Digital 3-D movement’s leader found inspiration in Las Vegas

New Line Cinema

Director Eric Brevig and producer Charlotte Huggins are the creators of “Journey to the Center of the Earth 3-D,” the first full-length 3-D movie filmed digitally.

By Jerry Fink

Tuesday, March 18, 2008 | 2 a.m.

Producer Charlotte Huggins speaks about the marriage of 3-D films and digital technology with the fervor of an evangelist on a mission to convert the world.

She urges anyone who will listen to share the vision she saw more than 10 years ago when she became totally immersed in the new world of moviemaking, one that doesn’t need film.

“Someone said to me recently that 3-D is the killer app we’ve all been waiting for,” Huggins says during a break at last week’s ShoWest, the annual convention for theater owners. “That makes me so happy to hear that. I feel like I’ve been waiting for the wave and here it is.”

You’d expect that from a producer who has two 3-D movies coming out this summer. But Huggins has been riding the new wave of film technology for more than a decade, working on IMAX films and special projects in Las Vegas and heading up the digital studio nWave Pictures.

But she pinpoints the exact moment she knew that she’d made the right choice with 3-D. It was five years ago when she took her father-in-law to a screening of the first 3-D movie she created for IMAX, “Encounter in the Third Dimension.”

“When the lights went up after ‘Encounter,’ ” she says, “he said to me, ‘I have seen the future of cinema.’ ”

Her father-in-law should know. Roy Huggins created some of TV’s most successful series from the ’50s through the ’80s, including “Maverick,” “77 Sunset Strip,” “The Fugitive,” “The Rockford Files,” “Baretta” and “Hunter.” His career started in silent films and he witnessed the birth of sound, color and other technologies we accept as routine today.

This summer Charlotte Huggins, who wrote for “Hunter” for a couple of years before going high-tech, will release two 3-D movies — the action story “The Journey to the Center of the Earth 3-D,” starring Brendan Fraser, and the animated “Fly Me to the Moon.”

“Journey” and a part of “Fly Me” were screened at ShoWest, exciting theater owners, Huggins says.

“Journey” is a historic bench mark. Huggins says it’s the first live-action feature created specifically for 3-D and shot entirely with digital technology. No film. It will be released in theaters with digital 3-D capabilities.

“The movie was conceptualized, framed and edited for 3-D,” Huggins says. “It’s a real movie. It’s not gimmicky, although we have fun with 3-D. But the fun is not a gimmicky kind of fun.”

The story is loosely based on the Jules Verne novel, as was the 1959 film starring Pat Boone and James Mason.

Since Huggins entered it, the world of 3-D technology has made such great strides that digital cameras make film cameras all but obsolete. “With ‘Journey’ we took all the rules out that said we can’t do something and we did them — multiple-camera shots, dollies, cranes, steady cams,” she says.

Most studios use digital technology as part of the overall filmmaking process — but they still shoot film, turn it into digital form for editing and then back to film for exhibition and distribution.

That eventually will change, Huggins says, as will theaters.

About 1,000 theaters across the country have the technology to screen a digital 3-D movie. By the time “Journey” is released in July, Huggins says, she hopes that will increase by about 50 percent.

Making a digital movie in 3-D costs about 20 percent more than a regular movie, a cost that’s passed along in ticket prices.

“Theaters are charging the higher prices now and they’re having success. People are willing to pay for the extra experience,” Huggins says.

The proof comes when a theater complex shows 3-D and 2-D versions of a movie in side-by-side theaters: “3-D will earn three times the revenue,” she says.

From working for several years in Las Vegas, putting 3-D films in IMAX theaters at the Luxor, at the Excaliber and at Caesars Palace, Huggins learned that filmgoers are willing to pay more for an interesting experience.

“The first things I did were projects here in Las Vegas,” Huggins says. “I worked a lot here over the last decade, doing special venues, large formats in high resolution.

“All the things people now want in their feature films we were doing here in Las Vegas in the last decade. Las Vegas was the hub for that because people come here seeking extraordinary entertainment alternatives. Vegas is a Mecca for all sorts of entertainment.”

She is considered the leader in 3-D film production.

“There have been 23 IMAX 3-D movies made in history and I made seven of them — all in the last 10 years,” Huggins says. “So we knew from the IMAX movies how people would seek the 3-D experience.”

Inspired by what she saw here, she decided to begin making full-length 3-D motion pictures, not simply converting movies made in standard formats to 3-D, as was done with “House of Wax,” “Dial M for Murder” and “Jaws.”

The clincher was when the “Spy Kids” sequel, “Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over,” did so well in 2003. “I decided five years ago it was time,” Huggins says.

She left the production company she co-founded, nWave, began looking for scripts and fell in love with “Journey” and “Fly Me to the Moon.” She and “Journey” director Eric Brevig are developing three more films for 3-D.

While 3-D has been a novelty in the past, going through phases of acceptance and rejection, it seems poised to plunge into the mainstream of the theater world, thanks to the technology that has made watching the screen less of an eyestrain and a more enjoyable experience, if more costly.

“This is it,” Huggins says. “This is our summer.”