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Topic: "The Master" in 70mm in Denmark
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Leo Enticknap
Film God
Posts: 7474
From: Loma Linda, CA
Registered: Jul 2000
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posted 05-07-2013 05:33 PM
quote: Steve Guttag
I would argue that the handcranking is inherently more uneven, with respect to torque/wind tension than a motorized version...especially if you had a fancy rewinder with electronic back-tension that was constantly maintained.
Agreed, and I would have agreed at the time. But the individual in question was in his sixties, had been the chief at that theatre forever and was not someone to be argued with - especially by an 18 year-old new hire, which I was at the time. He was also in the advanced stages of drinking himself to death, which was why I ended running that high profile show (this was an independent in the London suburbs which got the Gandhi preview because one of the actors who played a minor part was a relative of the theatre's owner) single-handed. He simply didn't show up for work on the day of the screening, having been taken into hospital the previous evening.
It wasn't my job to ask why he refused to have motorised rewind heads in his booth, and so I didn't. If I had to guess, the only rational explanation I can think of is that perhaps the early ones weren't sophisticated and able to apply cleverly self-adjusting back tension, and tended to be unpredictable. But by the time I knew this guy, his days of thinking rationally were long behind him.
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Stephen Furley
Film God
Posts: 3059
From: Coulsdon, Croydon, England
Registered: May 2002
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posted 05-11-2013 05:10 PM
quote:
'Hamlet' on changeovers must have been fun - IIRC the shortest reel was under 7 minutes!
'The Jazz Singer', the original one, would have been interesting to project. Since there was no way to edit the sound, other than by re-recording onto a new disk, a change in sound, e.g. from just music to a section with lip-sync dialogue, generally meant the start of the next reel, and the next disk. I think some were around 7-8 minutes. A reel couldn't be longer than 1000 feet or so because that was the maximum playing time of the 16 inch disks.
The film would have been nitrate, so the previous reel would have had to be taken out to the rewind room and the next one brought in. Between reels the machine would have to be cleaned, the carbons replaced or the trim adjusted, the film laced up, the disk replaced, or turned over, the needle changed, and then placed on the start mark, film and disk checked, the arc struck and allowed to stabilise before the next changeover. I wonder how many projectionists it took to run a Vitaphone show?
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. I guess you would not just give yourself a workout with that, but your DTS system too...
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