Screen Wars: Exploring the Ways Movies Were Watched Over Time

Article By: Joaquin D. Valle, Writer | BCS Chronicle

What You Need To Know:

• The way people interact with movies and media has drastically changed since the early days of cinema.

• From cassettes, to DVDs, to laserdiscs, to streaming media, the experience of media ownership has changed a lot over the years.

• Despite all the recent advancements in media playback technology, cinema continues to play a major role in people’s lives.

For Houston native Katherine Giovanna Argueta, going to the movies is more than just a way to pass some time; rather, it is an escape into a world that exists on the screen and in her mind. Her family would go to the movies almost every weekend. They would arrive in the morning for the early bird tickets. She was unsure why, but being inside the theater always filled her with excitement. It was hard for her to focus on anything else as she immersed herself in the story in front of her. 

Over the years watching movies as a hobby has changed drastically. From the Golden Age of Cinema to now, the activity and culture has become a niche hobby dominated by film geeks keeping the heart of movies alive. At one point in time going to the cinema was not as niche of a hobby as it is today. During the Golden Age of Cinema and also when most grown adults were kids, going to the movies used to be an event in itself. Now with the rise of technology and company buyouts streaming has taken over as the new medium for entertainment.

The Golden Age

Going to the movies was a different experience before technology advanced as much as it has today. Before streaming, dvd players, vhs and other forms of video machines the only way to see the new movies at the time were at movie theaters.

Performance and Visual studies professor Daniel Humphrey shared some insight on going to the movies as a hobby in the “good old days”. 

“The classical era of Hollywood is probably the 30s and 40s,” Humphrey said. “Really, that's before TV and movies were a very affordable form of entertainment.”

The Classical Era of Hollywood or the Golden Age was from the 1910’s to the early 1960’s and during that time many of Hollywood's most iconic films were released. Some of these films include The Wizard of Oz, King Kong, Gone With the Wind and many more. 

“Hollywood was just churning them out,” said Humphrey. “You know like 10 movies would open a week and they were from all the big studios.”

Humphrey said during the Great Depression more people were attending movies because ticket costs were so low that the average American could afford to go to the cinema two or three times a week. 

“But when a movie came out, it was more of a big event, you know,” Humphrey said. “There was a time when, like, kind of seemed like everyone in America watched the Academy Awards. It was like the Super Bowl.”

Humphrey explained that the movie industry peaked in popularity at this time and since then they have struggled to capture people's attention since then. 

“Yeah, people of your generation, I think, don't quite get why older people love movies so much,” Humphrey said.” “Every once in a while, the people who put on the Oscars will say, how can we get that big audience back? And a lot of film scholars are like, you'll never get that audience back.”

Humphrey explained that theaters lost some of its magic and there are a number of reasons how and why this has happened. 

“An Indiana Jones movie would play for six months in the theater but now it's gone in three weeks.Then next week it's on and you can stream it at home,” Humphrey said. “Decades after film was invented, it still seemed really remarkable to people, you know, like, Oh, wow. There's John Wayne up on the big screen there's  Roman Novaro or Ricardo Montalban or Grace Kelly. 

The Classical Age of the movie industry is very special and holds a lot of special feelings and emotions in people's hearts. So much so that many popular movies from this time period are recycled and remade countless times. They are key pieces in many people's childhood memories and the amount of influence these films have in today's age is undeniable. 

It is not easy to find people who have experienced theater during the Classical era. Luckily Rachael Garcia ,from the city of San Antonio, loves to talk about life back then. 

“I was born in 1945 and I am 79 years old,” Garcia said. “The theaters were nice. We had the Majestic and the Aztec theaters were the really nice ones I would go to.” 

Garcia said it was very inexpensive to go to the movies and it was an event where everyone dressed up. 

“In the 50’s it was about $1.25 or $2.25 or something like that,” Garcia said. “At that time people would dress up to go downtown, to the movies, shopping, everybody would dress up as if they were going to Sunday church.”

Garcia mentioned that movies back then were a lot more innocent than the new stuff that is being put out today.

“They were nice decent movies, you know, ones for couples to go see on a date,” Garcia said. “They were nice and decent, a little bit different than what is out now, now what they release can be a little crazy.”

Garcia said for those who did not want to go to the theater there was an alternative viewing experience that she would visit with her late husband. 

“I went to the drive-ins with my husband a lot when we were younger,” Garcia said. “It was different, you didn't have to dress up for one, it was very casual.”

Garcia said it was very cheap to go. It would usually cost about $1 or so per car and it was one of the most convenient ways to go see a movie. 

“All you would need to do was show up, park the car and tune the radio to the channel the audio was playing from,” Garcia said. “There was a snack bar you can go to and it also had little things (playgrounds) for kids to play in to keep them occupied.”

