Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: Time machine

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Posted by Brad Miller (Member # 2) on 09-02-2011, 10:32 PM:

This one should be interesting.

If you had a time machine and could go back in time to change ONE thing for the better about the cinema exhibition industry, what would that one thing be?

(We all understand there is no such thing as a time machine, so it's ok to say something like "kill the guy who invented blah, blah, blah".)

Posted by Tom Petrov (Member # 1534) on 09-02-2011, 10:37 PM:

I don't know if I would change anything. But I would go back and visit and experience all of the old theatres of the past that closed.

Maybe I would shoot the guy who invented the cookie cutter multi plex!

Posted by Monte L Fullmer (Member # 2797) on 09-02-2011, 11:02 PM:

quote: Tom Petrov
invented the cookie cutter multi plex

If history is correct, it was James Edwards Sr. who started the "multiscreen" idea.

He started in the late silent era as a doorman/usher at one of the large houses in SoCal area of Newport Beach. Then, due to loving the business, in 1930 he bought a storefront and converted it into a small cinema.

Being the penny pincher he was, he saved money up to buy the store next door two years later and also converted that one into a small cinema, but each had their own staff and manager.

Thus to cut costs and still gain profits, he knocked down the common wall between the two so one manager could run both.

Thus began the first operational twin cinema.

...and James Edwards Sr. grew his business into one of the largest SoCal businesses - Edwards Cinemas.

as for the question: To make sure that Lightholler had his binoculars so he could have seen that iceberg a lot earlier so the "Titanic" would have steered away from creating history.

or..found a way to create a distraction so that JFK would have gone a differnt route .. and NOT gone down Deely Plaza.

or .. found a way to delay the flights that crashed into the Twin Towers ... which changed our lives forever.

Posted by Tom Petrov (Member # 1534) on 09-02-2011, 11:11 PM:

quote: Monte L Fullmer
If history is correct

I always thought it was the guys who started Cineplex. Dranbinsky and sometime, Nat Taylor I think.

Posted by Brad Miller (Member # 2) on 09-02-2011, 11:44 PM:

Monte, the question was specifically what would you change in history to better the cinema industry.

Posted by Robert E. Allen (Member # 1351) on 09-03-2011, 12:54 AM:

I'm with Tom on the multiplex thing. However, that would be right after I shot the idiots that allowed vulgar language and sexual nudity in general release films.

Posted by Monte L Fullmer (Member # 2797) on 09-03-2011, 02:15 AM:

(Whoops ... got a little carried away in other histories ....)

Have owners and unions work together as a main operational force intead of them fighting against one another across the barganing table as who is better organized.

Posted by Edward Havens (Member # 4715) on 09-03-2011, 02:42 AM:

The truth of the matter is, it doesn't matter who thought of multiplexing first. If it hadn't been Person X in 1914, it would have been Person Y in 1930, or Person Z in 1947, or someone else somewhere down the line. We might not have thirty screen monsterplexes, but there would be some kind of multiplex existing.

Ditto snack bars, color film, sound on disc, sound on film, stereophonic sound, widescreen cinema processes, 3D, computerized box offices, stadium seating, digital sound, DLP projection, laser projection and any other evolution of the cinema process. Would the moviegoing experience be better today if Jon Duan and The Jazz Singer didn't have any kind of sound, and that process didn't become popular until the 1930s or 1940s? Would it have been better if Cinerama and Cinemascope hadn't shown up until the 1960s or 1970s? Or if Jaws and Star Wars hadn't ushered in the blockbuster mentality?

It's a nice dream that some things would be better if someone else didn't happen. But I only dream at the movies.

Posted by Scott Norwood (Member # 30) on 09-03-2011, 06:33 AM:

I would un-invent television.

Posted by Mitchell Dvoskin (Member # 751) on 09-03-2011, 10:02 AM:

I would eliminate the Paramount Consent Decrees which forced the studios to divest themselves of their theatre chains. Once the studios no longer had the need to support the overhead of the retail end of distribution, they no longer had a reason to provide programming that would keep people coming to the theatres, or to keep their products off of competing formats (broadcast, cable, video, streaming, etc).

