The New Audience: Movie-Going in a Connected World

Late last spring, I participated as the opening speaker of a program hosted by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and dealing with the future of movie-going. The program was organized by Michael Shamberg, a two-time Best Picture nominee with credits including The Big Chill, A Fish Called Wanda, Erin Brokovich, and Django Unchained. My fellow panelists included Ze Frank, the President of Buzzfeed Motion Pictures and a long-time innovator in digital media; Tayo Amos, a young filmmaker who described how digital media was creating openings for minority artists to create and share their work; and John Lassiter, the chief creative officer of Walt Disney and Pixar Animation Studios and principal creative advisor for Walt Disney Imagineering. As a long-time Oscar fan, it was a great honor to be speaking to this audience and I enjoyed pulling together a talk which spanned the history of motion pictures and sought to flag some key developments in contemporary Hollywood. Over the summer, the videos of this event have been released, and I wanted to share them here.

Over the next week or so, I am heading off to the East Coast: I am on leave this fall and in residence at Microsoft Research's New England office. There will be a brief gap in the flow of blog posts, having gotten caught up on a backlog of material that built up over the summer, and then I will be back like gangbusters. So pardon our interruption.