What will become of film?

Posted on Nov 26, 2012 by mrdrivein

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.

Catalog provides look back at 1947

Posted on Oct 11, 2012 by mrdrivein

Kallet Drive-In, west of Syracuse NY, as captioned by Theatre Catalog, 1946-47: THE ENTRANCE, with its two box offices, is manned by four usherettes, two for each cashier, stationed in front for the purchase of admission tickets for the patrons. There are also four men to clean windshields while the purchase is being made. There is a four-lane entrance to the theatre, and a four-lane exit.

I was fortunate enough to borrow the 1946-47 edition of Theatre Catalog, published by Jay Emanuel Publications, Inc. You can buy a copy on Amazon. I don’t know if it’s worth Amazon’s hefty price tag, but it definitely provides many hours of reading and hundreds of wonderful photos.

Just one of those amazing photos is at the right. It’s the entrance of the Kallet (Camillus NY), which had a three-tier waterfall pumping 50 gallons of water a second on the highway side of the screen. Too bad there wasn’t a good photo of that!

This amazing book has almost 600 Life-magazine-sized pages covering every aspect of movie theater (I spell it -ter) operation. There’s a lengthy article from the American Automobile Association discussing how to provide enough parking for downtown theaters, and whether the theater owner or the town should provide it. An article on facades and movable letters includes six pages of discussion and 28 photos. If you love movie theater history, this book is worth almost any cost.

(What this Catalog doesn’t have is a directory of active theaters. Later editions, such as the 1950-51 listed a few weeks ago on eBay, appears to have listed them all, making them great snapshot drive-in census reports. But not 1946-47.)

This book includes features on five drive-ins under Recent Theatre Construction and tons of great pictures of post-war theaters. My favorite part is a really interesting one-page article titled Notes on Management of Drive-In Theatres by Carl Hellpen, E.M. Loew’s Theatres. Hellpen tells managers that frequent painting not only makes a drive-in’s structures look clean, “it is by far the best protection of the property.” He also suggests that a uniformed usher should walk among the ramps to police the patrons, and that every new drive-in must have a gas station, so maybe can you take it with a grain of salt. You can read the article in its entirety here.

I’ll finish with one more photo, this one of the Speedway Auto Theatre (Greenville OH). It’s not much of a picture, but it shows the huge speakers mounted below the screen of this old-style drive-in.