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Topic: UNIVERSAL RENTALS ?

Steve Matz
Jedi Master Film Handler

Posts: 672
From: Billings, Montana, USA
Registered: Sep 2003

posted 05-21-2014 05:31 PM

Back in the 70's I use to rent a lot of films from UNIVERSAL 16, They also had a 35mm Rental Library appropriately called UNIVERSAL 35. I know the 16mm Library is History but someone told me that they still maintain a large 35mm Rental Library perhaps renamed.

I was wanting to rent the two 3D Features "It came from outer Space & "Creature from the Black Lagoon that Universal in the 70's made into single strip anaglyphic Prints. I had rented these 2 Titles in 16mm back around 1976 and showed them on my Eastman 30 and was actually quite impressed with the 3D Quality. I thought they had only done this for the 16mm field but was told they also had produced 35mm Prints. The process was actually pretty simple in theory. They printed the 2 seperate B&W color tinted negatives on a single strip of Color Release Positive Film.

I kind of wondered why this wasn't done this way back in the 50's when 2 Projectors were required to show 3D back then but maybe they didn't have a Contact Printer capable of that Function or the 3D quality may have not met what they desired for a larger Theater Screen.

I showed the 16mm Prints on a 12ft wide matte screen back then and I thought the quality was Good. Would like to see a 35mm Showing on a 25ft Screen. Im going to be projecting it with a Devry XD 2810 if there available...

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Scott Norwood
Film God

Posts: 8146
From: Boston, MA. USA (1774.21 miles northeast of Dallas)
Registered: Jun 99

posted 05-21-2014 05:39 PM

Call Paul Ginsburg's office at Universal. They will set you up for repertory bookings. They are one of the best distributors to deal with; pretty much anything in their library is $250 vs 35%. Shipping is via DHL at about $100 per title for delivery. Return can be by Fedex Ground (which will be cheaper) if you get their permission in advance.

It Came from Outer Space was reprinted in 35mm in 2004 and the print (single-strip anaglyph) that I ran in 2006 was nearly mint.

If you want 16mm, you can get that through Swank.

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Steve Matz
Jedi Master Film Handler

Posts: 672
From: Billings, Montana, USA
Registered: Sep 2003

posted 05-21-2014 08:39 PM

Thanks Scott I will give him a Call! [thumbsup]

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Frank Angel
Film God

Posts: 5305
From: Brooklyn NY USA
Registered: Dec 1999

posted 05-31-2014 04:09 PM

I second Scott's praise of Universal and Paul Ginsburg -- very helpful as an actual "classics" department where you aren't made to feel that asking to book an old titles is an reall annoyance to them.

A word about CREATURE and ICFOS -- 1) anaglyphic, while it does allow you to see the 3D, it is VERY hard on the eyes, forcing each eye to "white balance" in totally opposite directions and 2) these titles are over 50 years old. Even though anaglyphic prints were struck from the original negs, each film strip had suffered the shrinkage independently of each other. Alignment of those two images, whether on a single strip of film or in dual projection, is very problematic -- if you watch the edges of objects in the two images when projected, you will see those image are move randomly around each other in all directions and a lot of the time VERY dramatically out of alignment.

Using the glasses, you don't see that independent movement, but the nature of the 3D is that your eyes muscles and brain are forcing you to converge those irratic images; that means your eyes are forced to move in that SAME independent way, irratic and randomly, sometimes actually in circles.

Now whereas our eye muscles can easily converge horizontally, that's how we see 3D in real life, but in real life they almost never have to converge in the vertical plane. These two pictures, because the mis-registration is in all directions, including vertical, it can cause real eye strain and headaches. Just imagine your left eye needing to follow the left image upward, while the right eye is been forced to follow the image downward! Yes, these are slight mis-movements, but this is happening CONSTANTLY for 90min.

I made the BIG mistake of running both these anaglypics as a double bill. I had audence members complaining loudly of headaches. I had three cases of severe nausia.

I have no idea if Universal has digitally corrected for the misalignment in these 2006 prints; they may have done so for the BR releases, but the question really is, was this work incorporated into a new negative for the 35mm prints? I would definately ask Paul about that. And I definately would NEVER run them as a double feature.

Lesson learned.

Oh, and that "white balance" that the eyes do. If you want to see a practical demonstration of it, just put those glass on and wear them for to minutes. Then take them off and cover one eye and note the over all hue of the scene -- has a decided coloration. If it was the eye that had the green filter, the real life scene you see will have a VERY unnatural red cast. Now cover that eye and open the other. That will have a very green cast -- each eye trying to compensate to make real life look "normal" so that the color of faces, very important in our evolution, are true. Which is why when we used to have to adjust the hue on our old color tvs, we instinctively adjusted so that faces look closest to natural, no matter what that did to the colors of everything else. The severe chroma unbalance that anaglyphic causes between the eyes rarely happens in real life.

And THAT boys and girls, is why we HATE anaglyphic...not to mention the hurled lunch found in our women's room after that 3D double feature feasco.

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