Changes over 25 years - from an old film-tech member

[Evans A Criswell]

After being a regular here from early 2000 until around 2004, it's amazing to come back and think about how much has changed. I'm sure some of the people from then are still here. Also, a good many will have retired and some will no longer be with us after 22 years. I've been retired since Halloween 2017.

It was an adventure looking through old posts of mine in the forum archives and some of my posts and comments, especially in the movie review threads, are of movies I struggle to remember seeing (or outright can't remember seeing). That's what 25 years of aging will do.

At the time I was very active here, it predated most modern social media. film-tech, in retrospect, WAS my social media in those days. I remember creating a thread "You might be a film-tech junkie if..." and had a list of things and it got a ton of responses. I discovered film-tech in 1999 and registered in March 2000, it seems. I became familiar with the profile photos and the writing styles and personalities of the participants and learned so much more about everyone than you can with many on Facebook. I felt a genuine connection and it was comforting to visit and check for new activity. LiveJournal was my first "mainstream" social media in late 2003. It was great in that people wrote paragraphs and you got to know then. Later, MySpace and Facebook came along and sentence fragments and pictures were the new norm.

I was a very frequent moviegoer from 1997 to 2006 and was well-known as a movie theatre expert and at the time, had theatre ratings (as opposed to movie ratings) on my web site and got interviewed by both the Decatur and Huntsville newspapers circa 2002. A lot of my time was spent alone and going to the movies was a good way to have new ideas coming into my mind and started going alone in summer 1997 and made a big habit of it.

There is no way I could have known in the early 2000s that all of the theatres I was attending and writing about would go away. Not one of the 5 first-run and 2 second-run theatres I was attending and writing about here are still around. My first actual post here was likely the one about Regal shutting down the two second-run theatres in May 2000. In the coffee shop where I'm sitting writing this, the old Regal 8 (Cobb Cinema 8) is diagonally across the highway, and that theatre was a short-lived A&P before Cobb converted it to a theatre. After the theatre left, it was a Mike's Merchandise for years and recently became a new Goodwill. Of all the other theatres in business then, the Carmike 10 is the only building left standing although closed for years. All others were demolished. The fact that Regal wouldn't have a theatre in Huntsville in a few years would be mind-boggling then.

It is quite embarrassing to say that I've only been to 3 movies in theatres after 2006. Here in film-tech, I posted reviews for quite a few dumb comedies since I was literally going to see something nearly every week. Some even joked when they'd post a review of a dumb lackluster comedy that I'd love it and buy the DVD. I was literally going to the theatre in those days and looking for something not yet seen to watch. Later, I wasn't enjoying the movies as much in 2006 for some reason. After May 2006, I rather abruptly stopped going to theatres and seriously cut down on the number of DVDs I bought. Back in those days, people still got together and did things. I had a large movie collection on Laserdisc then DVD and having movie nights and groups coming over was a regular thing since I had a widescreen HD set and a surround system. That stopped around 2013 as I got older and people became more focused on social media than other people. Sadly, the living room home theatre system has rarely been used in the past few years.

Since the forums changed, I notice that I'm a "Newbie", which, if I start going to movies again, I'd truly be. On the old forum, it looks like I may have posted/commented 1579 times, which seems like a lot for 3-4 years. This may be post 2 on the new one. Going to a movie theatre here now would be a totally different experience and literally starting all over again. Digital instead of film, different companies running the places, no familiar staff from before. One thing is for sure - I'd never do the theatre ratings site type thing again since I don't have the energy I had 25 years ago. That energy would be better put into exploring mathematical and programming interests.

Going to the movies was a healthy habit and was a source of new ideas when social interactions were diminishing. One good thing is that now, if I got back into movies, it would be similar to 1986 all over again when I'd have 20 years of movies to catch up on.

I've got to get out of the habit of preferring something old from the 70s through the early 2000s to anything new. It's not going to be good for my mind or memory in the long run.

[Mike Blakesley]

Evans! Welcome back to Film-Tech. I like to enjoy going back and reading old posts every now and then, and you are one of the many people on my "whatever happened to..." list. It's good to see you are still around.

The biz has certainly changed since we all got on Film-Tech in the early days. The discussions are just as passionate now but they don't have the nuts-and-bolts feel of the film days, that's for sure.

