11

The End of James Cameron's Quiet Years

Charles R. Acland

For many, James Cameron's groan-inducing “I'm king of the world” proclamation during the 1998 Academy Awards broadcast confirmed existing stories of his egomania. His outburst was part of his acceptance speech after winning the Best Director Oscar for Titanic (1997). Just imagine what he must have been thinking when he got up to accept the Best Picture award a few moments later! Though he was quoting a line of dialogue he had written for the film, Cameron's triumphant declaration made his status as a less-than-beloved figure, especially among people who had worked for him, evident to a wide television audience. A few weeks after the Academy Awards, Peter Bart wrote an April Fool's editorial in Variety that parodied Cameron's megalomania, saying executives had to rent Chasen's Restaurant just to take a meeting with him, that Cameron insisted no fewer than four studios would be required to back his next project, and that he asked to be addressed as King, beginning all meetings with a few minutes' silence for the victims of the Titanic (Bart, 1998). But for all of his grandiose behavior, imagined or otherwise, let us remember that just prior to Titanic's release, the film and Cameron were widely ridiculed, with high expectations that his film would be a colossal failure. The production, the financing, and the releasing strategies were so outside industry standards at that time that it was difficult for observers to understand his plan. So, that evening at the Academy Awards ceremony, he had reason to gloat.¹

The pre-release miscalculation about Titanic led many critics and industry analysts to take a “wait and see” attitude toward his more audacious sci-fi project Avatar (2009). Cameron wrote, produced, and directed that unparalleled expensive 3D production; he also did uncredited work as director of photography and provided hands-on contributions for virtually every aspect of the production. Critics reserved judgment on what appeared to be a fundamentally insupportable business model, even when some sneak peaks at footage left fans underwhelmed. And once Avatar's record-breaking box-office returns began to roll in, it was clear that this was a prudent decision.

Concerning the years between Cameron's career peak in 1998 and the release of Avatar, an impression circulated that he was not making movies. For instance, Variety titled a brief 2001 update on his career “Titanic titan takes time out” (Hayes, 2001, p. 4). During that time, though, his status as an elusive craftsman and perfectionist never rested; indeed, it expanded even though he was absent from the annual blockbuster slate for over a decade. Despite his enigmatic, and counterintuitive, career path, he remained popularly understood as a decisive creative force. His cameo in the émission à clef, HBO's Entourage, had Cameron playing himself and signing the heartthrob character Vinnie Chase to star in Aquaman, a fictional project that seemed to be a plausible Cameron pursuit: he has made water-set action epics and worked to launch the Spiderman franchise before being supplanted. In a telling moment, Cameron notifies the actor of his casting decision via a cell phone call while piloting a helicopter. The image of the powerful filmmaker, directing the players from on high, propellers churning in the background, matches the sense that Cameron is rather like a remote and technologically savvy military commander. As Turtle, a member of the show's eponymous entourage, says, “With Cameron directing, you know it's going to be special.” This reputation persisted, and his fan base was strong, despite the fact that most assume he had made only six films in the 25 years following his breakthrough movie, Terminator (1984). That's roughly the same rate of production as his self-declared creative mentor, and painstakingly slow filmmaker, Stanley Kubrick, from Spartacus (1960) to Eyes Wide Shut (1999).

In actuality, Cameron was an active filmmaker during the years between Titanic and Avatar, working as a documentary producer and director as well as a television producer (Fox's Dark Angel), and he did so in his outsized way. His documentary turn was unusual for this committed sci-fi action director, to say the least. He was executive producer of several controversial made-for-cable documentaries, most notably the revisionist biblical subjects of The Exodus Decoded (2006) and The Lost Tomb of Jesus (2007), both directed by Emmy Award-winning documentarian Simcha Jacobovici, who has since gone on to star in the VisionTV and History Channel series The Naked Archeologist. Cameron's own directed and produced documentaries are Expedition: Bismarck (2002), which he co-directed with Gary Johnstone, Ghosts of the Abyss (2003), and Aliens of the Deep (2005). The latter was co-directed with Steven Quale who, incidentally, went on to be a second unit director on Avatar.

These three Cameron films are large-budget science documentaries involving remote undersea settings. In fact, some claim Aliens of the Deep, which included a $14 million dollar expedition, is the most expensive documentary ever made (MacInnis, 2004, p. 27). His penchant for quoting himself reappears in these titles, two of which allude to his features Aliens (1986) and The Abyss (1989). Beyond these references, the links between these documentaries and his blockbusters are manifold and substantial enough that we should not see them as the radical departure from his oeuvre that they might at first appear to be. In fact, in many ways, this trilogy solidified Cameron's relationship to ideas about popular science, exploration, and technological innovation. Indeed, his success in building a persona that embodied these traits is such that in 2006, with Titanic nine years in the past, and with Avatar still called Project 880, Cameron received the Visionary Award from Cinema Expo, the exhibitors' convention, for his special contribution to technological innovation (Pickard, 2006, p. A6). Two years earlier, he received the Nicola Tesla Award in Recognition for Visionary Achievements in the World of Digital Technology and Sound from the Satellite Awards. Meanwhile, an honorary doctorate from the University of Southampton for his contribution to maritime science and his membership on the NASA Advisory Council marked the degree of recognition he held among scientists. Take note that these industry and scholarly recognitions transpired at the time of his supposed hiatus.

Cameron doesn't do anything quietly, and his years of retreat from the mainstream of the Hollywood industry involved some grand exploits. His surprising activity over the 12 years following Titanic tells us something about the state of financial control, technological innovation, market development in the international film business, and relations among film and other media. This period of his career offers a case in which we can explore what exactly this thing is we call the film business. The first step is to know that there is no easy definition, and that there is no unified and stable entity called “the film business.” Tom Schatz (2008) has described the current phase of film history as the era of “Conglomerate Hollywood,” characterized by film's diminishing revenue-generating centrality inside a maze of vertically and horizontally integrated business concerns. Eileen Meehan (2008) has shown that the varying corporate structures of “the Big Six” – Disney, General Electric, National Amusements, News Corporation, Sony, and Time Warner – reveal nonsynchronous relations between entertainment sectors, hence differing approaches to industrial strategy. In short, what we refer to casually as Hollywood is in fact a configuration of different industries, agendas, strategies, and commodities, which can interlock and promote one another or can be countervailing forces.

In a media system noted for its sprawling and unwieldy character, Cameron stands out as one who succeeds – commercially and, in some quarters, critically – where prevailing logic suggests he shouldn't. With each film, Cameron and his collaborators systematically worked through problems and possibilities for certain kinds of special filmmaking conditions, special exhibition contexts, and business strategies. Significantly, and this is what I investigate in this chapter, in his projects and persona we can identify the technological imperative lodged in conceptions of the future of cinema. He displays a certain technological auteurism, especially in the popular and industrial representation of his credited innovations. As Variety's Peter Debruge (2006) wrote of Cameron, “When ‘the King of the World’ sets his sights on tomorrow's technology, the rest of the industry takes note” (p. A1). Through Cameron, we can begin to discern the meaning and implications of “technological achievement” for an industry that devotes a considerable amount of investment in the notion. The Academy Awards for technological accomplishment tend to be sectioned off from the primary broadcast, relegated, at best, to a few minutes' recap of an earlier highly gendered ceremony with an attractive starlet doling out statues to geeky men. In actuality, this dimension of corporate competition for proprietary control over the advancement in moving image technologies is a major feature of the entertainment industry. By linking Cameron's blockbusters with his documentaries, and by focusing on production and exhibition technology, this chapter shows how certain unstable technological aspects of the film industry have been carefully capitalized upon by Cameron. In a sense, he is an idol of the digital future of cinema. This especially involves his commitment to 3D film and to the development of 3D filmmaking processes. Even though such processes have a long history and are associated with countless innovators, Cameron has been elevated as a vanguard enthusiast for the technological and economic viability of contemporary 3D. To establish his current status as a technological auteur, we begin with the reception of Avatar and its use of 3D.

