U2 on You Tube & What it Means to You

I want to feel, sunlight on my face
See that dust cloud disappear without a trace
I want to take shelter from the poison rain
Where the streets have no name
Bono/U2

I’m going to break up my posts on Once Upon a Time in Hollywood to point out the significance of the U2 concert last night that was live-streamed via You Tube to seven continents.

I’m sure we’ll hear in the coming days how many people participated in watching the concert online, but I’m guessing into the milions. I started just watching to see and hear the quality and to see if they could pull it off technologically. They did and I stuck around for the entire concert. It was a late night here in Cedar Falls, Iowa.

For the last four days I’ve been posting a mini history of the Hollywood film industry. They film industry is in a lull now connected to the economy and I wanted to show how it’s always been an industry in flux.

But there are new technologies emerging that will provide many opportunities related to how we shoot and view movies and other forms of entertainment. Last night’s concert was a tour de force of current technologies mixed with great talent and creative energies giving us a foretaste of what is to come.
As a personal side note the concert brought back a few memories of my L.A. days back in the 80s when I did several photography, film and video shoots at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena where the concert was held last night. The concert itself reminded me of Bruce Springsteen’s last Born in the U.S.A. concert at the L.A. Coliseum back in ’85 which I attended with around 100,000 other people.

And as Bono started into The Streets Have No Name I couldn’t help but recall a missed opportunity. I was a writer/director/cameraman and editor with a Burbank production company when their Joshua Tree album came out. On the morning of March 27, 1987 we got wind that U2 was going to be playing on a rooftop in downtown L.A. and thought that would be pretty cool to shoot and experience. Then we decided we didn’t want to deal with all the traffic and the crowd. Watch the You Tube video below to see the security risks involved. The police were doing their job, and the rockers were doing theirs. (Also this was back in MTV’s heyday when record labels dropped a lot of money producing music videos. One more example of how things change.)

Sure wish I would have gone. Life is full of regret and missed opportunities and what I’ve been trying to show in the last couple days and will show in the days to come is that the film industry has been through many bumpy roads in the past but there are new opportunities coming— but it’s going to require you embracing a new way of doing things.

Just keep in mind that five years ago You Tube hadn’t even launched. Can you even imagine what kinds of distribution channels there will be five years from now?

Scott W. Smith