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Topic: Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood 70mm/35mm release?

Carl Martin
Phenomenal Film Handler

Posts: 1424
From: Oakland, CA, USA
Registered: Feb 2002

posted 08-02-2019 03:41 AM

i thought of the love witch when i saw samantha robinson's name in the credits of ouat(...)i(...)h this morning. while i like it, it's a flawed film, particularly as it's wrapping up and there's an awkward scene between her and the cop in a bar that seems like it was censoriously edited to the point that noone's motivations make any sense. that may be the point but it doesn't really come off right.

anna biller's previous film viva, however, is an out-and-out masterpiece and utterly sumptuous to look at.

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Martin Brooks
Jedi Master Film Handler

Posts: 900
From: Forest Hills, NY, USA
Registered: May 2002

posted 08-02-2019 02:22 PM

Saw this yesterday at an AMC Prime theatre in digital and I thought it looked (and sounded) absolutely fine. It didn't look like 3-strip Technicolor, but it wasn't meant to. I can't decide whether I want to sit through it again to see what the 70mm looks like, which wouldn't be an apples-to-apples comparison anyway because the theaters are so different.

Three nitpicks: The TV shows were not in a 4:3 AR - they were actually taller than they were wide...strange choice. Hullabaloo was widescreen and should have also been 4:3, unless the rationale was that we were watching them in the studio and not on a TV (and while there were a few episodes shot in L.A., most were shot in Brooklyn), and most of the KHJ audio was full fidelity (and some in stereo) instead of what it really would have sounded like in a car with an AM radio in 1969, although certainly playing the music in full fidelity gave it more emotional impact. One could also ask whether the characters in the newer cars wouldn't have actually been listening to album rock on FM in that era. FM rock radio had been around since the summer of '66.

Personally, I don't like Tarantino's apparent obsession with changing history, although it bothered me much more in "Inglorious Basterds" than it did here for reasons I can't explain.

I have to wonder how many younger people will see this and not realize that this is about Manson and the Tate-Labianca murders or now believe that Tate and the others weren't actually murdered.

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Leo Enticknap
Film God

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

posted 08-02-2019 02:59 PM

Will look out for the other Anna Biller pic - thanks.

Feel a bit guilty about slagging off The Love Witch, because I showed it in 35mm at the Aero a few years ago and met her - she couldn't have been more charming - the complete opposite of a stereotypical a-hole movie director. But I did remember thinking that the film itself was visually beautiful, but in every other respect, an overhyped chick flick.

quote: Martin Brooks
Personally, I don't like Tarantino's apparent obsession with changing history, although it bothered me much more in "Inglorious Basterds" than it did here for reasons I can't explain.

I haven't seen Once Upon a Time... yet, but my initial reaction is the opposite. I guess that there is so much fiction about the Nazis and WWII already out there - everything from sh!t lit novels to video games, and of course a vault full of movies - that one more example to add to is isn't going to do much harm (as long as it doesn't make a serious attempt at Holocaust denial). Added to which, very few participants in WWII are still alive to be upset by it, and Tarantino's parody of a Nazi entertainment film is hilariously funny and very accurate. I had to watch lots of them as a student, and the movie within a movie is spookily accurate in capturing the atmosphere of a Karl Ritter or Veit Harlan propaganda pic. Tarantino must have seen lots of them, too.

But the Manson gang murders are still pretty recent, most of the protagonists are still alive, and AFAIK, have not been used as the inspiration for any history-rewriting fiction so far, which makes me feel a bit uneasy about the idea. Still, I'll try to reserve judgment until I've had a chance actually to see the movie. One scene was filmed in a drive-in that I service (the Bianchi drive-in in Paramount, CA), so I'd be intrigued to see it, just for that reason. I was on vacation during the week that this all happened, but am told that he brought a 35mm projector in for the shoot.

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Jean-Pierre Gutzeit
Film Handler

Posts: 43
From: Berlin, Berlin, Germany
Registered: Nov 2012

posted 08-02-2019 05:45 PM

Missing DTS and SDDS track?

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Harold Hallikainen
Jedi Master Film Handler

Posts: 906
From: Denver, CO, USA
Registered: Aug 2009

posted 08-02-2019 06:23 PM

The DTS time code discussion got me thinking. SMPTE ST 430-12 is a Frequency Shift Keyed synchronization signal on Atmos soundtracks that is used by the CP850. It includes the Edit Unit Index (frame number) and UUID. I wonder about putting this in an optical track on film. A CP850 could pull the Atmos bitstream (SMPTE ST 2098-2) from a USB drive, decrypt it, and synchronize with the FSK signal from the film. The Barco APX uses the SMPTE ST 430-14 binary sync signal, so that would not work with film (unless they wanted to add an FSK decoder).

Anyway, DTS timecode on film is interesting...

Harold

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Sean Weitzel
Jedi Master Film Handler

Posts: 619
From: Vacaville, CA (1790 miles west of Rockwall)
Registered: Dec 1999

posted 08-02-2019 07:11 PM

SDDS hasn't been printed on 35mm releases for a long time. The last 35mm title I personally handled with SDDS on it was Gravity (2013). The last title sdds.com listed on their sdds database was 47 Ronin which was a february 2013 release. The website died shortly thereafter. Gravity was an October release. It's entirely possible that was one of the last releases with an SDDS track.

