The Video Age: The Effect of Home Video on Hollywood
Introduction
The home video age has come and gone, being predominantly replaced by highly digitized and sophisticated mediums of viewing film and other content. Video’s role, however, remains embedded in every arena of cinematic culture. While VHS is nearly obsolete now, save for those who choose to collect such items for sentimental sake, it is the culture that the home video set forth that is responsible for the DVD industry that has seemingly taken over. Hollywood now caters to the legions of audiences who will wait for the film to come out on DVD, perhaps for the additional content or the ability to watch a movie over and over again. Regardless of the reason, the effect of home video on Hollywood is a reshaping of the mindset that makes up its viewership, and a recognition of this vital medium of mass entertainment that allows people to not only enjoy intimate settings where they can watch movies they love, but also enables film culture to become a part of everyday life rather than a single event.
The year 1977 marked the birth of the American home video market. The audio and video firm called Magnetic Video was the catalyst for this now-indispensible feature of entertainment. Facing dire financial struggles, Twentieth Century Fox sought other forms of generating income other than box office ticket sales. Magnetic Video’s founder Andre Blay saw the opportunity laid before him. He bought out Fox for the home video licensing rights to a large portion of their films. This move was the birthing point for the immensely prominent entertainment market that still exists today. According to Wasser (2001), “the first American movies released on VHS were The Sound of Music (Robert Wise, 1965), Patton (Franklin J. Schaffner, 1970), and M*A*S*H (Robert Altman, 1970).
Prior to this, World War II had instigated a series of changes in lifestyle, first in America and then in other industrialized countries. Such lifestyle changes included the “widespread adoption of television.” Even in the first decade of the 20th century, there existed “rumblings for the potential of home viewing of films, for entertainment and the dissemination of news and political discussion.” However, not until the advancement of broadcast television and the creation of home video did home viewing become the mass medium that it is today. Ironically, even during this momentous stage in mass entertainment history, most people were generally more interested in going to the theaters rather than staying home. In Veni, Vidi, Video: The Hollywood Empire and the VCR, Wasser suggests, “We can speculate that although people were use to staying at home to make music and therefore to listen to prerecorded music, they were still in the habit of going out for their theatrical entertainment.” At this point, the film industry was centered on the image of a mass audience. As a result, most people carried similar beliefs and saw film watching as something to do with a group, rather than alone at home with a small sector of people. It was far more accepted to be amongst a large group of mostly strangers, while watching the same film that would be played all over the world.
In the 1980s, when only a single percent of American homes owned a VCR, a momentous event in the culture of home video took place. According to Allott (2013), “the opening moments of a terrifying new movie, Friday the 13th (Sean Cunningham, 1980) portended the influence video distribution would have on motion picture aesthetics.” While the film was mainly praised for its gory renovation of horror movies, its more significant development was its brutal effect on the viewer. It reflected and challenged modern theories regarding the filmic experience. While classic horror movies had existed for decades, Friday the 13th was the consequence of a new phase in filmmaking: “it was too bloody and sexually explicit for TV, yet it addressed itself to a home viewer.” Alongside Friday the 13th, Next of Kin (Atom Egoyan, 1982), Sex, Lies, and Videotape (Steven Soderbergh, 1989), and Strange Days (Kathryn Bigelow, 1995) all contained features of home video that seemed not only seamless but nearly invisible. According to Allott (2013), these films “affirm the significance of home exhibition for motion pictures.”
The medium of video maintains a complex nature; exact and sufficient definition eludes us. This is so mainly because of its rapid transformation over the last thirty years. Adequate account of the history of video must include previous cultural assessments of video’s current and future forms. According to Moran (2002, pp.2), “Technological determinism and the discourse of inherent properties retard such a history, for they must inescapably fail to pin down contemporary video’s manifold interfaces among an ever-changing complex of multimedia.” Extended social tensions of society at large were responsible for the invention of television as a cultural form, rather than mere causality, chance, or corporatism. Even with today’s immensely sophisticated development of the video format, the medium remains a highly personal instrument for the individual viewer. Herein lies the most distinct differentiation between video and film. The complex nature is attributed to video array of available formats, the malleability of its recording ability, and the countless possible multimedia configurations. What Moran describes as its “chameleonlike quality [and] ceaseless process of becoming,” can be traced back to its initial purpose of complementing broadcast television. The medium of video had been initially formulated “as accessories to commercial network television, whose agendas inflected the formal and technical properties of the video medium itself.” Its inception thus began with a formless identity.
