Deep Media

Why Lucas and Spielberg see Hollywood at the edge

Sometimes you really need to sit up and pay attention. That was clearly the case at USC last night as George Lucas and Steven Spielberg predicted the immiment demise of the movie business—or at least, the movie business as we know it. Because Lucas and Spielberg aren't just two super-successful directors who've made a bunch of blockbuster films. They are the two directors who essentially invented the blockbuster back in the '70s, and in the process saved Hollywood the last time it was headed for oblivion. When they say, as Spielberg put it, “There’s going to be an implosion where three or four or maybe even a half-dozen of these mega-budgeted movies go crashing into the ground and that’s going to change the paradigm again,” it matters, because they're the ones who set in motion the paradigm we have now. 

George Lucas and Steven Spielberg at USC with Don Mattrick, president of Microsoft's Interactive Entertainment Business, and Elizabeth M. Daley, dean of the School of Cinematic Arts.

The occasion for this pronouncement was significant as well: the opening of the School of Cinematic Arts' new Interactive Media Center, a $50 million high-tech playground that boasts such toys as Oculus Rift headsets, Microsoft Kinect motion sensors, a 3-D printer, and 55-inch interactive screens from MultiTouch. Whatever takes the place of movies will as likely as not be invented here. 

 

Way-way-off-Broadway: How the immersive theater of 'Then She Fell' resonates with the digital world

Okay, here's an admission: I've never been able to take Broadway musicals seriously. In fact, I've barely been able to take them at all. I did watch the Tonys last night with an actress friend who's in from LA, and I have to admit there were some transcendent moments—Cyndi Lauper performing her '80s hit "True Colors"; almost any time Neil Patrick Harris was onstage; Kinky Boots sweeping the awards and capping it off with best musical. (Drag queens, I've found, can salvage just about anything.) But the good news from my perspective is that conventional, proscenium-arch theater, musical and otherwise, has been getting serious competition recently from the immersive variety—from productions that break down the fourth wall, and with it the barrier between audience and performance. 

Photo: Dariel Sneed 

Rachel I. Berman as Alice in Third Rail Projects' "Then She Fell."

One of the standouts is Then She Fell, an intimately scaled, highly idiosyncratic look at the Lewis Carroll-Alice Liddell relationship. Staged (so to speak) in a grim, featureless structure in Williamsburg that was built a century ago as a parochial school, the performances are limited to an audience of 15—small enough that everyone gets an individualized experience. The three-story building, cramped and institutional, has been re-imagined as Kingsland Ward, a dubious facility that's home to all manner of feverish behavior involving a Mad Hatter, a White Queen, a Red Queen, two Alices, and Carroll himself. As strange and dreamlike as the Alice books themselves, Then She Fell invites you to explore the fantastical world that Carroll created—and with it, the mystery of the Oxford mathematician and the little girl he liked to take rowing, until for unexplained reasons her mother cut off the relationship one day in 1863.