'Star Wars' prequels employ digital projectors but theater owners are reluctant to use them

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Why use film at all then? Good question. "Everything is already in a digital sandwich now anyway," says director Robert Zemeckis (Cast Away), who has recently overseen the establishment of a digital film school, the Zemeckis Center for Digital Arts, at his alma mater, USC. "The only places we use film are in the camera and in the theater." And the camera could be next: If Lucas' gamble pays off, Episode II could conceivably become a watershed in movie production, The Jazz Singer of digital cinema. Says Zemeckis, "There's a good chance that I may have made my last film on film."

So when's it going to happen? It depends on who's talking (and what their financial stake is), but the consensus is: slowly. "I wouldn't expect to see a mass rollout of digital exhibition technology until 2004, 2005 at the earliest," says Forrester's Scheirer.

Moreover, reports of the imminent death of celluloid are greatly exaggerated. "We think film is going to be around for a very long time," says Phil Barlow, executive VP of the Walt Disney Motion Pictures Group. "It's probably not economically viable to convert every screen in this country to digital, and as long as there's money to be made from film exhibition, the studios aren't likely to pass up that revenue."

It's hard to dispute, though, that celluloid's days are ultimately numbered, and that's causing ambivalence in some romantic souls. Digital projectionist Tom Avitabile is one of them. "I like film," he says in the booth of theater 13. "[But]the next generation won't know what film is. They don't know what a record is. There'll be no nostalgic memory. You see the grain on an old movie, that's nostalgia." He punches a button on the new machine. "Film is history." It's not clear which meaning he intends.

Originally posted May 11, 2001 Published in issue #595 May 11, 2001 Order article reprints

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