Jack Valenti, we hardly knew you

I once bumped into Jack Valenti in a corridor in Bally's hotel in Las Vegas during a ShoWest. What intrigued me was that he was merrily munching from a bag of popcorn. Forty years of working for Hollywood and he still hadn't tired of the white stuff! Though he was more of a friend of the studios than cinemas - not surprising as the former paid his wages - it is appropriate that his memorial service was held at the ArcLight Cinema Dome in Los Angeles. Both the LA Times and New York Times were there to record the event.

For someone so much in the industry's eye it turns out we knew very little about the man himself, at least based on what his daughter had to say about him. From the NYT:

Ms. Valenti said her father had called her “my tumultuous daughter,” and there was much history, and much love, between them. “I was a moody and emotional kid,” she said. “But thanks to my lovely team of therapists, that he shelled out for, I’m able to embrace our past.”

Her father was also the kind of man, she said, “who shows up at his daughter’s birthday party at 1 a.m. so he can give her a hug.”

Saying her father had “more energy than me and all of you,” Ms. Valenti lamented what her father would miss: movies, elections and “the conversations about how incompetent the president is.”

“I hope I’m not betraying his confidence,” she quickly added.

While in the La Times Hollywood's Who's Who line up to pay tribute without getting too sentimental or reverential:

"He was the human equivalent of the iPhone," Steven Bochco, the creator of "NYPD Blue," said during the service. "He was a small, sleek package with irresistible features."

While he will never live down his 'VCR-Boston Strangler' comment even in death it is good to hear him getting recognition for the work he did for the likes of Friends of the Global Fight. A little bit of Hollywood history dies with him.

Korean TV show goes big in Japanese cinemas

With Transformers upon us, The Simpsons Movie just over the horizon and Sex & the City big screen adaptation confirmed, it's interesting to see television shows in their original format making it onto the big screen. The show the single-handedly made Korean culture a hit in Japan will be re-screened in cinemas in Tokyo, according to Screen International article:

A special version of Korean hit television drama Winter Sonata will be screened at Toho's flagship Roppongi Hills cinema in Tokyo.

All 20 episodes of the series will be shown on Tuesday mornings from July 10 to September 11, featuring extra footage only shown once previously on NHK's BS satellite channel and unavailable on DVD. BM Inc is handling the theatrical distribution of the series.

As Roppongi Hills is one of Tokyo's key multiplexes, Winter Sonata is fighting for screen space against Harry Potter And The Order Of The Pheonix, a live-action feature based on hit TV anime Saiyuki and the latest installment in the popular Pokemon franchise, all opening on July 14. Seven of the cinema's nine screens will show the episodes on July 17.

All of the multiplex's nine screens had show the last episode of Japanese TV drama Hotelier (a re-make of a Korean series by the same name) and set a one-day record of 2,000 admissions. This is said to be "part of an increasing trend of TV viewership in cinemas" in Japan.

I do not know what they charged for tickets, or even if they could - the article reveals that the screening had sponsors - but it is interesting to see this happening in the home country of high definition, which has been slow to embrace digital cinema.

How to make European cinema sexy

Post-Expo summary of European situation

I'm too lazy and busy to do a post-Cinema Expo summary, but fortunately FJI's new digital cinema editor Bill Mead has already done the work for me in this article. It is an excellent snapshot of where things stand in Europe:

Nowhere else in the world is the digital-cinema rollout more complex than in Europe. Compared to the U.S., where similar virtual print fee (VPF) arrangements have prompted an initial first wave of installations from exhibitors, Europe has more difficulty finding the common ground among the exhibitors, distributors, and digital-cinema providers on which equitable financial sharing arrangements can be built. In Europe, as elsewhere, the question of "who will pay" has evolved into a series of follow-up questions about how to develop equitable cost-benefit sharing deals that are fair today and are sustainable in the future.

Europe is a diverse market. Not only are there cultural factors but business and economic factors contributing to rollout complexity. There are more than 800 distributors operating in Europe and the mix of Hollywood studio and locally produced content varies by country, typically averaging around 70% imported titles. 35mm prints tend to be crossed-over between theatres more than in the U.S., so any print savings have to be spread across multiple theatres. There are also more theatres which are either part-time or with a relatively low annual number of admissions. Overall lower screen counts result in lower economy of scale from creating digital copies.

The article doesn't include details of AAM's two VPF deals, but I'm sure that will come in a future issue. For now, hats off to FJI's new digital cinema editor for a strong start. Andreas Fuchs has pulled the heavy European digital cart at FJI all by himself for too long.