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One night I was assigned to build two prints of the "Animal" for the next day's release. When first inspecting the reels of all the films before buildup I noticed one can, even when closed, let off a particular nasty smell. Opening it up revealed a tremendous amount of mold covering the entire inside of the can. I took the reels themselves out and noticed the film had been severly water-damaged. The mold smell itself proved so bad that for the time being we had to store the can in a faraway closet so no one would get sick. We called technicolor up and they apologized, blah blah blah, leaving us with half a print built and the morning projectionist having to come in early and finish up. Then the next day I came in to find out that the replacement reels were delivered to the Loews Cineplex down the street, so when we finally got it, we had to put it together in the last minute, now come on! Also to add the bad can stayed with us for about a week stinking up our closet before anyone decided to pick it up. Needless to say Technicolor wasn't on my good list from then on.

Last year about this time we got socked with a major blizzard and every area theatre closed. UPS and airborne had loads of prints that couldn't be delivered so yup, you guessed it, they were told to ship them all to me... since our office staff had been stranded and we were "open".

I called in and inquired as to the reasoning why they needed to send us another print when we already had one sitting right here (in good condition too). The operator found out that the print that was shipped (and addressed) to us needed to play at another theater. So why can't they just ship the other print to this other theater to save on everyone's hassles? Our screening dates were exactly the same. Funny enough, even the TES operator thought it was senseless and we were told to hold the existing print. Shortly thereafter we were called back and told to release the print, and then that we could keep it again. Then another call came in from TES furious that we "refused to release the print". (The rep was very rude from what I understand.) Bullshit! We never said we would not release the print, we only asked if we could just keep this one. This crap went on for a couple of hours with them not being able to make up their mind. Finally we just gave it to the Airborne guy who showed up for the initial pickup just to get it the hell out of the theater so we wouldn't have to listen to the bs anymore.

Turns out the print we got right before the screening came from some theater in Virginia. It was broken down with masking tape, leaders thrown on reels every which way, stretched sprockets in sections of the film and scratched! Thanks again Technicolor. You're AWESOME!

While I'm thinking about it, I heard that Universal is going to pull out of TES and go over to the infinitely superior ETS depots. Anyone know more specifics?

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