A few months ago, I stumbled onto a childhood artifact. When I was 10 or 11, I had drafted a contract with the kid across the street forming a motion picture production company. Signing our names in crayon on cardboard, we vowed to save our allowances to buy a Super 8 camera and then start making monster movies. I remember devising scripts and perfecting my vampire makeup, while the kid next door practiced his wolf-man shuffle. For the life of me, however, I can't recall what we were planning to do with these films once we made them.

Amateur films have always been home movies. We make them in our houses, we make them in our neighborhoods, and we show them in our living rooms. Digital cinema may change all of this, at last providing a means of distribution and exhibition so that home movies can become public movies. Today, kids and adults are making their own Star Wars films, using desktop computers to create special effects that would have cost Industrial Light & Magic a fortune just a decade ago. And even more remarkably, we can all watch them on the Web.

Digital cinema could do for movies what the photocopier did for print culture. In the 1970s and '80s, we saw the explosion of newsletters and 'zines, documenting the experiences of folks living in retirement homes, working in minimum-wage jobs or slam dancing in mosh pits. Now, the introduction of cheap and lightweight digital video cameras, PC-based digital editing software, and streaming-video distribution on the Web puts the resources of filmmaking in the hands of an equally broad range of citizens and thus expands the potential for grassroots creativity.

Some skeptics may grumble that they have heard this all before: a succession of previous technologies promised more democratic access to the means of media production, only to remain on the margins. Yet this misreads the nature of the current revolution. Digital cinema may describe a range of technological changes, particularly in cameras and editing suites, but what's really different this time is the advent of Web-based film distribution. That's what turns digital, or even conventional, filmmaking into digital cinema. In the past, amateur films never made it into the multiplexes. Local activists had to struggle ceaselessly with city councils to protect public-access cable, one of the few venues for such films. But digital cinema is meeting the challenge of distribution at several levels-at the commercial portals, hungry for product, that have put hundreds of films on their sites; on various more specialized fan or subcultural networks; on sites built by filmmakers to showcase their work.