This was common in the old days, the last time it was done on a large scale was for the 1953 feature length Coronation, on the ABC circuit “Elizabeth Is Queen”, and on the Odeon & Gaumont circuits “A Queen Is Crowned”.
I myself only experienced this a couple of times at the Playhouse, Hampstead on the Sunday morning Indian films. Fortunately I was the first showing, as every reel came off on the take-up plate, there was someone ready to do the ‘cross over’. Quite a task as Indian films were always 3 hours plus length.
For historical interest, Technicolor prints always had on leaders, letter by letter on frames 'PROJECTIONIST PLEASE FOCUS'. On the “Queen Is Crowned” prints was also the following... 'GIVE IT THE WORKS MR PROJECTIONIST'. I seem to remember a note in the can to play the sound at a higher fader setting.
Posted by Daryl C. W. O'Shea (Member # 1303) on 04-26-2003, 07:20 PM:
I've never used a bicycle to 'cross over' prints since the 10-15 mile stretch done the highway would take a little too long. I have nearly missed arriving on time though... once I got stopped in a huge line up for a R.I.D.E. (Reduce Impaired Driving Everywhere) check. When the officer asked me why I seemed so nervous, he quickly let me go when I told him my boss was going to kick my ass if I didn't make it to the other theatre in the next three minutes.
Posted by Brian Guckian (Member # 1678) on 04-26-2003, 07:56 PM:
Greetings all, from the Emerald Isle...a few years ago I previewed a film made here called "Crushproof" (about teenage delinquents). A release print was flown in from the UK lab, and was conspicuously marked with the title. Well...let's just say it may have proved a challenge too far for the guys at the airport or the freight depot...we disposed of the remains and got a new print the next day! ![[Roll Eyes]](rolleyes.gif)
Best
Brian
Posted by Daniel Fuentz (Member # 1684) on 04-29-2003, 03:52 AM:
RE: cutting off the green ratings from trailers, I had NEVER seen this done, until tonight! The trailers all ran together, like ads on TV. (This was my first time at a Cinemark theater. Surely this isn't common practice with them?)
Posted by Scott Norwood (Member # 30) on 04-29-2003, 06:05 AM:
Cutting off the green bands is a standard policy at several chains. I know that AMC does this. Regal used to as well. I've never been to a Cinemark, so I wouldn't know what they do.
I wouldn't mind it _if_ a) cutting of the green band never cut into the trailer soundtrack and b) the theatre always spliced in about 5-10 seconds of black leader between trailers instead of running them in rapid-fire mode.
Posted by Bill Langfield (Member # 818) on 04-29-2003, 10:34 AM:
Brian: Love the 'Crushproof' story!!! Did they lable the next print 'Handle Like Eggs' ?
Leo: I miss the old days of 6000ft drops. Running to a 6k reel rather than the platter, then breaking the join at end reel 3 then taking up to another 6k reel.
Bill.
Posted by John Wilson (Member # 269) on 05-02-2003, 08:26 AM:
Bill, don't you still do the Herron Drop at Cremorne?
Posted by Carl King (Member # 398) on 05-02-2003, 08:46 AM:
About 15 years ago I was working in a twin booth using two projectors in each house with 600' reels. Upon returning to the booth after a couple of days off I began to rewind the last 6000' reel of POINT BREAK that contained reels 4,5 and 6. When the tail of r6 showed up it was split straight down the middle from the tail splice all the way to the head splice. 2000' of film was split in two. I was not happy
Posted by Lindsay Morris (Member # 1430) on 05-03-2003, 11:55 PM:
When I was just starting out in the cinema scene as a rather raw recruit in 1960 we had a film delivered to the cinema with one reel presented as a tangled up mess in a big cardboard box.
The prints were shipped to the cinema (The Melody at Rockingham south of Perth in WA) by the local carrier and one trunk had fallen over onto its side. Somehow all the jolting over the rough road managed to let the reels out.
They were sliding all over the tray of the truck which had a wire mesh side and rear with canvas over the top.
One reel was caught up by the turbulence of the truck movement and the film began to unravel from the spool and trail out of the rear of the truck flapping in the breeze as it drove along.
An overtaking vehicle flagged down the truck and the perplexed truckie wondered how he would get ALL that film back onto the reel which had unwound about 3/4 of the spool.
So he just dumped the reel into a big cardboard box he had on board and hauled in the film hanging out the back.. all dragging on the road as well and left the lot at the cinema for us to sort out.
We had one hell of time getting it all untangled and back onto the reel for the show that night and then checking it for "show stopping" type of damage and a clean as best we could with carbon tetra-chloride from the pump type fire extinguisher in the bio box.
On the screen it was not that bad with lots of random scratches and some pretty big gouges down to the base and we just sent it back with a note telling the story and heard no more about it.
In those days there were not that many prints about so I guess the next cinema copped that reel as it was.
Lindsay
Posted by Bill Langfield (Member # 818) on 05-04-2003, 02:50 PM:
John,
In mainstream like Hoyts, which I just quit, (see post in 'A Few Good Men'), there are so many prints going around, they don't really seem to care when they are ready for pickup.
But with Art House, well, we often need the print ready to go within the shortest time after screening so we can send it to YOU or you to US! (you know what I mean)
At Cremorne, No they have never done it (Herron Drop) since I've been there.
Were you doing it when you were there?
That said, Brett created the Brett Drop a few weeks ago, seems the take-up rollers on the speco in C#5 ran all the to the top at thread-up and jammed there. So when the show started, the take plate had no reason to spin, the rollers did not drop to the projector cut-off/film-break microswitches, so an hour later he created the Brett Drop, by simply breaking the film coming out of the projector and taking the rest of the movie up on a spare plate. His version has the on screen show never missing a beat, but Hmmmmmm.