I will also have to say that while there are still great movies, the ones in the past 20 years or so just don't seem to have the staying power of the previous eras' films. I suppose that's partly to do with me getting older -- the modern stuff doesn't resonate with an older person as well because they're aiming at the younger crowd. Attitudes change. I find myself drawn to re-watching older movies and even old game shows on TV. It's an escape back to the ever-popular 'simpler time.'

I'm nearing 70 myself and starting to have the old aches and pains, but still love the industry and don't know what I do with my evenings if I didn't have the theater to go to. My wife, thankfully, feels the same way. It's our social life -- it's like we throw a party every night and see who shows up.

Anyway, welcome back and don't be such a stranger now.

[Evans A Criswell]

Thanks, Mike. I wondered how many of the ones from the early 2000s would still be around. I'm 57 now. I do want to watch some newer movies but I have so many great memories from older movies that my mind tends to want to just put an old movie on in the background rather than watch something new. It's like what I've done with music, listening to stuff from the 50s through the 80s and 90s from my own large collection. I feel I'm one of the few people wanting to have my own copies of songs instead of streaming.

I feel that what happened to movies paralleled what happened to music. With music, it was a decline in quality due to applying a formula based on what sold the most as well as the loudness and overcompression war to the point that a song from CD seldom sounded better than it did in the car on the radio. As the quality of music worsened, I abandoned the radio and as a consequence, didn't hear hardly any new music. With movies, in mid 2006, I'd grown tired of the same few actors who were in all the movies and it seemed the quality of the movies were in decline. I'd see a trailer and think, "Oh, another comedy with that guy in it. Can't they get some new fresh people to be in the movies?" The presentation quality of the movies was quite good at the time in the theatres around me, but the movies themselves started being the weak point in the chain. I found myself unsatisfied and disappointed with more of the movies by 2005 and 2006 and just weren't enjoying most of them like I had with ones earlier.

However, the danger in just listening to old music and watching old movies and TV shows is the negative effect on the mind due to not having new ideas coming in. I've seen the effects that dementia and memory loss has had on a family member and realize that the same could happen to me eventually if I don't keep some variety and new things coming into my mind. Watching all those movies (one every week or two) gave my mind a lot of things to think about and gave me new ideas. At the age I am now with limited social interaction (coffee shops are where most conversations happen), I think watching movies I haven't seen is a good thing. I still act a good bit younger than I am and have most of the same interests I had as a teen (electronics, math, computer science, music, etc.).

[Bobby Henderson]

It's good to see you back at the Film-Tech forum, Evans!

Some of the forum participants from 20+ years ago still post here from time to time. I'll see a decent number of FT members on social media sites too. A few FT members are sadly no longer with us.

My feelings about movies and music are fairly similar. My movie disc habits dropped off a cliff sometime back in the 2010's (for a variety of reasons). I can't remember for certain the last movie I bought on Blu-ray disc. I still visit theaters from time to time, but not as often as in the past.

I'm worried the former-Carmike/now-AMC theater in my town could close. AMC hasn't been doing the greatest job of maintaining the place. The theater has a bigger than average IMAX-digital house (over 550 seats, the screen is in the 70'-80' size range). I've hoped AMC would upgrade the 2K Xenon projection and 5.1 audio to 4K laser projection and 12 channel sound. Now I'm just hoping the place isn't shuttered. It's our town's only multiplex. It would suck having to drive an hour or more out of town just to visit a theater.

Regarding music, I'm not too bad at keeping up with some of the newer stuff. I have an Amazon Music Unlimited subscription. I listen a lot at work -via headphones to block out distracting, annoying racket. When I'm working out at the gym being able to listen to music over noise cancelling ear buds makes a big difference. The music gives me an emotional boost and it makes the time go faster. Anyway I'll usually put on a "channel" and let it play. Sometimes I'll hear some new stuff I like enough to buy.

When I do buy music I still buy it on physical CD. I'll use Adobe Audition to rip the data off the disc in LPCM WAV format, save it to an external hard drive and make additional copies in FLAC Lossless or 320kbs MP3 format to either play on my smart phone or an SSD plugged into my pickup truck. The "brick-walling" they do to the dynamics of modern music is pretty terrible. However, I can still hear a noticeable difference between tracks on a store-bought CD versus the stuff streamed online -even if Amazon says the audio is "HD" or "Ultra HD."

