This is topic 16mm prints on 35mm reels? in forum Film Handlers' Forum at Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE.
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Posted by Brad Miller (Member # 2) on 07-10-1999, 02:43 PM:
Here's an interesting one.A friend of mine received a print for a kids matinee yesterday. Upon pulling the reels out of the cans he found the film was fairly nicely wound onto the shipping reels...BUT had been sliced down the middle, almost as if there was two rolls of 16mm film on each reel!
He was right. I didn't believe it until I saw it. I'm thinking it happened during breakdown, perhaps running under a keeper bracket, as I can't imagine it happened any other way.
Posted by Joe Redifer (Member # 3) on 07-10-1999, 04:14 PM:
Sounds almost as if it was done intentionally. It would be really hard to slice a film perfectly in half all the way through like that. Probably a disgruntled projectionist.
Posted by Ken Layton (Member # 133) on 07-10-1999, 06:39 PM:
Sounds more like an "inspected" print from Technicolor.
On second thought, make that Kit Parker!
Posted by Scott Norwood (Member # 30) on 07-11-1999, 12:40 AM:
I heard a story about this once, but I always assumed that it wasn't entirely true. Anyway, were the reels wound tails out? If so, it's possible that the film was last run on 2000' reels in a nitrate-era projection booth. Apparently some reel magazines had a device which could cut the film at the entrance to the upper and lower magazines if the film jammed in the gate and burned. Anyway, if the razor-blade thing is mis-adjusted, it is possible to slit the film down the center. I've never actually seen this type of setup, though; the reel magazines that I've seen just have "valve rollers" which supposedly make the upper and lower magazines airtight (though nitrate film doesn't need air to burn, so I can't imagine that this would be terribly helpful).
Posted by Jim Bedford (Member # 4) on 07-13-1999, 07:06 PM:
Last year, while running a print of The Groove Tube, I walked into the booth and there it was, right after the last roller: The film had split in half at a splice, after passing the shutdown switch, and half the film was being taken up on the reel and the other half being taken up on the floor. It was in a lame portion of a lame film, but I too, had a 16mm looking film on a 35mm looking reel.
Posted by Brad Miller (Member # 2) on 07-26-1999, 01:09 AM:
Yes, the last theater to have this print ran it reel to reel. It came to the theater tails out, right from the takeup shaft.
Here it is
Posted by Stephen Furley (Member # 1277) on 06-05-2002, 11:26 AM:
"the reel magazines that I've seen just have "valve rollers" which supposedly make the upper and lower magazines airtight (though nitrate film doesn't need air to burn, so I can't imagine that this would be terribly helpful)."The idea of the fire traps is not to make the spool boxes, (magazines), airtight, but to prevent the passage of flame into the spool box, a bit like a miner's safety lamp.
Before projecting a few minutes of a nitrate print recently, on one of a pair of long disused projectors, I threaded a few inches of film through each of the fire traps, and ignited the outside end. The flame did not pass through the traps; I wouldn't have tried running the film if it had.
Don't ask awkward questions about where this was, it was not in a public cinema, but was in a still fully equipped box, despite years of dis-use. It was a private screening, just for myself, and one other person, not that I got to see much of it, I was too busy keeping my eyes on the gate. I inspected every inch of the film very carefully before running it, then ran it through the mech with the lamp off, watching and listening for any problems, then inspected again before running it with smaller than normal carbons, and somewhat reduced lamp current.
Posted by Jesse Skeen (Member # 586) on 06-05-2002, 01:24 PM:
A 35mm print of "The Groove Tube" was destroyed?! What a tragedy!
Posted by Thomas Procyk (Member # 1170) on 06-05-2002, 01:57 PM:
They always seem to send the absolute worst prints for kids matinees. When Regal had their "Free summer kid's film fest" thing, there were some horribly old films in the lineup: Hey There its Yogi Bear, Here Come The Littles, Smurfs and the Magic Flute, and some He-Man Adventure.Yogi Bear I believe was from the 60's. That's what the copyright in the credits said. Not sure if the print itself was, but it was mono and there were various stretches for several minutes where the image was a dark purple, and you could barely make out the outlines of the characters. 
Audio was fine, though.
Here Come The Littles was a disaster. Triacetate print that was as brittle as a potato chip. They still wanted a 4-screen interlock despite my protests. Walking by the take-up platter, I noticed it winding funny. Not exactly 16mm size, but just a bit smaller than 35. It was missing the sprocket holes on one side, and there they were in a pile, being shaved off by a roller. So we had to stop a 4-screen interlock packed with screaming day-care kids. 