Posted by Stephen LaPadula (Member # 3050) on 09-03-2011, 11:07 AM:

Mitchell: Amen to that. Splitting up production/distribution/exhibition exponentially increases eachs self serving interests.
Barriers of entry into the industry would have been (and was) near impossible for entrepreneurs to break into even a decade or so ago....but look at how many independent filmmakers/theatres there are today. The ever evolving audio and video technology that fuels our business makes it increasingly easier for production and exhibition

Posted by Damien Taylor (Member # 4255) on 09-03-2011, 11:20 AM:

quote: Mitchell Dvoskin
provide programming that would keep people coming to the theatres

Maybe I'm misunderstanding block booking, but didn't it allow studios to produce overall lower quality content?

Posted by Tony Bandiera Jr (Member # 2365) on 09-03-2011, 04:04 PM:

I would go back and stop the demolition of the Grand Roxy Theatre in New York. Anyone who has ever seen the design of that theatre would understand why it was called "The Cathedral Of The Motion Picture".

Gloria Swanson standing in the ruins of the demolished auditorium, picture courtesy of Cinematreasures:

Old man Roxy knew how to do it right.

LINKY to Photos

Posted by Joe Redifer (Member # 3) on 09-03-2011, 04:28 PM:

Hmmm, this is a tough question. There are a few things I might consider:

-Having the framerate be 30fps instead of 24. More temporal resolution, but still has a very similar temporal look to the framerate.

-Somehow, with only my wits, make it so that 70mm was the standard for all theatrical presentations and 35mm was looked upon as a laughable hobbyists format. All motion pictures would be shot in that format as well. Hell, make it 71mm. A little extra quality never hurt.

-Make it so that no screen was allowed to be smaller than 41.6 feet (measured vertically) and also that only common height screens would be allowed or the po po would come and shut your entire establishment down and shoot the theater owner in the face.

-Make it so that owning a theater is actually profitable. As it has been for the last few decades, most theaters can't even afford projectionists. Times are tough. One wonders why companies even stay in the business if the income is that low.

Posted by Bobby Henderson (Member # 840) on 09-03-2011, 05:02 PM:

If I could change things I would make it so THX, or rather the original idea behind it, was applied to ALL commercial movie theater screens no matter how big or small. Any new theater would be built from the ground up with room acoustics in mind and feature the level of amplification and speakers needed to get the damned job done absolutely right.

I would also include militant high standards of sound system maintenance. Great movie theater sound should NOT be a premium priced experience reserved for only a few screens. One shouldn't have to search high and low for one of the few theaters doing a good job with the sound systems. This is in that "basics" category every theater needs, like bathrooms, a popcorn popping machine and electricity.

Posted by Manny Knowles (Member # 1171) on 09-03-2011, 05:29 PM:

AMC propaganda touted Stan Durwood as the creator of the multiplex.

Posted by Leo Enticknap (Member # 534) on 09-03-2011, 05:33 PM:

I would have had W.K.L. Dickson invent polyester film base back in 1888, instead of nitrate. That way, archivists would never have had to deal with base decomposition issues, a lot more early films would have survived, the operating costs of distribution and exhibition would have been a lot lower, and, crucially, several hundred lives would have been saved that were lost to nitrate fires in theatres and distribution exchanges while the stuff was in mainstream use.

If I'm allowed a second, I would also have made the brief widescreen boom of the early 1930s (e.g. Fox Grandeur etc.) stick, rather than fizzle out for a couple more decades, with the wholescale conversion to widescreen happening at the same time as the conversion to sound.

Posted by Mitchell Dvoskin (Member # 751) on 09-03-2011, 05:39 PM:

quote: Damien Taylor
I'm misunderstanding block booking, but didn't it allow studios to produce overall lower quality content?

Block booking is a different issue. Prior to the Paramount Consent Decrees, each studio owned it's own chain of theatres. In fact, MGM was created and owned by Loews Theatres. Because they owned the theatres, it required them to keep them profitable. There were independent theatres, but they existed mostly in smaller towns.

Block booking required an independent theatre to play all the product of a given studio for a period of time. They got the good films and the bad.

Posted by Randy Stankey (Member # 64) on 09-03-2011, 11:09 PM:

I don't know... I would like to go back to some time around 1945 or 1950 and just stay there.

No matter what you did, who you killed or what you changed, progress would catch up and you would have a whole new set of problems and political bullshit to deal with. You could also inadvertently make a change for the worse.

I would rather just go back to a time when things were more like the way I wish they could be and take things as they come. If I played my cards right, I could be a lot better off in the long run.

Since I would have traveled back from the future, I would have knowledge of the way history is supposed to unfold.

