Film lab screwups?

[Mathew Bailey]

Han anyone had any experience with screwups involving film labs in making a trailer or print,etc. For example the studio & distributor pissed at the lab for the following: "You threw all your copies of all my release negatives in the trash without checking if they were used or not!?!?"

[Kenneth Wuepper]

Lab spliced the color chart in the opening credits of "the Godfather" version 1

Had a call from Hollywood just before the first showing to a full house. "Take the film out of the projector and remove the color test."

"Might or might not be in frame so stay hot on the framing knob." (It was in frame with our splice)

That was the only splice we made in a feature before the first showing with the audience in the house. (Actually started on time)

[Frank Cox]

You mean technical problems? Your question isn't really clear.

If that's what you mean, I'm sure I had some movies where the colours were off on one or two reels over the course of time, though I can't think of any examples offhand.

I do remember One Hour Photo. Here's the film, the reel bands say scope, the leaders say scope (lab printed), so okey dokey, it's scope. Set up the trailers, set up the movie, go to play it for the first night, trailers go through, start of feature, and.... short fat people. It's flat! So here's me doing a really quick lens change.

That's where I learned my lesson to never ever trust what's written on the film, even if it's printed at the lab. Slap 'er on the light box and check for myself, forevermore after that.

[Steve Guttag]

There have been some strange ones over the years. There was one print of "City Heat" where something went wacky on the contact printer because the image and sound just went off center/out of focus like they separated or something and came back...it's one of those you wouldn't believe it if you didn't see it on the print itself.

Every once in a while, back in the day, when they would assemble a print from A/B rolls, they wouldn't remove the heads/tails between the A/B and you'd get a countdown in the middle of the reel. It was extra special if they happened to be double-head reels (they spliced tail-to-tail). It didn't happen very often but I've seen it more than once. That isn't so much a lab problem as a distributor when mounting the film to reels from cores.

Cue marks can sometimes be an issue if not placed or placed properly...or within the actual format of the movie (scope cues placed in a flat print). I believe I saw that happen on a 70mm 1.85 title too...they put the cues in the black matte.

Deluxe Hollywood seemed to have a knack for pre-damaging 70mm prints and also printing them out of focus (and have it vary). Anyone that ran a Metrocolor 70mm print knows how good a 70mm print can look (Technicolor-London was my second favorite 70mm lab).

[Leo Enticknap]

Sometime in the mid-1990s; it was the second Jurassic Park pic. About a week earlier, we were asked if we were equipped for DTS, to which we replied in the affirmative. I assumed that the reason for the question was a shortage of discs, and that they didn't want to ship them to theaters that didn't need them. However, during the intervening week, the power supply in our DTS player went out, and we were still awaiting the replacement on the opening day.

About an hour and a half into the first show, a customer walked out and complained to the girl behind the box office that "Everyone's suddenly started talking f***ing [insert racial slur for Germans] language in the film!"

Thanks to a lab screwup, about 50 copies of reel 5 had been printed with the German dub on the analog SVA track. The reason they wanted to know if we had DTS was because they wanted to offload one of these bad reel 5s on us. Because the DTS timecode is the same regardless of the audio version, we could use the print if we played DTS.

I don't know how this was done, but a new power supply arrived within six hours of discovering that, whereas previously we'd been told that we'd be waiting for another week.

[Don Furr]

Going way back to 1982. Reel #3 of Friday the 13th Part 3 (3D) the picture (after the change over) creeps up to reveal the framing line. It's the same on the two prints I have. I guess something must have gone wrong with the printer. I ran this title when it was released first run and don't remember having that problem.

[Mitchell Dvoskin]

Back in the mid 1990's, there was a local weekly films series hosted by NY Critic Jeffrey Lyons where they would screen an upcoming film a few weeks before its release, and then afterwards Mr. Lyons would discuss the film with the audience. One of the shows was Mi Familia (My Family) 1995 version, a film about a Mexican coming to Los Angeles. The first reel looked like a faded "red" eastman print. The reel ended shortly after they got to L.A, the following reels had perfect color. After the film, Jeffery Lyons gushed over the artistic merits of portraying the scenes in Mexico as faded red bleakness, and L.A. as plush green, warm and natural looking. The plants and trees in L.A. went from faded barely green to perfect green at the reel change. I wanted to jump up and scream NO!, it was just bad lab color timing on reel one. I didn't since I was a guest of the theatre manager and did not want to embarrass him.

