The unleashing of the digital menace

I've always been a big "Star Wars" fan. When I could barely walk I used to dance around the room wildly conducting the original John Williams score from an old LP. (My family has 8-millimeter film footage — tres cute if I do say so myself.)

I've probably seen the original "Star Wars" 40 times, followed closely by "Jedi" and "The Empire Strikes Back." You could say I'm borderline fanatical.

For many fans, the 1999 "Episode I" was a real disappointment. It lacked a compelling storyline and the multidimensional characters of the original films, it was pedantic, and the computer graphics, while impressive, made it feel like a cartoon.

It's quite possible that there was no way for George Lucas and company to live up to the enormous expectations of two decades of "Star Wars" fans.

Be that as it may, the film sold five million VHS copies in just two days when it became available on video in April 2000 and more than $400 million in rentals to date.

Suspiciously absent from the video release was a DVD version. Lucasfilm announced that the public would just have to wait for a DVD release, as George Lucas did not have enough time to devote to the creation of a DVD for even the most recent film, let alone the original classics.

Today, however, part of that wait is over. This week marks the first ever DVD release of a film in the "Star Wars" saga. "Episode I: The Phantom Menace," hit store shelves Tuesday.

But why did it take so long? To answer that question, one has to learn about the history of DVD.

Digital Video Disc began as the logical evolution of the ubiquitous Compact Disc format, introduced by Philips and Sony in 1983. CDs, despite being the medium of choice for music and computer software, have never been able to handle adequately the demands of video.

In the early '90s, improvements in data compression and storage techniques set the stage for a new format. After a brief conflict between the electronics giants about the technical details of the new medium, the DVD standard was agreed upon in 1995. Consumer players first entered service in 1997.

Since then the adoption rate of the new technology has exceeded anyone's expectations. The players have been snapped up 10 times faster than VCRs were and four times faster than the CD format. There are more than 11,000 titles currently available on DVD. The picture and especially the sound quality rivals that found in movie theaters.

For movies like "Star Wars," it would seem a perfect fit. But Lucas was adamant. No DVD for you!

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Maybe George was concerned that if "Episode I" were released on DVD, the fans would use hacking software to decrypt the discs and then use video editing software to edit Jar Jar down to a binks . . . er . . . bit-part.

The reality is more complicated.

Initially, only Warner Bros., Columbia/Tristar and New Line Cinema were releasing films on DVD. Twentieth Century Fox, the distributer of the Star Wars films, among other studios and electronics retailer Circuit City, were heavily promoting a competing pay-per-view DVD format, called DiVX ("Digital Video Express").

DiVX offered encryption, access-control, and copy-protection measures which were vastly superior to those employed in the open DVD format.

Hollywood studios hate open home-video formats because they generate no further income after the initial sell-through phase. That's why so many studios were easily enticed into adopting the DiVX format (and, incidentally, why so many titles are always available on pay-per-view cable).

The DiVX standard was geared toward the rental market: DiVX discs expire two days after you first play them, and if you want to watch the movie again, a modem in your DiVX player makes a phone call and charges you a rental fee.

If not, you can just junk the discs. Or create modern works of art by stringing dozens of them together. Doesn't everybody do this? You don't have to return them to the video store like you do with DVDs.

With DVD, you buy it, and watched it whenever you want, as much as you want. Just like VHS.

As I recall, it was even speculated at one point that Lucas himself had a financial interest in the DiVX venture, possibly providing an ulterior motive for his reluctance to develop and release his films on DVD. If the "Star Wars" films were released ONLY on DiVX, they would be unwatchable on non-DiVX-enabled DVD players.

The big problem with pay-per-view is that it's not in the consumer's best interest. Watching a movie at home would be no different than buying tickets at the theaters. You could not, for instance, watch the handful of scenes in "Episode I" that are worth watching, without first paying the rental fee for the whole thing. Highly bogus!

In the case of "Star Wars" and DVD, a grass-roots campaign was launched, including petitions and an letter to Lucas in the Jan. 24, 2000 issue of Daily Variety.

By then, DiVX had been thoroughly "DivXterminated" by the market and the formerly DiVX-only studios, including Fox, had begun to release films on DVD.

Eventually, even Lucas caved, and work began on the DVD for "Episode I."

Next week, watch for reviews of the new two-disc "Episode I" and a few new films premiering this weekend. "From Hell" anyone?

Macauley Peterson is a contributor to The Independent Film and Video Monthly and a Princetonian Access Arts columnist. He can be reached at macauley@princeton.edu.