December 23, 1999

Harvey Goldberg
Project Manager |
Disability Rights Unit
Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission
Sydney, Australia

Dear Mr. Goldberg,

The following is a response to the Captioned Movie inquiries from the Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission. I have combined your various questions into one document. Let me know if I can be of further assistance.

Eleven films have been captioned for conventional theatrical release so far:

The Jackal (Universal Pictures)
Titanic (Paramount Pictures Corporation)
The Mask of Zorro (Sony Pictures Entertainment)
8mm (Sony Pictures Entertainment)
Entrapment (20th Century Fox Film Corp.)
Star Wars: Episode 1 - The Phantom Menace (20th Century Fox Film Corp.)
Big Daddy (Sony Pictures Entertainment)

Random Hearts (Sony Pictures Entertainment)
Toy Story 2 (Buena Vista Pictures) - cc only
The Green Mile (Warner Bros. Pictures) - cc only
Stuart Little (Sony Pictures Entertainment)

In addition, almost 30 films have been captioned for Imax theaters, including:

Cosmic Voyage
Everest
Island of the Sharks
The Living Sea
The Nutcracker
Special Effects
Stormchasers

And the Disney theme parks (Disneyland, Disney World, EPCOT, MGM/Disney Studios, and Animal Kingdom) have installed 27 Rear Window Captioning systems with attractions including Bug's Life, Lion King, MuppetVision 3D, and dozens more. 

We expect to provide a minimum of one captioned feature per month over the next year. The eventual goal is to be able to have a majority of major studio releases captioned, totaling as many as 100 per year, but this is dependent on wider installation of RWC systems to create greater incentives for the studios.

The film producer (actually, the distributor, which is often the same company) first and foremost agrees to contract for the captioning and to pay for it. They then agree to provide a video-tape copy of the film so that a time-coded caption data file can be prepared.

They virtually never ask for approval or control of the final caption product, but they do retain rights and ownership to those captions as a derivative work of the original copyrighted script. These captions can be repurposed when the film is eventually distributed via home video, pay-per-view, cable and broadcast presentation.

The studio is actively involved only in that they agree to have their film captioned, provide video and script, and informally help arrange showing in RWC equipped theaters, when possible.

Due to time constraints, most of the films captioned to date have been prepared in two to seven days with an additional day needed to transfer the caption data to the DTS digital audio disk which is used to synchronize the captions to the film in the theater.

The rate per film is $1,200/hour ($2,400 for a 2 hour film). These costs are paid by the studios. An additional fee of $500 per DTS disk (one needed per installation) is also paid by the studio.

The demand for RW has been quite intense across the United States. Deaf and hard-of-hearing people are constantly sending us e-mail asking how they can get the system set up in their town. When a new theater is set up with RW, the use is quite high when the appropriate publicity and outreach is done, but project resources have been quite meager, so often the publicity is lacking. We don't have data or numbers for usage, mostly because the theater personnel are too busy and overworked to keep records on this. We do hear from the theater managers regularly that the patrons are quite grateful for their efforts and we know that in some areas of the country people have driven two hours or more to see the newest captioned film.

Again, we don't have hard numbers, we do have hundreds of messages from users who are almost universally pleased by the service and want more captioned films as soon as possible.

We have worked with Universal, Paramount, Sony, 20th Century Fox, Buena Vista, and Warner Bros. They are all pleased with how the system works and how well it meets their needs. They all have expressed the need for more installations to justify their expense and efforts. They are not involved in further development of the system, but have provided advice and consultation on how we could get more systems installed. Other studios are interested but have also expressed the need for a wider installed base of RW-equipped theaters. You may contact the studio executives directly, but we are bound by our business relationships not to provide their contact information.

Good, if we can get more theaters to install the equipment.

The prospects are good for the system in that the deaf and hard-of-hearing community in the U.S. has expressed strong desires to see more captioned movies in more locations. The major roadblocks are lack of funds for publicity and therefore lack of interest by exhibitors to buy the systems. RW is generally available to the public already, but if you mean widely available (i.e., at least one equipped screen in each of the top 50 markets), then any guess is as good as any other. Two years?

