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Topic: HATEFUL EIGHT 70mm - all discussion
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David Stambaugh
Film God
Posts: 4021
From: Eugene, Oregon
Registered: Jan 2002
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posted 12-31-2015 07:21 PM
http://www.indiewire.com/article/what-its-like-to-be-a-hateful-eight-70mm-projectionist-with-quentin-tarantino-watch ing-20151231
What It's Like to Be a 'Hateful Eight' 70mm Projectionist (With Quentin Tarantino Watching)
Editor’s Note: Adam Witmer is a 22-year-old senior at UNC School of the Arts in Winston Salem, North Carolina, where he works in film preservation and as a projectionist at one of the largest film archives in the country. At this very moment he is the projectionist at the AMC Burbank 16 in Los Angeles for Quentin Tarantino’s 70mm Roadshow of "The Hateful Eight."
When I first heard about the plans for "The Hateful Eight" 70mm screenings, I quickly contacted Boston Light and Sound about being a projectionist for Quentin Tarantino’s Roadshow. I had a strong sense this would be something historic and I desperately wanted to be part of it. I emailed and called BL&S every other day trying to get my foot in the door, but was told over and over again to be patient and remain flexible while they worked out the scheduling. Finally, at 1am on Christmas Eve, I received an email saying they needed me to fly to Torrance, California to split some shows with the AMC Del Amo 18’s current projectionist. The next morning I was on the phone with a travel agent booking flights and hotels, and at 2pm, barely 13 hours after being assigned, I hopped on a plane. I arrived in Torrance in time to run to the theater and see the projection system during the final show of the evening.
Before I go on, I should mention that I have years of experience projecting 35mm and 70mm film on a two-projector, reel-to-reel system, but I’d never used a platter system like this before. The weeks leading up to the Roadshow, I’d done lots of research, looked at manuals and diagrams, and talked to some of the installers of the system. So, while I arrived with a solid grasp on how the system worked and what I needed to do to make it work, I’d never actually touched the system before I arrived in California.
The next morning in Torrance I had some time before our first show, so I practiced and became familiar with the platter system. Together, the other projectionist and I got the first show of the day up and running without any major issues. While we were threading up for the second show, however, the theater manager raced upstairs to inform us of a new development, "Quentin Tarantino is here and wants to introduce the film."
I’ll be honest, I was more than a little anxious. This was only my second time with my hands on these machines. Sure enough, as soon as the patrons took their seats, Tarantino walked to the front and introduced the movie. He took a seat in the fourth row, and we started the show without a hitch. I checked the projector to make sure it was running correctly: all good. I checked the platter, and that’s when I noticed it: The brain.
Now, the brain controls the pay-out platter’s speed based on the tension of the film. It sits in the center of the film on the pay-out platter, and the film goes through it before anything else. The film runs through a little arm, and depending on the tension, tells the platter to spin faster or slower in order to provide a consistent feed to the projector. Essentially, it’s like the gas pedal in a car.
Imagine that you are driving your car and have to maintain 55mph on a road with lots of hills. Going down the hills you don’t need to press the gas as much because you can coast, but on the way up a hill, you have to really floor it to maintain that speed. Now imagine that your gas pedal sticks. It’s unresponsive, and you can’t push it down past a certain point. So now as you climb those hills, you gradually slow down, and eventually get to the point where you can’t make it up.
It was as if the arm was bouncing off an invisible wall. The film would tighten, pull the arm, and then suddenly the arm could go no further. The platter wasn’t being told to spin fast enough, so the film started to wrap itself around the brain. It scared the hell out of me because I knew that if it kept tightening it would seize the brain, become tangled amongst the rollers, possibly tearing or creating a massive knot that would stop the show. In desperation, I grabbed the arm with my fingers and pushed it to the left, forcing it to speed up. The platter responded and the film unwound. Problem solved, yes? Until I let go.
I released the arm, and the same thing started happening again. I put my finger on it, and again it responded. Now, I don’t know about you, but Quentin Tarantino is the last person I want witnessing any hiccups in my screening, and it was then that I realized I was going to have to hold my arm at shoulder height, reach across the film, and manually drive this mechanical beast for the duration of at least the first half of the film.
