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Topic: White Christmas - is this a "t.v. print"?

Mathew Molloy
Master Film Handler

Posts: 357
From: The Santa Cruz Mountains
Registered: Nov 2000

posted 12-28-2005 02:41 PM

quote: Scott Jentsch
Is there an online source of which movies are available for theatrical showings? I'd be curious to see which are available and how much it would cost to run them.

Paramount and Sony both have exhibiter websites listing their available classics titles. Others, such as Warners and Universal, need to be contacted directly. The standard rental for classics is in the $250-$350 range vs/35%. We've had a pretty good month with the Christmas classics. A Christmas Story, Nightmare Before Christmas, White Christmas and Wonderful Life over Thanksgiving holiday. For White Christmas, we should be hitting the 400+ attendance figure Bill had but over the course of an 8 day run.

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Robert Harrison
Expert Film Handler

Posts: 239
From: Harwood Heights, Illinois, USA
Registered: Jun 2005

posted 12-28-2005 11:24 PM

I ran a print of "White Christmas" last year for two days. I figured it would run fine at 1.85 only to find that heads and feet were missing from dance numbers. The next night, I ran it 1.37 which was better except for one sequence on a train that was hard matted at 1.85 . Did you notice this sequence by any chance?

Damned if I do, damned if I don't! I looked up VistaVision in the book "Wide Screen Movies," and it stated that in those early days of widescreen films, some 1.37 prints were made for theatres which hadn't converted (for CinemaScope or any other widescreen process).

For further reading on the soundtrack, see The Afterlife and a thread titled "Stereophonic re-mixes of mono soundtracks."

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Brad Miller
Administrator

Posts: 17775
From: Plano, TX (36.2 miles NW of Rockwall)
Registered: May 99

posted 12-28-2005 11:30 PM

You might want to check out Wide Screen Movies Corrections v2 Apparently it's not the most accurate book ever written. [Big Grin]

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Christian Appelt
Jedi Master Film Handler

Posts: 505
From: Frankfurt, Germany
Registered: Dec 2001

posted 12-29-2005 11:13 AM

Technicolor seems to be a special problem.
I just had a 35mm print of GENTLEMEN PREFER BLONDES for a christmas show, and it looked very soft, had low contrast and extreme color changes, some scenes with a yellow or greenish look, and more grain than I am used to from vintage Tech-IB prints.
The dupe neg was created from color separations, many shots were misaligned with almost anaglyphic green and red contour lines.

The studios do strike new prints sometimes, but mostly from inferior dupe negatives made in the 1970s or 1980s, which is a pity because modern audiences believe "that's the way these films looked back then".

The worst examples of new prints from large format that come to my mind are NORTH BY NORTHWEST (Vistavision) and BEN HUR (Ultra Panavision, currently rereleases over her in really awful 35mm prints from some garbage negative).

If the music business was run like the film industry, we would hear Elvis and Sinatra on wax cylinders today... [Frown]

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Mathew Molloy
Master Film Handler

Posts: 357
From: The Santa Cruz Mountains
Registered: Nov 2000

posted 12-29-2005 03:42 PM

quote: Christian Appelt
The worst examples of new prints from large format that come to my mind are NORTH BY NORTHWEST (Vistavision)

We recently ran a new print of North By Northwest and it was real nice. There was the odd, imperfect moment here and there but on the whole, excellent.

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Christian Appelt
Jedi Master Film Handler

Posts: 505
From: Frankfurt, Germany
Registered: Dec 2001

posted 12-29-2005 04:14 PM

A small distributor rereleased NORTH BY NORTHWEST some years ago in germany, and they got prints from a grainy, out of focus dupe negative with many neg scratches, splices and spots. Looked like a improperly processed 16mm print and had terrible colors, like 1970s Super-8 releases. [puke]

But you can get lucky, too: Just checked a SOME LIKE IT HOT print today for our Dec. 31 show, and it was the best print I ever saw of that title, made in 1999 and sparkling black&white. [thumbsup]

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David Stambaugh
Film God

Posts: 4021
From: Eugene, Oregon
Registered: Jan 2002

posted 12-29-2005 04:15 PM

quote: Brad Miller
You might want to check out Wide Screen Movies Corrections v2 Apparently it's not the most accurate book ever written.

60 pages of corrections! lol.

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Robert Harrison
Expert Film Handler

Posts: 239
From: Harwood Heights, Illinois, USA
Registered: Jun 2005

posted 12-29-2005 09:50 PM

Yes, well, on top of that, I misquoted the book. What it actually said was, "The first engagements were presented in anamorphic format, with regular 35mm prints offered for second-run playdates in theatres without (or that didn't want) 'scope."

No actual aspect ratio was mentioned. I took "regular 35mm prints" to mean 1.37. Or, I picked up this tidbit from the Internet from a website that I can't remember. (It wasn't the American Widescreen Museum.) OR, I'm being my usual "Mr. Short-Term Memory."