After the failure of playback only systems, American entertainment industries were forced to acknowledge the irreplaceable importance of its consumers. Entrepreneurs responded to this “by developing the infrastructure of video rental and creating new independent distribution companies.” Consequently, not only was the innovatory experience of filmmakers altered, the audience’s experience of film culture was also remolded in the face of progressive video rental. In fact, the video rental phenomenon was as fundamental as the spreading of neighborhood movie theaters during the early 1900’s. Similarly, this new medium offered the same feature as the nickelodeon, which brought the film to the viewer both in their home and at the theater. In today’s culture, the emphasis placed on leisure time “gives an edge to the large multi-faceted companies that can market films across media.” Since the end of the 20th century, American audiences have almost exclusively watched films using a video platform, whether in VHS, DVD, Video On Demand, or streaming media through the Internet. While the actual video platform may alter, “prerecorded video as a distribution model continues to structure motion picture production and consumption.” For both the filmmakers and the film watchers, videos are the main source for mass entertainment.
What was once an exciting technical possibility that was birthed from the video age, is now a widespread cultural staple: moviemaking using one’s own camera and computer and dissemination over the internet. The era of grass-roots filmmaking has definitely come, with desktop computers responsible for the seeds that start full-fledged motion pictures. What had been predicted over ten years ago has become undeniable reality: “If history serves as any guide, these films will simply be ‘calling cards’ that will enable the desktop film director to move on to a career of making big-budget movies.” Filmmaker Robert Rodriguez writes about his experiences with basic filmmaking and the role that the home video had on his journey: “I had realized that with two VCRs hooked together I could edit by playing my movie on one VCR and recording on the other VCR, using the pause button on the recorder to edit out unwanted material. My editing system was born. What I didn’t realize was that by making movies in this homemade, extremely crude and time-consuming manner, I was actually training myself for my future filmmaking challenges.”
Not only was the VHS inspiring future filmmakers and birthing the seeds of now sophisticated editing systems, the video industry itself had moments of flourishing success. In 2001, the American home video industry “attracted sales of $18.7 billion.” Blockbuster was not only the leader of the video store industry since the early 1990s, it was also a staple of the cultural activity sphere for families and friends alike. Video rental therefore embedded itself into Hollywood culture, linking the audience with mass entertainment in a way that it had never been before. Home video quickly transformed into an extremely successful sector for motion films, “representing not only another outlet for their films but an extremely profitable one, with low distribution expenses involved.”
Although DVD technology surpasses the VHS in terms of quality and features—namely for its countless playback possibilities for computers and DVD players as well as the opportunity to view additional material about a movie—the VHS is the root of its success. In some cases, the distribution of DVDs account for “30 percent of studio’s retail revenue from home video sales and rentals.” Yet this would only be possible if the first milestone of the home video had been passed over, with generations of families and friends gathering to rent a movie and watch the film in the comfort of their own home. The ritual and medium merely gained sophistication while still maintaining the same charm and appeal of the old VHS.
During the course of cutting technological progress, fascinating scrutiny of film theory can take place as one ponders the question of what cinema actually is. In just the last thirty years, video culture has been steadily dappled into mainstream media despite the rise in technology. In films such as Videodrome (David Cronenberg, 1983), The Blair Witch Project (Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez, 1999), The Ring (Gore Verbinski, 2002), and Paranormal Activity (Oren Peli, 2009), we see the enterprising exploration of the home video medium and platform in the US film industry. This new face of multiplatform distribution has changed the way Holly wood views motion picture spectatorship and the resulting abundance of new content and film theories that arise. US and Canadian entertainment industries are fully aware of the fact that the majority of their viewers approach the work of producers and artists through a variety of video forms. Since the inception of video, the question of motion pictures and how they are actually received by the public audience, has been emphatic and divisional in nature.
