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Old cinemas get digital face-lift
Emerging Pictures, theater league strike
strategic alliance
Jul. 17, 2002
By Ian Mohr
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NEW YORK --
Big Apple-based Emerging
Pictures has struck a strategic alliance with the League of
Historic American Theaters in its bid to launch a national
network of satellite-fed digital cinemas, with the goal of
taking on 300 screens during the next three years.
Under the pact with LHAT, some
digital projection systems would be installed in restored
historic "movie palaces" nationwide.
Emerging Pictures plans to supply existing cinemas
with digital projection systems and satellite receivers that
would enable member venues to present selected independent and
international features, as supplied through Emerging Pictures.
The technology also would enable theaters to screen such
content as live HDTV closed-circuit broadcasts and prerecorded
music concerts, theatrical productions, lectures and corporate
events.
Emerging Pictures plans
to provide the projection systems and content to member
theaters at its own expense, and the company said it is
negotiating with manufacturers over initial installations. The
company is weighing whether to utilize DLP technology from
Texas Instruments or the JVC D-ILA technology that Kodak
Digital Cinema recently opted for and installed at a test site
at the Hollywood & Highland six-plex (HR 5/5).
Financial details of the plan were
not disclosed, but the companies point to a licensing
arrangement with a certain percentage of ticket sales per week
split between Emerging and member venues.
Emerging Pictures' Ira Deutchman said the company's
EmergingCinemas, or EmCi, locations would be "completely
opportunistic" in terms of geography and will be selected
based on "whether a given market can support the product being
brought in."
"What's been lacking
to date is an installed base of digital cinemas designed to
widen the distribution for specialty films to include an
audience we're firmly convinced exists in all sorts of
communities around the U.S., not just in the major media
markets," Deutchman said.
The
indie outfit's move comes after NewCo Digital Cinema, the
digital coalition formed by major studios, took a step closer
to its own digital cinema plans last month by installing
Clearview Cinemas president Charles Goldwater as CEO (HR
6/18).
According to Deutchman,
Emerging's plan would not technologically preclude member
cinemas from screening studio fare (which the studios have yet
to standardize) because "the vast majority of (studio) films
will eventually be archived on high-definition video masters."
A number of indie distributors have indicated interest in
supplying selected films to the network.
But whatever the technology, the popularity of the
plan will reflect some indie theaters' willingness to move to
digital cinema without waiting for mainstream Hollywood.
"My suspicion is that the theaters
(under this plan) are not the ones Hollywood would be in
business with anyway," LHAT executive director Terry Demas
said from the organization's 26th annual convention in
Minneapolis, where the Emerging Pictures partnership is being
unveiled this week. "These are not the kinds of theaters where
you just put a big multimillion-dollar ad in the paper for
people to come and see 'Spider-Man.' We're not talking about
direct competition with the multiplexes. These are theaters
that are having a harder and harder time getting product."
Demas added that his members have
shown keen interest in the program, the rollout of which will
build slowly so as not to create competing venues.
Emerging Pictures is run by indie
film veteran Deutchman, along with television producer Barry
Rebo and home theater/consumer electronics executive Giovanni
Cozzi. The company has so far been using a 245-seat theater at
Manhattan's Intrepid Sea-Air-Space Museum to show off digital
cinema technology.
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