Avatar as Game Changer

The jokes about Avatar were almost as good as the movie: Pocahontas meets Halo, Dances with Wolves in Space, James Cameron's Ferngully, and a recruiting vehicle for Blue Man Group. With the film's juggernaut rollout, such humorous spins were to be expected. But it is one thing to put the promotional engine in high gear, and another to deliver a financially successful, audience-pleasing, and critically respected film to match the hype. By virtually every measure, Cameron did exactly that with his body-swapping, environmentally aware space opera. Avatar enjoyed a high cumulative score on the omnibus movie review website Rotten Tomatoes. And audience interest bulked up the film's box office to $750 million domestic, and $2.73 billion worldwide, making it (arguably) the highest-grossing film of all time.

Avatar was a “tentpole” film, which means it was the centerpiece of distributor Twentieth Century Fox's slate of recent releases. There is no hard and fast definition for what counts, but tentpoles typically have large budgets, especially for promotion, and might be expected to launch or continue a film franchise. A major distributor may have a couple of tentpole films over the course of a year. Such films are often mentioned in the annual reports of media corporations, as distributors temporarily bank corporate fiscal health on the success of those particular releases. With tentpoles drawing the largest theatrical audiences, a distributor fills out its “tent” with films that might be directed toward genre or niche audiences. For exhibitors, a tentpole benefits simultaneously released films, as, say, parents drop off their kids to see Avatar and then take in It's Complicated (Nancy Meyers, 2009) on the screen next door.

But Avatar was also something of a different order. It may be a case of absence making the heart grow fonder, but the lead up to Avatar's release date – itself a commemorative or superstitious marking of Titanic's release date 12 years earlier – was extraordinary in a number of respects. Online ticket vendors MovieTickets.com and Fandango both started selling tickets in August, an unprecedented four months before the release (“Are James Cameron fans the type,” 2009). Cameron enjoyed a substantial amount of media attention through the fall of 2009, with profiles of his career and the technological innovations of Avatar characterizing him as a “man of extremes” who did not let the mundane fiscal realities of a production budget hamper the final product. But these profiles also carefully crafted a kinder, gentler, blue-collar hero whose advancement was the product of ingenuity, hard work, and a faith in scientific discovery.²

An air of secrecy around the film's production helped build public anticipation. Entertainment news greeted the release of individual photographs from the set and film stills as being just as newsworthy as paparazzi shots of inebriated stars. But a tone of reverence was evident in some of this entertainment journalism, making the publicity photos seem like images of an actual far-flung space station or scientific expedition.³ The availability of a three-minute trailer for Avatar online and in theaters was conventional marketing material. A new trailer premiered on an episode of Fox's House, M.D. (November 16, 2009), with advertisements for the trailer broadcast through the preceding week. Close connections to the gaming industry were sought; Ubisoft developed a 3D Avatar game, released on December 1, 2009, just weeks ahead of the film itself.⁴ Not surprisingly, the trailers for the movie and for the game were easily confused, and indeed, this was part of the point. But the decision to show 25 minutes of the film in Amsterdam at the exhibitors' convention CineExpo in June, then in Los Angeles at a gathering of 2,000 US exhibitors at Grauman's Chinese Theatre, and then at the US comic book and science fiction convention Comic-Con in July in San Diego, was all part of an atypical rollout strategy. The lead-up to the release additionally included surprise clips and a panel discussion at the videogame conference E3 in Los Angeles and a free showing of 16 minutes on 100 IMAX 3D screens on August 21, 2009 (McClintock, 2009). Such limited access to a portion of a highly anticipated film generated a sense of scarcity and word-of-mouth publicity. But these were very risky decisions, for reviews, especially on increasingly influential web-based fan sites, were not uniformly positive.

The most unusual aspect of the months prior to release was the way Avatar was talked about as a revolutionary shift in cinema. Few media products have such elevated expectations as Avatar had attributed to it. And these expectations were not only for its own success, but also for a number of other products and technologies it bundled to share its revenue-generating glory. Many believed that this film was a game changer for the business of cinema. Steven Soderbergh was one unlikely auteurist voice singing the praises ofAvatar based on partial footage he had seen during the production process. He went so far as to describe it as a “benchmark” movie, comparable to The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972) in its day.⁵ Similarly, DreamWorks Animation head Jeffrey Katzenberg asserted, “I think the day after Jim Cameron's movie comes out, it's a new world” (quoted in Goodyear, 2009, p. 67). At the film's premier, director Michael Mann declared, “There's before this movie and after this movie” (Higgins, 2009).

The language of the “game-changing” impact of Avatar is illuminating. First, the film represented stupendous budget aggrandizement and ever more Byzantine accounting procedures. The official budget from Fox and Cameron's production company, Lightstorm Entertainment, was $230 million, up from the initial budget of “close to $200 million” when Fox's participation was first announced in January 2007 (Waxman, 2007). So unrestrained was Cameron that that amount soon seemed like a bargain next to unofficial estimates. Once we add all international distribution and marketing expenses, and the personal financial commitment of individual investors, including Cameron, the figure is closer to $500 million (Cieply, 2009). That outlandish figure was not the worrisome feature for the distributing studio Fox that one might expect, due to the fact that it limited its liability. Dune Entertainment and Ingenious Media, two private equity partners, were reportedly in for roughly 60% of the budget (Cieply, 2009). That Avatar's grosses rapidly surpassed its record-breaking budget gave industry investors confidence in the financial viability of the top end of the budget food chain. Take note that a parallel 2009 Hollywood success story was that ofParanormal Activity (Oren Peli, 2009), a $15,000 movie that made over $100 million in domestic release. These two films thus laid out two contrasting contemporary blockbuster economies.

The trade and popular press coverage of Cameron's production unfailingly emphasized the intricacy of the technological requirements of the film as part of its “game-changing” status. Trade publications faithfully repeated that Cameron had sketched the idea for Avatar in the mid-1990s, but the technology needed to realize his vision was, according to Cameron, “not advanced enough” (Rampton, 2006, p. 14). He had to wait for the technology to “catch up” to his vision (Snyder & LaPorte, 2007). Frequent mentions of how long this project gestated presented Avatar as the product of a devoted artist. As the story goes, Cameron was so singularly driven by his original vision for the film that he was willing to wait until the cinematic technology matched his imagination, or he simply and impatiently initiated the innovations himself. Cameron, in this representation, essentially willed the future of cinema into being. The trade press emphasized that Cameron was, in a sense, making a movie for a cinematic apparatus that did not yet exist, something that had been suggested at other points in his career, especially related to the groundbreaking CGI in The Abyss and Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1992).⁶

Trade pundits and cultural commentators most frequently discussed Avatar's game-changer status in relation to 3D exhibition. He began production of the film at a time when the conversion of cinemas to digital exhibition – a vast international endeavor to replace traditional celluloid projectors in movie theaters with digital ones – had slowed. Digital theaters were going to be an essential aspect of the film's success, as it required the new 3D digital projection for which only a fraction of existing digital screens had been equipped. There was a level of blind faith on Cameron's part that the screens would be there by the time he released his film. By April 2009, there were merely 2,000 3D-ready digital screens in the United States, representing just over 5% of all screens (Cohen, 2009). The risk inherent in such a form of production was being offset by plans to release regular 2D versions of the film as well.