I cannot stand broadcast radio; nearly all the stations in my area suck. The only exception is the Cameron University radio station (KCCU). All the commercial radio stations play what seems like the same 10 songs over and over again for months on end, only interrupted by lots and lots of commercials. Sirius|XM still keeps giving me pricing deals to remain a customer; so I still have that turned on in my truck. But I have my music collection copied to a SSD plugged into one of the USB ports; so that's a decent alternative.

[Barry Floyd]

Evans, good to see you back on here. You came to my newly constructed drive-in (just outside of Nashville) back in 2003 or 2004 when we were first getting started and took booth photos. 23 years later, we're still at the drive-in, although realistically we probably only have about 4-5 years left. The land value it sits on is so expensive now, its hard not to think about selling it and retire.

[Jim Cassedy]

Welcome back-
Having been on this for many years, the biggest change that I've noticed, especially if you go
back & look at the 'old' archived forum, is that there just doesn't seem to be the same 'diversity'
of people posting. Right now, I'd say appx 90% of the posts are from the same core group of
about a dozen or so people now, who post regularly. I don't know what happened to all the
others. A few have passed away, some have maybe moved on in life, and perhaps some of
them are still here, lurking' and reading what the rest of us post.

[Leo Enticknap]

I suspect that app-based social media is a big part of the reason why 10-15 people now account for around 90% of the posts, and a lot of the rest appear briefly to start a thread with a specific query or issue, and then disappear (or return to lurking) once it's resolved. When it became mainstream in the late noughties (which, IMHO, was when Facebook threw its doors open to everyone and no longer required you to have a .edu or a .ac.uk address), I made the conscious decision that I didn't want to have anything to do with it, primarily out of privacy concerns. I did not like the idea of commercial and/or government entities knowing who my "friends" were, potential employers being easily able to know (or believe that they know, based on data they scrape about me from the socials) my political beliefs, etc. etc. I have never registered on, or used, Facebook, XWitter, or Instagram, and intend to avoid doing so unless and until I have absolutely no practical choice. I was on Nextdoor for a few months, but the torrent of abuse, dark money-funded propaganda, and general crap that it threw at me was such that I eventually deleted my account and uninstalled the app.

I believe that I also registered on Film-Tech mk. I in 2000 - it was certainly around then - and remember Evans's posts from those days. I am also in complete agreement with him about having basically gotten less interested in movies as I've aged. Part of it is simple life circumstances: having a full time job and raising a child does not allow much time for going to the theater, and most of the movies I do now see as a customer are kid-friendly ones. But I guess that I'm not the first and won't be the last to feel that the cinema industry of my childhood and early adulthood was in some way "better" - a more diverse range of films on offer (not a stark choice between franchise blockbusters and microbudget arthouse), more accessible (it was financially possible for an average income couple to go to the theater regularly, not just once or twice a year), and more of an experience (when a CRT TV and VHS was all that most homes had to offer, experiencing a 50ft scope picture and 5.1 audio was an event).

Of all those who were active on F-T in the noughties and who have now passed away, John Pytlak is the one who sticks in my mind the most, not least because he was the first F-Ter I actually met in person (at a technical symposium in, IIRC, 2004 or '05). I sometimes wonder what he would have made of the DCI digital cinema rollout followed by the eventual re-establishment of film as a niche but enduring medium if he had lived to see it happen.

[Evans A Criswell]

What's amazing is that although I have way over 1000 Facebook friends, I seldom interact with more than 3 or 4. Film-Tech, in retrospect, in the 2000-2003 time period, was far, far more satisfying as far as feeling connected to a group of people. LiveJournal was great too until everyone jumped ship when MySpace and Facebook came along. I didn't have a cell phone until 2 and a half years after I registered here on film-tech, and didn't have a "smart phone" until 2009. Interactions here were with real people (and still are) but most of what I do on Facebook seems to be to trick the algorithm into showing me more of what I like rather than actually interacting with people. Although plenty of human beings I know are on it, few actually interact and social media feels less and less human every year. On film-tech when reading a lot of replies on threads, it felt more real than 95 percent of what is on my Facebook feed every day now.

I love that I can actually hit Enter here to start a new paragraph here without it prematurely posting. It's the way things used to be everywhere. Software is quite terrible now and isn't designed for usability but to trick you into clicking ads. It's good to see something that still works well here. I miss all the online blogs on various topics of interest to me that mostly all moved behind walled gardens on Facebook groups. Sites like Film-Tech are becoming more rare.

