Coppola's Megalopolis "Live Scene"

[Ryan Gallagher]

We've gone from "Don't talk during the movie" to "Who can we get to talk during the movie?". ;-)

Anyone having to present this with the live component? Anyone seen it with the live component already?

https://www.indiewire.com/news/busin...er-1235050576/

As far as reach, I feel like this novelty is about 20 years too late. It should have been done in the era of single screens, well staffed, booth operated cinema.

As far as 4th wall mechanics, live theatre prevails and has been using that tool for centuries. This just feels like a gimmick to create a memorable moment in cinema. But in that regard it's succeeding I suppose.

[Joe Redifer]

Now THIS is what I call immersion! Way better than a movie that ONLY takes place on a screen. That's dumb and outdated. I think as this revolutionary feature evolves we'll have more and more actors participating in front of the screen. Maybe it will come to a point where we can just get rid of the dumb screen altogether and just have the actors play out the entire production. Hmmm maybe we could even call it a play. How astonishing would that be to see such a magnificent thing? The future is truly wondrous!

[Ryan Gallagher]

It took way too long for youtube to recommend this 138million views video to me the other day:
(or maybe I'm mis-remembering, and it was in fact posted in a thread here)

[Mark Ogden]

As far as reach, I feel like this novelty is about 20 years too late. It should have been done in the era of single screens, well staffed, booth operated cinema.

Oh, it was. This is a lot of William Castle hokum that was seen in the fifties and sixties. House on Haunted Hill where the projectionist was expected to operate a hand crank that made a glow-in-the-dark skeleton pop out of a box at the top of the screen, or The Tingler where some of the seats were wired with little motors that would give people's asses a shock during the scary scenes, or maybe The Lemon Grove Kids Meet the Monsters, where some poor kid got hired to wrap himself in gauze bandages like the Mummy and run around in the audience. Gimmicks.

The 1993 movie Matinee, with John Goodman playing a Castle type huckster, is a good and fairly accurate look at this era.

[Marcel Birgelen]

I've seen this thing... this, euhm... movie yesterday in a room that fits 596, 588 seats were left untouched. There was no live interaction whatsoever.

Now THIS is what I call immersion! Way better than a movie that ONLY takes place on a screen. That's dumb and outdated. I think as this revolutionary feature evolves we'll have more and more actors participating in front of the screen. Maybe it will come to a point where we can just get rid of the dumb screen altogether and just have the actors play out the entire production. Hmmm maybe we could even call it a play. How astonishing would that be to see such a magnificent thing? The future is truly wondrous!

Yeah, but that's kind of expensive... since you can only do one such play with a full set of actors at a time. Those actors also need to be somewhat talented, and since they're human beings, I'm afraid you also need to pay them. So, I see a scalability problem here. What if we put a camera in the room where that play is happening and record that performance? Then, in stead of a podium, we simply put up a giant white screen and project the play on that screen. This way, people all around the world can enjoy the play and we're getting filthy rich, since we only need to pay the actors once and we can show this pre-recorded play as many times as we want!

[Frank Angel]

Hmmm....paraphrasing: "in some instances, theatre personnel will step in as the "live" person." So as Marcel points out, do these theatre employees get SAG/AFTRA scale for acting in the movie? Guarantee not if the exhibitor has to pay for it. Coppola probably would, but Mr. Exhibitor sure won't, not unless he's allowed to take it right off the top of his gross...or maybe use it as excuse to add another buck to every tub of popcorn.

I am pretty surprised that this was something Coppola thought was a good idea. Does he think giving his MEGOPOLIS a ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW panache will somehow be a crowd-pleaser? Certainly putting the title in the same league as the hokum that Castle use to use, as Mark said, will not give his offering any gravitas, quite the opposite. And what does this stunt do in terms of the film's story-line? Is it supposed to enhance it...clarify it in any way? Or is it just what it seems to be on the surface -- just another transparently sleazy gimmick as old as any number of Hollywood B pictures used to try.

This ain't gonna save the film and if it starts a trend, it's not gonna save industry either.

[Marcel Birgelen]

From what I've heard those "live interactions" are being paid and arranged for by the distributor of the movie, but it's only limited to a handful of sites and probably also only for the first week or so of the performance. I've not heard of a single location over here, doing "live interactions". Only the premiere run during the Cannes Film Festival seemed to have featured the live actor component over here in Europe.