Such devotion to a future cinematic era does not always work out. A relatively recent example of such a commitment to a specific vision of technological changes was George Lucas's declaration that he would release Star Wars Part I: The Phantom Menace (1999) exclusively for digital exhibition. At the time, he was confident there would be a speedy conversion to hard drives and digital projectors from film reels and celluloid, and doubly confident that his film was so attractive to exhibitors and audiences alike that it would actually encourage that conversion. This, of course, did not come to pass for a variety of reasons, including underdeveloped technical standards, shaky security, and a lack of coordination between exhibitors and distributors for the expense of digital conversion, as well as the dire financial straits of exhibitors at that time.

Cameron saw Avatar as an engine that would push the 3D technological shift, as much as he and Fox expected to benefit from it, and eventually an influential segment of the industry would agree. A significant difference from Lucas's 1999 effort was that the financial and technical coordination for digital exhibition had been resolved, largely through the work of the industry consortium Digital Cinema Initiatives (DCI). And the exhibition industry was relatively sound, with the 2009 domestic box-office receipts set to be a record at over $10 billion before Avatar's December release. Moreover, the advanced word on the film itself was strikingly positive – those tepid online fan reviews of select film segments notwithstanding – something that The Phantom Menace did not enjoy.

A certain industrial agreement had been in process that 3D was the next phase in cinema technology history. When an opinion piece in the Los Angeles Times, by Patrick Goldstein, derided the rush to 3D, Katzenberg responded in Variety to reaffirm the celebration of 3D technologies and to chastise Goldstein for being a Luddite. As with the turn to color, Katzenberg (2008) reasoned, 3D will eventually be recognized and exploited for its artful potential. His drum-banging was in part shilling for his 3D DreamWorks Animation SKG releases Monsters vs. Aliens (Rob Letterman and Conrad Vernon, 2009) and Shrek Forever After (Mike Mitchell, 2010). But he did represent a high level of faith in the general economic viability of this transition. And Avatar figured prominently in this cheerleading for 3D. Time concluded its feature on 3D describing Avatar as a vanguard example of the future of the format (Quittner, 2009). Michael Lewis, head of the leading 3D exhibition outfit RealD, predictably concurred, saying, “the industry is looking for its Citizen Kane, its definitive work of 3D, and Avatar may be that film” (quoted in Goodyear, 2009, p. 67). Versions of this line had been repeated by this company for several years, a view that gently pushed the responsibility for the conversion to digital 3D, in particular their proprietary system for 3D, back on filmmakers who were yet to have made an art of the form. Joshua Green, co-founder of RealD, said in 2005, “We still haven't seen the Citizen Kane of 3D” (quoted in Merritt, 2005, p. 13). By 2009, his business partner Lewis reiterated, “Avatar is potentially the Citizen Kane of this medium” (Browning, 2009).

The seizing of milestone moments is one way in which technological change is made comprehendible and inevitable. Investment analyst Lloyd Walmsley, for instance, predicted that “3D stands to reestablish the ‘experience premium’ of movie going. It's a game changer” (Huggins, 2008, p. 25). Trade reports conventionally linked this phase of 3D with the short-lived fad of the 1950s, but went on to cite other lasting changes, like the variety of widescreen processes of the same period, as more relevant comparisons for this exhibition innovation (Bing, 2005). Michael Lewis maintained that 3D is “the killer app of digital. As more and more of these films come out and we see them perform well, there's going to be an even bigger push to get more [digital] screens out there” (quoted in Debruge, 2007, p. A6). The subtitle of Variety's supplement on Cinema Expo and 3D in summer 2008 was “the killer app” (Cinema Expo/3D, 2008, p. A1). Thus 3D exhibition, which had proven lucrative for animated features over the years just prior to Avatar, was being taken as a driving force for the acceleration of the conversion of theaters to digital exhibition. In this understanding, Avatar's influence extended beyond 3D to the speeding up of the obsolescence of celluloid projectors (Huggins, 2008, p. 25).⁷

The “game-changing” hyperbole was manifest in other aspects of the Avatar commodity world. Game developer Ubisoft's 3D Avatar game prompted Variety to wonder, in a rather weak pun, whether or not it was “A Game Changer?” (Morris, 2009, p. 4). Ubisoft had been seeking increased involvement in the feature film business, acquiring prestige CGI company Hybride, based in St. Sauveur, Quebec. A further complication to the lines between entertainment industries, Cameron contracted Hybride to do effects for Avatar, the movie. Panasonic used Avatar in an international cross-promotion deal to sell its own new HD 3D Home Theater system.⁸ This push linked to the gaming industry, as Avatar: The Game required a 3D-enabled television or monitor in order for the full 3D design of the game to work. But it also looked ahead to 3D television programming. Accordingly, immediately following Avatar's apparent box-office success, several television channels announced plans for conversion to 3D broadcasting.

To see how Cameron became an industrial avatar in the technological revolution of digital and 3D cinema, we must look at a period of time generally thought to be his “quiet years.”

Battle Across Formats

Cameron's first foray into 3D was with T2-3D: Battle Across Time (1996), made for Universal Studios Theme Parks. This theme park attraction, based on Terminator 2, includes a mixture of live action and a 12-minute multiple-screen film. T2-3D extends the action enough to be considered – by Cameron, at any rate – a miniature sequel. The film portion features Terminator 2 cast members Edward Furlong, Linda Hamilton, Robert Patrick, and Arnold Schwarzenegger. At $62 million, some have claimed it is the most expensive per-minute cost of a film to date. It is difficult to assess the profitability of this kind of attraction, but its longevity lends some justification to this investment, and the exhibit continues to play at Universal theme parks in Florida, California, and Japan.

T2-3D was made with the involvement of Digital Domain, a company Cameron started with special effects expert Stan Winston and Steve Ross from Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), along with a 50% equity stake from IBM, in 1993. They intended the enterprise to be an artist-centered special effects shop all under one roof (contra the mish-mash of boutique companies that made up ILM). That one location is a Frank Gehry-designed retrofitted warehouse in Venice, California, over which the self-described Hollywood renegades fly the Jolly Roger. No pirates ever enjoyed such comfortable digs. Cameron did plunder, literally, the resources of Digital Domain to such an extraordinary extent for the making of Titanic that he almost ran the company into the ground, departing acrimoniously from the board of directors in 1998, though he maintained minority ownership. His parting words to the board were reportedly those of the musicians on the sinking Titanic: “Gentlemen, it's been an honor and a privilege playing with you” (Lubove, 2005, p. 161).

The company did not sink; just the opposite. While Digital Domain's work on such films as Fight Club (David Fincher, 1999), Apollo 13 (Ron Howard, 1995), and X-Men (Bryan Singer, 2000) garners most of the praise lavished on the company, it handles roughly three or four films a year. By way of contrast, it does approximately 80 commercials annually. As a result, projects other than features are usually the first testing ground for new software and effects (Bizony, 2001, p. 10). These smaller works become a point of initiation for new processes, digital and otherwise, only to be highlighted for popular entertainment audiences in subsequent films. It follows that in order to properly account for the development of new cinematic processes, techniques, and software, we must attend to the industry's full range of audiovisual production, eschewing a narrow focus upon feature fiction. Accordingly, with Digital Domain, a first turn for Cameron toward his current interest in 3D was not with a feature film or a documentary but with a theme park exhibit.