His clean up would have been fun, but I've cleaned up at least 60 minutes of similar stuff ups. And complete dropped prints (Neither, were my fault, they were call-outs for a place I no longer work for - see above!) But I do dread walking into a projection room I have not not checked since feature start, to find the lot on the floor)
However I have already had my fair share of film all over the floor of my own to deal with, in the past.
Bill.
Posted by System Notices (Member # 2357) on 08-20-2004, 09:53 AM:
It has been 473 days since the last post.
Posted by Jason M Miller (Member # 2597) on 08-20-2004, 09:53 AM:
The worst brain wrap(if you want to call it that) was when one of our training projectionist had just started the village and but forgot to take out a splice marker (we use a wooden ring) which of course could not go through the brain, lets just say it was bad, we had to take a nice section out of a trailer, lucky none of the movie was damaged.
Posted by Rich Granata (Member # 2285) on 08-20-2004, 12:13 PM:
On the Christie MUTs, there is a plastic pin that (i guess) keeps the film on the bottom roller. The metal bracket must have gotten bent in so the that plastic piece was touching that roller. A manager that transferred in was unfamiliar with Christie stuff and built up King Arthur (scope) with it. There were gorgeous green squiggly lines going through a few of the reels right in time for opening day.
You know a print is in bad shape when the CUSTOMERS actually notice the damage.
I guess that pin just keeps the film off the floor when there isn't tension. But I decided to just remove the bracket, since I can easily keep the film off the floor with a little care
Posted by Adam Wilbert (Member # 1184) on 08-20-2004, 05:31 PM:
One april fools day a few years back some friends and I saved up about 75 old trailers and spliced them all together to make a feature sized spool. We picked the thing up, without clamps, and walked it past the GMs office door. Just then, I pushed up on the center ring and the whole thing popped out and fell onto the floor. We made a big scene out of it, flailing our arms in a pathetic attempt to get ahold of it while just making it worse. Needless to say the gm nearly ![[bs]](graemlins/bs.gif)
a brick. Not really destroying a print, just thought I'd share. ![[Big Grin]](biggrin.gif)
Posted by Brad Miller (Member # 2) on 08-20-2004, 10:45 PM:
Rich, your manager threaded UNDER the roller AND metal bracket. That's what caused your horrible green scratches.
This is why every time I go into a booth with Christie MUTs the first thing I do to them is move that metal bracket so that it is no longer at the 6:00 position. By moving it to the 4:00 position, it becomes obvious to anyone using it whether the film is between the roller and keeper (metal) bracket or not. That manager simply did not look down when he put the film on the lower roller. He just wrapped it under the roller and keeper bracket.
Posted by Rich Granata (Member # 2285) on 08-21-2004, 11:21 AM:
I gave him the benifit of the doubt. I mean, he would have had to be pretty foolish to do that. (but then again...)
That trailer story is awesome. If i did something like that to my GM, he would probobly laugh hysterically and never let me touch film again. ![[Razz]](tongue.gif)
Posted by Christian Appelt (Member # 1067) on 08-21-2004, 12:56 PM:
This one didn't happen to myself, but I like it anyway:
A film collector asked a friend to transport a 70mm print of DOCTOR ZHIVAGO in his minivan. They drove by night, drifted off the road and the car rolled over a few times. Luckily, nobody was hurt seriously, but three 70mm containers opened and the reels went flying into the forest. They spent the rest of the night getting the print back onto spools - but after laborious hand cleaning there were about 8 new splices and surprisingly few scratches visible in projection.
Posted by Leo Enticknap (Member # 534) on 08-21-2004, 02:30 PM:
This one potentially destroyed hundreds of prints in one incident, and before they were ever made, too. Someone who worked on a restoration of Wings of the Morning (the first British Technicolor feature) told me that they had to strike the new preservation negative from surviving release prints. The reason for this was that the cut YCM camera negatives were shipped to America to have the matrices and prints made for the US release... on the Hindenburg.
Presumably anyone travelling in close proximity to six million cubic feet of hydrogen was unlikely to worry about the odd few reels of nitrate in the hold!
Posted by Bruce McGee (Member # 131) on 08-22-2004, 06:35 PM:
While hanging out at the TV station one night about midnight:
The engineer and I were loading up the next reel of the movie that we were running that night. I threaded up, and the engineer went to get the take-up reel. I cued the film and went into master control. We ran the entire 2000' reel of film before we discovered it had taken up allover the floor. The engineer checked his VTR set-up and forgot to get the reel.
We never had that happen again.
The good part was: I carefully found the end of the roll, put it on the reel, and gently and slowly wound it back up on the reel using a cleaning pad on my hand. I did clean the print before we ran the movie again, and it suffered no damage.
I DID arrange for there to be several 2000' reels kept in the vicinity of the film islands from then on.
Posted by JC Cowles (Member # 914) on 08-22-2004, 07:05 PM:
This was back in 1999. The film you see is Toy Story 2 during its opening week. If this picture could talk, it would simply be the sounds of hundreds of screaming kids crying out "Bring back Woody!"
It was my day off and a long time ago, so don't ask me how it happened. Needless to say, it wasn't my day off anymore and I soon joined the fun on the floor.
The showing and the next were canceled, and even a bazillion free movie passes won't make a kid stop screaming (let alone hundreds of them).
The amount of dust and crud that accumulated on the film was horrible. And of course this was before I ever heard of Film-Tech or FilmGuard. So until a new print arrived, kids got to watch Toy Story with black snow.
Posted by Michael Schaffer (Member # 1204) on 08-22-2004, 07:16 PM:
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