Barry, yes, I remember going out to Watertown during the day before your drive-in opened. You were the first (and likely only) film-techer I ever met in person. I believe you were closest one geographically closest to me. I'd just gotten that new Sony digital camera and went to a good many cities and took pics of some of the theatres and am glad I did since many are long gone now. That camera was junk compared to the Canon DSLRs I'd later get in 2012 when I did a lot of photography for a venue I was involved with. When the venue closed I no longer had a bunch of bands and people to photograph so my cameras have sat unused mostly. Around that time, 2003 or 2004, is when the quality of movies were starting to decline somewhat as was new top 40 music was 2-3 years earlier. There seemed to be more "filler" movies made for the sake of being made rather than because there were good ideas behind them.

Jim, yes, I noticed how active everything was in those old days. Threads would have a lot of replies fairly quickly, but you have to remember that this site was the equivalent of social media for all of them then. Film-Tech was likely the main online interaction with others for people here. I left it up in a browser most of the time at work and refreshed it every now and then to see what comments had been left. I think there were a lot more theatres and more staff then and more people with a general interest in theatres and cinematography then.

Another big change is the decline of the printed daily newspaper. Theatres ran daily showtimes ads. Newspapers declined rapidly and theatres stopped bothering to put showtimes ads in them. Newspapers got more narrow and shorter and had fewer pages until people stopped buying them. Huntsville, AL stopped having a printed newspaper years ago and it had gotten so small that nobody hardly cared. The online version isn't even local but is run from Birmingham 100 miles away. There are also no local media outlets. The three main TV stations here are all owned be media companies elsewhere.

Many malls have declined and are either dead or closed and even demolished, and many were also sites of movie theatres, either attacted or as outparcels. I couldn't have imagined that at all in the early 2000s. In my city, what was the largest best mall within nearly 100 miles slowly declined and closed and was demolished. It was where you went to be guaranteed to see someone you knew and look around at a lot of things and eat and go to the movies as well. It was a wonderful "third space" that no longer exists that is missed by many.

Attention spans - do any teenagers have the attention span fora. 90 minute to 2 hour movie? Even in 2012 at the venue I was involved with, if we didn't stir them up in various ways, they'd all sit around and be on their phones instead of interacting with each other. I don't think many people under 30 could stand to not look at their phone to see their social media or whatever. I admit it has affected me somewhat as well. Social media has forced content to be shorter and shorter. Oh, and shooting everything vertically instead of horizontally. Don't even get me started. We spent decades getting screens to be wider in the home and on our computers for all the teenagers to undermine it with those vertical videos in just a couple of years.

I could not have predicted any of these major changes 25 years ago when active here. I'd have thought that everything would have kept getting bigger and better.

[Edit: Leo, your post came in while I was writing this one. I too have less interest in movies and it's almost as if my mind became untuned for them by 2006 or so. I found myself getting frustrated by the tactics used like the fake resolution, the whole overused plot of "boy meets girl, something breaks them up, boy spends rest of movie trying to get back with girl", overemphasis on special effects and CGI rather than plot and substance, my ability to predict and dread what they're going to do, etc. It was obvious that movies were being made with a formula and less and less for the viewers]

[Steve Guttag]

Hey Evans was one of the few F-T people to have his own emoji (the long hair).

Honestly, I think it is the lack of film itself for the reason why F-T doesn't have the activity it used to. It's a different crowd that tends to film versus digital. Yeah, there are those that made the transition but, by and large, it's an entirely different vibe. I'm fortunate that film remains in my world. It isn't at the level it once was but with sites like the AFI/Silver and the Library of Congress, I get to work with it still. Film people remain film people.

[Mike Blakesley]

I too have less interest in movies and it's almost as if my mind became untuned for them by 2006 or so.

These days I find myself judging a movie (before it comes out) based on how well I think it'll do, vs. wanting to see it myself. Out of all the stuff coming out this summer, the only ones I'm really interested in watching are "Disclosure Day," "Toy Story 5," and "Coyote Vs. Acme." (I was intrigued by "Supergirl," but the marketing has done a good job of making it look like a pile of crap, so I'm less interested now.)

Another big change is the decline of the printed daily newspaper. Theatres ran daily showtimes ads.