Upon its release from its reliance on television, video achieved equal footing with other traditional mediums of art by reintroducing itself as based on “qualities and principles that are timeless and universal.” The challenge of this was to also stay loyal to the unique traits that separated video from other mediums. One of these unique traits was the ability to record and transmit at the same time, which would effectively allow for instant feedback. Other advantages, which were especially idolized by performance artists, included the ability to work alone, to have complete creative reign, to easily repeat a performance from any location, and “to buffer personal revelation from an audience in real time within the safety of an electronic space.”
The entire culture of Hollywood and film has therefore changed. The ubiquity of VHS, and now DVD and Internet, has created a generation where movie watchers engage in home viewing over going to the theaters. Furthermore, the rising addition of video images “within filmic narratives has modified the phenomenology of classical Hollywood spectatorship.” Films such as Death Watch (Bertrand Tavernier, 1980) and American Beauty (Sam Mendes, 1999) all feature facets of the unique medium of video through “video scan lines, pixels, SLR framing, LED messages, and shuttle effects [which] make up a new set of hybrid narrative codes.”
Whether it is VHS, DVD, and media sourced from the Internet, the majority of the video we entertain ourselves with has been recorded and distributed by another. While other researchers have explored sectors including “time-shifting (recording television broadcasts for later viewing), bootlegging, amateur videography, and video art,” the fact does not change that for most American video users, the medium has been interchangeable with the movies (Allott 2013, pp.6). While this irrefutable association has changed Hollywood and the entire film industry, the home video phenomenon did not occur in a boardroom or at a video store. The revolution occurred as a result of movies themselves, in the crucial exchange between the viewer and the film. According to Allott (2013, pp.6), there lies a spectatorial relationship—to the discursive construction of a spectator who sometimes goes to the movies but more often ‘waits for it on video’—by examining how motion pictures have reacted to home video, the new ways they reach and affect their viewers.” A new legion of audience has been formed as a result of this versatile medium of video.
The word video comes from the Latin videre, which means “to see, to observe, to comprehend, to understand” (Allott, 2013, p.13). This term has become an incredibly amorphous term for every non-filmic form of motion picture dissemination and presentation. More importantly, it has transformed into a term that denotes a deeply personal experience, a unique way of “encountering extracinematic motion pictures” (Allott, 2013, pp.13). Without question, the medium of video has developed into an unmatched platform. It now seems nearly impossible to watch a movie without the desire or ability to pause, rewind, and fast forward. Additional bonus features describing everything from auditions to the interviews with the director, from the actors’ auditions to movie commentary, from alternate endings to deleted scenes, all provide highly tempting incentive to forgo the movie-going experience in lieu of the home-viewing experience. The changes that video has brought forth in film viewing spectatorship has resulted in a necessary recognition by American entertainment industries to adjust their feature motion pictures accordingly. Furthermore, while the medium of video was once nondescript and merely ancillary to the film, it now stands as an equal contender. Since 1986, Hollywood has generated more income from video than from film, “which indicates that video is not a secondary market in their eyes but as fundamental as the box office for the commercial life of a movie.” There is no question that the medium of video has become a vital part of not only the motion picture industry, but also the everyday lives of ordinary people.
Video has become synonymous with movie, and this powerful and immensely versatile medium has enabled giant shifts to occur within Hollywood. Large entertainment companies are now acutely aware of the growing need for video-related content and attention. The home video began this cultural mindset of staying in to watch movies, while at the same time bridging the relational gap between the filmmaker and the viewer through the ability to share more content with the audience, thus furthering the feeling of connection, experience, and understanding.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Allott, Caetlin Anne. Killer Tapes and Shattered Screens: Video Spectatorship from VHS to File Sharing. Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 2013.
Moran, James M. There's No Place like Home Video. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002.
Rodriguez, Robert. Rebel without a Crew, Or, How a 23-year-old Filmmaker with $7,000 Became a Hollywood Player. New York: Penguin, 1996.
Wasko, Janet. How Hollywood Works. London: SAGE, 2003.
Wasser, Frederick. Veni, Vidi, Video: The Hollywood Empire and the VCR. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2001.
