Closest I've been to a premiere was a test screening 20 years ago of THE STUNT MAN. I noticed on that screening that they had an operator stationed at each projector watching the screen all the time.

Mark Lensenmayer

I did host a test screening/premier of a more main stream product -can't remember the title at the moment- and the only thing I remember is that they synched up a full-coat mag donkey projector for the sound.

Richard Rush, Steve Railsback and Barbara Hershey were flown in for the screening.

I always thought special credit should have been given to the crane operator that flew Eli Cross around. That was some VERY smooth work.

Mark L.

We closed the auditorium for the day. A man from Dolby came and did an A-chain and B-chain for the room. He set up the dubber and we ran a test run of the film. The room sat 500 and had 7 QSC MX 1500s and a CP 65 with Dolby Digital, DTS and SDDS. The surrounds had been upgraded from EV TSR8s to JBL 8340s. We ran four EV 18” subwoofers. The room sounded great.

Back in 1987 I handled projection for the west coast premiere (a special benefit screening) of 'La Bamba' at the Luther Burbank Center for the Arts. the light booth that i was having to put the projector was too small to fit two machines let alone a platter so I ran the show on a single [rented]Century SA with 6000' reels and an intermission that lasted about half an hour as the VIPs (to include Esai Morales and the real-life brother and mother of Ritchie Valens)gave a little Q&A session and some other schmoozing as I waited for them to cue me to start the second half.

The next big show was in 1998 for a special screening for visiting universal executives of an unmarried workprint of 'The Jackal' Universal's techs came in and did a once-over on the Sonoma #1 booth and did a complete b-chain on the house, and swapped out the (since replaced) inferior lenses with some of their very high quality ones and the picture was incredible, although we could only squeeze about 13 footlamberts from the CFS console (the brightest I have EVER seen one get on a moderate throw theatre)... The mag fullcoat ran in the room adjacent to the booth on a modified Eprad MUT with the huge reels.

Several months later I was in charge of projection for a special test screening of 'The Virgin Suicides' at the Fairfax Theatre, the Zoetrope techies came in with another unmarried workprint, this time with 6-channel digital sound ( from an 8-channel Tascam digital tape machine synched to the film via a trick timecode generator made from an old DTS reader with a sprocketed large roller and a couple of pad rollers that proved to be mucho trouble, and we modified the thing several times and ended up having to have someone actually hold the film against the sprocket as even with the pad rollers, the film would want to just run right off the sprocket if left to do so. Got to meet Francis Coppola (for the second time, the first was on the set of 'Peggy Sue Got Married' back in 1985) and his daughter Sofia (who directed 'Virgin') and Francis was given a tour of the booth and acted as if he had never seen a platter booth before and was very impressed with everything. The show itself went off flawlessly, and everyone left happy

Aaron

Ian!!

I must correct some gross misrepresentations about you post on Greenwood's
Dracula premiere! Once again you have deceived the world for your own evil
agendas!

#4 never had SDDS until I installed a unit 2 years later. (I put the box in the sound rack, the reader on the projector, and hooked up the cabling ) The SDDS in #9 was
installed by Pat and Sony the day I started (that was a pretty cool day with
all that cool stuff going on). #4 had 4 QSC MX1500a amps. The left, center,
and right amps were also QSC, but they were those huge ones with the vents on
the front (forget the model). The surrounds had not yet been replaced. They
were still those AWESOME EV's. And if you really want to get technical, #4
only sat 494, not 500!! Geeesh!!! Oh, and you forgot that Anthony Hopkins
also showed up (Erika saw him). And how could you forget Winona Ryder? She
was there as well. Surely you hit on her, and therefore must remember that.

Once again I have come along and foiled your evil plans with my
anal-retentiveness!

Joe

(Ah, I remember it well.)

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Rob

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Rob