While Digital Domain worked on the 3D CGI effects for T2-3D, the challenges of shooting in 3D included the sheer weight of the dual 65mm camera unit, which at 450 pounds required a specially constructed cable system to suspend and move the unit during the long motorcycle chase sequence that is the centerpiece of the 12 minute film. Cameron, and his cinematographer Russell Carpenter, who also shot Titanic, learned – as anyone shooting 3D realizes – that getting the exact focal-length for the point of convergence of the two cameras, and hence our two eyes, was key to reducing eye-strain, as well as establishing the best 3D effect. Crudely put, in order to be able to cut between an establishing shot and a close-up, you have to change the point at which the audience will focus their eyes, and having a camera system that allows the director and director of photography to do this easily is extremely valuable to 3D filmmakers. This, and the weight of the double-camera unit, became the primary issues addressed by the systems he would later help develop. Additionally, slight differences in positions of frames on each of the two projectors used at the 3D screenings can ruin the depth effect. This was solved by increasing the frames per second from 24 to 30 for both shooting and projection (Bizony, 2001, pp. 221–222). More broadly, Cameron became an active campaigner for increasing the accepted standard of all frame rates above 24 fps (Cohen, 2005, p. 7). He challenged the new standards for digital projection because they addressed pixels but not frame rate, believing the ideal format would be 3d/2k/48fps (Cohen, 2008). The faster frame rate for the T2-3D shoot, in turn, necessitated an extraordinarily bright shooting environment, and unusual power demands to light the set.

So elaborate, and expensive, was the production of this attraction, and so unusual the involvement of such high-profile Hollywood figures, that Variety reviewed T2-3D's opening as though it were a film. While most of the review recounts the narrative setup for the blended live-action/3D film performance, there was much reverence for the technical accomplishment. Reviewer Joe Leydon wrote, “The 3D cinematography and special-effects handiwork are nothing short of astonishing” and “everything about this enterprise has been meticulously thought out and cleverly executed” (Leydon, 1996, p. 82).

After Titanic's release, and following the accolades for that film's technical achievement, especially the integration of CGI with conventional photography in what appeared at the time to be a seamless fashion, Cameron committed to 3D as a fulfillment of the cinema's promise of totalizing sensory involvement, despite the generally unsatisfying experience shooting T2-3D. His ethos as a filmmaker involves popular forms of pleasure via the action/romance genre, which include unfamiliar images (the liquid Terminator in T2), surprising leaps from the intimate to the destructive (the “I'll be back” sequence in Terminator), and powerful and prominent female leads.⁹ Cameron's action set-pieces typically involve locating the view at the heart of the sequence – in the cab of the truck or police cruiser racing away from a pursuing cyborg, among the soldiers running from aliens, and inside a flooding submersible. In this way, the potential of 3D as a “new” popular action experience met its equal potential to extend the sensation of being surrounded and engulfed by images, as emphasized in many of Cameron's films. Indeed, the centrality of immersion to the cinematic experience is arguably something Cameron has implicitly grasped well, offering underwater and sci-fi sets that nestle, or claustrophobically entomb, characters and viewers alike.

But as a maker of popular plot-driven entertainments, Cameron is also on record as understanding the limits of immersion, believing that IMAX screens are too large and allow for too much wandering of the eye on the part of the spectator to work for strongly narrative forms. His approach to 3D is to direct the eye, and to guide the viewer through the narrative experience (Debruge, 2006, p. A6). Contra claims that Citizen Kane's extensive use of deep-focus cinematography is a good model for 3D shooting, Cameron said,

In addition to an aesthetic and thematic overlap, it is also noteworthy that in our era of economic tilt toward home theater systems, Cameron's 3D projects – which continue with writing and directing two Avatar sequels and Battle Angel (pre-production, 2016) as well as producing Sanctum (Alister Grierson, 2011) – display remarkable faith in theatergoing. Though the bulk of revenue can still be expected to flow from ancillary windows, he makes these films for theatrical exhibition and for the newest iterations of theatrical digital projection.

Two of his documentaries, Ghosts of the Abyss and Aliens of the Deep, were shot for exhibition in IMAX 3D, though these were not shot with the IMAX camera system. The opening sequence of Titanic includes a dive to the wreck, led by Bill Paxton's character. This sequence serves as a framing device for the story and introduces the film's MacGuffin – the Heart of the Ocean diamond necklace. This opening was the product of an actual dive, though Digital Domain “improved” that footage later. Cameron returned to the sunken wreck, with Bill Paxton, to shoot Ghosts of the Abyss in 2001. That time the shoot included a 26-pound lightweight 3D HD camera developed by Vince Pace, called the Reality Camera System (RCS), and two smaller remote control vehicles carrying standard video cameras, anthropomorphized as Jake and Elwood, named after the lead characters in The Blues Brothers (John Landis, 1980). Vince Pace is an underwater film expert and had worked with Cameron on The Abyss and Titanic. The expedition included another documentary filmed by Russian crew members and an Internet webcast of the descent, with the Buckminster Fuller-esque title EarthShip.tv, supervised by Cameron's brother JD. The other familial connection was brother Mike, an engineer who designed the deep-sea casings for the cameras. Such a thoroughly recorded event, not surprisingly, involved many cameras, including small “lipstick” cameras inside the diving capsules. The final result did not impress reviewers, though they remained taken with the 3D effect. Tim Cogshell (2003) wrote for the exhibitor trade Boxoffice, “Ghosts of the Abyss can be too jokey and often outright silly with an overwrought sense of drama. But it's fascinating, especially in 3D” (p. 60).

Expedition: Bismarck, which chronicles a dive to the famous sunken Nazi battleship, was shot with the same 3D system, two remote control cameras, and other cameras, though broadcast on Discovery Channel in the more familiar dimension of 2D (McKay, 2002, p. 37). As in Ghosts of the Abyss, this film too uses computer graphics and reenactments to supplement the raw data of the wreck with speculative accounts of how the ship sank. It was filmed after Ghosts of the Abyss, in 2002, but Discovery broadcast it the same year, prior to the opening of the IMAX 3D film, making Bismarck Cameron's first documentary release. For their efforts, they received five Emmy nominations, winning one.

Aliens of the Deep documents several dives in both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, but centers on a journey to the so-called Lost City, a deep-sea location with a unique ecosystem of creatures that live without light around hydrothermal vents of 350 degrees Fahrenheit. For this film, he used these same 3D cameras, though he and Pace had modified their RCS system to improve things like the zoom, which they put to effective use to record close-ups of some bizarre and relatively unknown creatures, including one they call, and likely is, “the ugliest fish in the sea” (Calhoun, 2005, p. 61). Nonetheless, an otherwise skeptical review by Jonathan Barnes in Sight & Sound still confesses the film's 3D experience elicits both “childish delight” and fright, with giant sea creatures “out of H. P. Lovecraft's most inventive nightmares” (Barnes, 2003, p. 40).

Following the Aliens of the Deep shoot, Cameron and Pace built the next generation of the camera, now called the Pace/Cameron Fusion System, which allowed for easier changing of the point of convergence between the two cameras for 3D shooting. Other differences from the earlier RCS include faster response time, lighter weight at 22 pounds, and better accommodation of sound (Hurwitz, 2009). Cameron, Pace, and Patrick Campbell (president of Pace and a camera assistant on Ghosts) received the patent for their system, a “platform for stereoscopic image acquisition” (7,643,748, filed June 2, 2006, received January 5, 2010) and one for “stereo camera with automatic control of interocular distance” (7,899,321 B2, filed October 13, 2009, received March 1, 2011). Versions of this camera system were used to shoot the live-action sequences ofAvatar as well as concert films for U2, the Jonas Brothers, and Miley Cyrus, and features including Final Destination 3D (David R. Ellis, 2009) and Journey to the Center of the Earth (Eric Brevig, 2008). In terms of wider market development, they claim to have the largest inventory of such 3D units (Hurwitz, 2009, p. 32), which puts Pace (the company) and Cameron et al. (the patent-holders) in an advantageous position as the making of 3D movies grows, against competing 3D camera rigs like Element Technica, Binocle, and P+S Technik.