We do not have such data since we are unable to track usage and number of viewers. In addition, the theater v. studio share of box office receipts is a complex system using a sliding scale over time. So if a deaf person comes in the first week of a film's opening, that is worth less to the theater than if he or she comes in the fourth week. But a film may be moved from a RW-equipped screen to an unequipped one in the third week, so revenues may be lost.

We also have combined our captioning and description systems, so users may be either deaf or blind. It is important to note that deafness and blindness are low-incidence disabilities (totaling less than 5% of the population), so if any further installations or government requirements are based on marketplace rewards or guaranteed return on investment, it is unlikely to meet those needs. But wheelchair ramps for theaters and other public buildings aren't required to pay back their investment and neither should accommodations for deaf and hard-of-hearing people.  

Exhibitors buy the hardware and display equipment for their theaters and provide some publicity; distributors and producers pay for the captioning (and description) and provide logistical support for the caption-production process; the captioning agency in this case is also the organizer, inventor, promoter, and marketer al in one (probably not what would occur in Australia). All try to coordinate and cooperate to assure that captioned films are actually booked into equipped theaters.

Producers and distributors provide the right for us to caption their film by contracting us to do the work. They retain ownership of the captions and the copyright as well. There are no copyright problems associated with this service.

It presently costs approximately $8,000 to equip a theater with RW captioning. This assumes the theater already owns a DTS-6D modified digital audio player, the only digital audio system presently supporting RW. The theater must have DTS to use RW at this time, though further development for other systems is planned.

None – the studios have paid for the captioning discs.

Issues of anticipated proliferation of systems are discussed above. However, when movies are captioned, they ARE simultaneous with release – a major and key goal of the service. We hope that eventually all movies will be captioned, but a more realistic long-term goal would be the major releases of the major studios and many of the independent and small-studio releases as well.

So far, only one screen per complex has been equipped in the 12 conventional theater locations in the U.S. It would be desirable to have more than one equipped screen per complex since movies are often moved around in the complex based on popularity of the film and box office results. The recent cost-reduction in the datawall component of the system (from $8,000 to $4,000) should help exhibitors better afford the system.

Other matters I would like to comment on:

• Though the present issue the HREOC is dealing with concerns deaf and hard-of-hearing people, it is important to recognize that RW has always been installed along with the parallel equipment for people who are blind or visually impaired – the "DVS Theatrical" system, which adds approximately $2,000 to the equipment costs and $12,000 for the cost of providing the narrated descriptions (this latter cost is borne by the studio).

• In its filing, Village Cinemas commented that the RW captioning system has a negative impact on those seated around the users of the reflectors. This has not been our experience and the number of complaints from hearing moviegoers has been no more than one or two in the many years the systems have been in place in various venues.

• Village Cinemas also states that the cost would be A$2 million to fit out their cinema circuit. This number is certainly daunting, but an inaccurate statement of realistic expenditures should they decide or are compelled to equip their theaters. Certainly a modest phase-in over a number of years would be agreeable to consumers, with targeted and select theaters being equipped. With such a limited, phased-in approach, the costs would be considerably lower.

• Finally, Village Cinemas states that the onset of digital technology would make the current closed captioning technology obsolete. Though they make no statement of their plans to incorporate captioning when digital cinema arrives (many years hence), in truth, the visual display presently used will work fine when the advent of digital cinema allows us to encode our caption data right onto the digital film. Equipping their theaters with datawalls now will give them a head start when digital cinema allows efficient caption data encoding regardless of whether a theater has a DTS digital audio system.

I hope these comments assist you in your decision-making process.

Sincerely,

Larry Goldberg, Director
Media Access
WGBH Educational Foundation
125 Western Ave.
Boston, MA 02134

Internet: Larry_Goldberg@WGBH.org

617-300-3722 (direct voice/FAX)
617-300-3400 (main NCAM)
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