I still want to know why that one sequence was hard-matted at 1.85 if it was a TV print.

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Mathew Molloy
Master Film Handler

Posts: 357
From: The Santa Cruz Mountains
Registered: Nov 2000

posted 12-29-2005 11:48 PM

Hey Robert, I just checked the 'train scene' you mentioned and it's not hard-matted on this print...although I thought the grain was more noticeable.

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Leo Enticknap
Film God

Posts: 7474
From: Loma Linda, CA
Registered: Jul 2000

posted 12-30-2005 05:50 AM

quote: Brad Miller
Apparently it's [Carr & Hayes, Wide Screen Movies] not the most accurate book ever written.

...and it was published by McFarland. What a surprise!

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Robert Harrison
Expert Film Handler

Posts: 239
From: Harwood Heights, Illinois, USA
Registered: Jun 2005

posted 12-30-2005 09:40 PM

quote: Mathew Molloy
Hey Robert, I just checked the 'train scene' you mentioned and it's not hard-matted on this print...although I thought the grain was more noticeable.

Well, doggone it. Now I'm 0 for 2! Everybody's gonna think I'm on that I-30 stuff!

Did you run it in stereo? Was there crosstalk in the surrounds?

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Mathew Molloy
Master Film Handler

Posts: 357
From: The Santa Cruz Mountains
Registered: Nov 2000

posted 12-31-2005 12:31 PM

We did run this in Dolby A with surrounds and yeah, there was some crosstalk - not so much during the dialogue though. I did a test run with the first reel without the surrounds on and it was lacking . Running it in Mono was just mushy. Heck, this was nothing compared to that nightmare re-release of Gone With The Wind!

Besides, you know how it is when running a movie without surrounds these days- "know-it-alls" come out to tell you the speakers aren't working. (And 90% of what we run is Mono!) [Roll Eyes]

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Scott Jentsch
Phenomenal Film Handler

Posts: 1061
From: New Berlin, WI, USA
Registered: Apr 2003

posted 12-31-2005 01:23 PM

quote: Mathew Molloy
Paramount and Sony both have exhibiter websites listing their available classics titles. Others, such as Warners and Universal, need to be contacted directly. The standard rental for classics is in the $250-$350 range vs/35%. We've had a pretty good month with the Christmas classics. A Christmas Story, Nightmare Before Christmas, White Christmas and Wonderful Life over Thanksgiving holiday. For White Christmas, we should be hitting the 400+ attendance figure Bill had but over the course of an 8 day run.

I'm not an exhibitor, so I don't have access to those sites, but thanks for the information.

Are the rental figures per show or for a certain time-span, like a week?

I'm thinking that it would be cool to run a series of movies, one per week from Thanksgiving to New Years. These would be likely candidates:

Going My Way (1944)
The Bells of St. Marys (1945)
White Christmas (1954)
It's a Wonderful Life (1946)
Holiday Inn (1942)
Scrooged (1988)
The Family Man (2000)
While You Were Sleeping (1995)
The Santa Clause (1994)

Are the TV shows like A Charlie Brown Christmas, and Frosty the Snowman able to be shown theatrically? I think that a showing of the shorts could be very appealing to parents looking to take their kids out to a theater and not be concerned about how "PG" a G-rated movie might be.

Besides being a lot of fun, I would think that theaters could make up the rental costs in concession sales alone!

I have a 5 year old, and maybe I'm just being protective, but there was nothing in theaters this entire Christmas season that I could have taken her to. That's a shame, and a lost opportunity for theaters.

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Robert Harrison
Expert Film Handler

Posts: 239
From: Harwood Heights, Illinois, USA
Registered: Jun 2005

posted 12-31-2005 04:26 PM

quote: Mathew Molloy
Besides, you know how it is when running a movie without surrounds these days- "know-it-alls" come out to tell you the speakers aren't working.

Yeah, I know what you're talking about, as I'm sure most people on this forum do. Especially the customers that believe that dialogue should come out of the surrounds!

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Sean R. Custer
Film Handler

Posts: 35
From: San Francisco, CA, USA
Registered: Dec 2005

posted 12-31-2005 07:53 PM

Matthew:

Aren't you proud of your new relationship with Paramount? They have a differnent definition of "Archival". I think Paramount and Fox were the among the first to prepare prints for T.V., and as soon as the new dupe was struck, they usually destroyed or abandoned the nitrate-stock originals, which I imagine was the case with that "Wonderful Life..." print I was griping about. Less likely they did this with Vista Vision prints, but I can only guess at what they did do... There's a good chance that your print of "White Christmas" is a dupe of a dupe of a shoddy trasfer to begin with. Did you happen to notice any pan & scan employment on your print? Was it all on polyester or was some of it triacetate? In any case, sorry to hear it gave you trouble.
Great scans, incedentally.
-SRC

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