But yeah, this is just a gimmick that won't save the movie. I'm pretty sure this won't be appreciated by everybody. And like so many things regarding this movie, it feels like it's 45 years late...

Regarding live screen interaction, one of the best examples I've seen over the years is actually a former Disney attraction. I guess that thing worked so well, because it's not over-mousificated and is a pretty well-done homage to the history of movie making itself:

[Frank Angel]

So they must have two different files -- one for the interactive version, and one for the non-interactive version, otherwise it will look pretty wonky if Adam Driver waits for a question that is never asked and starts answering it. Same if the live actor doesn't get there in time, no doubt timing is critical. Even the slightest, ill-timed delivery of the live actor's line -- say, heshe has to clear hisher throat -- then it's game over. It's like when my curtain motor crapped out and I had to have an usher go back stage to pull curtain and we relied on the old cue light system. I'd give the Front of House a detailed time-table sheet as to when they needed to be at the rail to open and close the curtain. There was small cue light box at the rail; on it there was a yellow light with the word STANDBY, a green light with the word OPEN and a red light with the word CLOSE -- pretty fool-proof one would think, yeah ? Well, fool-proof only if there were a senescent human standing there looking at it. On the Time Schedule I gave them a full 15 min margin-of-error just to be sure. Turns out, I think at least one out of every 10 curtain pulls were MISSED because evidently one of the qualifications for being an usher is that they are unable to, you know...TELL TIME!. It was said, if you listened closely, you could hear me cursing at the top of my lungs from the booth as the film started but the curtain remaining closed. And this booth was a full 6 flights up in the air above the orchestra.

[Mike Blakesley]

We watched the movie at the Rocky Mountain Convention a couple weeks ago and I hated it. I have no idea what this thread is talking about so there must be two versions. Nothing was said about a live interactive deal either.

The movie itself beyond sucked though. YMMV.

[Marcel Birgelen]

There are at least two versions.

Apparently, the director himself has indicated that the format to see this in is "IMAX". Afaik, there have been zero IMAX film prints struck for this movie and it also wasn't filmed on IMAX cameras. So, the live performances might be an IMAX exclusive.

The IMAX "advice" is actually somewhat ridiculous, since the aspect ratio of the IMAX release is 2:0, just like the "plebs" release. Obviously it's put into a FLAT container, ensuring the least possible amount of patrons will see the movie the best possible way... In my case, they clearly hadn't a FLAT 2.0 macro, so it ended up window boxed on a GIANT screen set to flat.

As the scene itself: It's in the part where the frame "zooms out" and strangely ends up in the center bottom of the screen. With the live interaction, it makes more sense, but with the "non-interactive" version, it absolutely makes no sense at all to have the picture so strangely zoomed out and aligned, like it does...

Let me add that I'm not someone who wants to motivate people to start filming with their phone during presentations. But since this is such a strange occurrence, exceptions might be granted for once?

[Ryan Gallagher]

The irony is that if someone managed to do this “well” in a contributing way in this era, on a broadly appealing flick, people would line up to see it in person on the big screen rather than wait for streaming.

But if everyone tried it, you’d have 95% failure due to execution or quality of the film it was being applied to, which would only sour audiences even more.

Seems we are beyond such gimmicks contributing toward saving the larger exhibition industry, nevermind that we are no longer set up to scale such ideas on wide releases.

[Marcel Birgelen]

To be honest, I think the movie production and exhibition industry will do better if they would not focus on gimmicks but on real substance.

This brings me back to the horror flick "Substance" I've seen last week, which was also wild and weird, but in a better way than this latest thing by mr. Coppola.

For me, those gimmicks are best left for theme parks, the same is true for me for moving chairs, wind, snow, rain and whatnot "4D" effects. While those gimmicks may give a very temporal boost, what has been proven to be the best strategy for both the film industry and the exhibition industry is to simply make those movies audiences want to see.

Also, what's so special about a guy talking to a screen? Especially if you know this is coming. It's also not like this is some high-end kind of acting... it's just asking a single question. You can also clearly see in the video, the theater isn't properly set-up for such a thing. Raising the house lights on such a giant, unmasked screen with some badly edited picture floating in the middle just looks amateurish and... stupid?