For 90 minutes, the other projectionist and I took turns operating the throttle. I’d go for five to ten minutes, switch arms, go another few minutes, then switch out with my partner and take a break. We switched back and forth like this up until intermission, when we could finally stop the projector and poke around. We had a back-up brain and swapped it out. This brain had the same issue (we later isolated the problem to within the gears of the platter itself), but we had luck on our side.
By this point in the movie, half the film is off the platter, and it doesn’t need to spin as fast. The arm was able to handle the tension at this point, and we could allow it to regulate itself under close supervision. The intermission was perhaps five minutes longer than usual while we troubleshooted, but other than that, from the audience's’ perspective (and more importantly, Tarantino’s), the film went off without a hitch.
The job of a projectionist is to manage and fix problems as they arise without the audience being aware. We are the buffer between the chaos of projection and their experience. Every time a show needs to switch to DCP because of a problem, or a show shuts down for a technical issue, there have been 10 equally large issues that the projectionist covers. Many of these projectors are practically antiques, the platter systems were never intended to support the weight and size of 70mm, and entire new pieces of equipment had to be specially manufactured for this production.
Because of this, dozens of tiny mechanical failures are bound to happen, and part of our job (the above story is a prime example) is to make sure small issues don’t propagate into catastrophes. Just today, I’ve had a lamp shift slightly to the right creating a vignette effect at the left of frame, a fuse blow, and a lens slightly scoot forward in its housing, causing me to have to refocus and tighten it down.
Film is a temperamental medium. It doesn’t always want to do what you want it to. There’s a lot of sweat and dedication behind the glass in the back of that auditorium, and that is often overlooked. The projection is the pickiest one in the entire crowd, and we do everything we can to uphold the quality standards we so often fail to see in modern megaplexes.
Not to mention, projectionists were flown to their Roadshow location at most a day before their first show. And that’s not walking into a system that is ship-shape and ready to go. They had to unpack the film, load it onto the platter, and get it ready to project, which takes no less than five hours in and of itself. Then they have to learn the system, because no matter how experienced you are, every system is slightly different -- I was moved to AMC Burbank 16 after my first day in Torrance and it took time to feel out that projector and learn its nuances. All this while not being able to practice or test fully because I started running shows immediately upon arrival.
Now that the Roadshow has started, we work 15 or 16 hours per day, with no days off for the duration of the run. Sleep deprivation begins to become a legitimate issue as your reflexes begin to slow, particularly for the late evening shows. I leave the booth by 2:30am every night, and I’m back in at 10am the next morning. That said, I’m lucky in that I only have four shows per day. Some projectionists are doing five shows a day, making for 20 hour days without a break.
"The Hateful Eight" looks incredible projected in 70mm, and the difference between the print and the DCP are striking. The print’s colors are more saturated, the blacks are blacker, the whites are whiter, and the entire thing is much crisper and, for lack of a better term, deeper. The DCP looks flat and washed out. But along with that quality difference comes a need for finesse and care on the part of the projectionist. This job is by no means easy; it’s really fucking hard. We are only human, and these systems are only machines. It’s the price we pay for that beautiful, quality image. But it’s undoubtedly worth it, and I think audiences are starting to understand that.
Tonight the DCP of The Hateful Eight opened at my theater, with 60 tickets sold. Simultaneously, in my house: packed seats, 300 strong. And they got a great show.
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Brad Miller
Administrator
Posts: 17775
From: Plano, TX (36.2 miles NW of Rockwall)
Registered: May 99
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posted 12-31-2015 07:35 PM
I've seen this article passed on a number of times today now and I'm going to skip over all of the incorrect bits of the article and instead point out the specific quote that makes me roll my eyes every time I see this article.
quote: Adam Witmer
This job is by no means easy; it’s really fucking hard.
Really? It's "really fucking hard"???
Ok so I get it, the guy has never ran a platter before...but to say the job is "really fucking hard"? I wonder how he would do behind the concession stand at a busy theater trying to serve 2000 impatient people in an hour...or working at McDonald's...or perhaps digging ditches? What if this guy was promoted into a managerial position and had to deal with the general public directly when something goes wrong?
The job isn't hard at all. You just have to have:
*Proper training (or experience).
