Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: Hey you, you suck! (AKA: Outing bad film handlers)

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Topic: Hey you, you suck! (AKA: Outing bad film handlers)

Stephen Furley
Film God

Posts: 3059
From: Coulsdon, Croydon, England
Registered: May 2002

posted 02-12-2006 08:25 AM

Sadly, another contribution to make to this thread.

On Tuesday we are running 'To Have and Have Not', just two shows, on that one day. The print, DL1 from the BFI had arrived when I got there on Friday afternoon. When I open the box everything looks ok, blue 'polyester' labels on the cans, so it should be a fairly new print. Open the cans, the reasonable quality purple ones which the BFI tends to use, print looks clean, and not full of splices. I don't expect any problems.

We don't normally pre-screen films; lots of films, single screen, there just isn't time to do it, but I inspect everything on the bench before it goes on screen. With an old film like this I do try to run one reel, mainly to check the sound levels. The only time when there was a long enough gap in the programme to do this was after the morning children's film. I hadn't had time to inspect the first reel properly beyond the first minute or so, but it looked ok, so I put it up on screen. Picture looked fine, sound level was unusually high, went down to the auditorium to listen to it. Sound level not right, run up to the box to adjust it, when I get back down it sounds fine. A remote fader in the auditorium would be useful at times like this. Then I notice something strange; there's a sort of small dark patch dancing about near the right-hand edge of the frame. It's in a dark area of the picture, so it's not easy to see what it is, but it certainly wasn't there at the beginning of the reel. I take a closer look; it's a burn. How the hell do you manage to burn the edge of the frame like this? Go back up to the box, I can see the damage above the gate, and even feel it if I touch the emulsion side. The damage gets worse as the reel goes on, but reel two is ok. Maybe it was run on 2000 foot reels; no, reel three is fine. Only reel one is affected, and what's even odder is that the damage runs past the end of the reel, through the tail leader. It looks like somebody has run a single reel of the film, with a lamp almost impossibly out of alignment, and screened the tail leader as well, just for good measure.

I've scanned one of the several ID frames from the tail leader. More on that in a moment. Here's what it looks like:

The emulsion hadn't actually burned through to clear film on most of the frames, but the position was the same throughout the damage, probably about 75% of the reel. I'm not sure I could burn a print in that position even if I tried to.

Thanks are also due to several long-run projectionists for chopping off the leaders at various random points, anything up to about six indididual ID frames, with a splice between each in some cases. Assuming that the original printed cues were in the correct position, one reel has no less than 14 frames completely missing. We will be running the film on 6k spools, so I only bothered to check the position of the cues on reel three.

Then there are the changeover projectionists who so kindly provided me with several different sets of cues. The negative had been punched to provide a black dot, which was perfectly visible, but somebody had decided to scribe, with a proper marker, on top of these,but with a two-frame offset from the original position, so the cue spans six frames. I quite like the scribed cues, they are small, can be seeen against a light or dark background, and avoid having to mark the negative, but there is no need for them when the print already has perfectly adequate printed cues. Just for good measure there were also white wax pencil and red ink cues in various random positions, but at least I was able to remove these. Finally, there is the visually-impaired 6k spool projectionist who felt the need to add sticky label cues to the end of reel three. These were rather odd cues, they were on only two frames, but not consecutive ones, and the two sets of cues were only about three seconds apart. I'm not joking, these things were about 9mm in diameter. I managed to remove them, but it took several minutes each by the time I got rid of the sticky muck that they left behind.

The duty manager, and two technicians are in the hall next to the cinema, so I call them in to look at it. We agree, even before seeing the end of the reel where it gets worse, that we need to try to get a replacement, but I don't think the chances are good.

Tried to 'phone the BFI to report the damage, but couldn't get through to anybody, so I'll e-mail the chief this evening, and he'll have to deal with it tomorrow.

This is a polyester print; it can't be more than a few years old.