In April 2011, Pace the company was rebranded as the Cameron-Pace Group to offer a full range of 3D products for feature films and for television, sports, commercials, and other specialty events (Giardina, 2011). Along with their Fusion camera system, CPG offer a service it calls Slate2Screen to assist in all aspects of 3D production. Emphasizing its cross-media expansion beyond feature film, it made this announcement of the formation of CPG at the National Association of Broadcasters' convention in Las Vegas, rather than at a film industry event. The proponents – by which I mean the company promoting these features – claim their cameras and systems are “artist-centered” and give control back to those on the shoots rather than the special effects team later on. A material consequence is that Pace supplies just two personnel to whoever rents the system – an engineer and a systems supervisor. It doesn't supply directors of photography (DOPs), as its Fusion System is comparable enough to other kinds of high-definition shooting that special training is not necessary (Hurwitz, 2009, p. 32).

One feature of Cameron's visual instruments includes a way to produce immediate and on-set approximations of how 3D and performance capture will look. He did the motion capture portions of Avatar (2009) with a “virtual camera,” which was basically a hand-held monitor on which he could watch the performers. This screen was fed by a grid of a hundred HD cameras and, by moving it, he could record the camera work he desired, including pans, tilts, and tracking (Duncan, 2010; Duncan & Fitzpatrick, 2010). No lens to look through, no actual tracks laid for camera movement, and no individual lighting setups. For the live-action portions of Avatar, Cameron experimented with the “Simulcam,” developed with performance capture company Giant (DiOrio, 2009; Giardina, 2009). This allowed people on set to see, when looking through the camera eyepiece, takes with mock-ups of green-screen and motion capture elements. A limitation for CGI-driven shoots is the separation between filming personnel and digital craft workers whose enhancements to the film appear much later. The Simulcam gives directors and directors of photography the ability to see a rough approximation of effects that will be integrated eventually, and thus they have an immediate basis for on-set decision-making.

Regardless of the actual location of creative energy, in the least, the innovation and services offered by CPG reassert a conventional creative hierarchy for filmmaking. They allow for the existing networks of filmmaking labor to continue. Mark Deuze (2007) has documented the importance of networks of connections among personnel as they travel from credit to credit and from job to job. These informal relationships, he shows, are central to being able to maintain a steady flow of work and to build a reputation. New production technology that can be introduced without disrupting these working relationships is therefore of premium value. Cameron's own stable of personnel travels across his films, and some have established a special expertise with the Fusion System (e.g., Avatar second unit director Steven Quale directed the 3D Final Destination 5 [2011]). In sum, one of the advantages of Cameron's 3D and performance capture systems is that they can supplement, and hence reinforce, existing commitments to CGI, relations among crew, and digital exhibition concurrently.

Access and Apparatus

There are many telling commonalities across Cameron's three documentaries. First, it is important to note that the deep-sea locations build on the underwater experience Cameron had shooting not only Titanic, but also his earlier film The Abyss, which was an especially arduous and expensive feature about alien life forms, nuclear terror, and labor politics. The making of that film produced an ample supply of the definitive stories of Cameron's dictatorial monomania. He was reportedly so insensitive to the conditions of actors that several claimed to have nearly drowned, which Cameron denies (Lampert, 2009).

In The Abyss, the subject of the undersea oil workers realizing they are pawns in the company's operations represents an ideologically advanced critique that appears to contradict the actual working conditions Cameron himself created. His films routinely offer complex, if contradictory, depictions of abuses of technological power. Terminator might be best known for its dystopian views, depicting the lead-up to a devastating nuclear holocaust precipitated by initially benign but ultimately fateful decisions on the part of corporate managers and military contractors (like Cyberdyne's Miles Dyson, played by Joe Morton). Aliens, even with its visual fetish for weapons and their accessories, is a story of the fallibility of military command and corporate colonial ambitions. As James Kendrick (1999) has suggested, where most Hollywood films are superficially radical, internally conservative, Cameron's films are “superficially conservative, internally radical” (p. 38).

Yet these currents of ideological critique battle the mode of representation, which on screen figures in character facility with technological apparatuses and improvisation. In her classic feminist reading of time travel in Terminator, Constance Penley (1986) noted the “tech noir” aesthetic that includes representation of the everyday abundance of machines running the gamut from hairdryers to automated factory equipment. Typical Cameron scenes include the crew in Aliens, under siege by the creatures, scouring blueprints of the colony facilities on illuminated screens, trying to hatch an escape plan, and Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn) in Terminator teaching Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) how to make explosive devices from everyday materials. There is a recurrent image of technological investment and improvisation for narrative action in these films. The acquisition, construction, and operation of machines and devices drive stories forward and set up the conflicts among characters. A case in point is Corporal Hicks (Michael Biehn) outfitting Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) with various weapons and explosives in preparation for one of her final battles with the Alien Queen creature in Aliens, which amounts to an unusually tender moment. Notably, this investment mixes the advances of new technological capabilities and a survivalist DIY approach to low-tech devices. This theme, in particular, reappears in Avatar, where the conceit of the drama is that part of the planet on which the majority of the action transpires is so humid and has such a strong magnetic field that some advanced weaponry is inoperable. Or, as Cameron confessed, “It's all an excuse to do helicopters versus pterodactyls” (Goodyear, 2009, p. 66).

These features display considerable thematic and aesthetic connection to Cameron's documentaries, where a brand of techno-fetishism, both improvised and cutting-edge, also drives the tales.¹⁰ Annette Kuhn (1990) has suggested that the attention to special effects makes science fiction films a notable genre in which the state of the cinematic art is expected to be encountered (p. 7). Cameron extends this aspect of sci-fi to his documentaries. To say that each of Cameron's documentaries is about undersea exploration only captures part of their subject matter. Each equally focuses on the technological means by which the images are being captured. It's not just that the cameras needed specially designed titanium casings to withstand the high-pressure environment of deep-sea shooting locations and lighting conditions; it is that the films announce these and comparable features repeatedly. The films become documentaries about the inventiveness of the filmmakers-cum-explorers and the complexity of the hardware as much as the purported subject of marine life and shipwrecks.

Ghost of the Abyss announces the core theme of visual technology, opening with a poetic camera tracking movement into an early twentieth-century stereoscopic slide viewer, displaying several black-and-white period scenes of the famous ocean liner, with a slight tremor shaking the image as though a crude mechanism is flipping it to the next. On the final image, the figures in the slide begin to move, and the background dissolves to color and to the film's title. To remind viewers of the passing of media history, the film returns to these stereoscopic slides later on. One finds comparable techniques in other moments of technological transformation, including Al Jolson's opening declaration in The Jazz Singer (Alan Crosland, 1927) that “you ain't heard nothing yet,” and Tom Ewell's direct address about stereophonic sound, color, and aspect ratio in the credit sequence of The Girl Can't Help It (Frank Tashlin, 1956), pushing the screen's edges horizontally to a widescreen format. Transitions of this sort carry spectators through a short evolutionary narrative of media format, essentially proffering improvements for the appreciation of audiences.

These stereoscopic images of Ghosts are computer generated from archival images, constructed to appear to be antique slides. Similarly, postproduction involved converting the various resolutions from the different cameras to a uniformly high resolution acceptable for IMAX screens. This conversion also involved software to approximate 3D effects for the images captured from the regular high-definition cameras, as well as those produced in postproduction. And some shots of the wreck are in fact composite images, with technology “used by NASA,” as stated in one DVD extra, to produce complete images of planets and solar systems. Invoking the imprimatur of NASA suggests that it is state of the art and that it is not really manipulation of the visual record, which of course it actually is. In the end, the viewer is watching a composite image, rather like a mosaic or a David Hockney grid-like Polaroid portrait but with the seams between the smaller images rendered invisible (Kaufman, 2003).