About 3 minutes of the print was ruined.
Smurfs had green lines through the entire image, too many to count. I don't even know why they bothered to show it. 42 splices in Reel 1 alone. I ran this 2 years in a row, second year it came in 1/2 a reel shorter, and fell apart" at the theater afer ours.
Never ran He-Man. The manager from the previous theater brought it to us clamped, and carried it in the rain.
The print that Brad is talking about has actually crossed my mind before. Something sharp in the middle of a stuck roller could make an entire print irreparable. (is that a word?)
=TMP=
Posted by Peter Kerchinsky (Member # 1098) on 06-05-2002, 09:21 PM:
I
also had a print split at a splice after the fail safe, half going on the platter, the other half going on the floor.
How that damn Super Platter took up a 16mm size film for almost twenty minutes is totally beyond me. Something eventually shut the whole thing down and I really can't print what I said when I got to the booth and saw this mess of film on the floor.
To make matters worse we lost a good portion of a sexy scene in an Al Pacino movie titled SEA OF LOVE. The mishap happened on a Friday night and we could not get replacement reels until Monday! By the way it was a discount house and alot of customers had already seen the film first run, apparently, because lots of complaints about us "editing" the film.
Kind of makes me like this new mylar film stock that doesn't break eh.
Posted by Joe Beres (Member # 678) on 06-05-2002, 09:28 PM:
I have seen film split like that before, but to have both pieces take up on a reel like that is bizarre. Perhaps it split, but the projectionist didn't notice until the end or near it. Then they wound the 2000' x 16mm pice that was sitting in a pile on the floor next to the 16mm piece on the reel, but didn't say anything to anyone hoping that it wouldn't be traced back to them. Even if that seems far fetched, whoever sent that reel out like that certainly knew it was split, as they must have taped the ends down. Or did they not?
Posted by Gerard S. Cohen (Member # 994) on 06-05-2002, 10:18 PM:
"...intentionally...?"
To damage a print deliberately to make it unusable but still viewable, as for example in a stock footage library, the device used was called a Film Mutilator. Photos of benchtop models appear in the
1934 Neumade Products Catalog.
It could be set to make one or more scratches through the length of the film on emulsion side, through the image, or through the sound track, or both. There was a drawer to catch and permit disposal of the emulsion shavings. I believe they were made in 35mm and 16mm sizes. [Perhaps it didn't sell well, there being those who mutilate film frequently for free, no device needed save inattention...]
The device to divide a length of film is of course a Film Slitter,
sometimes made at home for slitting double-8mm amateur film from 16mm stock, but more often done on precision machines at processing labs,
such as those of Eastman Kodak.
Posted by Gordon McLeod (Member # 33) on 06-06-2002, 05:42 AM:
Did the slit extend through the splice into either the head or the tail leader and was it tail up or heads up
Posted by Scott Manley (Member # 867) on 06-06-2002, 08:47 AM:
Many years ago......I had a cartoon we were showing in front of a Disney film split after the failsafe for about 60 feet before it tripped....Another projectionist and I decided to try to put it back together....laaying the film on a splicer we placed splicing tape down the middle of the film....put it back in and it ran. Looked a little funny on the screen....but it was a cartoon....kids loved it.
Posted by Jerry Chase (Member # 660) on 06-06-2002, 10:08 AM:
OK, nobody has asked the question yet...
The reel is already trashed, so just for kicks - have you tried threading and running both strips of film?If possible, the idea brings up the mind boggling possibilities of some strange midnight shows where the left and right strips are threaded with an offset time base, or the left half of the image is from one feature, and the right from another entirely different feature. "Rocky Horror"/"Chorus Line"? "Star Wars"/"Tora Tora Tora"?
Posted by Frank Angel (Member # 248) on 06-06-2002, 10:01 PM:
This is amazing, I just posted to Tom Kroening's thread -- Every had one of those weeks -- about a film splitting event that happened to me years ago. Luckily it only split a few minutes of film before I caught it. I can't imaging how this could happen in a change-over house to a full print without the projectionist noticing it. This guy did this to five or six reels without seeing what had happened? Was the theatre hiring guys with brain damage? And then, how did it get past Technicolor's inspector JM?