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Usually its a flat rate for older titles, some others take a flat rate plus 17.5% of the boxoffice.

-Aaron

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The problem is that if you're a non-profit or educational institution, you must go through a company called Swank, which is by reputation the hellish offspring of Satan & Zippy the Pinhead. Swank has been licensed to handle distribution & exhibition rights for 35mm, 16mm & video to non-profit groups for most of the studios. Swank's prints are of varying, often crappy quality. It's been pointed out that if a venue's got good connections, they can get a good print from some other source without having to worry about what kind of print Swank will serve up to them, but Swank must still be paid for the exhibition rights in whatever weird &/or exorbitant &/or incorrectly surcharged &/or surprise additional amounts added after the show manner Swank dictates.

If you're a commercial, for-profit theater, you deal with the studios' rep divisions & their prints.

I really think that non-profit PAC's, in order not to deal with Swank, need to set up for rep showings a for-profit company to promote & produce the shows just so they can get good prints, & then the company would deal with the theater like any other rental. Another reason to have the show put on by a for-profit entity is that Swank for the lower non-profit & educational rates *prohibits* advertising the show. If it decides afterwards that you have advertised the show, or that you're not really education or non-profit, they'll bill you for the higher commercial rate which includes a percentage of admissions. This will be after you've closed the books on the show, which may have had film rental budgeted to be covered by a sponsor, & the whole thing becomes an immediate nightmare bill. If it was a series, you see how it can Run Into Money.

The horror stories about Swank are numerous & ghastly. Swank has also claimed to handle the rights & demand to be paid for titles it *doesn't* control, & to tell someone who asked about he availability of a title that it was unavailable in the US, when actually it was known by them to be distributed by another company. Swank's rep of course helpfully suggested other titles which Swank *did* handle.

As far as I can tell, the only thing Swank works for & is good for is something like college student "cheap date" films & videos shown in the Student Union.

Outside of major US studio titles, there are companies which distribute foreign titles in the US & things like silent films; companies like Kino & Douris. They do not deal through Swank, they handle their own distribution to commercial & non-profit theaters. The studios just sort of slung it all off to Swank for non-profits, & apparently neither know nor care how Swank operates.

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As well as others:
http://www.cinemaweb.com/
http://www.kino.com/
http://webdev.archive.org/movies/movies.php

No, Thomas, Swank is generally not that bad for 35mm. For 90% of the cases, you don't get a "Swank print," you get whatever TES or ETS sends you, and you're in the same boat as the rest of the universe. For a few rare cases there are "Swank prints" or films (generally for some WB titles...), and then you may get a print that's been at the mercy of Swank's Film Done Wrong(tm) customers...

That said, I certainly don't like them and they do seem to serve the function of "middleman who makes no one happy."

--jhawk

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I've only run one 35mm print from Swank (at a military theatre) and it had obviously been run before, but was basically mint, with leaders not cut. It was shipped from TES, but labelled "Swank" with a single-digit print number, and thus appears to have come from a different inventory from the normal 35mm theatrical prints. In some ways I guess this makes sense, as Swank prints are likely to end up in the hands of poorly trained operators (at colleges, etc.) at some point, though. On the other hand, there are plenty of poorly trained operators at the gigaplexes, too, and plenty of caring people involved in college film societies.

I do agree, though, that the company serves mostly as an annoying middleman who has exclusive rights to certain types of programming and certain markets and tends to be overpriced and difficult to deal with. The other nontheatrical distributors I have dealt with (New Yorker Films, Criterion Pictures, Biograph, KPF [RIP], and a few others) seemed to be less expensive and offered better customer service.

I'm not sure what your experience here is with Swank. We book about about 40 titles a year from Swank, in 35mm. And less than 10% of them are Swank prints (probably more like 5%? I'd have to go total up stats). Swank does not maintain their own inventory of 35mm prints.

The only way that Swank gets a 35mm print that's seperate from the studio's inventory is when the studio sets aside some prints for their usage, which only happens in extremely limitted instances (less than 10%), and only with specific studios (e.g. WB); and also when a Swank customer pays Swank to arrange for a studio to strike a new print, though that's even more rare. Furthermore, even for the so-called "Swank prints," they are actually handled by TES (even for ETS studios, like WB), and not shipped by Swank.

Now, 16mm is an entirely different ballgame, and I won't address it [could that be what you were referring to?].

Anyhow, on the face of it, your statement "If you get a good print from Swank, it likely means they didn't have a print, got it from the studio's rep division, & made it your very luck day" is extremely misleading. It is the normal case for Swank to direct studios to send their own prints. It is the extreme exception for Swank to stock a print. Now, the likelyhood of a "Swank print" goes up some with "popular rep titles," but it's definitely not in the "very lucky" area.

How statistically significant is your dataset?

--jhawk

This is definitely true. Swank has a huge library of 16mm prints though. They are somewhat hit or miss, but I haven't seen many terrible 16mm prints come from them.

jhawk, myself and some others had a rather lengthy discussion about this and other aspects of Swank's business in a couple of threads. A search might provide some interesting info.

This new theater concept will (hopefully) be a for-profit entity! It will run only retro/classic 35mm prints, which is the cause for concern. Swank's 35mm availability list on the web (link in earlier message) was very impressive but now I hear from my esteemed collegues that it is hit or miss. However, I suspect that the big audience pullers (like the Casablanca or Hitchcock pictures, for instance) are generally around.

I do have two questions though:

1. If the studios do not have a 35mm print available... say, Elvis' BLUE HAWAII for instance, which is not on the Swank list... but a collector print is available, what are the chances they would allow me to pay them the rental and screen my own print?

2. Is there a low cost theater video projection system around that is not in the price range of the new DLP systems? I'm thinking about using such a system to run public domain shorts and trailers prior to a 35mm feature. Quality would not be an ultra-critical issue here as the preprint materials would be mostly B&W. If I do this I wonder what the video source would have to be to get a decent picture... Betacam, Digi-Beta, a High Def transfer played off a hard drive?

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John P. Pytlak, Senior Technical Specialist
Worldwide Technical Services, Entertainment Imaging
Research Labs, Building 69, Room 7525A
Rochester, New York, 14650-1922 USA
Tel: +1 585 477 5325 Cell: +1 585 781 4036 Fax: +1 585 722 7243
e-mail: john.pytlak@kodak.com
Web site: http://www.kodak.com/go/motion