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This topic comprises 3 pages: 1 2 3
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Author
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Topic: False newspaper advertisements
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Jesse Skeen
Phenomenal Film Handler
Posts: 1517
From: Sacramento, CA
Registered: Aug 2000
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posted 11-17-2000 08:35 PM
The 6-screen theater I used to work at started out with regular Dolby Stereo in 1989, which was pretty good at the time, then in 1996 they added DTS to 2 screens- and since then they NEVER bothered to acknowledge or advertise it anywhere! We showed the DTS trailer before the show but that was it (and of course people would sometimes forget to take it off when it moved!) They've since moved one of the DTS's to another screen after it broke and was fixed, replacing it with Dolby Digital in the screen it used to be in, but looking at their newspaper ad is a guessing game as they don't say WHICH movies are playing in digital! They have even had a movie showing on 2 screens, one with digital and one without, and not bothered to note this anywhere. When I did the phone recordings there I always made sure to say which movies were playing in digital, but no one else ever did, and I also made some DTS logos to go in the box office over the movies that were using it, but they'd invariably get moved or if I wasn't there a day the shows changed I'd get back to find the DTS logos over films that had been moved to a different screen. In other words, nobody else knew and nobody cared; in fact the previous manager there seemed to think I was being a pain in the ass for wanting to indicate which movies we were showing in DTS.
I'm now at a 16-screener which has Dolby Digital in 12 auditoriums and DTS in the other 4 (none of them have both.) As seems to be law at every theater, movies that are only in Dolby Digital get put in one of the DTS-only houses at least for a week- their newspaper ad lists everything as "Digital" so while that's technically true that all theaters are EQUIPPED with digital, if it's a one-format movie it might not be playing in digital. For example "Billy Eliott", which is only in SRD, got put in a DTS auditorium this week but the ads are saying it's in "digital." One of the people who makes films up there likes to put Dolby or DTS trailers on, but nobody but me seems to remember to change them if/when the film changes screens- I opened today so I took off all the Dolby Digital trailers that didn't apply anymore, but I was off last Friday and when I came in Saturday a few movies had the wrong trailers on them. I'm sure the average customer who barely understands the concept of sound at all is even more confused by these competing formats 
As for home theater, the only thing more pathetic than people who don't buy good equipment is people who buy it but set it up wrong. Most common is setting the brightness and color levels WAY too high, some people also have to turn on one of the "fake stereo" settings at least for mono films. I once let a friend stay and play with my stuff while I went to class, when I got back he had all the sound going to all the speakers and thought it sounded better!
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Stefan Scholz
Expert Film Handler
Posts: 223
From: Schoenberg, Germany
Registered: Sep 1999
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posted 11-18-2000 01:17 PM
Not only do theatres use false labels in advertisements, some distributors in our country also do it - on purpose.
In my home town Hamburg, the local Cinemaxx chain used digital advertisement, in the example a local German film beeing advertised in "DTS". This film was never released in this format, and the auditorium featured analog only - I went to see the mgmt., a nd they told me, the advertising guy just places the logos for graphic reasons... After telling him that this is fraud, they changed, and do no longer use any type of movie specific sound system, just the complex and the installed systems are mentioned. (E.G. THX/SDDS/DTS/SRD means at least one auditorium has one or more of the above mentioned sound system, there maybe analog theatres.)Another case are distributors, some use large SDDS / DTS logos with films dubbed into German and released in SRD or worst case - American Pie - QS matrixed Dolby Surround (Stereo without NR encoding !!!), or SDDS 8 track with U571 released in Dolby only. They want fraudentially and on purpose lure moviegoers into theatres with pretending to offer high-tech systems, but all they only offer is low tech video mixes for films originally intended to be dubbed tape / DVD releases only. And theese have to be plastic TV enclosure type speaker ciompatible.
How to screen a QS matrixed film? Only very few theatre sound decoders allow the use of a surround decoding sound format without use of NR. You might use CP 50 with Stereo w/Surround, no NR (doesn't this apply the Academy filters?) or link cards for the NR modules? Some digital domain processors allow to program this format, the ADSG, the USL DSP60 and I think the Sony 3000 (?) could handle it.
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Charles Everett
Phenomenal Film Handler
Posts: 1470
From: New Jersey
Registered: May 2001
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posted 03-10-2002 02:32 PM
Who tops the chart when it comes to false newspaper advertisements? Miramax!  Let's take their stack ads from the Newark Star-Ledger this weekend:40 Days and 40 Nights is in SRD/SR/SDDS/DTS. The stack ad only mentions SRD/SR -- with the logos all but unreadable. Amelie is in SRD/SR/DTS. The stack ad only mentions SRD/SR -- again with the logos all but unreadable. Amelie is now in its 17th week at the Montgomery Cinema in Rocky Hill NJ -- an arthouse that began as a twin in the 80's and became a 6-plex in larger quarters in 1995. Miramax still refers to the Montgomery Cinema as a twin. Italian for Beginners is in SRD/SR. The stack ad does not ID the sound formats. Also, Miramax refuses to include the Princeton Garden Theatre in the stack ad. That theater just opened Italian for Beginners -- and the Star-Ledger includes the showtimes in the movie clock. Iris is in SRD/SR. Again the stack ad does not ID the sound formats. In the Bedroom is in SRD/SR. Again the logos are barely readable. Another embarrassment: Miramax refuses to include the AMC Hamilton 24 in stack ads for Northern New Jersey. That theater is running 40 Days and 40 Nights, Iris (area exclusive), and In the Bedroom. Miramax does have room in the stack ads to list the Multiplex Cinemas at Town Center Plaza -- which was a Regal Cinema until 2/28.
