Johnny: I’m not saying it’s already gone, only that there are fewer places to buy and process B&W film today than there were 10, 20, or 30 years ago. And that the situation will continue to get worse until eventually all film work, B&W or color, will be a rare and expensive boutique process, kind of like making dye transfer photo prints.
I know people in the film business who are worried that all the guys at the labs who really know the processes and know how to produce high-quality images are near or at retirement age, and that there aren’t nearly enough young people interested in learning this dying art. As demand for shooting and printing on film drops, manufacturers will make less, labs will close, and it will be difficult and expensive to work in film.
Digital cinema – converting movie theaters from 35mm to digital projection – is expected to really take off in the next couple of years. As many as 4,000 digital projectors may be in place by 2008, out of about about 30,000 screens in North America. The savings to distributors from not having to make and ship film prints is driving the process.
Once studios are no longer ordering thousands of prints for hundreds of films every year, labs will close, Kodak will shut down production facilities and getting a 400-foot roll of 125T will be as hard as buying a buggy whip.
Yeah, that was the one in which Batman fought aliens in a museum of giant cash registers. Didn’t work.
Color television was long established by then, of course, and smart executives made the switch much earlier because they saw the future. The Adventures of Superman started filming in color in 1954 and created a hugely profitable rerun niche, even though the show itself suffered from the cost:
Could the movie have been shot in color then converted to black and white in the processing (or however they would do that)? Hence the Technicolor credit?
That is true. But for now it’s still readily available.
Still, I’m going to sell my Arri 35 BL and my Arri 16S, as well as a couple of Bolexes anf the Krasnagorsks. (I’ll keep a couple of Bolexes and my Éclair.)
Unfortunately, the IMDb doesn’t have the exact quote, but it’s just to the effect that projectors can’t show B&W movies any more.
Okay, it’s not the actual line that’s so funny, it’s the idea that studio execs would be so clueless about how a film projector works as to think that could even be possible.
