One of the books I’m reading is A Year at the Movies by Kevin Murphy, who played Tom Servo on Mystery Science Theater 3000. In 2001, Murphy decided to watch at least one movie per day in a wide variety of settings, then write a weekly column about it. The book has been an affectionate bear hug for good movies and the best places to watch them.

Part of the appeal of a book with bite-sized, independent chapters is the ability to read it in multiple sittings, and I haven’t finished it yet. (Heck, I haven’t even reached the part with drive-ins.) But I just ran into a very relevant passage.

In early June 2001, Murphy visited the Ziegfeld Theater in New York City, where he saw “Atlantis,” (probably Atlantis: The Lost Empire). He loved the Ziegfeld for its velvet drapes, plush seats, rolling snack carts, and lack of pre-show advertisements. Here’s how he told the rest of the story:

There was only one thing preceding the movie: a notice from the good geeks at Texas Instruments announcing they were about to blow our collective minds with their new technology called DLP, or Digital Light Processing.

And then they did it. The projection was perfectly focused, sharp in every detail in every corner of the screen. No print scratches, no reel-change pops, in fact no reel changes at all. No projector flutter, no soundtrack rumble.

You might not realize how rare this is. Even the very first screening of a virgin print of Apocalypse Now Redux with Francis himself running the projector is going to have some small flaws. Having every single inch of the screen in perfect focus almost never happens in any theater.

This film was flawless.

It was flawless because it wasn’t a film. Atlantis never was a film; it was conceived, created, animated, edited, and, at the Ziegfeld, projected completely in the realm of digital information, without one single frame of film involved.

It was beautiful, the color density full, detail razor sharp. With video projection there is always some artifacting or scan line problem: In layman’s terms, video still looks lousy when projected. But this isn’t video. It’s a completely new technology using ones, zeroes, and mirrors.

… The import of what I was seeing rolled over me like the Pacific surf. It could mean the end of film for motion picture exhibition. (emphasis mine) DLP will be flawless every time it’s shown. This means the magnificent picture I was seeing at the velvety Ziegfeld theater in Manhattan will look just as magnificent in decidedly less velvety venues in the various boondock theaters around the country. We’ll all be able to see really good-looking films. Even in Idaho. I don’t want to alarm anybody, but it just might raise our aesthetic standards.

I read this passage soon after reading Daniel Eagan’s article lamenting the fate of most older films in the new digital-projector world, as discussed in our previous post. That film gourmand Kevin Murphy could recognize this trend so early is pretty remarkable, considering that TI had been demonstrating DLP in just a few theaters for only about two years. I think it also serves as an eloquent counterpoint in favor of digital projection, illustrating the viewer’s benefits from the new system.

In A Year at the Movies, Murphy repeatedly surprises me with the depth of his cinema knowledge and clever wordplay. But if you’re not knee-deep in love with the movies, it’s hard to avoid a certain repetitiveness. Some films are great, some are awful. Some theaters are heavenly shrines, some are icky pits. Ironically, the book has very little to do with MST3K or movie riffing, though it can be funny at times. Anyway, I recommend this book to anyone who cares deeply about movies and the theaters where we watch them. And if he says something interesting about drive-ins, I’ll let you know.

Film canisters from the National Archives. Photo by Mr. T in DC

I suppose that it’s natural to shape every bit of news to find the parts that affect our hobbies or business. In every report of theaters needing to upgrade their projection systems to digital, the main focus has been finding the money, or occasionally how the new system looks in operation.

Film historian Daniel Eagan has written about the same issue with a different perspective. When essentially all theaters have moved to digital projection, what will happen to all the older movies that only exist on film?

Eagen writes in The Atlantic that the effects of the end of film have already begun. “Curators, programmers, and repertory schedulers are scrambling to find versions on film of titles that used to be easy to acquire. Warner Bros. won’t rent titles unless it has at least two copies in its vaults. So if a theater wanted to show Sky Full of Moon or Fearless Fagin, WB films from the 1950s, it would have to project a DVD — with an accompanying drastic drop in sound and image quality. Twentieth Century Fox no longer has prints of Miller’s Crossing or Barton Fink … However, if a collector will supply a print, Fox will be happy to charge its usual licensing fees.”

The trouble is that running a film through a projector is a necessarily destructive process. It scratches and fades with time. Never mind the hefty cost of creating a new print from a negative; there are few companies left to do it at all.

Even when films are transferred to Digital Cinema Packages, there are a lot of tough questions. Will the digital format of today become obsolete a few years from now? In the restoration work, are the right people adjusting color, contrast, and brightness? The digital files are huge, and all hard drives die eventually, so what’s the right way to store them?

I feel a little embarrassed by Eagen’s fine article. I’ve been worrying for over a year about small theaters in general, and drive-ins in particular, when I should have been worrying about the larger picture. I sure hope we come up with a good way to save film in general, since it stores so much of our 20th-century memories.

Here’s the germ of a business idea for you. With the digital conversion wave sweeping across North America in 2013, there will be roughly a zillion discarded theater-grade film projectors that will be available for cheap or free or better. (If they’re heavy enough, maybe someone will pay you to haul them off?) Given this low-cost resource, what can you do with it?

The true answer will probably be mundane or sad. Maybe a lot of them will be shipped to countries that still use film and would love to get more cheap projectors. Maybe some of them will just be melted down for scrap. But if someone could come up with a whizbang business plan for converting them to fun and profit, wouldn’t that be so much nicer?

How about a chain of “drive-in movie” indoor restaurants? They could get some cheap old movies (film copies ought to be cheaper too, maybe?) and show them on a screen at one end of the place while folks sit in booths that look like old cars. How is this better than using a DVD player and a projection TV? I don’t know. So maybe that’s not such a good idea.

It’s your turn. Leave a comment with your better idea. Then when someone (maybe you) hits it big with one of these ideas, he’ll send us royalty checks. Or at least offer us a free meal at his drive-in movie restaurant.