What are some different avenues or contacts for getting old 35mm films

[Luke Anderson]

Im a long time film guy getting back into it at a 1945 single screen going non profit here in Spokane Washington. We will show free stuff, old stuff, new stuff...etc both Digital and 35mm. Trying to get film nowadays is tough as you know, so any help would be greatly appreciated,

Luke Anderson

[Ryan Gallagher]

[s]Is this for exhibition to an audience in a cinema or in a home/private setting?[/s]

Sorry, noticed you said non-profit cinema! Exhibition rights are most likely gonna be required regardless of where the print comes. Doing them on the regular is going to typically require a distributor like Deluxe or a heavily stocked private collection partner or library/university to be involved.

[Henry Atkinson]

We are a nonprofit and always need exhibition rights when showing, doesn't much matter where the print comes from. HFC/Warner, Deluxe, LoC Film Archive, etc all want to see proof of rights. Often you can go through your usual digital distributor, and for movies that were printed to 35mm, you can ask for a film print. When our digital projector was broken, we kept our weekend showings going on film without much hassle on the distribution end.

Be aware that a lot of places don't really know what they actually have on film... as the digital transition happened people responsible for keeping those warehouses in order were cut out of the picture, and things aren't super well documented in some cases. We requested a print of The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers and were shipped 1 can with 4 reels in it, which was half of Extended Two Towers. Distributor thought they had sent us the whole theatrical cut, and had to overnight us the 2nd half (which they thought was just a 2nd print of the same movie).

[Tim Androes]

Another issue you will run into is whether you can run reel-to-reel. Some folks will not send out their archival prints if you are going to chop them up to run on a platter. Do you still have the Ballantynes there?

[Jim Cassedy]

I agree with comments made by Henry& Tim above. Another source is Academy Film Library, but as
Tim mentioned, many of these places will not allow their prints to be platterized.

<edited>
Be aware that a lot of places don't really know what they actually have on film... / / We requested a print
of The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers and were shipped 1 can with 4 reels in it, which was half of
Extended Two Towers. .

LOL! Several years ago it took 3 shipments for a distributor to get us all the right reels for one of the HALLOWEEN
flicks. They had alotta trouble with the way they had the reels labeled, which made it really tricky to tell the difference
between HALLOWEEN PART TWO , Reel 3, and HALLOWEEN PART THREE, Reel 2, etc, As I said it actually took
3 shipments . .and I'm still not sure I ran the right movie that night.

[Scotty Wright]

I was at a marathon trilogy screening of Lord of the Rings a couple years ago in Boston at the Coolidge. Was supposed to be Fellowship and Two Towers extended on 35mm and Return theatrical on 35mm. Fellowship and Return arrived fine, but the Two Towers extended cans ended up being a 2nd print of Fellowship. They ran Two Towers digitally for my showing and the correct print got shipped out for the next weekend’s screening.

[Henry Atkinson]

I was at a marathon trilogy screening of Lord of the Rings a couple years ago in Boston at the Coolidge. Was supposed to be Fellowship and Two Towers extended on 35mm and Return theatrical on 35mm. Fellowship and Return arrived fine, but the Two Towers extended cans ended up being a 2nd print of Fellowship. They ran Two Towers digitally for my showing and the correct print got shipped out for the next weekend’s screening.

Heh, wonder if it came from the same warehouse that caused our SNAFU. Our print was Swank's ETT Print 0005.Once we had the whole thing it was in immaculate shape, 2003 re-release print on Fujifilm 3513DI struck for the leadup to ROTK, had probably only been run a few dozen times.