Posted by David M. Leugers (Member # 2968) on 09-03-2011, 11:50 PM:

I think I'd go back to 1959 and watch films with my older brothers at the Paramount theater in Hamilton, Ohio like we did. It was my first year going to the movies and it was miraculous. A beautiful showplace of a theater with a balcony and pipe organ, it had ushers walking up and down the aisles carrying flashlights. It was abruptly closed and torn down to make a small parking lot in 1961. I would change the ownership of studios to prevent corporations from ownership, prevent the industry threatening wastes of huge budgets on overblown idiotic film ideas (Cleopatra for one, there are many over the years) and make sure film makers with real talent and fresh ideas get to make films. Only when customers are flocking to the theaters can those theaters survive. Great films are the key.

Posted by Aaron Garman (Member # 1653) on 09-04-2011, 12:56 AM:

Very tough to pick one, but here are a couple:

-Kodak develops analog backup for CDS: it would have hopefully prevented the digital sound war of the 90s.

-2K projectors never sold to a single cinema. Instead, 8K becomes the standard from the beginning, including all work flows.

-George Lucas consumes hemlock in 1984, and never makes the prequels. Star Wars Trilogy preserved for all ages to come in its original form.

AJG

Posted by Tom Petrov (Member # 1534) on 09-04-2011, 01:25 AM:

quote: Aaron Garman
George Lucas consumes hemlock in 1984, and never makes the prequels. Star Wars Trilogy preserved for all ages to come in its original form.

Now that is funny!

Posted by Monte L Fullmer (Member # 2797) on 09-04-2011, 01:36 AM:

Film-Guard was invented at the beginning of film projecting.

Can you imagine how film would have ran through those older machines if they were treated,esp nitrate?

Posted by Damien Taylor (Member # 4255) on 09-04-2011, 06:07 AM:

quote: Mitchell Dvoskin
Block booking required an independent theatre to play all the product of a given studio for a period of time. They got the good films and the bad.

Thanks for validating what I thought.

Posted by Geoff Jones (Member # 3668) on 09-04-2011, 01:14 PM:

First, I'd forbid my girls from watching any movies on home video.

Then I'd travel forward 4 years to pick up my 3 year old at age 7. I'd take her and my (currently) 7 year old back to 77, 80, & 83 to see the Star Wars films on the big screen. Then I'd go pick 'em both up at around age 11 to see Raiders, and again at 15 or so for Alien & Aliens. I'd continue doing this for a while.

After that I would travel forward 10 years at a time to see if they ever start making good movies again, and if they ever come up with technology to make movies look better instead of worse.

(sorry for not following Brad's rules.)

Posted by Bobby Henderson (Member # 840) on 09-04-2011, 03:27 PM:

quote:
-2K projectors never sold to a single cinema. Instead, 8K becomes the standard from the beginning, including all work flows.

I agree 8K would be great as a standard for digital intermediate use and native resolution for projectors.

Unfortunately, 8K isn't very practical for widespread use in post production due to limits in computing power, particularly hard disc I/O. My understanding is 8K work has to be done in gray-scale channels or in a low resolution "proxy" for full color operation. 4K projectors are only now starting to become common in some areas. There's no telling if/when we'll ever see 8K resolution digital projectors.

Some of this gets back to how freaking slow certain developments have been in processor design and hard disc technology. Companies like Intel squeezed out as much as they could in single CPU designs. It's only now that symmetric multiprocessing is more common (yet the vast majority of computing applications are not compiled in multi-threaded form to take advantage of multiprocessing). I thought eSATA might help beef up hard disc speeds due to greater consumer demand, but eSATA never was all that common. Now there's another chance with USB 3.0. But the hard disc itself can move only so many bits only so fast.

Posted by Joe Redifer (Member # 3) on 09-04-2011, 05:39 PM:

Bobby, these days you can go down to the grocery store and buy a 4 terabyte hard drive with a side of spaghetti. In 5 years (or even less) we'll be buying drives which have sizes of 100+ terabytes. People will LOL at 2011 technology. They will view you and I as primitive plebes 10 years from now. My point is that the only thing the 8K "practicality" thing means is that digital would have had to wait a few years for technology to catch up.

Posted by Bobby Henderson (Member # 840) on 09-05-2011, 12:09 PM:

Capacity isn't the biggest problem with hard discs. Rather, it's how much data the hard discs can read/write per second.

