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

[Marcel Birgelen]

Going completely off-topic here, but I guess the euhm... topic of this topic was already not really set in stone...

SGI and Sun Spark workstations used to be lightyears ahead of anything you could do on a PC or even high-end Mac. Maybe NeXT came close.

But yeah, SGI went the way of the dodo once Wintel boxes became cheaper and "mostly as good" as the far more expensive Unix workstations. We had a mix of SGI boxes and Sun machines, but I always preferred the SGI machines, I never really became friends with Solaris and I found those boxes to be slow and clunky... And with SGI, you could always brag that those were the machines that made Jurassic Park.

Back in the late 1990s, we had access to an SGI Origin 2000 with god knows how many CPUs and gigabytes of memory (even back then), paid for by government money. Nobody did anything useful with it and the usage accounting was manically broken. So we used it as our personal plaything. I guess I learned a lot on that system, like how to write stuff for distributed systems.

But it's all gone now... Your mobile phone now has more processing power than the $50k workstation of back then... What used to be the SGI headquarters is now the Googleplex, the absolute epicenter of the massive Google headquarters. But it was SGI who eventually fueled the early success of Nvidia, without SGI, there would probably never been an Nvidia... no Donkey Kong, no Jurassic Park, no Goldeneye (the N64 game)... and possibly even no Google Earth...

I still remember times when 20 GByte sounded like infinite storage... That's what my PlayStation (which I last touched like a year ago) now considers a small update... Then again, I remember the agony of downloading a 5 MB MP3 over 33k6 like it's yesterday... or juggling around with stacks of 24 disks via CPBackup from one machine to the other... Monkey Island 2 came on 11 disks on the Amiga... Windows 95 on 28... but you could do with 15 if you had Windows 3.11 on MS DOS 6.0 already installed!
</nerd mode>

[Evans A Criswell]

Ah, I guess any comparison between now and 25 years ago could be considered "on-topic".

One thing I remember was in one thread back then, there was this silly joke that came up insinuating that two people were the same person on the forums (Brad and Joe) and I actually captured a bunch of their text from posts and did a statistical analysis showing the most common words each used with the percentages and Brad soon responded with a comment that used none of his 10 most commonly used words. This was 3-4 years before I wrote a program that could generate a concordance for my personal journal and later on I changed it so it could create such a thing for any set of text files. Eventually, I added the ability to search and find all blocks of N words (say 100 words) that contain a list of search words and if I'd known that would become the most-used method, I'd have done it much sooner. On the 20th anniversary of writing the program, I added more features and gave it an interactive mode so searches could be done on the terminal rather than having to load the web pages. It's a program I use more often than any other program I've ever written.

Posting and commenting here on Film-Tech reminds me of the "good old days" when software was predictable and worked as expected. Hitting enter goes to a new line instead of making the post. There aren't little ads and animations everywhere. Things don't pop up where you are about to click to cause you to click the wrong thing or an ad. Real people are reading and responding. There is no "algorithm" to attempt to manipulate. I'd say that at least half of my Facebook and Instagram usage is liking and failing to click like on things not based on how much I like them, but by how I want to affect the algorithms as far as what they continue to show me (or not show me as often). Everything here on Film-Tech seems driven by real people and software written in a direct way with predictable behavior. If I Google something while this page is open, I don't have to worry about suddenly being blasted with ads related to what I Googled for days afterward or it changing what the algorithm shows me.

A big change in the last 25 years is the changeover from many mechanical processes to non-mechanical ones. Going from the mechanical process of showing film to projecting a digital movie file happened far more quickly than I expected. I remember going to the old Carmike 8 location in Decatur, AL and they were using digital projection. Everything I knew and had been using to rate theatre projection was mostly outdated and irrelevant. With digital came a new set of problems, such as them seeing to have the projector in "3D mode" for a short while when starting the previews. The projection was so much brighter and clearer when they switched that the vertical screen seams were visible when a bright light-colored image was shown. That theatre closed within the next few years after a new complex was build at the Beltline Mall and a church is now in the old Carmike 8. Sadly, I've never been to the new one at the mall. The old Regal River Oaks 8 behind the mall was closed and later demolished. The old 1960s Gateway Theatre which had been later twinned and quadded, was a second-run theatre run by Regal that closed in mid-May 2000. It wasn't demolished until within the past few years.

