films shot at 24 frames per second forced the viewer’s mind to fill in the blanks. That’s how movie magic happened. Without 24 frames per second, no magic.
From 2007-2013, I split my time between NYC and Austin, two towns that know their fuckin’ movies. During this time, most theaters were switching to digital, though there were still theaters like Film Forum, Nitehawk Cinema and the Alamo Drafthouse that screened both digital and 35mm film. Seeing films on 35mm were becoming more of a treat because they were becoming less frequent every year.
When they made the announcement they were no longer sending film prints to theaters, part of me cried inside, knowing this could be a death blow to what I love most in this world. That screening of The Wolf of Wall Street in 2013 proved how fuckin’ right I was.
I was home for Christmas when I went to see it in Ronkonkoma, the town next to where I grew up. Digital projection must’ve been new to this theater because it was like nobody knew what the fuck they were doing.
Two seconds into the previews and already I got that gross feeling in my gut. The colors on the screen were completely off. And off badly. There was way too much green and the reds burned so bright I felt it in my brain. When the movie started, I was horrified, as the same reds and green took over Scorsese’s work of art. Leonardo DiCaprio looked a bright orange, not unlike one of the Simpsons. Same with Jonah Hill. The colors were so saturated, it was as if a toddler was given a remote control to the projector and kept pressing buttons randomly and without care.
This looks fuckin awful, I thought to myself. How can they do this to Scorsese?
It was the like showing up at the Louvre and throwing a can of paint on the Mona Lisa. Fuckin’ disgraceful.
After about twenty minutes of waiting for someone to fix these mistakes, I stormed into the lobby, demanding to speak with the manager.
Is something wrong? The pimple-faced usher asked.
I pulled him by the arm into the theater. “Look at this shit,” I said.
Knowing it didn’t look right, he said, “I’ll get the manager.”
The manager was less understanding.
“Look at the colors,” I told her. “Movies aren’t supposed to look like that.”
“No, that’s what it looks like,” she said.
She didn’t know what the fuck she was talking about and she definitely didn’t know anything about movies, projectors or the difference between analog and digital. It was a job to her, like she was managing a CVS.
“If you’re not gonna fix it,” I said. “I want my money back.”
“We don’t give refunds after the movie started,” was her reply.
I then told her, “If I don’t get a refund, I’m gonna make a YouTube video about this. I’ve already taken pictures. I’m gonna name this theater, the time I was here, and tell the world what you did to Martin Scorsese!”
She gave me my money back, not because she was worried about me making a YouTube video, but probably because she thought I was crazy.
I’ve since managed an independent non-profit movie theater that screens movies digitally and I now understand what was wrong that day. Mostly they let their projectionist go because they were told they didn’t need him anymore with this new technology. It was just a matter of hitting play on the projector like you would on any other device. So there was no one around to check on the film or give a shit how bad it looked. They could’ve contacted the projector people to see if they could send someone, but they didn’t, most likely because they didn’t care.
From that moment on, anytime I went to the movies, I went knowing it wasn’t going to be as magical as it had been for the first hundred years of cinema. I’d be sitting in a room with a digital screen playing a movie, exactly like what I do in my living room.
In 2023, I moved to Los Angeles where some people still care about how movies look and about keeping the magic alive. I live down the block from the New Beverly Cinema, a theater owned by Quentin Tarantino that only screens movie on 35mm. Being at such a close proximity, the anxiety and depression I felt for the last ten years has almost dissipated. I experience the magic again twice a week. Occasionally when a new movie comes out, I go to a digital presentation of it and usually the theater is empty. When I go to the New Bev, it’s almost always full.
Maybe these specialty theaters are the future of movies? Maybe we have to hit the rewind button on our projectors and remind ourselves what was so magical about going to the movies. Hell, it’s not like anything else is working.
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