We still have a local newspaper, thankfully, but it's run by an out of town company so the "local" content is slim. We stopped advertising in it a long time ago. What convinced me was, I had given them two weeks of ads in advance, and they accidentally ran the second week's ad in the first week's paper. That ad was for one of the Spider-man movies. Not one person came in thinking we were showing Spider-Man, so I realized that no one was seeing our ads. After we stopped running them, I got zero complaints, which cemented it.

The other thing that's changing, is we hardly get any phone calls anymore. People use the website. I guess that's fine, I don't particularliy like answering the phone anyway. This being a small town, I remember the days when we'd have a popular kids movie, people used to drop off their kids to the show, and we would then get 30 or 40 phone calls asking what time the show would be out.

I think it is the lack of film itself for the reason why F-T doesn't have the activity it used to. It's a different crowd that tends to film versus digital. Yeah, there are those that made the transition but, by and large, it's an entirely different vibe.

Yeah. Every film projector and transport system had its own quirks and all the various things that could happen with film were great for discussions. Plus the pics were more interesting.

[Evans A Criswell]

Steve, I remember that emoji. They took my old profile photo and made it from that. old_film_tech_icon.jpgI joined before profile pics were a thing and remember not having to send one in because they made it from a photo of myself that I had posted. Evans_In_Office_199708221200_smaller.jpgIt was taken August 22, 1997 in my office. One of the admins (probably Brad) cropped my face area and made an icon before he started telling people to send him photos. The icon was just there and later someone made an emoji out of it (except I don't thing we called them that then). Check out that Silicon Graphics Indy with that HUGE CRT monitor on it. It was my second SGI desktop machine, with my first one being an Indigo in 1992. Everything was UNIX (SGI Irix) in my work environment. I think I still have that shirt and the white pants too and that nice Huntsville map on the wall behind me. By the time I was registered on Film-Tech, I was in an office in a different building and everyone had been switched to Windows machines.

[Steve Guttag]

I want to say that emoji had an exaggerated length of hair (like double-long).

[Evans A Criswell]

Steve, I don't know. In May 1997 my hair got to 33 and a half inches long! I started growing it April 30, 1991 and it got long by mid 1992 (past shoulder length) and it's been well past shoulder length long ever since. I'm thankful to still be able to grow it at age 57.

[Marcel Birgelen]

Check out that Silicon Graphics Indy with that HUGE CRT monitor on it. It was my second SGI desktop machine, with my first one being an Indigo in 1992. Everything was UNIX (SGI Irix) in my work environment. I think I still have that shirt and the white pants too and that nice Huntsville map on the wall behind me. By the time I was registered on Film-Tech, I was in an office in a different building and everyone had been switched to Windows machines.

I immediately recognized that machine, the "poor man's SGI workstation"...

The SGI Indy, for some reason, was one of my favorite desktops, a quirky little machine, sometimes it would overheat, but it beat Windows at every opportunity. IRIX is something to get used to, but compared to Linux back then, it just worked out-of-the-box and once you go UNIX...

From the Indy I went to the Indigo2, but that was pretty short-lived. I went to an O2 shortly afterwards... good memories, machines built like a tank, a little like your average 35mm projector...

Wasn't a regular on FIlm-Tech back then, more like an anonymous lurker, but around that time, I did work for several cinemas, both in the booth and as "the guy that knows computers"...

My hair has seen periods of equal lengths back then.

Anyway, welcome back!

[Evans A Criswell]

From the Indy I went to the Indigo2, but that was pretty short-lived.

The Indigos and Indys were just our desktop machines. We had two large refrigerator-sized SGIs as servers that we spent a lot of time shelled into. We had two Indigo2 machines in another lab where I later spent a lot of time working. I loved the SGI machines. One of our Indigo2 machines was rock solid but the other was flaky and froze every day or two. Although it was faster, its flakiness made me not want to depend on it.

By the time I was registered on Film-Tech, everyone had been using Windows machines as their desktop computers since at the time, Intel chips were getting faster and could beat the speed of a lot of the UNIX workstations and cost a lot less so it was pretty much the end of that era. We used terminal programs under Windows (putty I think) to login to the SGI servers. Eventually all those got replaced with Linux servers.

When I registered here, a 20 to 40 GB external drive was typical. Think of how infeasible it was to store a bunch of music or video on a live online magnetic drive. You had to write a bunch of CD-Rs to back them up. A lot of what we stored on drives except for JPEG photos compressed quite well since it was text. Think about all of the text from 1999 to now on this site and how much space it would take.