In addition, Cameron has actors play out scenes from the sinking ship superimposed on these composite images of the wreck. These “ghosts” recreate the event of the sinking on the “actual” deck and in the “actual” cabins, though these sets are not to be found at the bottom of the North Atlantic, and only appear with CGI manipulations. One dramatic sequence involves a CGI representation ofTitanic's sinking with a fast-paced collage of archival photographic portraits of the victims falling into the wreck as though being sucked again into the vortex. Cameron's efforts to scrape together as proximate a representation as possible of the actual disaster here replays the calamity using the only indexical traces remaining – places where passengers stood, pieces of objects they touched, and family photographs. The film wants to bring the spectator as close as possible to be a “witness to tragedy,” as one crewmember puts it. This impulse is driven home when, during their expedition, they receive news of the September 11, 2001, attacks. This prompts several comparisons between the two events, and sparks their resolve to memorialize the 90-year-old disaster by laying a plaque on the ocean floor.

Much of the adventure of Ghosts involves the cameras, getting them to the wreck and providing adequate lighting. The film displays not just the wreck but the special remote control cameras that get to the interior of the Titanic. Emphasizing the premium placed on technological presence, one of the dramatic episodes of the film involves the recovery of a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) that lost power – Elwood, incidentally. During this interlude, the ROV is described as one of the crewmembers, and a military credo is evoked that no one gets left behind (ignoring the fact that the credo isn't “don't leave broken hardware behind”). For a good portion of the dive segments we see several smaller inset images of crew, including Cameron and Paxton, observing and operating cameras and submersibles. In fact, these inset images obscure direct visual access to the wreck, as they lie on top of the pictures of the sunken ship.¹¹ While not exactly a film about cameras, there is enough attention to them that parts might have been called Cameron's Cameras.

All three films present comparable thematic priorities. For instance, Bismarck is about the special submersibles that get people and cameras to the remains of the Nazi battleship. The MIR submersibles receive special attention in each film, with rollicking sequences of the Russian “Zodiac cowboys” who have to attach cables that will lift the submersibles back onto the ship by riding on top of them when they surface. The challenge of completing this task in rough seas becomes visually exciting, enhanced by a fast and dramatic musical score.

Aliens of the Deep is the most aesthetically ambitious of these three films. The opening presents a series of portraits of individuals and animals, which includes some crowd-pleasing tricks like an elephant unfurling his trunk directly at the camera and audience. We see an urban street corner, a dance club, then fireballs in space. A few shots of suburban life follow with a slow-motion IMAX-size 3D image of kids playing in a sprinkler and a chubby boy eating a messy hamburger in a fenced-in backyard, while a cow moos on the soundtrack. This sequence of a calculatedly spectacular ordinary sets up the animal–human, and terrestrial–extraterrestrial, connection that the rest of the film pursues. Several young scientists accompany Cameron, though the lead is Dijanna Figueroa, an African American marine animal physiologist doctoral student from University of California, Santa Barbara. In a surprising, perhaps ill-considered, turn, this film ends with speculative sequences about meeting moth-like alien beings, which in tone and appearance seem to appropriate the angel creatures from The Abyss. One sequence depicts a hypothetical method for melting through thick layers of ice with a nuclear-heated torpedo and a journey down through an extraterrestrial ocean by a fictional remote control vehicle, presumably several generations more advanced than Jake or Elwood.

The film ends with Figueroa and Kevin Hand, an astrobiologist, greeting an imaginary sea creature on the ocean floor through the glass of a submersible. “We have new friends,” Figueroa says in this ET-like moment of interspecies harmony, blending the real and the invented. Cameron's documentary aesthetic does not hesitate to borrow from science fiction filmmaking in order to approximate the actuality of a scene or argument. The film advances a universalist idea about experience and knowledge, reasoning that the similarities between life forms give us warrant to extrapolate what we feel and know to others. This, for Cameron, includes creatures that, for all we know, do not exist, which is a fine conceit for a science fiction writer, but not sound argumentation for a documentarian.

With Aliens of the Deep, Ghosts of the Abyss, and to a lesser extent Expedition: Bismarck, documentary realism stretches to include computer-generated special effects. In this case, documentary is not the recording, or the creative representation, of reality but a display genre for visible effects. Importantly, not all effects are equally visible; some do not announce themselves as such and take a trained eye to identify them. Others are obvious and signposted, often by the narrator, with the effect of making each film a document of CGI representational strategies. Others form the basis of DVD extras. In a way, the extreme locations and the presence of the filmmakers in these extraordinary places – places that relatively few humans have ever visited – become the guarantor of authenticity for what, in the end, are constructed computer-based moving image productions.

Here we see a link between moving image innovations and other technological materials. Cameron's particular brand of celebrity activism involves “gee-whiz” popular science and an environmentalism that embraces technological progress. Within weeks of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010, Cameron had convened a panel of experts and quickly produced a recommendation on how to stop up the well. He offered not only his own state-of-the-art submersibles, but also to do it himself. And in March 2012 he successfully shot, diving in his newly designed submersible, some of the Avatar sequel and a new 3D documentary in what is known to be the world's deepest point 11 km under the Pacific Ocean in the Mariana Trench, a place where only two people have ever been before (Cohen, 2012). That's fewer than Mt. Everest and fewer than the moon. Cameron's investment in exploration vehicles for extreme shooting conditions might seem like the polar opposite of his investment in the virtuality of digital cinema, simultaneously plunging as deep as one can go into extraordinary location shooting and into simulation. But in fact they are products of the same impulse, both foregrounding the scientific-technological apparatus. Where Sean Cubitt (2004) points to the neo-baroque cinema of Cameron and others as involved in creating and presenting simulated worlds closed off from history and the social, we see here that the attention to unusual shooting locations and production processes – including pulleys, power sources, lights, ROVs, and performance capture software – stretches us well beyond that virtual seal.

These documentaries all involve Cameron as a central figure. He is on camera and is guiding the expedition as much as the narrator in each. Ghosts has Paxton, and Bismarck has Lance Henriksen, both part of Cameron's stable of actors, as non-expert narrators whose journey and introduction to the subject matter are written to mirror those of the audience. Paxton's amateur status is especially emphasized; his arrival on ship involves a staged comical interaction with a Russian crewmember who only speaks in Russian, making Paxton appear that much more on unfamiliar territory. He describes his nervousness about the upcoming dive, and later treats IMAX spectators to big-screen vomit upon return to the surface. These figures serve to bolster Cameron's experience and command of both the filmmaking and expeditionary situations. Aliens of the Deep uses student scientists to fill this “amateur” role.

By building his persona as a champion of science, explorer, and technological wizard, Cameron is, after a fashion, part of a long history of the expedition film, which often involved the anthropological, or quasi-anthropological, filmmakers of primarily European lineage traveling to some outlying location and population, returning with images of some strange earthly wonders. Cameron often refers to Jacques Cousteau as a major influence, but he is also not that far from the likes of Merian Cooper and Ernest Schoedsack, the explorer/showmen making Grass (1925) and the hybrid ethnographic/fiction feature Chang (1927) who then include the explorer/showman as a central part of their fiction films; remember that the original King Kong (1933), aside from the gorilla-girl love story, is about filmmaking and show business.¹²

Cameron's expedition trilogy asserts multiple times that we are watching the absolute cutting edge of imaging and transportation technology, with the newest and most complex gadgets, some custom made for the demands of these enterprises. And one can understand the appeal of this approach for the science museum context of many IMAX screens and for the Discovery Channel. On this point, each film presents Cameron as a cruel technological taskmaster, who is “totally reliant on technology” (Aliens of the Deep), dealing with state-of-the-art machines that “push the limits of technology” (Ghosts of the Abyss). These three documentaries construct a relationship between technological and natural wonders: extreme machines for extreme shoots. Indeed, the National Geographic companion volume to Aliens of the Deep says this exactly (MacInnis, 2004, p. 20). If there is an environmental ethic, especially evident in Aliens of the Deep, it is one of awe, where viewers experience the eye-popping, jaw dropping, spectacular vistas of unusual natural wonders. Robert Koehler (2003) wrote that Ghosts “is nearly overwhelmed by incessant chatter and expression of wonder by crew members” (p. 20), and Ronnie Scheib (2005) wrote ofAliens of the Deep, “as many ‘wows’ and ‘gee whizzes’ abound as do albino shrimp” (p. 67). But the natural world is not meant to hold a monopoly on the aesthetic of the awesome; these films extend this affect to the world of advanced technology. Buried beneath their titular subject matter, this expedition trilogy is essentially a series of “making of” documentaries promoting the ingenuity and resourcefulness of filmmaker/explorers in the seizing of remote sights for audiences back on dry land.

