• number of reels
  
• footage of reels
  
• type of film [ESTAR, acetate, etc.]
  
• condition of specific prints of the film
  

The way it would work would be that projectionists and others involved in the film industry would add data as they encounter specific films. If you show a film and it's missing footage in reel 2, post it. Then, if the distributor replaces the footage, they could post it here too.

Some of the reasons that I propose this:

• See post entitled "Number of reels." Summary: John Pytlak says that published info usually does not include something as simple as number of reels.
  
• The IMDB is frequently inaccurate.
  
• See post entitled "Unfortunate evidence of film done wrong" where Dave Bird quotes the commentary track of My Fair Lady to the effect that: restorations are great, but prints are often butchered.
  
• At the same time, some prints are kept in great shape. See post: "Enter stage left ... Moulin Rouge" where John Wilson asks to get his own print back. Well, not everyone gets a movie twice, but those who care enough can share info about specific prints that are good.
  
• There seems to be a general consensus on this forum that "Integrity Inspection" is useless because so little of the film is actually looked at. But there's another, extremely detailed, source of inspection: all the caring projectionists who hand-check and project the film. Of course, not everyone will participate, but it's better than the spotty info that we have.
  
• Projection seems to be craft where some people have a tremendous amount of knowledge, but data is often circulated only via word-of-mouth. Film-Tech has helped to circulate knowledge; could there be a more efficient/effective way of circulating data?
  

Of course, if I do this, it'll be quite an undertaking. So I don't want to go ahead with coding something this big if it will not be useful to people. Please post comments and suggestions. Do you see any downsides to this? Am I being naive in believing that studios, depots, and exhibitors could all work together when complaining about Technicolor reels only results in even flimsier Technicolor reels?

Yup!

Such a website will never work because the studios will never bother to update it. Also, studios never replace "footage" anymore. If the print starts to get that bad, they either keep sending it back out, junk it, or strike a new one. Then there's also the issue of some titles being printed on various film stocks, which prints ended up getting junked and which ones did not, projectionists (who honestly would be your only real source for good information) having the time to keep updating it, and the fact that no two people will rate a print's condition the same. Even here in the "Feature Info" forum we see discrepancies between theaters on prints received.

Since getting this type of information is difficult, I imagine that creating a WWW site devoted to print information would be extremely difficult. To have any hope of making it work, you'd need a large network of booth staff from a lot of theatres just to capture a small subset of the data about specific prints that have problems.

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Evans A Criswell
Huntsville-Decatur Movie Theatre Information Site

quote:

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Yup! Such a website will never work because the studios will never bother to update it.

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quote:

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The members of Film-Tec give very accurate date in the Feature Info and Trailer Attachments forum.

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• What about older films? Posts "Requesting Info for Film X" appear on Feature Info Forum from time to time. But if everyone who ran older films did this, then that forum would get swamped.
  
• People don't always check that forum as often as the Film Handlers Forum, so it might take a while to get data.
  

Because of the need to rely on a somewhat large network of people (not to mention the fact that many projectionists are not online), it probably won't work. But that was the idea.

Thanks for the comments.

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Tao Yue
MIT '04: Course VI-2, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Projectionist, MIT Lecture Series Committee