Special Instructions To Projectionist From Distributors

[Dan Allen]

That's the only projectionist note I've held onto. Didn't Pixar used to occasionally include 'projectionist trading cards' with their movies? I'm pretty sure I have a set of cards somewhere from "UP" that came with the 35mm print when we showed it.

[Mike Blakesley]

Lets not forget Gremlins 2. With the fake film break in the gate.

I remember that one well. I was in the office (from which we can see the screen) and saw it happen, and about broke my legs racing up the stairs. Had my hand on the booth door and looked out to see the shadow puppets on the screen.

I remember being quite impressed at the job they did making it look realistic.

After that first time, it was fun to watch the audience reaction every night.

[Thomas Hauerslev]

More: https://www.in70mm.com/news/2015/letters/index.htm

[Mitchell Dvoskin]

The one I wished I had saved, but didn't was from Woody Allen's movie Manhattan. There was a notice in the can indicating that the film's proper aspect ratio was 2:1. I still remember thinking that we, along with every other theatre I had ever worked in back then, did not have aperture plates nor pre-set screen masking stops for anamorphic with the sides cropped for 2:1. We ran it the standard 2.35 and it looked fine..

Just an amusing aside, the IMDB list the film as being 2:39, but the film was released when the standard for "scope" films was still 2:35.

[Thomas Hauerslev]

AR 2;39:1 was introduced around 1970

[Mitchell Dvoskin]

> AR 2;39:1 was introduced around 1970

I stand corrected.

[Frank Cox]

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[Van Dalton]

There was a notice in a print of Disney's FANTASIA (I made a copy of it, but not where I can find it now) that said be sure to play the Dolby Stereo print in stereo ONLY. Playing it in mono as it will cause very bad phase-shifting distortion. It MUST be played in Stereo, it said. Those original tracks were very badly time misaligned and if you mixed them as a mono signal, yes, the Rodent was right, it would sound like flanging was going on all over the place.

Absolutely it did. I think it was an artefact of the now-primitive late 1930s recording and mastering equipment plus potential time delay added by the telephone transfer of the Fantasound prints that was done in the 50s to prepare the Superscope rerelease, as well as the master tapes it was stored on. It could have also been the tapes were acetate (had to have been, was there polyester yet in the 1950s?) and there might have been some cupping or shrinkage going on which might have contributed. These effects were incredibly evident in the Terry Porter remaster which IIRC was based on that version. I in fact got to hear a 30-year old VHS tape of "Fantasia" in HIFI, albeit through a mono RF connection into the TV, a couple weeks ago at a neighbor's. It was....odd.

Funny, that was basically the same type of setup I used to hear it on as a kid at my grandparent's house in the early 90s and nobody even noticed or said anything about it. Were peoples' standards really THAT low back then?

[James Biggins]

Were peoples' standards really THAT low back then?

With VHS?...Yes.

[Mitchell Dvoskin]

It is my understanding that the original Fantasound mix from the 1940 roadshow presentations of Fantasia was recorded on 35mm motion picture film, with 4 distinct soundtracks spread across the full width of the 35mm film. Fantasound eliminated the academy curve for full frequency response, and raised and lowered the volume for quite vs loud sounds using control tones for added dynamic range, similar to what Perspecta Sound did years later for its speaker control. Fantasound was played back in the 13 theatres that actually ran the film in Fantasound with a custom built optical dubber that was synced to the image projector.

It is true that for the 1956 35mm Mag Stereo release that the sound was sent though telephone lines, but that is somewhat misleading. It was sent from one building on the Disney lot where the Fantasound equipment was located to another building on the lot where the magnetic stereo mastering equipment was located, via internal private phone lines. While the result maintained the full dynamic range, it did loose some of the high frequencies. A few decades ago, I personally got to see and hear an archival 1956 Superscope mag stereo print of Fantasia, and while I was not impressed with the re-formatting of the image for 2:1 scope, the sound was outstanding and blew away the analog Dolby Stereo release.

[Van Dalton]

Did they transfer all three (or four) tracks simultaneously in one pass over multiple lines or individually over one line in four passes? If the latter case I can see where timing issues would occur on the recording tape deck, particularly due to mechanical tolerance and operator imprecision. I can speak from experience from playing around with synchronising mono tracks into stereo on my grandparents' consumer Akai reel-to-reel deck in the 1990s, though the deck/s Disney would have been using would have been professional units (probably 1/2- or 1-inch transports) of far superior quality and workmanship to that unit. It makes me wonder why they didn't just bring recording equipment into the building where the Fantasound equipment was being held and record it directly rather than adding extra loss by going through the company PABX. Was it just that 1950s magnetic recording equipment was too big and cumbersome to be practical, like a huge rack-mounted unit or ?