New Hollywood

The New Hollywood era began in the late 1960’s and ended in 1980’s. This era is responsible for many legendary movies like Taxi Driver, Jaws, the original Star Wars trilogy, The Godfather and so many more. It also consisted of legendary directors Stanley Kubrick, George Lucas, Martin Scorecese, Steven Spielberg and Mel Brooks. The end of this era also brought different advancements in technology which encouraged people to watch movies at home. That being the Video Home System (VHS) player and Video Cassette Recorder (VCR).

Video Home System (VHS)

Larry Lemmons was born in 1956 and grew up watching movies with the Video Home System(VHS) and Video Cassette Recorder (VCR). “One thing that I really am amazed by in the time I have been alive is that the formats of so many things have changed,” Lemmons said. Lemmons explained that formatting has changed so much and one of the first big changes happened in the 1970’s when VHS and VCR came out.

“First of all, you can record off the television so that was neat,” Lemmons said. “So if there was something you really wanted to watch or somebody had a camera you could record that onto VHS.”

Lemmons explained that VHS was used by people with cameras to record all of the things they filmed or movie enjoyers would go to movie stores like Blockbuster to find something to watch. 

“If you couldn't catch a movie in the theaters.Or if you just wanted to see it again, well, you could rent that VHS and sit around and watch that,” Lemmons said. “TV’s were not that big back then but still they were of pretty good quality.”

Lemmons mentioned that with every good thing comes some problems and with VHS there were a few. 

“There were problems with VHS,” Lemmons said. “For example, the tape sometimes will get screwed up or whoever had that tape before you would screw it up or they put peanut butter in it.” 

Lemmons said that sometimes people would not rewind the movie when they returned it even when there was a sign on the tape saying to do so. 

“There was always this little thing written on there ‘Be Kind Rewind,’ so a lot of people watched the whole movie and then took it out and they returned it but it wasn't rewound,” Lemmons said.

Lemmons said the other problem was that sometimes VHS owners would have to clean the heads on the tape machines. 

“It wasn't bad for everything that you got, that's a pretty cool deal to have the VHS,” Lemmons said. “That's also when porn got big because now people could go and rent it, and they didn't have to go to a porn house or something like Pee Wee Herman.”

Laserdisc

Technology expert Joseph Lopez, aka Mr. Media Lab, has a vast knowledge on all things electronic, especially the newest home media system at the time – the laserdisc player. 

“A laser came out in 1979 and they are what you call an optical medium,” Lopez said. “There is a laser that reads the optical medium and what it does is there's typically a metal film or some kind of foil film that reflects and so the laser reads the information on the disk.”

Lopez said the format itself was modeled after a record or an LP. 

“The form factor is the size of a record,” Lopez said. “Features of the laser disc that made it different from like VHS or beta was that they let you not just like hit play and watch like you didn't have to fast-forward or rewind, you could go to chapters and look around in a way that you couldn't do with VHS.”

Lopez said the laser disc was way different from VHS and was superior in terms of quality. 

“It started by having similar outputs as a VCR but they would eventually have like S-Video outputs and other kinds of outputs that were high Fidelity compared to DHS,” Lopez said. “They had more resolution and the video signal was higher quality, the audio signal would become higher quality.”

Lopez said it was interesting because the laserdisc could be considered the first form of DVD.

“It was an interesting time because this is before DVD and so you're basically kind of getting this DVD quality experience but without DVD,” Lopez said. “But they were big and so you know blockbusters didn't carry them and they were also delicate and the first ones that came out like you literally had to flip the disc.”

Lopez said although it was better to have a laserdisc over VHS it could be pretty pricey owning one so the average consumer was probably better off without one. 

“I don't remember off the top of my head but a combo deck, which came out in the mid 90s, I remember those being around $500 so in today's money it would be like $1000 to $1500,” Lopez said. “Those (Disc) were like 20 to 50 bucks even at the time so it was very cost prohibitive to even buy them because most VHS was like 10 to 30 bucks maybe 40 bucks.”

Digital Versatile Disc (DVD)

In 1996 another advancement in technology brought the Digital Versatile Disc also known as the DVD. This format made waves in the world and Jonathan Guajardo, a professor of Communication and Journalism, grew up when DVDs overtook VHS in most American households.

“I remember DVD players being super expensive back in the day,the problem was that people were like, Oh, it's too expensive to buy DVD players. We'll just visit with VHS for a while,” Guajardo said. “But then, you know, like everything, the price began coming down, and more people began buying DVDs, as opposed to VHS, as in, blockbusters began stocking DVDs.”

Guajardo said he remembers back when he was a kid and his father replaced their VHS player with a brand new DVD player. 

“I'll never forget the day they took out my parents VHS player, and they put in the DVD player and and they're like, This is it? This is our thing. Now we're all, we're a DVD household not a VHS household name,” Guajardo said.” 

