Intermissions in Italy is very usual, all prints come with a "intermission" leader printed directly (not spliced) at the end of reel 3 or 4 (depending of the lenght of the movie).
The intermission is done or not depending of the owner, but I saw that usually customers like it. At my theater we do not have intermission because... we don't have an internal bar!!

In Italy two automatic projectors are very usual (while one is projecting the other is rewinding) so we don't need the intermission if we don't want to do it.
I have set automatic changeover without projecting the "intermission" leader.

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If you crop to 1.85, there are shots where it is obvious that significat portions of the image is being cut. For example -- there is a long shot where a character stands close to the top of the picture. If you rack the frame correctly so that the subtitles are EXACTLY at the bottom of the picture, the guy's head is cut off by the top mask. If you get his head the frame, the subtitles fall below the bottom edge. The other downside of printing subtitles at 1.85 when a film is composed at 1.66 is that the subtitles are unnecessarily high into the picture, more of a distraction than they have to be or would be if they were printed at the bottom of the 1.66 frame.

Then again, if I were a distributor who knew that 99% of my potential bookings would only be able to project at 1.85 and would have trouble if subtitles were down at the 1.66 bottom edge, then I guess I would be pragmatic and etch them at 1.85 too. But since each individual print is etched separately, I would at least make a few 1.66 prints so that somewhere, someone, even it is just a few people in an art house someplace, would be able to appreciate the film as the director intended.

Edit:According to Amazon its out.

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Then again, if I were a distributor who knew that 99% of my potential bookings would only be able to project at 1.85 and would have trouble if subtitles were down at the 1.66 bottom edge, then I guess I would be pragmatic and etch them at 1.85 too. But since each individual print is etched separately, I would at least make a few 1.66 prints so that somewhere, someone, even it is just a few people in an art house someplace, would be able to appreciate the film as the director intended.

Actually, I take that back, maybe 99% of the commectial multiplexs don't have the lenses to play 1.66 flat, but since the Mirimax market is substantially the art house circuits, most of us DO have correct lensing for almost all formats. 1.66 is no big deal. If they re-release in June, maybe it's not to late to get them to etch a few 1.66 prints.

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Maybee 1.66:1 image within a 1.85:1 image area (black matts on the side of the image) would be a good idea ???

(double post sorry)

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And of course it is hard to miss the irony here -- on the one hand the industry is perfectly happy compromising quality by letterboxing (or in Disney's case, releasing their classic animated features with vertically scanned & panned prints, which is even worse, IMHO), yet on the other hand, it thinks this same industry will abandond film and make massive investments in DLP.

Oh, wait; sorry I mispoke -- that really isn't irony, just consistancy, because BOTH things compromise film quality.

Quick call the moderator!

I told him about our discussiion here and he said he was sure that Miramax ordered the subtitles to be placed at the 1.66 level. I asked if he were sure, because that sounded very suspect to me, given the practical implications of doing that, so he asked his boss who repeated that they were etching subtitles for the 1.66 aperture, not 1.85. Sounds wrong, but I can only repeat what they told me. I guess the houses that run everything at 1.85 are going to have to do a lot of unpleasant racking and re-racking. Too bad, because we know they won't pay any attention to it and it will be the audience that sufferes -- either they will see visual information chopped at the top of the screen or they will have to understand Italian because the subtitles will be just that....below the mask.

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Steve Guttag writes:

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I greek friend of mine said it was pretty typical for the small town theatres to only have one projector. An intermission was expected on all films. I think it was on hour reels though rather than 20 minutes.

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Yikes! 6,000 feet of nitrate stock on a single spool? No wonder that fleapit burnt down! When I showed nitrate we had a very strict rule - 1,000 feet per reel maximum. Any prints which came in 2,000 lengths were split up, with new acetate spacing and head leaders being added as appropriate.

The heat and expanding gases caused by 6,000 feet going up in an enclosed magazine would probably cause an explosion.