USB 3.0 is 10 times faster than USB 2.0 (transfer speeds up to 5 billion bits per second). But I doubt those new USB 3.0 external hard discs now appearing in stores will actually sustain those speeds. Uncompressed 1080p HD with basic 8-bit per color channels uses 1.4 billion bits per second of bandwidth. An 8K image is 16 times larger than a 2K image. For real time record/playback the disc system would have to sustain 22.4 billion bits per second just for basic color. I'm not sure if even the highest end RAID systems could handle that.

Posted by Leo Enticknap (Member # 534) on 09-05-2011, 01:32 PM:

quote: Bobby Henderson
Uncompressed 1080p HD with basic 8-bit per color channels uses 1.4 billion bits per second of bandwidth. An 8K image is 16 times larger than a 2K image. For real time record/playback the disc system would have to sustain 22.4 billion bits per second just for basic color. I'm not sure if even the highest end RAID systems could handle that.

Hence the reason (or one of them, at any rate) why d-cinema imaging systems generally take a lossless compression approach: the server's processor can uncompress a lot faster than the equivalent generation of technology enables the uncompressed image data to be transferred from a hard drive.

Posted by Bobby Henderson (Member # 840) on 09-05-2011, 08:29 PM:

D-cinema prints are really lossy compressed, via JPEG 2000 format. The level of compression is relatively mild in comparison to the much more severe levels of compression used in formats for home video. In the production/post production stage I think the crews generally work on uncompressed or lossless compressed imagery.

Posted by Ian Parfrey (Member # 5122) on 09-05-2011, 09:29 PM:

After partaking in 50 year old scotch, I would go back, track down the tools that championed 2k DI's, put their faces through an industrial blender and fast forward to 5 minutes before I originally left so I could enjoy that 50 year old scotch again.

Satisfaction.

Posted by Martin McCaffery (Member # 37) on 09-06-2011, 08:22 AM:

With all due respect to Leo, I would go back and prevent the invention of safety film. Therefore, no platters and no multiplexes (as we know them). Skilled labor to run the films, and knowledge that if you don't do film right you are going to get hurt or killed [evil]

While I was at it I would magically install in all the producers, exhibitors and film handlers that each film is a cherished thing that needs to be properly handled, stored, preserved and protected for future generations.

Except, of course, for those Star Wars prequels...

Posted by Louis Bornwasser (Member # 3063) on 09-06-2011, 09:55 PM:

Which versions? Louis [Roll Eyes]

Posted by Leo Enticknap (Member # 534) on 09-07-2011, 08:00 AM:

quote: Martin McCaffrey
With all due respect to Leo, I would go back and prevent the invention of safety film. Therefore, no platters and no multiplexes (as we know them). Skilled labor to run the films, and knowledge that if you don't do film right you are going to get hurt or killed [evil]

So I take it you agree with the road safety activists who suggest that you should remove all airbags from steering wheels and replace them with razor-sharp spikes mounted with the pointy end facing the driver?

I agree that the safety precautions associated with nitrate had a positive side-effect in that anyone involved in handling it, either in cinematography, post-production or theatre projection, by definition had to be a dedicated professional. My rationale for wishing that it had never been invented was that if the industry had used safety from the word go, both films and lives would have been saved.

At least now, the worst a mickey mouse projectionist can do is to scratch a print. In the 1908 Boyerstown fire or the 1929 Glen Cinema fire, for example, they succeeded in killing dozens of innocent people (almost all of them children, in the latter case).

quote: Martin McCaffrey
While I was at it I would magically install in all the producers, exhibitors and film handlers that each film is a cherished thing that needs to be properly handled, stored, preserved and protected for future generations.

But by preventing the invention of safety film you'd also make it a lot more difficult and expensive for archivists to achieve that. OK, we now know that nitrate will store for centuries if kept in a very cold and dry environment. But we can only take advantage of that fact if we manage to get the stuff into the system before it's seriously started to decompose, and have a lot of money to maintain atmospherically controlled vaults that also have very elaborate fire prevention measures in place. Granted, you also need the atmospheric control for acetate and all colour film (but not blastproof compartments etc.). But if the first 50-60 years or so of b/w cinema history had been shot on polyester, then it could be stored more or less at room temperature and humidity, and a 50-year gap between a film ending its theatrical run and someone deciding that it was worth preserving in an archive would be a lot less likely to mean that it got lost forever.

Posted by Louis Bornwasser (Member # 3063) on 09-07-2011, 06:05 PM:

Maybe we should have had Edison use Mylar. Think of all the old films that we would still have, not lost to nitrate. louis