Meyer's division into large and small pictures makes me wince, since small pictures look better on a big screen, too. But independent filmmakers may not feel the same way. Access to an unlimited audience through the Internet may be an irresistible lure. Richard Linklater, who makes both commercial comedies like "School of Rock" and intimate, low-budget movies like the "Before Sunrise" and "Before Sunset" duo, told me that his small movies reach the larger cities and some of the college towns but never make it to many suburban multiplexes or to rural areas. Linklater said, "On the Internet, the people who have been shut out of the national conversation on those movies will now be able to take part in it, and for the independent filmmaker that's an incredible gain." For the beginning filmmaker, the game is afoot. Shooting with lightweight digital equipment, he could put together a feature-length movie for very little money and then distribute it through the Internet. All he needs is ability and a cast and crew open to adventure.

Big digital spectacles that click with the audience make so much money for the conglomerates that it's impossible to imagine that the studios will ever stop making them. But it is crazy to spend almost a hundred million dollars to make and market a routine movie. The big-studio business model has its uses-overhead costs can be buried in a production budget-but it's bound to break down someday. Steven Soderbergh is one director who is positively evangelical about reform. He has an alternative business plan, which he put into practice with "The Good German," that goes like this: The A-list talent (actors, directors, writers) work for relatively small up-front payments-not the market-driven "quotes" of five or ten or even twenty million but a "nominal" fee of, say, a million or two. (If the talent doesn't like this arrangement, they can be paid more up front but they will have to forfeit special arrangements, like "gross points," which are paid later.) When revenues start coming in, the take is divided according to fixed percentages. If the studio and its financing partners have put up the production budget, they get the biggest piece-say, fifty or sixty cents of every dollar. Star A gets six cents, star B five, writer X two, and so on. If the movie is a bomb theatrically, the ancillary markets will minimize the studio's loss, as they do now. If the movie is a hit, everyone owns a piece of it forever. And the artistic payoff is a lessening of fear. "If the initial outlay is kept down this way," Soderbergh said to me, "then there's a good chance that the studios will make more interesting choices of material."

At the moment, the smart money may be going small budget. Just recently, wealthy individuals, pooling their money in hedge funds, have begun setting up deals not with studios but with successful producers like Joel Silver and producer-directors like Ivan Reitman. The production money will go to genre films-thrillers and comedies and horror pictures-in the low-budget (about twenty-million-dollar) range. John C. Malone, the chairman of Liberty Media Corporation, is opening his own studio to make movies on a similar scale. Some of these pictures will undoubtedly be routine, but the relatively low stakes could also allow producers to hire writers and directors who are willing to do more daring work, the way B-movie directors, toiling quietly on back lots, did sixty years ago.

Films made fast and cheap in this way would still need studio distribution and marketing, but once the theatres go digital that may no longer be true. Distribution is the key to freedom. In the future, what is to stop a group of producers, directors, and writers from forming a coöperative, raising money for a slate of films, and hiring non-studio distribution and promotion people to get the movies to digitized theatres-liberating themselves at last?

The lobby contains a restaurant, a bar, and a book-and-gift shop. Before the movie, people hang out and have a drink or leaf through a hot new novel or a movie-star biography. The rest rooms are spotless, and the concession stand serves delicious coffee. All the seats are reserved, and they are plush, with plenty of legroom. The steeply raked auditorium is dark, and insulated from the sound of the other theatres in the same multiplex. Is this some sort of upper-bourgeois dream of the great good place? A padded cell for wealthy movie nuts? No, it's an actual multiplex, the ArcLight, on Sunset Boulevard near Vine.

The idea of user-friendly theatres may be catching on. Sumner Redstone's daughter Shari, the president of National Amusements, the family-owned theatre business, has vowed to convert half the lobbies of the chain's hundred and nineteen theatres to social spaces with comfortable lounges, and to build more. Martinis will be served; newspapers and magazines will be offered. If theatres go in this Starbucks-plus-cocktails direction, the older audience might come back, with a positive effect on filmmaking, and the value of the movies as an art form and an experience could be preserved. After you are seated at the ArcLight, an usher standing at the front of the auditorium tells you who wrote and directed the movie and how long it is. He promises that he and another usher will stay for a while to make sure that the projection and the sound are up to snuff. There are no advertisements following his speech, and only four coming attractions. The movie begins, and you are utterly lost in it.