The day that happened changed everything Guajardo said and there are hundreds of reasons for why owning a DVD player was necessary. 

“DVD’s are a lot more portale, they require a lot less physical space to take up as far as a medium to the picture quality is clear, it's pure digital,” Guajardo said. “You could write them, you could copy them. Then also, they tended to last longer, they wouldn't wear out.”

Guajardo said with VHS the user could wear out the tape if they watched it too much, and an even bigger issue came with watching a long movie.

“I think the big one that I remember is Titanic was, like, two tapes, two cassette tapes, and, like I said, two VHS tapes, and then the actual DVD was just one,” Guajardo said. “That was a huge deal. I was like, how did they fit it all on there? So size was a big deal, storage, the longevity of the DVD as well and also it was just better viewing quality.”

Guajardo said the DVD was great in itself, but after a few years, a better version of it came out.

“Blu-ray is just a HD DVD, it's a 1080p DVD, whereas DVD was 480p,” Guajardo said. “The picture quality is better, the sound quality is better so it was a big deal to have a blu ray disc player as well.”

Watching Movies Today

Watching movies today is an entirely new experience because technology has improved so much. The wants and needs of modern day audiences reflect the product they consume and the form it is presented in. The product has changed so much from the periods before then. Daniel Humphrey had a few things to comment on where films are at today.

“We're in what an art historian would call a Baroque phase,” Humphrey said. “The Baroque phase when all these artists tried to continue impressing people and the art got really kind of overly elaborate and exaggerated to the point where it was kind of almost sort of ugly, it was just kind of entering this decadent phase of sort of too much.” 

Technology has changed everything. Nowadays people have access to huge libraries of different shows and movies. Going to the movies is still a thing people do but it is more common for people to wait and watch films at home rather than go to the local cinema. 

Environmental science senior Katherine Giovanna Argueta mentioned that going to the movies has become a little inconvenient. 

“I feel like going once a month is a little excessive but I would say I go about once every couple of months,” Argueta said. “I think part of it is I feel like the movies today are not as original or really highlight creativity in film.”

Argueta believes that most movies coming out today are sequels or part of a franchise or remakes of other stuff and she does not feel incentivized to go because of the price. 

“I think with fees and stuff the average I spend for a ticket is about 15 bucks,” Argueta said. “I feel like spending that much money on movies and going regularly does not feel worth it or entice me to go.”

Performance and visual arts professor Patrick Sullivan has some more insight on why people today do not really attend movies. 

“Streaming and television has become a site of revenue for these studios right now,” Sullivan said. “Disney releases the movie in theaters but they are also gonna have you subscribe to Disney + so that you can watch the movie later on.”

Sullivan said from the company's standpoint it is all revenue so they will go wherever the money is.

“For people knowing that it's gonna come out in 2 weeks (On Streaming), they might go, oh i’m not gonna worry about seeing that and wait to watch it on TV,” Sullivan said. 

Junior marketing major Connor Field believes that streaming has not changed much in the movie industry but has made watching more convenient.

“I still go to the theaters quite often, I'll go a couple times a month, maybe once a month,” Field said. “Watching movies has changed because of just being able to pause stuff and return to it later.”

Field said that in this new day and age streaming has allowed people to watch whatever they want whenever they want and big studios have taken note of that. 

“Most of the Apple TV movies you see were designed to work best on streaming,” Field said. “The movie Napoleon was specifically made to where it would work best with streaming, even though you were playing it on the big screen.”

Field explained that during filming a lot of studios are planning out days to get shots that will look good for streaming specifically.

“I wouldn't say that necessarily makes the art form better. I think it definitely makes it to where marketing is easier,” Field said. “If I'm streaming a movie, I have this way for people to watch it, even after it releases, you can still be able to grow, like to a gross audience.” 

Field believes that the art form is not in any danger but he believes it is evolving into something new because of streaming. 

“Streaming has changed it because the types of movies we see are more driven based on what they think will actually do well,” Field said. “Then you have the rare exception with people doing it just because they like to make movies in which oftentimes those don't necessarily make the types of money that the bigger ones do.”

Field also mentioned that content and movies are so easily accessible now and for small creators streaming has become a thing they can use to get their name out there.

“If you're looking at Pluto you can get easy or cheap distribution deals to get your film on there,” Field said. “If you're trying to market yourself as a filmmaker and get people to watch your content then streaming has made a lot of it easier, even if you want to go to Youtube.”

Field said with a giant catalogue streaming has made watching movies more convenient to everyday life.

“I watch a lot of movies to the point where it looks gross, just like it looks disgusting the amount of movies I watch, but it's because I do it the same way people listen to music,”  Field said. “Where I can throw it on in the background and I still know what's going on.”