As I understand they did the transfer both to obtain the recording for the 1956 and future releases, and for preservation (because the original master soundtrack films and Disney's Fantasound system itself were deteriorating). I'm not terribly familiar with how Superscope works, was its audio a discrete system like Cinemascope or 70mm? I can definitely see that it would be far superior to the matrix Dolby version if it was. Interestingly, the 1990 (1991?) Laserdisk release had two different tracks, the Porter Fantasound remaster on the digital track and a mono-with-slight-reverb version on the analogue pair. Was the latter version obtained from the mono failsafe track on the roadshow version or a different (later?) remix? Alternating between the two one can hear that they are definitely two different mixes.

Unrelated, but I remember when reading about the Perspecta system about 20 years ago I noticed how much it resembled an extremely over-simplified (probably even dumbed-down) re-implementation of Fantasound.

With VHS?...Yes.

In the late 1990s (maybe early 2000s) I saw an early DVD-Video player that had an RF output! I can only imagine how horrific it must have looked and sounded, but then I don't remember line-level I/O being as popular at that point as DVD helped it become a few years later and a lot of people did still have TV sets that only had RF inputs.

[Mitchell Dvoskin]

I have no idea the procedures the Disney sound engineers used to transfer the tracks to magnetic, nor I am knowledgeable regarding whether they they transferred it full coat mag 35mm or some form of magnetic audio tape. Remember that magnetic regarding in the USA had only existed for around 10 years at that point, and I do not believe (but do not know) that there were no mass produced recorders for anything more than ¼" tape. The history of the AMPEX Corporation is rather interesting. The founders of the AMPEX Corporation were GI's stationed in England shortly before D-Day. One of them was a recording engineer in civilian life, and wondered how Radio Berlin was able to broadcast hour long classical music concerts, supposedly live while we were bombing the city, or without any breaks between transcription records. After the war, he was stationed in Berlin and went to the radio station to see how they did it, where he discovered BASF tape recorders. They disassembled one and sent it home piece by piece, and when they finally were discharged they reversed engineered it and founded AMPEX.

It is my understanding that neither the Fantasound equipment nor the magnetic mastering equipment was easily (read cheaply) moved due to the fact that both the player and recorder needed be synced with a separate 35mm image roll, and all the peripheral equipment that needed to go along. It was not just a matter of carrying the tape recorder to another building. As 1956 was just about the end of RKO as an active studio and distributor, I doubt that they were willing to spend a penny more than necessary to have Disney remaster.

SuperScope, from an exhibition perspective, was just regular anamorphic CinemaScope with a 2:1 aspect ratio, with black bars on the sides for theatres that did not have 2:1 anamorphic aperture plates.

Perspecta Sound was never real stereo, although it did a rather good job of faking it. Perspecta sound was mono sound that could be steered between the 3 front speakers by controlling the volume of each speaker independently using 3 deep base control tones that were below the frequency cutoff for the "Academy Curve" that all theatre sound systems adhered to at that time. By this method, they could play the same mono sound equally loud from the 3 speakers, or bring the volume up and down independently to to create a fake multichannel or panning effect. This eliminated the need for dual (mag & optical) prints, since the only thing on the prints was a standard mono track, and the control tones would be cut off by the theatres mono sound system. I projected Forbidden Planet in Perspecta when I was still involved with The Landmark Loews Jersey using a vintage Perspecta Integrator (decoder), and I have to say it sounded amazingly like stereo.

[Jim Cassedy]

Didn't Pixar used to occasionally include 'projectionist trading cards' with their movies?

Yes. They did that for quite a few releases. I think they only went out with preview or first run film shipments,
and I think they also went out with some DCP's if I recall.
They had projection specs & instructions on the backs of the cards. I saved all of them. Occasionally I've
seen a "complete set" show up on e-bay, with a fairly high asking price, especially if the card pack is unopened.

[Mike Balsamo]

Lets not forget Gremlins 2. With the fake film break in the gate. This time at a multiplex with platters and I was doing an advanced screening. I went to check on things right at that scene, I went running up the stairs and get to the top to see the shadow puppets. I understand they later did enclose a warning about that scene. Another good one is the hair in the gate with Whats up Tiger Lily. A projectionist friend told me he about passed out trying to blow it out of the gate and then he saw the hand on the screen grabbing at it.

I ran the trade screening of Gremlins 2 for the Chicago market. There were studio execs there; but, no projectionist notes in the can.
I had assembled it on an alpha platter and started when they were ready. I was in the back row of the auditorium when this hit.
I took off like a shot for the booth. When I got up there everything was, of course, running fine, so I looked out the porthole window.
White screen then shadow images. Once my heart started beating normally again, I went downstairs.
One of the studio guys was waiting for me. He apologized and said there would be note for the projectionist.

[Tony Bandiera Jr]

Another heart-stopper was in the 80's flick "Xanadu". During the "Glitz" musical number with Gene Kelley, he stomps his foot and the image rolls up to the next shot, as if the framing knob was being rolled. Just about gave me a heart attack on the preview run I did.