In Athens, AL, the Cinemagic Drive-In that opened in 1997 was expanded with a 5-screen indoor theatre build to accompany the drive-in. It opened May 2006. It closed a couple of years ago and a church is in it now, I believe.

Here in Huntsville, AL, I'd mentioned earlier that the Regal Hollywood 18 closed with the pandemic and never reopened and was demolished. The Madison Square 12 closed and was town down due to all the "Mid City" development that took the place of the old Madison Square Mall. The Carmike 10 was a second-run theatre for a while and was taken over by AMC, later closed and sits unused as far as I know. The old Regal 8 (Cobb Cinema 8) closed May 2000 just two months after I originally registered here. It's a Goodwill now. Carmike University 6 which opened June 1977 (Consilidated Theatres 4-plex then), is a church. The old Trans-Lux twin from 1970 closed February 1993 is an Advance Auto Parts after being many restaurants and a furniture store. The old Westbury CInerama was taken out in the November 1989 tornado with Westbury Shopping Center, rebuilt in 1990-1991. The Madison Theatre at Parkway City Mall became a Yeilding ladies' clothing store and later a Castner-Knott home store and was demolished with the old mall before Parkway Place Mall was built there. The Alabama Theatre closed around 1986 was demolished and a Costco sits roughly where it was. The Lyric Theatre downtown burned in 1982 after closing at the end of 1978 and there is still a blank place there where no new building was ever built to fill the space in. Across from it is a club, Sammy T's, with a Martin Bar and Bistro upstairs, and it is named after the Martin Theater which closed in 1982 in that building.

It would be interesting to see how many theatres that were running in early 2000 that are still operating now in other large cities nearby.

Not just movie theatres have declined in number, but music/video stores mostly disappeared. If you see a store in a mall with CDs and/or DVDs, it's usually a store selling used ones and some stores seem to be doing well in a few malls doing that. There is no store where one can browse new CDs and movies and such except the bare-bones selection that Wal-Mart has.

Book stores have declined as well. Barnes and Noble still has a lot of stores, but there is no place with a good selection of technical books. When I registered here, the university book store, Barnes and Noble, and Madison Books and Computers all had vast selections of computer and technical books covering science and engineering areas. That dwindled over the years and Barnes and Noble, the last store, downsized it and downsized it and now only a very small 8-boot-wide section remains for computer-related books here. Of course, the ability to lookup so much online and support libraries for so many languages being too large to fit into a describe within one book, as well as how quickly they go out of date, has doomed reference books for the most part.

Software has really changed. Nearly everything wants to be connected and online and be updated all the time, sometimes for better, sometimes for worse. The idea of having an app for everything rather than it being a web site, with the app limiting functionality, is often frustrating. Everything done is saved and logged somewhere and sold to advertisers. Software isn't designed to be easy and non-frustrating to use, but designed to trick you into clicking something that appears between the time your finger starts moving to click and when your finger hits the phone screen, or it is tricky, appearing to be something legitimate when it's an ad or a link to something harmful. Everything has to be as clean and featureless as possible, with advanced functionality hidden away somewhere with options that might go away or change with the next update.

[Rick Raskin]

Hey Evans, glad to see you posting again. I can't remember when I first became a FT member, but its probably at least 25 or more years ago. I joined FT after Brad contacted me about my experiences at the AFI nitrate fire in 1975 at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC. I occasionally worked that venue but mostly in the AFI screening room for private parties. I was a union projectionist in Washington DC back then but got out of the business sometime around the mid 1970s. I retired from Verizon in 2003 where I had specialized in broadband certification and testing. I still have a fondness for film but like you, rarely go to theaters anymore.

[Mike Blakesley]

It would be interesting to see how many theatres that were running in early 2000 that are still operating now in other large cities nearby.

The situation in Montana isn't so good in some places.

• Butte (population about 30,000) has no indoor theater at all, to my knowledge, after the Carmike Plaza 6 there closed. In the film days, they were known for their ability to shred film. You never wanted to play a print that had been in Butte. They do still have a drive-in showing current movies.
• Dillon (population 4,000) had a two-screen cinema with a 50-year history that was closed just a few weeks ago, with the land being sold to a restaurant developer who is planning to tear it down and build a Taco Bell.
• Hardin (pop. 4,000), a single screen, never reopened after Covid.
• Laurel (pop. 7,500) had a single that burned down in the '90s, then had a three screen combined with a coffee shop that was built in a repurposed grocery store building. As projectors failed, it dwindled to two and then one screen, and finally converted to a gift-shop with occasional movies sponsored by local businesses before closing for good last fall.
• Sidney (pop. 6,500), another single, was struggling before Covid, was sold, and reopened briefly but is now closed.
• Whitefish (pop. 8,000) had a twin owned by the same company that owned the Dillon theatre, but it closed when one of the big chains opened an eight-plex in Kalispell, about 10 miles away.

