Paramount has just become the first studio to announce that it will no longer distribute film prints. This means that each forthcoming movie from Paramount, regardless of whether it was produced on film or video, will only be shown digitally in theaters. Paramount is the trailblazer, but my prediction is that by 2015 every other major studio will follow suit.

Ironically perhaps, this morning I finished logging all the footage of Pause of the Clock. When I got to the end of roll 33, the final shot of which is a stray glimpse of the church sanctuary where we staged the movie’s final scene, I must admit feeling a bit wistful. We had the good fortune to shoot on 16mm. And though, at this point, the possibility of ever being able to “finish” on film by producing a final film print looks very unlikely, Pause of the Clock will always have that special look that comes only from shooting on film. James Gray puts it really well:

But I think the power of what is new is really in some ways what is damaging, because let’s say everyone was shooting digital — the whole world, Steven Spielberg, Chris Nolan, all those guys, they were all shooting digital — and then all of a sudden I came out with this product and said “Well there’s this thing, it doesn’t see in pixels, it sees in grain, which is more like your eye sees, and it has a better contrast ratio than digital and it has a better color representation,” everybody would be like “This new thing — film — I gotta change to film.” I can’t understand why everyone wants to migrate to a medium that is — in my mind — objectively worse.

Now, the movie’s the thing. A good movie is a good movie (and a terrible movie is a terrible movie) regardless of (or sometimes despite) its format. But it’s just very sad to suddenly have fewer choices rather than more choices.