To take the thread’s title overly literally, IIRC someone once figured that Noises Off clicked in the theater — by which I mean as a live stage play — but not so much in the movie adaptation, because, well, it’s one thing for this or that to go wrong in the show-within-the-show, but on some level you always know that the finished product is exactly what the producer reviewed and okayed: if they didn’t like the way that it got filmed on Take Five, they just shrugged and did a Take Six.
But when you see people live on stage pretending to be performers who occasionally screw up, on some level you’re constantly being reminded that, holy crap, the actor-playing-the-actor could screw up: maybe, in between pretending to flub their lines — which, we’re being shown, sometimes happens — they’ll actually flub their lines! Heck, maybe someone will be so busy trying to make it look like the character is on the brink of dropping a prop that the performer will slip up and fall down and, who the hell knows, accidentally bare a breast or two or something!
In my copious notes above about movie projection details, I tried to describe some of the parts of the Century film projectors that we used but wished I had a photo to go along with it.
Last night I was sifting through old photos looking for an appropriate “Summer” photo for the SDMB competition when I stumbled upon a photo I took in 1990 of one of our film projectors.
I have taken a few minutes and added annotations showing what the various parts are. Specifically, I wanted to draw attention to things like the film-break failsafe levers at the bottom, something that just doesn’t seem well documented on the Internet.
During the use of film for mainstream releases, plenty of well-maintained multiplex booths operated by people who basically knew what they were doing had legitimate reasons to run interlocks on as many screens as possible - midnight premieres during their heyday in the mid-2000s and, especially, the summer kids shows in areas with a lot of families and day cares. Why try to ship and assemble 15 or 20 prints of Antz for 2 or 3 morning shows when you can just get 1 or 2 of them and do the above? If you understand the equipment it’s really not a big deal and it worked perfectly fine.
I trust you are speaking in generalities of the use of relatively complex interlock setups, and not that specific video—that setup in the video was pure insanity!
Even if they didn’t mind 45 minutes of setup for each run, there were so many contact points and jerry-rigged twists and turns that it would be a miracle if the print wasn’t scratched by day’s end.
That is another feature of a bygone era: scratched films. If the film is improperly threaded or there are contaminants in the projector the entire film can be scratched from end to end. If the scratch is on the emulsion side it usually scrapes off some color, leaving an annoying green line on the screen. If the scratch is on the back side of the film stock, it will appear as a hair-thin black line.
I’m sure that as an experienced 35/70mm operator you would agree with the truism that a competent, dedicated projectionist can run film properly on any equipment, and someone who doesn’t care is going to have a subpar quality show and scratch film no matter how expensive and new the hardware is.
There is no reason that running film on any arbitrary number of rollers or twisting and turning it should scratch it. Sending film over a thousand rollers in a booth run by people who can avoid damaging rollers and know how to keep them clean and free of burrs won’t scratch film. Running reel-to-reel where the film might only touch two rollers outside of the projector itself in a booth where the operators don’t know or care about maintaining the equipment will scratch film.
I have been involved in 45-minute setups for 8-screen interlocks. It’s a lot better than spending 15 hours hauling, building up, and breaking down 7 extra prints of the film for no reason. And those 45 minutes include the 25 minutes it would take to load 8 projectors separately in the first place so you’re spending 20 net extra minutes of threading time to save two full shifts’ worth of man-hours on peripheral tasks.
If interlocks are / were a common tactic, you’d sort of expect multi-screen theaters to have a built in infrastructure for carrying film between interlocked projectors.
The idea of jerry-rigging this stuff seems absurd. Doubly so when half the employees in a theater are idjit high schoolers.
Most of them did have a little extra equipment, both in terms of physical items and electronic syncing circuitry, but as the video shows, that just makes these a little easier and a little more idiot-proof. You don’t strictly need it.