There may be other casualties I'm not aware of but those are bad enough. You would think every one of those towns SHOULD be able to support a theater.

On the other side of the ledger, the 600-seat single screen in Miles City (pop. 9,000) closed for Covid, sat for three years, and was sold to a family who spent 18 months remodeling it into a three-screen cinema -- two screens with 49 seats each and one with 200 seats. It reopened in 2022 just in time for Top Gun Maverick and features first-run movies along with occasional stage productions by the local theater company.

And Glendive (pop. 5,000) built a new building with one screen some years ago. I heard they were intending to add another screen, but instead it evolved into a "family fun center" instead, with bowling and other games in addition to first-run movies.

Oh, and my theatre in Forsyth (pop. 1,700) is still kicking it as a first-run single. We're getting a new screen this summer to replace our 16-year-old one.

[Lyle Romer]

Good to see you back Evans! Congrats on retiring so young! I used to enjoy many of your posts "back in the day." I ended up on film-tech way back because of my interest in the technical side of film projection and film sound. When I was in high school I had a job at the GCC Mission Bay Plaza in Boca Raton, FL. The head projectionist, Mark Moore (RIP, he passed last November), was happy to teach me about projectors and sound systems. I'd spend a lot of my breaks visiting him in the booth and watching him build prints, thread shows. The most impressive thing to watch was when he would set up some crazy interlocks. The booth was an offset "T" shape and he set it up so that any two screens could be interlocked and up to all 8 could be.

He told me about Film-Tech (I forget which member on here told him about it). I liked to use the site to get insight into technical things as well as learn some operational stuff from others. I had become "Chief of Staff" at Mission Bay (which sounds a lot more prestigious than it was) before becoming an Assistant Manager at the Coral Square 8 in Coral Springs, FL so the "ground level" stuff became insightful as well.

I've remained active on the site because I found that a lot of the members continue to post interesting things even though there isn't as much variation in the technical side anymore. I've always liked reading reviews because I've figured out over the years who shares my opinions most often so I can use the reviews as a better indicator about whether I will enjoy a movie. The best thing about this forum is Brad's ban on politics. It's nice to be able to have discussions that don't devolve into "your team sucks, my team is great" arguments.

[Bruce Cloutier]

I got introduced to the cinema and movie theater industry by Kodak where we offered automation for their pre-show systems. They, in fact influenced the design of the Series 3 JNIOR. All that was back around 2003 if I recall. I don't actually remember when I started to participate here in F-T.

There was a time when the concept of a global network showed promise for a better world. I think that went south in the 90's when capitalism got the ill-founded idea that it had profit potential. They threw a tremendous amount of money at the Internet at that point. Then that bubble burst. That was the turning point and now most things online do not work to our benefit. In fact you have to learn how to defend yourself from it.

As for movies, I am so tired of sequels. It demonstrates a lack of creativity and speaks to the only real intent of riding the coattails of a successful (profitable) original movie. I have always feared that a sequel risks damaging the essence that made the original great. This whole thing about each new movie having to top that last, You know, more action, better stunts, bigger plot. It seems that it all has exponentially approached some level to where they all feel like the same noisy exhausting crap.

They need to get creative as it is only a fresh new concept that stands a chance of breaking through that mundane content ceiling. But without brick and mortar cinemas pulling you out of the real world and capturing your senses, it ain't gonna happen.

Streaming brings forth the issue that too many choices are no choices at all. Sure you can sit down in the comfort of your own home for a Saturday night movie only to waste an hour digging through hundreds of free movies and watching trailers trying to decide what to watch. I dread that. There isn't the big feature that everyone you know is getting out to the theater to see and then are all talking about.

We're not better off now than 25 years ago. Sure it is different now and you can there are advantages. I just don't feel as gratified by it as I should. And now we have the threat of AI to deal with.

Evans, I catch myself hitting Shift-Enter even when I don't have to. To your point...