Hollywired

It all happened so…fast.

Yesterday, you were sitting in your den, somnolent and content amid your CD collection and videotape library, awash in the glow of your 50-channel TV. Today, you’re a casualty of the digital revolution, one of those odd statistics in USA Today. Number of people who haven’t surfed the Net, who don’t have a CD-ROM, and who in general will be left behind when tomorrow comes: You.

That’s what it feels like, doesn’t it? You always thought you were a well-informed, up-to-date entertainment fan. But more and more, you flip through the paper, or turn on Extra, or open up ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY, and blanch. Consider the news that’s come out of Hollywood in recent weeks:

In November, Steven Spielberg plans to introduce his latest project, The Dig, an epic sci-fi adventure about a team of astronauts stranded on an alien planet. His subsequent directorial effort, MovieMaker, starring Quentin Tarantino and Friends‘ Jennifer Aniston, will be released next year. The Dig and MovieMaker are CD-ROM games.

A high-powered entertainment consortium composed of Toshiba, Time Warner, Sony, and Philips agreed on a universal standard for the digital videodisc (DVD), a technology that enables a full-length feature film with better-than-laserdisc image quality to fit on a single five-inch CD. Alternative soundtracks, videogames, and a separate wide-screen version of the movie could also be crammed onto the same disc. Analysts say DVDs could begin elbowing out videocassettes as early as 1997.

The music industry happily noted the release of the first major wave of enhanced-CD titles, albums packaged with interactive liner notes, music videos, and artist interviews. Enhanced CDs are expected to supplant their conventional counterparts within the next few years.

Blink twice if you’re still tracking.

Legend has it that movie mogul Jack L. Warner banned the appearance of TV sets in all Warner Bros. movies, a desperate symbolic act made to ward off an inevitable sea change in entertainment. These days, you kind of know how old Jack felt. You’ve been defiantly ignoring the digital future in the hope that it will just disappear. But Hollywood learned its lesson from Warner all those years ago: Wishing something away only makes the eventual shock of reality that much worse. According to InfoTech, a Vermont-based research firm, there were 1.2 million CD-ROM players worldwide at the turn of the decade. Today, there are an estimated 46 million. In that same period, the number of subscribers to online services (primarily America Online, CompuServe, and Prodigy) has exploded from 1.7 million to 11 million, according to estimates by the market research firm SIMBA Information. By 1999, that number is projected to hit 26.3 million.

What in the name of Bill Gates is going on? When did they decide the rainbow ended in Silicon Valley? How did high tech become high style or, for that matter, high concept? How did Rodney Freaking Dangerfield end up as a pit stop on the information superhighway (http://www.rodney.com)?

You may ask yourself, where does that highway lead to? As David Byrne, a spiritual forefather of the digital revolution, once wondered, Well, how did I get here?

Actually, the future was always with us; we just never recognized it. Long before computers entered the picture, the concept of multimedia was banging around in our collective consciousness. It’s a term that was first used in the ’60s to describe educational projects that combined audio, visual, and textual materials. (Remember what those nerdy guys on the AV squad used to get excited about?) Then in the ’70s, rock promoters lured dreamy-eyed teens to laser light shows set to psychedelic music by trumpeting the whole shebang as multimedia extravaganzas. (Remember Pink Floyd blasting at the local planetarium?)

But at the dawn of the ’90s, around the time Hollywood executives adopted the PowerBook as a fashion accessory, multimedia took on a new dimension. A promising technology, CD-Read Only Memory, was added to the equation, and along with it, that novel but fuzzily defined concept, interactivity. Then an old Cold War artifact came into play: a sprawling computer network, begun as a Defense Department experiment, called the Internet. Suddenly multimedia was no longer the sole province of geeks and trippers. The press, ever in search of a zeitgeist-friendly trend, pounced and began spreading word of the digital revolution, a.k.a. the Information Age, a.k.a. the Bit Bang. Next thing you know, cable systems and telephone companies and movie studios were scrambling to get into bed with each other, and Newt Gingrich was droning on about cyberspace being the ”land of knowledge,” and Dennis Hopper was doing his trademark bad-guy act, but this time in a videogame.

The hype has been so relentless that today everyone talks about tomorrow’s 500-channel full-service network, which promises to offer movies on demand, interactive games, and in-house banking, as if it were as evident as next week’s TV listings. ”We’ll no longer go to the movie theater or even the video store,” says Patrick Hasburgh, executive producer of seaQuest 2032, echoing a common Hollywood refrain. ”We will be able to plug into a studio’s library, download a movie, and either watch it over our computer or broadcast it into our home. That’s the future of entertainment.”

