If fashion can venture back into some of its cheesiest eras for contemporary inspiration (peasant dresses, wide-leg jeans, Chuck Taylor Converse sneakers, anti-war protests, Afros), then why can't technology? Everything new can't be oh-so-very-Steve-Jobs; sometimes, a trend's utter familiarity is what makes it so popular -- especially when it turns up in your living room tonight, when NBC's Medium (it airs on CTV in Canada) broadcasts in 3-D.
You might hang on to those glasses, too, while you consider this: Medium is only the most recent show to embrace 3-D. The format has been making a comeback for a few years now; it was used in The Adventures of Lava Boy and Shark Girl, Spy Kids 3-D and Polar Express (on Imax screens) and is also available in 84 theatres showing Chicken Little on digital screens. Recently, the Los Angeles-based production company nWave went into production on Fly Me to the Moon, which will be the world's first exclusively 3-D animated film. The format is ubiquitous among gamers, who are able to cruise effortlessly through the Middle-Earths and Indianapolis Speedways of the world thanks to enhanced 3-D technology. Even Broadway has even caught on, where the backdrops for the new $8.5-million (U.S.) Andrew Lloyd Webber play, The Woman in White, feature 3-D animation, a development Aristotle surely never saw coming when he wrote the rules of narrative arc. Furthermore, the arbiter of all things tech, George Lucas, has announced that in 2007, he will be rereleasing the original Star Wars in 3-D, surely the signal that the future is once again borrowing heavily from the past.
What in the name of extra-dimensional entertainment is going on here?
In Los Angeles recently, a bus full of foreign journalists set out on a journey through the United States' very own version of Middle-Earth -- the Los Angeles freeway system -- to pay a visit to Raleigh Studios in Manhattan Beach, where Medium is shot, to listen to the show's creator and stars talk about the rise of the paranormal drama.
Executive producer Glenn Gordon Caron says he wanted to do a 3-D episode years ago when he was working on Moonlighting. "When Medium became successful, I realized that in many ways it was an even better vehicle for 3-D," he said.
What's different about 3-D this time around is that it is tied to the evolution of digital technology. As movie theatres, prodded by directors such as Lucas and James Cameron, slowly make the costly switch from film to digital projectors, more and more venues open up to screening 3-D, a format that traditional film has a difficult time with. Similarly, on television, the advent of high definition has changed what's possible for television producers to show.
However, just as there was a border war between Beta and VHS back when videocassette recorders were new, there is no consensus yet on an industry standard when it comes to screening 3-D. True 3-D films need a double image (one frame for the right eye, and a slightly different one for the left). In the fifties, this meant using two projectors. Nowadays, digital projectors do it with one machine. Some 3-D -- Chicken Little, for example -- is merely the 2-D original converted into three-dimensional imagery. Others, like Fly Me to the Moon, will be designed using pure 3-D digital technology, more like a video game than a traditional animated film.
Caron heard about Allison Dubois, the real-life inspiration behind Medium, through a Paramount television development exec who discovered her while trying to put together a series about five New Agers: astrologer, numerologist, psychic, dream analyst, you get the picture.
"They identified 300 people around the country who were working psychics," Caron said. "One of the people they met was the real Allison Dubois, and she stood out from these other people because when you describe psychics, the image people conjure up . . . is somebody sort of marginalized, somebody with an 800 number, you know, not this 30-year-old woman who was going for her law degree working at the district attorney's office in the city of Phoenix, who wanted to be a judge, whose husband was an aerospace engineer, who had three kids," he added.
"The thing I found most interesting was that she fervently believed, with all her heart, that she saw dead people. And her husband . . . who at the time was working on a doctorate in mathematics, and the idea that this woman could be married to this man, the idea that this woman who saw dead people, who dreamt the future, was married to this man whose religion was based on science and logical fact -- that's what fascinated me."
The show, which airs Monday nights at 10, was a surprise hit on NBC last year. In a television world dominated by crime procedurals, who would have expected success from a kind of 1-900- Dharma & Greg? The show began to land regularly in the Top 10, Arquette won an Emmy for best actress, and the next thing you know, Raleigh Studios is full of Venezuelan and French and Finnish journalists asking pointed questions about the death penalty. (The show is against it; the real-life Dubois is adamantly in favour).
Although it's a show about seeing dead people, Medium is also very much a show about a marriage. As Dubois, Arquette and her husband, played by Jake Weber, have three kids they're passionately committed to raising. Mom's day job as a police psychic frequently leads to her inadvertently neglecting the kids, which drives Dad crazy. All in all, the sense one gets of this unique family is that being gifted with psychic abilities is as much a curse as it is a blessing.
"I really liked the relationship I was reading," said Arquette, a down-to-earth, thirtysomething mother of two (a teenage boy and a two-year-old daughter). In the nineties, Arquette, who is casually dressed in jeans, T-shirt and spangled baby-blue cardigan, was a movie star with lead roles in films such as David O' Russell's Flirting With Disaster and Martin Scorsese's Bringing Out the Dead, before she stopped to have another child. Like a lot of actresses, the transition from blond ingénue to mom didn't translate in Hollywood. "I didn't feel like in movies or on television I was seeing working relationships," she said. "It was either people who were passionately first falling in love, or it was really nothing out there to watch. The complications of having this macabre, dark world, and trying to have a happy family -- how do you do both at the same time? It seemed like a lot of conflict, and that's always interesting to play."
While the return of 3-D to movie and TV screens has a certain inevitable feel to it -- Hollywood has always been quick to leap for the first technological quick fix that presents itself -- the news that Broadway is embracing digital three-dimensional technology sounds downright heretical, if a little intriguing. "I want the theatre to have some of the visual scope and sense of movement that cinema has," William Dudley, set and video designer for The Woman in White, said in The New York Times. "Directors often talk about breaking through the fourth wall. I want to break through the second wall, the back wall."
Rather than requiring energy-sapping set changes, the setting changes instantly. (After five centuries of playwrights trying to think up new excuses for a character to leave the room, now the room leaves you!)
But what about the story? The Woman in White was produced in London in 2004 using the same technology, to less than rapturous reviews. Charles Spencer said in the Daily Telegraph, "What's required, surely, is an authentically Victorian atmosphere, not something that looks like an out-of-focus video game." Linda Winer of Newsday wrote, "Never before have I wished that vertigo pills were sold in the lobby."
That said, other Broadway shows have climbed aboard the 3-D bandwagon: Ring of Fire, a Johnny Cash musical, will feature computer-animated images of backwoods Americana. Broadway has seen the future -- and it looks more like Playstation 2 than anyone could have ever imagined.
Special to The Globe and Mail