Spielberg vs Netflix

“Once you commit to a television format, you’re a TV movie," Spielberg said to explain why Netflix movies shouldn't be eligible for Oscars.

Of course, ALL movies end up on TV.

In the 1950's, the movie industry set out to compete with television. They did it by going to wide screen, color movies. But there was a period in the '50's where that trend was reversed and there was an increase in the number of black and white movies shot in the standard aspect ratio. Hollywood did this so that the movies could be shown on TV when they completed their theatrical run.

There were movies like Marty, Days of Wine and Roses and Twelve Angry Men which were originally live TV dramas re-shot as feature films, all of which won or were nominated for Oscars.

In the '80's or '90's, I read a critic complain about the way shots were composed in wide-screen movies. They didn't use the whole screen. They composed shots so they could scanned and panned to be shown on TV without missing anything. Did Spielberg never do this?

The movie Cleopatra (1963) then the most expensive movie ever made, was a box office disaster for 20th Century Fox. It was a top-grossing movie, but it cost so much that it still lost a fortune. It eventually broke even in 1973 from being shown on TV.

I already mentioned on this blog the two Oscar-winning '80's movies, Fanny & Alexander and Das Boot which had both been TV mini-series in Europe before being cut down for American movie theaters.

There was one movie I found was unwatchable on TV. It was How the West was Won, filmed in Cinerama, the three camera wide screen process. They used three camera to film and three projectors to project the movie. This gave it a huge, finely detailed picture on the big screen. When it was shown on TV, there was little detail. I saw people in the picture and I could hear them speaking, but I could see who was talking. I truly couldn't tell what was happening and I turned it off.

I'm not that concerned about movie theaters staying in business. In my town, we have have one art house theater in the university area in an old Spanish style funeral home. The rest are multiplexes owned by theater chains that I can't imagine anyone feeling an emotional attachment to.

Others have brought up Spielberg's movie, The Post, which qualified for Oscar nomination in 2017 because it was shown for a week in nine theaters at the end of the year. He exploited the same rules he now wants to change to keep Netflix out.

Spielberg always gets a big cut of the box office gross on his movies. That's his primary concern. He hasn't been to the movies in forty years. You don't become a billionaire without being incredibly greedy.

Of course, that goes for Netflix and Amazon, too.

To hell with all those people.