Behind the Kodak Moment

Like other industries at the turn of the millennium, moviemaking and photography shifted from analog to digital technology. Fujifilm, a leader in the digital field, stopped making motion picture film stock (or “celluloid”) in 2013. Rather than keep pace with a growing digital market, industry giant Kodak tried to survive through litigation and mass worker layoffs. After a federal bailout in 2013, the company prepared to shutter its celluloid operation until it found an aggressive champion in Hollywood’s Quentin Tarantino. Together with fellow blockbuster directors Christopher Nolan (Batman Begins), J. J. Abrams (Star Trek into Darkness), and Judd Apatow (Knocked Up), he pressured the five major studios to bail out Kodak again by buying up millions of feet of its film stock, regardless of whether or not the studios would use it. Eventually joined by Martin Scorsese, the group finalized the deal in 2015 and renewed it in early 2020, pursuing indie productions and TV shoots in order to prolong the use of the material. In the meantime, Kodak has focused on hosting dinners, vacations, and parties for those in the industry who are pushing its product. In January 2020 the company gave Tarantino a “lifetime achievement” award. This marketing strategy is working: last year, Kodak’s film stock sales rose, even as its overall revenue declined yet again, and it opened a celluloid processing lab in New York. With 3M, Dupont, and other companies long since out of the film stock game, Kodak now has a monopoly on it. 

Kodak’s efforts have paid cultural as well as financial dividends. Celluloid has become a cause célèbre of the film industry, with digital playing the villain. At a press junket in 2014, Tarantino seethed: “Digital projection… is the death of cinema as I know it…. that’s just television in public…. why an established filmmaker would shoot on digital, I have no fucking idea at all.” Five years later, his and Kodak’s crusade bore fruit. Of the nine 2020 Oscar nominees for Best Picture, four were shot mostly on film. One was Little Women, for which Greta Gerwig had insisted on using celluloid. In the 2012 documentary Side by Side, she says of her experiences appearing both on film and in digital formats, “They process digital now to look like film, as if film is inherently better. Just—we like the way it looks better, which seems...