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This topic comprises 5 pages: 1 2 3 4 5
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Author
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Topic: What is the worst film mess you've had to deal with? How did you fix it?
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Benjamin John Doman
Film Handler
Posts: 35
From: Slough, Berkshire, England
Registered: Jun 2007
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posted 06-03-2008 04:20 PM
My most bizarre incident as an engineer, call from ex-circuit house, now Indian cinema that went like this (30 year old Phillips / Kinoton ST200 platter):
Hello Ben, this is *****
Hello *****, how are you?
My platter, it is broken.
What’s wrong with it?
It is broken.
Is it running to fast, to slow or not at all?
It is broken.
What exactly is wrong with it?
It is in two pieces.
(much expression of disbelief)
Upon arriving at the site I found the column at a 45 deg angle to the A frame. Apparently they had just slid the film onto the plate, a 3 ½ hour Tamil film. Two of the A frame bolts had snapped, two bent. Being in denial I neglected to take a picture! I have heard of platters being pulled over, but this was a first for me.
![[Eek!]](eek.gif)
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Leo Enticknap
Film God
Posts: 7474
From: Loma Linda, CA
Registered: Jul 2000
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posted 06-04-2008 03:56 AM
I once had a 13-reel long Bollywood filmzilla arrive wrapped in newspaper and in Safeways carrier bags (this was in the early '90s, long before Bollywood went mainstream in Britain), delivered personally by the lady who ran the Indian film society (who hired our place for late screenings after the last show on a Friday evening), a member of whose extended family brought it with her on the plane from Bombay. The problem is that all the heads and tails were marked up in Urdu only, and by the time I realised this the lady had long since disappeared. When we managed to get her back again, it transpired that she, being the daughter of the film society's organiser and a second generation immigrant herself, couldn't read Urdu either! So, no problem, you thinkL I can piece the film together by matching up ID frames at the start and end of each reel, can't I? Oh no I can't - every friggin' reel started and ended with a fade to or from black (this was a common practice in the days before platters, in order to minimise the impact of a missed changeover - presumably the Indians still did it because most of their cinemas still used changeovers)! So in the end I just had to make the film up based on the order I found the reels in the bags. There were no complaints, so presumably either the audience didn't care, the plot made no sense anyway or they were being too polite.
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Jaime Tuzzio
Film Handler
Posts: 50
From: Salem, OR, USA
Registered: Apr 2008
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posted 06-04-2008 05:03 AM
quote: Robert LaValley
Most memorable mess was my first booth it was one of those crazy regal openings where I had 14 prints to build and 12 to break down all in a 48 hour time span.
I helped with dollar days prints pre-opening once. Eleven prints arrived on a day there were no projectionists and no booth training of new managers, so I built all eleven (used - and Without Limits was REALLY used) prints myself. Thirteen hours later, after removing tons of old splicing tape, redoing every splice I found, removing brittle old lab splices, removing mutilated and wrong-type cues, removing damaged film, removing gobs of masking tape labels slapped onto the feature (!!), labeling prints and moving them to their opening houses, I was done.
Needless to say, I could not lift my head the next day.
Fortunately, I did not have to be involved in breaking any of them three days later, but I'd had to mostly build & break 14 prints at my own theatre's opening five months earlier.
OT: I've only dropped one print and it was straight into my lap as I huddled under it as it started to separate. Thankfully I was able to lift sections back onto the platter perfectly to put it back together. I am ridiculously grateful it was a 75 minute print. Ran it with Film Guard next show and it was perfectly fine, albeit a tad staticy coming off the platter.
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Andy Frodsham
Expert Film Handler
Posts: 238
From: Stoke on Trent, Staffs, UK
Registered: Nov 2006
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posted 06-06-2008 03:05 PM
Our theatre (although open to the public) is based on a university campus. Although most of the films we run are on 35mm, in the old days we used to run 16mm prints for specialised groups or societies. Anyway, one weekend, about 20 years ago, we were booked to screen a couple of 16mm feature films for a local ethnic community. Each feature comprised two 16mm reels and each of these reels had itself been made-up of two original parts. So, I'm thinking this will a straigtforward job of joining the two reels together and screening each feature. I knew that the head of reel 1 and the tail of reel 2 were correct beacuse of the opening and closing credits. On closer inspection however, I had a suspicion that the second part joined onto the tail of part 1 wasn't actually part 2 but part 3. Conversley, what should have been part 3 was actually part 2! I asked the guy who brought us the print to translate the language written on the leaders and tails and he agreed that things didn't look right. On the basis of this, I took the plunge and re-joined the reels in the assumed correct order. I also had to do the same thing on the second feature.
After the screening, the guy who had brought us the prints told me that he had seen the films about ten times up to that point (at various venues throughout the UK) but that this was the first time they had made any sense!!
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