Rupert Grint in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (Jaap Buitendijk / Warner Bros.)
At ropeofsilicom.com, Brad Brevet has announced that Mike Leigh will release Vera Drake 2 in 3D, which proves that James Cameron's Avatar has truly revolutionized the industry. I mean, there are no wars, flying creatures, of blue people in the original Vera Drake, which is just a slice-of-life drama about an abortionist (Imelda Staunton) in 1950s' England, a time when the procedure was still illegal in that country.
Brevet adds that another Mike Leigh flick to go the 3D way is Happy-Go-Lucky, which will be converted from its current 2D format so you can feel Sally Hawkins' cheeriness more realistically. Or …
"Of course, none of this is true, and why would it be?," Brevet asks. "I mean, after all, what would any of those film's gain if they were presented in 3D? Not to mention the even sillier idea of converting a film from 2D into 3D. That's just dumb… right?"
Fans of Daniel Radcliffe will be able to see him in 3D after Warner Bros. converts the last two Harry Potter flicks, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 and Part II, to 3D at a cost of $10 millon per film. The faithful will also be able to see their favorite Greek gods in 3D once Clash of the Titans is converted. But will that make the movies any better? Brevet doesn't think so. Will that make the movie studios richer? Brevet is quite sure it will.
What WB is doing to their 2D films reminds me of the time when movies went from silent to sound and from back-and-white to color. The former was an abrupt change; the latter took decades to be finalized — and we still get to watch some black-and-white productions every now and then.
Anyhow, back in the late 1920s, following the success of the part-talkie The Jazz Singer (1927), most studios began scrambling to add sound to their productions. I've seen one such, a First National melodrama called The Barker (above), in which a silent film suddenly gets all chatty in reel 3 (or 4) and then goes silent again and then suddenly won't shut up for another ten minutes only to go silent again.
The dialog in The Barker didn't add anything to the proceedings. To the contrary, it became distracting and slowed down the action some thanks to the primitive sound techniques of the period. But those bits of dialog surely brought some welcome extra cash to First National (later acquired by Warner Bros.) for the studio could lure moviegoers into theaters so they could hear Milton Sills', Betty Compson's and Dorothy Mackaill's voices for the first time. There were several such hybrids distributed in 1928 and early 1929, before sound took hold for good as the 1920s came to a close.
Three-strip Technicolor was first used in short films, then made "guest" appearances in features such as The House of Rotschild (1934) and The Cat and the Fiddle (1934), prior to the first all-color (three-strip) release, Becky Sharp (1935). Since this Miriam Hopkins vehicle wasn't a major box-office hit, studios decided that the extra costs for processing color wouldn't be worth it. For the next two decades, color films were generally used to enhance to action/historical spectacles, fantasy movies, and musicals.
I could be wrong, but I believe that most movies will be released in the regular 2D format in the years to come. But even if I'm wrong, I'd be in good company. Initially, MGM's Boy Wonder Irving Thalberg was quite sure that sound would never overtake silent films.
Photo: The Barker (Warner Bros.)