Technological Tentpoles

Some commentators, including Tom Schatz and Edward Jay Epstein, point out that a core element in the contemporary media business is intellectual property, especially the ownership of stories and characters and control of the multiple products that come out of franchises (Epstein, 2006; Schatz, 2008). Such attention helps explain the arrangements between Disney and Marvel to gain access to the latter's stable of comic book characters, as well as the intense focus by the Motion Picture Association of America on piracy in recent years. Companies now exist to help others exploit their intellectual property. For example, Starlight Runner Entertainment specializes in the development and coordination of story worlds and mythologies, including characters, chronologies, geography, and weapons, with the intention of helping orchestrate “transmedia” incarnations of franchised works. They have done this work for Pirates of the Caribbean and are acting in this capacity for Avatar. As outlined in Variety, “Now that the franchise has replaced the blockbuster as Hollywood's holy grail, a new tool has emerged to help those who want to extend film and TV properties across multiple platforms” – the “megabible” (Caranicas, 2009, pp. 5, 11).

To this extension of the media format and text of motion pictures we should add the intellectual property associated with technological systems. US cinema history has been profoundly shaped by questions and challenges to technological patents, starting with Edison, but continuing with Michael Todd (Todd-AO), Jerry Lewis (video assist technology), and George Lucas (ILM). But any technological apparatus still turns on content, especially as a way to sell the advantages and improvements of one format over another. Consequently, we can find notable occasions in which specially designated content is linked quite directly to new media systems. This link is not about firsts but about log-jam-breakers, forgers, and tipping points. For example, Discovery Channel used Expedition: Bismarck to promote its high-definition format, and doing so with a mobile HD screen and theater installed temporarily at retail locations, like Best Buy, where new HD televisions were available to consumers. In such instances, the exact item being promoted is lost in the confluence of television channel, high-definition format, big-budget documentary, star director, and consumer electronics retailer.¹³

And this was where Avatar was a special stand-out. It was conventional in story and characterization, and it had the now conventional transnational economic impact of its production, spanning corporate participants from Quebec's Hybride to New Zealand's Weta Studios. But Avatar was celebrated and promoted as a flagship work beckoning the next wave of industrial and consumer technologies and entertainments. For instance, Panasonic's international cross-promotion deal with Avatar extended with the first 3D home version of the film, released in December 2010 – only available on Bluray and only compatible with Panasonic's Viera set (Raby, 2010). This exclusivity was set to run until February 2012. With Avatar, we had 3D filming processes, 3D exhibition, digital exhibition, and 3D home entertainment all banking on the film's appeal. Thomas Elsaesser (2000) has suggested that blockbusters act as prototypes for the future of cinema as they advance requirements and “set up standards” for new skills, production conditions, and exhibition environments (p. 191). In a way, the pairing up of new editions of videogames with new generations of consoles is the model here. Such film or audiovisual texts are technological tentpoles, under which not only commodities but also media formats slide into our lives as supposedly essential.¹⁴ Avatar was one such movie; one report even described Cameron's Avatar in exactly this fashion, as a tentpole for digital 3D (Hayes & Goldsmith, 2008). Technological tentpoles introduce and promote hardware and media systems; such entities advance a perpetually reconstructed cinematic apparatus as well as a wider audiovisual environment.

Consider Avatar's newspaper advertising, which promised the routine geographic reach of a widely released blockbuster (“everywhere”) but also format choice (“everyway”) between 2D, digital 3D, and IMAX 3D presentations. A few years ago, David Denby (2007) claimed that the expansion of exhibition possibilities for film has produced “platform agnosticism,” such that people no longer care how and under what conditions they see films, resulting in a coup de grâce for traditional cinephilia. Avatar's advertising showed just how erroneous Denby was. Instead, the multiplying formats have produced a heightened platform consciousness. In essence, the campaign sold media format and film at once.

The varieties of media materiality have ample representation in Cameron's vision of the future. Avatar is replete with screens on screen: 3D screens, topographical screens, video screens, computer screens, touch screens, hand-held digital tablets, and curved screens. The thematic centerpoint of the film – the conversion of our human characters into their respective avatars as giant blue extraterrestrial creatures, the Na'vi – appears as a form of transportation, with abstract blazing lights moving through a tube to some distant material body, like a cross between teleportation and long-distance communication. Avatar is so embellished with interstellar cutting-edge media culture that one might be surprised to discover that it tells an anticolonial tale of an indigenous population's resistance to the exploitation of minerals on their home planet, Pandora, by invading Earthlings. For Cameron, the devastation of colonialism includes the consequences of technological change. Stating this theme directly, he said, “we're basically telling the story of the Americas and to a certain extent some of the other areas in the world that were conquered by the British, Dutch and so on, but we're really telling the story of what happens when a technologically superior culture comes into a place with resources that the conquerors want” (quoted in Nepales, 2009). As a political parable, it is a thinly veiled critique of imperial adventures by armed forces, ostensibly US in appearance and style (with at least one shot of “Old Glory” in the background). Bombastic dialogue about natives as terrorists, “preemptive attacks,” “daisy cutters,” and “shock and awe” tactics takes what might have been a John Milius film – for instance, Farewell to the King (1989), of which Avatar is in many ways a remake – and reframes it as a critique of the US invasion and occupation of Iraq.

As influential as his work has been for nonconventional gender depictions, especially his muscularization of female action characters, the limits of Cameron's imagination are apparent in his racial politics. In Avatar, the species-specific divide presented on Pandora is recognizably driven by familiar earthbound notions of difference. His extraterrestrial indigenous peoples are a version of the noble savage, living harmoniously with their environment until greedy colonial invaders disrupt their spiritual bond with nature. Even as the drama directs audiences to cheer for the spiritually advanced and environmentally aware Na'vi, we confront stereotypical gestures and appearances of tribal peoples. Moreover, the actors behind the virtual costumes and makeup are suitably ethnicized to perform the “blueness” of the Na'vi. African American actors C. C. H. Pounder and Laz Alonso, and famous Cherokee actor Wes Studi, play lead Na'vi characters, and Dominican/Puerto Rican American actor Zoe Salanda plays hero Jake Sully's love interest. Pointedly, only White folk, like our lead Sully, get to cross over into their Na'vi avatars to live among the natives. Sully's story, then, is a “Na'vi like me” tale of passing. The core of the film is a “blueface” performance, which draws this film closer thematically to the other most referenced “game changing” film, the breakthrough talkie The Jazz Singer, in which, in a way, Al Jolson's stage persona is his racialized avatar.

