Today, the "average" theatre has a fairly large screen, digital sound (or at least Dolby Stereo), higher-quality lenses, prints in (generally) good condition from not having to be rewound repeatedly on those horrible Goldberg enclosed rewinds, and more consistant lab work. And, with platters and automation, there is relatively little to go wrong once a show is threaded properly and the timer is set.

What we are missing today, sadly, is the experience that could have been had in the best theatres in the '50s and '60s. We're missing the BIG theatres (1500 seats! 60-foot screens!), 70mm prints, IB Tech prints, 6-track and 4-track mag stereo that would have been many times better than the average home audio system of the time, and, of course, there would have been a much higher degree of showmanship than is common today: curtains instead of slides, tastefully decorated theatre buildings, no TV commercials before the film, etc., etc.

What upsets me about the current state of the exhibition industry is that it is being run with the goal of short-term profits at the expense of long-term viability. I genuinely believe that a theatre which spends a bit more than usual on presentation and forgoes the revenue generated by blatant commercial advertising will be more likely to be successful over the long term than the "anything for a buck" chain theatres that are all too common today.

During that time the Locals still used a Seniority number system for the jobs. So depending on how long you have been with the Local, you got a Seniority number. The lower the number the better chance to get
a good job at bidding time. The better jobs around that time where
Hollywood Blvd., Westwood, and that was the last great time for Beverly Hills. Around that time of the early 70's, United Artists
locked out the projectionists. That was the last time the Egyptian Theatre ran well till it reopened resently. So some of the operators
at those theatres in the LA Times letter. May have been there a long
time. So if a theatre on Hollywood Blvd. came on the bid sheet.
And it got 5 bids. And one of the bids came from a projectionist that
only worked drive-ins for the last 20 years and had a seniority number of 2. And the rest of the bids were from operators with seniority numbers of say 7, 8, 10 etc, etc. And they worked nice
walk-ins. The job would go to the projectionist with the number 2.
So sometimes seniority clause in the contracts, backfired. The best
theatres got the oldest operators with all the new equipment to work
with. During that time at Local 150, alot of the old timers. Worked
the big single screen houses, drive-ins. They were afraid of the
automation equipment, they just wanted to keep making change-overs.

And yes, the center dialog is indeed intended for proper home reproduction. Sheesh... spending money on movie technology then using it to format the film for home release. Ain't that sad?

I said "technical quality and presentation" in my post, not the actual story content. I don't know where you pulled that from, but that was not part of my comment.

Panned dialogue is indeed a wonderful thing, but only on scope movies. Flat movies should NEVER use panned dialogue, but then again no one should be shooting flat movies anyway. In the end, the big moneymaker is home video, so unless the filmmakers are willing to make 2 mixes, you can pretty much kiss that one goodbye.

I will agree that the filmmakers did more with what they had back then and that is certainly to be commended. I have had enough bad cgi to last me the rest of my life. However if you are going to use that argument, then how about these labs who have to crank out 8000 prints of Harry Potter and keep the quality up compared to only a couple hundred prints back then?

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