I wrote up a long thing in reply to a now-deleted post in this group, but maybe its still useful information: * Why do screenings advertised as 35mm sometimes turn out not to be? * The short answer is that booking plans and prints can fall through at the last minute for all kinds of dumb reasons invisible to the public, some foreseeable, some not. * * * Situations I have personally seen include: - Programmer got overoptimistic and assumed a print of a common title would be available, advertised it, and then learned it was booked somewhere else on the same date / didnt exist on film at all anymore / was tied up in a rights situation / whatever. - Programmer asked for a print and was told they might get one, but distributor ended up sending it to a higher profile / more trustworthy with prints / better connected / whatever venue at the last minute. Related: prints of new films, when they exist, seem to go the venues that cant project DCP at all first (which isnt unreasonable). - Catastrophic film projector failure (can sometimes be worked around by only using one projector of a dual-projector set-up, but many theaters dont want to run a show that way for a paying audience) - Print was lost in the mail (not as uncommon as youd hope) - Print wasnt delivered in time for the show - Print only partially delivered (only one can of two, or similar) - Print delivered, but not in good enough shape to project safely (often because of damage in shipping) - Print is delivered, but has damage bad enough that the theater decides not to subject the public to it (complete color fading, extreme scratching, missing sections, etc) - Print delivered, but the theater doesnt have the means to project it due to unforeseen technical circumstances (unexpected magnetic soundtrack, usually) - Print delivered, but turned out to be the 80s version with the same title and not the 30s version, or whatever (favorite instance of this: the time we got a print of Pasolinis THE CANTERBURY TALES (1972) instead of Powell & Pressburgers A CANTERBURY TALE (1944)!) * * * And if any of these things happen, the theater has to decide what to do about it. The last thing a theater wants to do is cancel an advertised screening completely! I think this is changing, but traditionally most theaters would say nothing about a format switch (as long as they were able to show the title advertised in SOME format), assuming the audience didnt care. These days I think more theaters would mention the switch, just because film is so much less common now and there are more (but not a ton of) people who vocally care about seeing things that way. But they would still show the advertised title on DCP or even DVD in an effort to avoid disappointed patrons who dont get the whole film thing. I cant think of a screening series or theater aside from my own that prioritizes replacing film prints with film prints — but we do that because ours is a niche program, and highlighting the medium is our thing. Most cinemas think of cinema itself as their thing — the movies, the stories, etc. So it follows that theyd replace a print with a DCP or disk if they had to do that, as long as they still got to show what they said theyd show. * * * The thing that I dont get are the theaters that screen prints but dont bother to advertise that theyre doing so. Perhaps theyre afraid of being yelled at by the public if their print falls through?
Posted on: Sat, 09 Aug 2014 17:16:58 +0000
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