The world of the noble savage offers ideologically safe contact with the natural and the archaic, that is, civilization's other. In Cameron's case, the environmental ethos of the Na'vi, while reiterating the trope of nobility, is equally a way to present harmonious connections among all beings, using contemporary technological references to do so. Characters describe Pandora as a complex and complete data network, where even plant life has communicative capabilities. The Tree of Souls, the spiritual heart of the ecosystem – female, of course – holds records of all feelings, expressions, and memories. It is, ostensibly, a colossal organic server. Flying into battle, individual Na'vi can communicate across distances by placing thumb and forefinger on either side of their throat, like a mimed handless mobile phone. Several scenes show the temporary intertwining of animal and humanoid as a kind of jacking-in of electrical filaments. Moments of these fusings are, in many ways, the most erotic renderings in the film, with abundant rolling eyes and pleasurable gasps. And plenty of talk about fidelity follows, too. Once selected, connected, and tamed, the pterodactyl-like flying creatures serve as your permanent transportation vehicle, which makes me wonder if this interspecies monogamy is actually a form of brand loyalty.

As figured, the Na'vi are not merely representations of an ancient and superstitious world view; they offer an image of a superior technological system. Pandora is worth defending, then, as an example of perfect synergy across beings and devices, with integration a racial, environmental, and technological concept simultaneously. This planet offers a world of natural networks. So when Sully, permanently “avatared” as Na'vi at the end of the film, remains behind on Pandora after winning the battle against the invading colonial forces, this is not a refusal of technological enhancement for some form of native spiritual awareness but a full acceptance of what might be called technological naturalism. This unambiguously anticolonial story, by the end, sneaks in the true colonists, those hybrid avatars. The technological game-changing film is itself a tale of full acceptance and assimilation, at the level of the genetic, with an even more advanced game-changing technological system. In a moment of corporate reflexivity, it should not go unnoticed that the logo for Cameron's production company Lightstorm – a thin, angular, blue individual readying a bow and arrow – bears an uncanny resemblance to the 10-ft. creatures populating Pandora.

Cameron does not fit the mold of what we expect of a Hollywood A-list director. And this ultimate insider-outsider had not had any Hollywood agent since the early 1990s until 2009, when he signed with CAA, ostensibly to represent him as the Avatar franchise develops and as his technological processes are marketed (“Titanic helmer docks with CAA,” 2009). There are easier ways to make money in the film business than trying to find a way to light the pitch darkness of three miles under the ocean, designing camera containers to withstand the pressure of deep-sea shooting conditions, and changing the frame rate to improve a 3D effect. Ghosts cost about $13 million and brought in a little over $22 million worldwide box office, a tidy sum for a documentary, but hardly an IMAX record, let alone an example of Cameron's stratospheric moneymaking prowess (Holson, 2003).

The point here is that it is easy to get caught up in the conventionality of Hollywood – buy a recognizable property, construct a star-driven vehicle with the appropriate smattering of romantic interest and international appeal, plan a big opening, follow through with releases of related commodities, then the DVD, and so on. With Cameron, we see that there are different, and influential, ways to navigate the demands of the media system industry. In our blockbuster-driven period, we might skip over documentaries such as Cameron's as side projects and inconsequential labors of love. And yet there is continuity through his entire oeuvre. Recognizing this, we need to be prepared to see the extraordinary range of corporate investments and priorities, which produce a greater cross-sector industrial beast and a fundamentally unstable technological apparatus. Cameron, in a sense, is an exemplar of the current phase of Hollywood history, in which the business of film is bound up with a range of media products, technological forms, and types of intellectual property. John Caldwell (2008) argues in his book Production Culture that not only is every script a business plan, it is also a branding opportunity. With Cameron the technological auteur, a script is equally a plan for the remaking of the cinematic apparatus and conventional modes of industrial and technological practice.

Most impressively, the language of revolutionary shift is not new; indeed, it has been a persistent feature in the film business. Never content with an existing apparatus, Hollywood competition has battled over formats, technologies, and processes as much as stars, directors, and movie franchises. Declarations of “game changing” and “technological revolution” are forms of competition at the level of hardware and software. We might see figures like Todd, Lewis, Lucas, and Cameron, rather than inventors, as the carnival barkers of the technological tentpoles. The benefits to becoming a new “industry standard” are immeasurable, and they can include markets beyond films into a number of other industrial sectors. In this way, an individual audiovisual entertainment like Avatar works to reinstate the dominance of key corporate participants, making technological change appear inevitable and natural. At one level, even with all the local instances of innovation – and yes, to be sure, the entertainment business is shifting dramatically – the language of “game changing” is another way to talk about business as usual.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The author wishes to thank Kelly Gates for her perceptive commentary during the preparation of this chapter, and Zoë Constantinides for essential research assistance. Versions of this chapter were presented at the “What is Film?” Conference (Portland, Oregon, 2009), at the Toronto International Stereoscopic 3D Conference (2011), and as the James Naremore Lecture (Indiana University, 2011).

NOTES

1 Justin Wyatt and Katherine Vlesmas (1999) have argued that the public drama of the budget and production problems in fact played a key role in the marketing, and ultimately the success, of Titanic.

2 Two prominent profiles were a 60 Minutes story, called “Cameron's Avatar” (Browning, 2009), and another by Dana Goodyear (2009) in the New Yorker.

3 For example, “New Avatar behind-the-scene photos,” www.comingsoon.net, January 12, 2009.

4 “Ubisoft and Fox team for Avatargame,” www.comingsoon.net, July 24, 2007.

5 “Exclusive: Soderbergh gives Avatar high praise,” www.comingsoon.net, April 30, 2009. Cameron was a producer for Soderbergh's Solaris (2002), so it is possible there is a closer relationship than is evident from their different filmmaking personas.

6 Two superior studies of special effects and cinema technology that include analysis of Cameron's specific impact are Pierson (2002) and Cubitt (2004).

7 It is curious that 3D is being interpreted as a catalyst for digital exhibition because the digital 3D systems currently require screens that make conventional 2D digital projections darker and less sharp.

8 See “Panasonic and Twentieth Century Fox team for global promotion of James Cameron's Avatar” (2009) and “Panasonic rolls with HD 3D home theater truck tour” (2009).

9 For a full analysis of this feature of Cameron's films, see Krämer (1999).

10 Cameron's techno-fetishism is dealt with by Alexandra Keller (2006) in her study of him as a blockbuster auteur.

11 When asked what he learned from this shoot, Cameron replied that the dives were so expensive that focusing on the divers is “counter-productive”; “it's stupid to be turning the camera around inside and pointing it at the people, when you should be focusing on the marine life and the geology” (quoted in Hurwitz, 2005, p. 62).

12 In this respect, Avatar seems to be a direct attempt to take the jungle expedition film from the 1920s and 1930s into outer space. Cameron has said, “It's an old-fashioned jungle adventure with an environmental conscience,” and he has cited as a primary inspiration Edgar Rice Burroughs's John Carter of Mars (Barsoom) series (Rampton, 2006, pp. 14–15; Jensen, 2007).

13 “Hendricks's wide world at HDTV: Discovery chief focuses in on a new platform,” Multichannel News, May 5 (2003), p. 4A; “ESPN, Discovery plug HD at retail: Basic networks look to drive penetration for local ops' new offerings,” Multichannel News, June 9 (2003), p. 38.

14 Along the same lines, the hand-held device industry has followed iPhone's lead on “apps” as a way to designate the special, indispensable aspects of its product. While many are cute and amusing, most reproduce information that is not especially hidden (temperature, location, time, cultural recommendation, game, etc.), albeit in an immediate and miniaturized form. Though many competing companies offer “apps,” note that the term offers a clumsy pun, simultaneously referencing “applications” and “Apple Corporation.” The measure of worth of this function is not the single, breakthrough utility of any one but the quantity of them. “Apps” are valuable because there are so many of them, over 250,000 currently offered for the iPhone alone. Their relation to the movement and expansion of the hand-held electronic market is not that of the technological tentpole. Instead, they are technological tent-pegs.

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