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Andy Muirhead
Master Film Handler
Posts: 323
From: Galashiels, Scotland
Registered: Dec 2000
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posted 03-10-2002 06:42 PM
We stopped advertising a film in DTS for a couple of reasons.We only have DTS in cinema 1, the other 3 are either Dolby or Ultra, and we do move prints midweek, depending on popularity.
Also we sometimes find that DTS sometimes puts off some people (shall we say the more mature customer!) as they tend to associate DTS or digital with VERY LOUD! While on the subject of DTS, we haven't run a film in DTS since last November, due to the increasingly terrible support for DTS in the UK. We ran Lord of the Rings in analogue (even though it had a DTS track, and was playing in our DTS theatre) for almost two months. Apparently the distributor for Rings in the UK "does not support DTS". Monsters Inc had faulty DTS (reel 5), and the distributor wouldn't send us replacement disc's. So i ran that in analogue, rather than have 4 reels of great sound, with the last reel being of poorer quality.
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Randy Stankey
Film God
Posts: 6539
From: Erie, Pennsylvania
Registered: Jun 99
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posted 03-10-2002 09:29 PM
Here's something that happens in my town...We have a "Showcase" section of the newspaper for arts and entertainment that comes out every Thursday. The theatre advertises its UPCOMMING movies with Co-Op ads and then there are the CURRENT movies advertised in a 1 X 3 collumn ad. Of course, the current movies will end Thursday night and the upcomming movies won't start until Friday afternoon. (morning?)
We constantly got people comming in looking for the upcomming movies on Thursday, despite the fact that it says, "STARTS TOMORROW" in big letters. Not only that, we get people comming in on Friday looking for the movies that ended on Friday, even though the ad clearly says, "Today's Times Only". We just felt like we were just shoveling shit against the tide trying to explain it to people. Most people who get the "Showcase" section keep it for the whole week. For MOST things in the Arts and Entertainment section, the ads ARE valid for the whole week. To make matters worse, the newspaper wants to have all the ads for the "Showcase" section delivered to them no later than 4PM on Tuesday. If you miss the deadline, any changes might not make it into the final edtion. Of course, in the movie buseness we get last minute changes right until Thursday night or even Friday morning! It's a catch-22! If you advertise only one day a week, it's pretty much got to be in the Tursday edition of the Showcase. On the other hand, the Showcase the most difficult edition of the paper to get your ads into. On top of that, as other people have said, the newspaper is famous for scrambling the information... Digital being advertised when it's not... etc, etc. A lot of theatres in the company that I worked for have started ditching newspaper ads in the traditional form. They just put in a 1 X 1 collumn ad that says, "Cinemark Theatre -- Address -- Phone number -- Web Site address -- Call for showtimes"
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Manny Knowles
"What are these things and WHY are they BLUE???"
Posts: 4247
From: Bloomington, IN, USA
Registered: Feb 2002
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posted 03-10-2002 09:38 PM
Andy:MONSTERS, INC had a revised Reel-5 issued during its run. It came with a matching DTS Disc. This happened with A BUG'S LIFE (another Disney/Pixar) movie because they changed the "outtakes" at the end to encourage people to come out and see the movie again. The revised DTS disk was silver with blue printing. It is possible that you got a mismatched Reel-5 and DTS disk. This info doesn't help you now, but MONSTERS, INC is still playing, so maybe it will help somebody. ------------------
And, hey! Let's be careful out there. ~Manny.
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Tao Yue
Expert Film Handler
Posts: 209
From: Princeton, NJ
Registered: Apr 2001
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posted 03-11-2002 02:56 PM
Charles Everett said:
quote:
Who tops the chart when it comes to false newspaper advertisements? Miramax!
None of your examples were in any way false. They were incomplete. Listing two formats for a quad format film) is much better than falsely advertising quad format for a film with only two formats. And don't studios sometimes decide at the last minute to add an extra sound format? In that case the advertisement may have been created before the extra sound format was decided on. Now, if they knew about it at the time the ad was created, that's their loss, but it's still not false. Legibility of sound formats is a function of newspaper line screen and logo size. Miramax is running an ad for its movie, not for DTS, Dolby, or Sony. The logos are reduced proportionately with the rest of the ad for the size run in the paper, and line screen (usually 85-110 lpi) makes it illegible. Of course, what they're doing is not the best way to advertise their film. But they're not being fraudulent in any way. ------------------
Tao Yue
MIT '04: Course VI-2, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Projectionist, MIT Lecture Series Committee
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sound playback of films which I remember hearing in a cinema that was tuned correctly.....all they need to do is to drive an automobile into their showroom, equipped with window shaking, metal rattle trunk sub-woofers for the same effect....home theatre drive-in.
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