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Marcel Birgelen
Film God

Posts: 3357
From: Maastricht, Limburg, Netherlands
Registered: Feb 2012

posted 08-02-2019 07:32 PM

quote: Harold Hallikainen
The DTS time code discussion got me thinking. SMPTE ST 430-12 is a Frequency Shift Keyed synchronization signal on Atmos soundtracks that is used by the CP850. It includes the Edit Unit Index (frame number) and UUID. I wonder about putting this in an optical track on film. A CP850 could pull the Atmos bitstream (SMPTE ST 2098-2) from a USB drive, decrypt it, and synchronize with the FSK signal from the film. The Barco APX uses the SMPTE ST 430-14 binary sync signal, so that would not work with film (unless they wanted to add an FSK decoder).

A system largely built on plain consumer hardware could sync with film-based time-code about 25 years back, so there is no technical reason why a modern decoder could not do the same. One of the companies that Dolby acquired (ImmSound) actually used MDA files stored on an internal hard disk and their files had to be separately ingested.

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Stephan Shelley
Jedi Master Film Handler

Posts: 854
From: castro valley, CA, usa
Registered: Nov 2014

posted 08-02-2019 08:25 PM

The clips shown of the spaghetti westerns were 1:37 but the poster of same film says scope. Sounds like an opps to me. Not to mention all the real spaghetti westerns I showed were scope.

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Bobby Henderson
"Ask me about Trajan."

Posts: 10973
From: Lawton, OK, USA
Registered: Apr 2001

posted 08-02-2019 11:14 PM

I still want someone to make a modern CDS playback system. C'mon now! I know someone out there can do it! Can they?
[Big Grin]

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Martin Brooks
Jedi Master Film Handler

Posts: 900
From: Forest Hills, NY, USA
Registered: May 2002

posted 08-03-2019 12:34 PM

quote: Bobby Henderson
I still want someone to make a modern CDS playback system. C'mon now! I know someone out there can do it! Can they?

Do any CDS prints still exist? If they don't, what would be the point? By my count there were a max of only 10 CDS releases (some historians dispute whether all of these were released in CDS). Only two of them weren't also released in 70mm 6-track Dolby mag. So if those mag masters still exist, they could be reprinted in either film or digital. The exceptions are "Hudson Hawk" and "Universal Soldier", both of which were only released in 35mm and probably in mono, the latter being the last CDS release.

I saw some of those CDS releases, including the first one, "Dick Tracy". I remember the sound being quite brittle and harsh, but it didn't play in the best theater.

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Carl Martin
Phenomenal Film Handler

Posts: 1424
From: Oakland, CA, USA
Registered: Feb 2002

posted 08-03-2019 01:40 PM

quote: Harold Hallikainen
A CP850 could pull the Atmos bitstream (SMPTE ST 2098-2) from a USB drive, decrypt it, and synchronize with the FSK signal from the film.

arclight hollywood advertises some shows as being both 35mm and atmos so either they're doing something like this or they're full of shit.

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Marcel Birgelen
Film God

Posts: 3357
From: Maastricht, Limburg, Netherlands
Registered: Feb 2012

posted 08-03-2019 01:55 PM

Though luck, the movie doesn't even have an Atmos mix...

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Adam Martin
I'm not even gonna point out the irony.

Posts: 3686
From: Dallas, TX
Registered: Nov 2000

posted 08-03-2019 10:24 PM

OnceUponATimeH_FTR_S_EN-XX-CCAP_OV_71-HI-VI-Atmos_4K_SPE_20190718_DTB_SMPTE_VF

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Marcel Birgelen
Film God

Posts: 3357
From: Maastricht, Limburg, Netherlands
Registered: Feb 2012

posted 08-04-2019 12:21 AM

So, what was the reason for 35mm again?

And does it really have Atmos? And if it does, does it have more than just the 5.1 stems in them?

Then again, syncing Atmos and 35mm is pretty much impossible, without cooperation from Dolby. You'd require a compatible server that can operate headless, because the CP850 won't read a DCP from some USB stick. Then you still would need to sync the server to the 35mm projector. While there is a way to sync some of those servers via dual-projector support options, those interfaces aren't really open and documented.

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Bobby Henderson
"Ask me about Trajan."

Posts: 10973
From: Lawton, OK, USA
Registered: Apr 2001

posted 08-04-2019 04:32 PM

quote: Martin Brooks
Do any CDS prints still exist? If they don't, what would be the point?

Aside from the joke, I would be a little surprised if all existing 70mm and 35mm CDS prints had been junked or destroyed. Nevertheless someone would need a working CDS system in order to play any of those prints. It would be interesting to see what would happen if someone made a new film reader using current era components rather than the circa 1990 stuff that went into the CDS readers. Would playback be more reliable? I guess there's not much point in finding out since merely playing a CDS print would put it in jeopardy.

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