US – Friday, July 30

Another dimension in film

Katzenberg promises the future is 3-D

PROFILE. A fully rendered Jeffery Katzenberg appeared at the Loews on Tremont Street earlier this week to show off three 3-D scenes from his company’s upcoming movies. Katzenberg, the celebrated CEO of DreamWorks displayed graphics from “Monsters vs. Aliens” that even the most technologically jaded Gen Yer will admit is really cool.

In one scene, soldiers on a battlefield come running up from behind you. When they pass, they kick up dust that flies off the screen and seems so real it almost makes you sneeze.

Indeed, with this new digital 3-D technology, which works a lot better and with a lot less headaches than the disappointing analog sci-fi 3-D that began in the ‘50s, the screen itself is transformed into a open window into the world of the film, creating an effect akin to a moving version of a book report diorama, except one that costs millions of dollars and man-hours to produce.

Katzenberg’s enthusiasm for the novel technology, which he believes to be, after the advents of sound and color, the third great technological leap in the history of cinema, appeared almost naïvely boundless. While he readily admitted that “it won’t make a bad movie good,” he refused to accept the common view of 3-D as a mere gimmick.

He pointed to a previous innovation, the pan shot, used famously in such films as “Laurence of Arabia” and “Star Wars” to both establish great scale and overwhelm the viewer emotionally, and promised 3-D would provide even richer opportunities for emotional intensity, adding not just another dimension of space, but of emotion as well, if one takes the view that the more real something feels to the brain, the more genuine the brain’s emotional response will be. He even went so far as to suggest, in a statement that would surely paralyze any film buff with outrage, that 3-D makes two dimensional films feel downright obsolete: “Many… movies that have been made over the years are great pieces of entertainment and many of them genuine works of art, but they actually don’t capture the essence of being there which 3-D does,” he said.

Maybe not, but when Katzenberg, like a ‘50s futurist promising a robot in every home by 2000, claimed that in the future all films, even crime or historical dramas like “The Departed” and “The Queen”, would be 3-D, it seemed hard to believe. How could a film like “Citizen Kane” be improved artistically in any significant way by being in 3-D?
Actually, the snow globe scene would look pretty cool.