Twitter, whether you love it or loathe it, the service and its seemingly ever-present 140 character messages are here to stay. For future generations studying film this presents a real possible Boon. Imagine not just reading about a director or actor’s opinion on a film but having their exact words. However Rosenzweig warned such a situation could easily lead to unimportant information obscuring, that which is actually useful to historians. Another problem, for film production at least is that information can be disseminated so quickly; film productions like to keep as much as possible under wraps, and twitter is likely to make this job more difficult than ever before. Most of the opinions on twitter seem to over praise or over scorn it; while I find myself more often in the later camp I can’t say I know for sure because it will be many years before we can truly assess the impact. Twitter has been around less than ten years, but it’s very clear if one reads a newspaper magazine, or news site that it as well as other new media is changing the way information is released and received. Much as the book altered the way altered human ideas of knowledge and memory by making knowledge permanent and transportable twitter alters knowledge by making it immediate.
The press, in particular film critics has often been a big frustration for filmmakers over the years. A bad review of a film or a story detailing a troubled production in a major newspaper or magazine can destroy a film’s chances before it even gets to theatres. As a result of this most major studios keep extremely tight controls on their production hoping to prevent any bad publicity. Twitter means a harsh review could be handed out for a movie while a critic is still viewing it, imagine a website being set up so that you could see the audiences opinion of a movie as they are watching it. Another problem is that because twitter is so public the anonymity and secrecy some film crews need to do their work is becoming increasingly more difficult. Film crews have often gone to great lengths to hide their production, the crew of Return of the Jedi created the fake film Blue Harvest that appeared on all official production materials.
With Twitter the cat is often out of the bag, a friend of mine from film school who worked on the film Fair Game related to me a story of a specific incident involving twitter. While the Fair Game crew was in New York the needed to film a scene that required a mostly empty street, they spent a week location scouting and found a street that would be empty at the time of day they needed, they gathered the crew necessary and went to the location. Several photographers and film fans greeted them; this cost the production around 10,000 extra that day alone. It seems a production assistant excited to be working on his first feature decided to mention the location in his twitter account; he was fired and the rest of the crew was strictly warned against future events. Such leaks have always been a problem on film sets and thanks to twitter the problem is only likely to be amplified exponentially. One could try and prevent this but to do so you would likely have to shut down the Internet so best of luck.[1]
Well just so you don’t think my whole intent is to be harsh on twitter, I have thought of some positives. Twitter because it is instant and archived allows to know things in real time, for future generations it makes it infinitely easier to know what historically important directors and actors were thinking; as well as how their actions were viewed by their peers. It also gives potential future archivists a lot of material to work with; provided the filmmakers of today are tweeting.
Another great feature of twitter is that anyone can use it; while presently this may mean a lot of information of questionable value a few years from now the gains are potentially enormous. Most directors and actors began their careers at the bottom of the industry totem pole; for aspiring directors this means the position of production assistant, for actors being an extra. Now most people working on a film today will not become a famous director or actress but some will, wouldn’t it be great 30 or 40 years from now to find out what they were thinking as they began their career?
So is Twitter a good or negative force for film? Well I don’t think one can say either way definitively since there is decent evidence for both sides. On the negative side critics now have more power then ever to destroy the work of hundreds with just a few characters. Additionally crews filming on location now have to worry about every single crewmember becoming a possible albeit an unintentional leak to the press. Finally while Twitter does allow for a nearly unlimited amount of tweets to be stored such abundance can as our readings this year have shown lead to unimportant information crowding over that which is useful.
On the plus side archiving will open up many possibilities for future historians. Instead of having to track down actors and crew members hoping that they have a good memory of a film the worked on Twenty or more years before you now can have their exact words. We also have the words of people who today might not be that important to the film industry but in a few decades could be up for an Oscar. The main difficulty with studying Twitter is that it’s reasonably new and we really can’t tell how much of an impact it will have in the future, but we can be sure someone will tweet about that impact whatever it may be.
[1] Twitter/LoC archive, http://sexdrugsandintellectualfreedom.com/2010/04/22/twitterloc-part-i/ retrieved 12/08/2010.
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