It’s an alluring vision, one that has enraptured Hollywood. Every movie company, record label, book publisher, and television network worth its silicon sports a glittery new interactive division, as well as a plot of virtual land on the Internet’s World Wide Web. But more important, the digital revolution has affected the Hollywood ethos in a fundamental sense. In August, Microsoft released Windows 95, its new operating system, and enlisted a phalanx of celebrities for support. No one so much as blinked at what would once have seemed a laughable incongruity: stars and software. Among those unafraid to plug the event unabashedly (for a fee, of course) were Jay Leno, who emceed the launch party; ER‘s Anthony Edwards, who hosted a nationally broadcast infomercial for the product; the Rolling Stones, who licensed out ”Start Me Up” for Microsoft’s TV spots; and basketball’s star rapper Shaquille O’Neal, who has his own chat room on Microsoft’s new online service.

Software as celebrity: By reflection, celebrities as software shouldn’t be such a strange notion. In 1993, washed-up actor Corey Haim filmed a few scenes for a forgettable CD-ROM game titled Double Switch, and publications from Billboard to The San Francisco Chronicle took notice. This year, hardly an eyebrow was raised when an interactive movie called Ripper began shooting. The cast of Ripper includes Karen Allen, Ossie Davis, Oscar nominee Burgess Meredith, and Oscar winner Christopher Walken. Sometime in those two years, between Double Switch and Ripper, Hollywired was born.

Why has multimedia won over Hollywood’s hearts and minds so quickly?

”Because they don’t know any better,” deadpans once-and-future media mogul Barry Diller. Possibly. But more realistically, the answer may lie in what at first seems to be a semantic oddity: Multimedia is a medium. More precisely, a new medium, one that holds out the promise of giving us a new way to share experiences. Right now, multimedia is still about hardware and techno-lust and everything that titillated those AV geeks back in school. But in time it will be another vehicle for conveying compelling artistic visions, right up there with books and movies and music and TV. ”We don’t watch Seinfeld because it’s on a 13-inch monitor or it has THX sound,” says Dan Adler, an agent whose clients include Rand and Robyn Miller, creators of the groundbreaking computer game Myst. ”We watch it because it’s interesting. That’s where we want to get with multimedia.”

So players in every quarter of entertainment have thrown their money and talent into this realm, in the hope of doing for multimedia what Disney did for animation. After all, a new medium equals new opportunities equals new money. The intriguing thing is, a lot of folks admit they’re not quite sure exactly what they’re doing yet. Last Christmas, Disney used its marketing might to make Disney’s Animated StoryBook: The Lion King CD-ROM a hit, selling more than 400,000 copies. Then came the backlash, as technical glitches and a basic misreading of the market led to a wave of angry returns.

Interactive divisions everywhere watched with glee as Disney floundered, but the smiles hid more than a modicum of fear. Exploring the unknown is scary stuff. Things would be a lot safer if everyone just packed up, declared the digital revolution a draw, and went home. ”The one thing we haven’t done [interactively] that we’d really like to do,” says Alan Cohen, NBC-TV’s executive VP of marketing, ”is have a sign flashing every five minutes on everybody’s computer that said, ‘Go back to your TV set!”’

But that’s not going to happen. Every day, evidence of change is more apparent. Look at what’s considered mundane today: that http:// address for a website that now seems to be de rigueur for movie posters and print ads; a computer screen decorated with a downloaded image of Teri Hatcher; Michael Jackson chatting with his fans via the major online services, with the text of the discussion broadcast live on MTV.

For now, the medium may be more compelling than the message, which still consists mainly of promotional or repackaged programming. But be patient. The future, as they say, is simply a matter of time.

I’ve had the good fortune to twice be placed in history at the beginning of a wonderful new technology,” says Charlton Heston, who recently completed work on the CD-ROM Charlton Heston’s Voyage Through the Bible. ”With TV in the ’40s, and now with multimedia. In both cases, the new media represented the future of the moving image.”

The future of the moving image… One hundred years ago, French audiences sat in a darkened Parisian basement and screamed in terror at the vision of a train rushing toward them, a scene from the Lumière brothers’ L’Arrivée d’un Train en Gare de la Ciotat, the world’s first commercial motion picture. A century later, the future of the moving image again hurtles inexorably toward a wary audience. And if the metaphor grabs you, heed this note: Stop screaming — the train is already here. — Additional reporting by Lisa Milbrand and Ken Neville