*Equipment that has been setup and calibrated properly.
*Reasonable intelligence and problem solving abilities.
It appears to me from the story as he wrote it like this guy had the third, but was lacking the first two. Had the light filter not been misaligned on the shaft of the axle, it would not have been rubbing up against the photocell in the arm of the platter. I know AW3s inside and out and that is EXACTLY what happened. It's a crazy-easy fix too with just an allen wrench, but what is perplexing to me is that for the platter to be calibrated properly during installation and setup, this would've HAD to have been noticed, yet it was not corrected.
Since that very basic part of the calibration was missed, I wonder if that platter will end up getting an award for distance in the print toss competition. If that happens, I wonder how he will describe it. What's worse than "really fucking hard"?
(Sorry Adam, you're probably a great guy, but the way that article quoted you is a bit on the whining side.)
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Mark Fontana
Film Handler
Posts: 13
From: Minneapolis, MN
Registered: Sep 1999
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posted 12-31-2015 08:19 PM
Saw the first show of the day at AMC Southdale in Minneapolis. They are no longer selling out, especially with another screen offering the DCP now, but attendance was still very strong.
There weren't any major technical problems, but the general setup could have been better. The temporary installation is in a larger auditorium with stadium seating and no curtains, running a JJ from a secondary porthole about five feet off center, with a fairly short throw onto a (toroidal?) curved screen, resulting in the expected distortions. The focus was about as good as could be hoped for, given the above plus the complexity of anamorphic thrown in.. definitely not close to the sharpness of flat 70mm on a flat screen. There was no top or bottom masking to hide visible debris on the aperture plate.
A vertical green scratch was present for over half the duration about 5% in from the right, and there were a handful of darker vertical scratches in the left and rightmost 5% or so. No major blemishes in the middle except in two scenes in the final chapter, where it appears there had been some excessive handling.
The left side was slightly brighter- thanks to Sam Chavez for explaining how this can be caused by the JJ. There was a tiny bit of travel ghost, noticeable mostly during the chapter titles.
I didn't see any cue dots. I guess they were omitted from the prints BL&S built up for platter use.
AMC apparently got permission from TWC to run 30 minutes of digital preshow (mostly obnoxious commercials) as long as the overture started at showtime.
Aside from the 70mm presentation, the score was one of the highlights for me.
No one seems to be able to use a hammer properly in this movie...
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Simon Wyss
Film Handler
Posts: 80
From: Basel, BS, Switzerland
Registered: Apr 2011
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posted 01-01-2016 06:47 AM
Witmer is a name known in this country. Adam might have ancestors here, so in some way I respond to a fellow countryman.
Welcome to film projection! A youngster has just entered our world, by chance on The Hateful Eight. How many times did I have to hold a button or a lever with an apparatus at a festival and at the cinemas I was regularly engaged? When a freshly appointed professor for film history at the University of Zürich asked me whether I’d do some projection for her, she lectured about the US documentary in the thirties, we both wouldn’t know that I would have to keep my finger on a little roller near the sound drum on a 16mm projector that allegedly was serviced by the uni’s tech department.
I don’t understand why the Weinstein people and Tarantino didn’t want to minimise the number of technical risks inherent with A) wide film, B) Ultra-Panavision 70, and C) an unusual length. I mean, facing the fact that you already have too few trained projectionists, why not the decision in favor of reel-to-reel operation? A reel spindle with its friction is so much simpler and devoid of electric contacts and the whole enchilada than platters.
The more I read about film-backs the more I miss the dependable basic 35mm technics. Apart from the landscape scenes, doesn’t a cabin setting rather call for the good old three-to-four aspect ratio? Four perforation holes pulldown of standard film, spherical lenses throughout, cheaper prints as well as meaningful activity of boothers, folks, there have been openings of quite different size. When King Kong got started in 1933 the technical tasks weren’t ridiculous at all. Highly flammable prints in the beam of high-intensity carbon arcs, thousands of patrons in the house . . .
Can it be that The Hateful Eight wouldn’t have had a chance if produced and presented as an Academy image mono-sound 35mm movie? Has today’s cinema only so little content that a hyped form remains as the single big attraction? Frankly, my dears, for Tarantino’s films I don’t give a damn.
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