Theaters that let idiot high schoolers run their projectors had poor presentation whether they routinely ran interlocks or not. Theaters that cared enough to train people (even, sometimes if rarely, non-idiot high schoolers) to be knowledgeable and conscientious about their work could do things like the above with confidence.
There was a movie theater (thirteen screens) that opened in Boston in late-2019. It was part of the ArcLight chain. As part of their marketing they promised more attention to how movies were presented; great projectors, sound, reclining seats, etc. I saw a couple films there, and they seemed to be very well shown.
It closed, like everything else, in March 2020. I heard sometime later that it would not reopen after the pandemic. Someone lost a bundle on that.
Checking just now, it looks like the whole chain folded in 2021. AMC has bought the Boston location.
Ooh, I thought of a movie moment that I had (and it ties in with the projection equipment tangent).
I saw Blade Runner on opening night, and, damn, the film broke. When they got it started again, there was Rick Deckard still chatting with Eldon Tyrell. We had no idea we’d missed a minute or two.
Including the minute where Tyrell admits that Rachael is a replicant, and has been given Tyrell’s niece’s memories.
For the rest of the film, and certainly through the last voice-over where Deckard muses that no one knows how long they have, I was holding two versions in juxtaposition. The Rachael the Woman and Rachael the Replicant versions.
And I kept those two world-views of the most powerful movie I’d seen in tension… for years (until I saw it again, and said “Whaaaa…?”).
Unless you hit [pause] while streaming at home to go use the bathroom and unnoticed by you the playback didn’t quit immediately, or never stopped at all.
In Yankee Doodle Dandy, a biopic of George M. Cohan, there’s a scene in which Jimmy Cagney (as Cohan) shouts, “Everybody sing!” to an audience of soldiers in the movie, who sing “Over There”. That movie came out in 1942, and you know he’s really breaking the fourth wall and that people in the theaters sang along too.
Cohan died shortly after seeing that movie at a private screening. He was ill, but it’s a shame he couldn’t see it with a crowd.
Back before VCR’s movies used to come back to theaterrs, so it wasn’t until about 1970 that I saw The Ten Commandments. The film broke right at the scene where you see Yochabel’s hand reaching out from the stone where she is about to get squished. We were upset, but they did rewind a little and we got to see she was saved.
At our place they had built-in setups for 2 or 3 theaters. Anything beyond that was jerry rigged.
At the time, a new 35mm print cost around $2000…that’s the cost of replacing a scratched film.
Just get enough prints so you have two or three on interlock max. We always had at least two prints of any major release (like Batman or Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade). No need to show off with a Rube Goldberg / Heath Robinson contraption. There is too much that can go wrong when it is all set up.
No matter how good your equipment is and how clean you run, something will break and now you have 8 theaters full of people who need passes or sit and wait for 25 minutes.
How did that pricing work? The theater paid $2,000 for the print? Did they then get to keep all of the box office revenue?
Because my understanding is the present model has the studio/distributor keep most of the box office revenue for the first few weeks, though the theater’s cut rises over time, and the theater gets all of the revenue from the popcorn and candy bar.
No, that was the cost of the actual print. The licensing and so on was complex, as you have indicated.
For example, if you did something terrible that destroyed the print (e.g. threaded it with too tight of a loop) that would be the replacement cost.
The prints are the property of the distributor and are returned when you are done showing it–they then send them to second-run theaters. I mention that cost simply to illustrate that there should be no need to spread one print thinly across a crazy number of projectors.
I wasn’t ever involved in the financial side of the house so whether or not the initial cost was fronted by the church I’m not sure. I don’t believe so.
It’s kind of like how if you get in an accident on the highway you will get a bill for the repair to the guardrail. Mess up the print and they will charge for a new one.
This. So much this. One of the most epic moments of my life. Saw it the second day it was out, with a packed theater of like-minded folks. The collective screams, hope, and absolute movie magic is something I’ll never forget.
I still get a thrill seeing it on TV, but nowhere near the amazing experience and rush as a few hundred strangers forming a collective sound of awe and wonder.
