With special thanks to Gordon McLeod, I managed to track down a set of 70mm "Indian Jones Trilogy" prints in Canada. Except for a little fading on "Raiders" these prints look and sound brand new. If anyone keeps track they are all over ten years old. This little endeavour started out as three weekends of midnight movies on Friday and Saturday nights, it has turned into a three week run. And quite a bit of money has been put into shipping the prints here and a bunch of extra advertising.

I have a union contract for a guaranteed 32 hours/week, the rest of the time the managers run the booth during their shifts. The managers do an excellent job at threading up and pushing the start button, but for the most part this is the end of their knowledge. The head manager who has been here for close to a year just found out last week what the two boxes on the wall of the office were for. They are the remote boxes for the projectors and the CP500. Perhaps, this is a separate training issue on my part, but that is beside the point I am about to make. So of course, knowing that the managers have never run 70mm before and I am only one person I called on another trusted projectionist to come help me run the booth. Earlier this week I found out that General Cinemas is only going to allow one week of a fulltime projectionist on duty. During this one week we are supposed to train the managers on how to run 70mm.

Yeah right. Sure. No problem. Just two weeks ago we had a week long run of "The Matrix" and it left with scratches in it because one of the managers threaded the platter wrong, pushed the start button, and came back two hours later to thread up for the next show. This is not to talk down the managers abilities to do their jobs, because that rarely happens. However, about 5% of their job is to run the booth. The other 95% of their job is to keep the downstairs up and running. The projection booth is the last thing on their mind.

Scratching a 35mm print of "The Matrix" is one thing, but damaging a 70mm print of Indiana Jones is a whole new ball game. Especially, when I spent a half an hour on the phone with the guy at the Paramount Film office in Toronto discussing the apalling treatment of 70mm prints in general. Then, I gave the guy my word that we would be careful with the prints and he would get them back in the condition that he sent them to us. With two midnight screenings of each print this was no problem.

If General Cinemas wanted to commit to a week long run of each print then they should have figured on spending the money to atleast have a fulltime projectionist for the three weeks. I don't know maybe I am just out of touch with the whole budgetting process and shouldn't even be worried. But it seems like a lot of preparation and money has already went into this and then to skimp on show quality is a little backwards. The managers can get away with pushing the start button and running back downstairs in a world where replacement reels are readily available, but doing this when there are some very rare 70mm prints being run is definitely not alright in my book. Plus the whole process of running 70mm and mag sound takes a little more babysitting, especially when we are expecting a huge turn out for this.

Although I doubt there is any solution to this problem because I have no say in the matter, I felt I at least needed to post this ridiculous situation here for everyone to be aware of. Oddly enough even the managers here at the Cinerama were shocked when they heard the news of this. Since my reputation and the Cinerama's relationship with Paramount is at stake I will probably end up coming in to work for free on my off hours because I am not letting anything happen to those prints, at least not while they are here at my theater.

Your dedication to "Doing Film Right" is wonderful. You are very correct that the scarcity of good 70mm prints today DEMANDS that only people SKILLED and EXPERIENCED in running 70mm should be allowed to handle the film. Is this something that Steven Geiger (GCC Booth Manager) or Tim Reed could support you on as your try to convince GCC management of the need to "bend the rules" for this special engagement?

Never take anything for granted and never let anyone except someone who has demonstrated that they can actually can do the job and ,most importantly, is competent to react quickly to any problem anywhere near the dwindling supply of good quality 70mm prints.

Ranting is very much justified in this case(I think, anyway.) It's typical that one of the workers cares more about the prints than the upper managment. And it's common for upper managment types to "forget" that untrained people are being made to work the booth, and blame the operators for any screw-ups.

I purposely disconnected the start button at a theater I worked at for the exact reason Dave described. It is not needed at theaters with only a few screens, and in fact causes more trouble than it's worth. I suggest you cut the wire to the start button.. the shit you might get for that will be less than for trashing a 70mm print.

No wonder no one wants 70mm prints....

Thinking that we would certainly be showing it, I got three-bladed shutters for our screen 1 machines, cut plates to show full-gate silent with our scope backing lenses, worked out a way of offsetting them for the optical centre of the full-gate frame and added an extra intake fan to the lamphouses in order to cope with a bit of extra current (this being to compensate for the light loss from the shutters). Several hours of blood, sweat and tears later we had a perfect, 16 foot lambert, totally flicker-free picture running at 16fps.

Then I found out that programmer had not been quick enough in booking the only print that's available for general distribution over here. So I called a contact at the National Film and Television Archive and she agreed to loan us their hand-tinted print of the 1998 Munich Film Museum restoration. Normally they would never let that print go anywhere besides the National Film Theatre in London, but my contact knows that I'll look after it, and agreed to let me have it.

I rang HO again to let them know what I thought they would regard as very good news - and got brushed off with excuses about how it would be difficult to publicise the show at short notice blah blah blah. Not only would it have been a chance to have about the only screening of this tinted print outside London, but I did all the work for them, and even provided contacts for musicians to provide the soundtrack. But it seems they're just not willing to follow it up.

That really PISSES ME OFF! I spend a lot of my time putting their friggin' machines back together after they are done tearing them apart (and sometimes LITERALLY tearing them apart!) only to see them tossing film on the floor as if it doesn't matter!