Back in the late 1980's, a local repository theatre was sent a brand new low fade print of what was originally a 1938 Technicolor short. Unfortunately, the lab apparently did not do the silver retention bath for the soundtrack (this was pre-cyan), and the S/N on the soundtrack was terrible. The distributor sent a replacement, and the bad print was put to the side and forgotten about. Years later, he wondered what it would sound like with the now installed red led reader. It played perfectly.

[Sean McKinnon]

I've had the typical thing where about a foot or so of a reel is fogged a certain color, or one interesting one was where the dolby digital track was printed off center of the space between the perfs. Thankfully I never had a random head and tail in the middle of a reel!

[Jim Cassedy]

I've had several over the years. A few that come to mind are:
1) I got a frantic call from a guy who was filling in for me on my night off. Usually I'd be there on the first night a new film ran, but for some reason that week the film changed on my night off that week. He said he couldn't figure out how to run the pre-show cartoon. He said on the first show he had to dump out of it early (we ran reels- no platters) because "the sound was backwards". I went down to the theater and upon inspecting the cartoon (which was a brand new print) I discovered the lab had printed the sound track negative BACKWARDS on the print. (So that you had the choice of either running it with the picture running normally, but the sound playing backwards, or you could run the picture backwards (and upside down) but the sound would be OK.

2) Back when films things were shipped in multiple metal shipping cases, I'd sometimes receive either a shipping case with a duplicate reel inside (So instead of Reels 1, 2 & 3, I got Reels 1, 2 & 2. Or since features were usually divided into two cans with the first 3 reels in one can, and the 2nd 3 reels in the other, I'd sometimes get two cans, but containing identical reels. The several times I had this issue, was back in the days when films in the cities I worked in were not sent by UPS or FEDX, but were handled by a separate company who had keys to all the theaters and whose sole job was to pick up & drop off films in the middle of the night after the theater closed. To be fair, the "shipping case problem" was usually not a laboratory issue, but a shipping error caused by the late night delivery driver. Eventually they started putting all the films in those horrid cardboard boxes, so all reels were in one box. For a long time, The Union wouldn't allow us to carry those boxes upstairs because of the weight. In some jurisdictions we (technically) weren't allowed to carry ANY film cans upstairs, but in most places I worked we were told not to accept delivery (or carry) any single shipping case containing more than 4 reels. This usually wasn't a problem, since the labs & the shipping company 'knew the rules"

3) The last few years of 35mm distribution, I have a feeling a lot of the experienced lab people were 'jumping ship' and there was a definite increase in the number of prints I received which should never have made it past the QC department. (Which had probably been shut down or become severely understaffed.) I recall a dreadful print of THE HANGOVER, on which the color balance noticeably changed in the middle of a scene on several reels, and one, in particular became quite purple during the last several hundred feet, and also looked light-struck as it got closer to the end of that reel. I did notice that all the 'problem' reels were the even numbered ones, which lead me to believe that those reels had either been done on the same printer and/or run through the same batch of processing chemicals, which had 'problems'. I worked in a lab for awhile, & we didn't always run film jobs 'consecutively' - sometimes we did all the "Reel Ones" on one day, & all the "Reel 2's" & so on, on another day. And sometimes we did all the even numbered reels in one batch, and all the odd ones in another. It all depended on how the dupe negatives were shipped to us, the lengths of the various reels, and several other variables.

3) I had similar color balance problems with GRAN TORINO, but not as bad. The main problem with the GT print I got was that on two reels, the fame lines were not "in register". In other words, the frame lines weren't exactly where they should have been in relation to the sprocket holes. I'm guessing the negative & print 'slipped' in the printer somehow. This wouldn't have been a big problem if we were running "reel-to-reel", but this print was running off of platters, and since the error wasn't a complete sprocket hole "off", there was no way you could fix it by making a splice with either one extra or one fewer perf holes. To make matters worse, it was a SCOPE print, so there was no 'wiggle room' to cheat on the framing. That movie opened to a full house on Christmas Eve. Although I had discovered the frame-line error when making up the print, there was no way they could get me another print by show time. There was also no way I could just manually adjust the bad framing when those reels ran, because I was running 6 auditoriums in two different theaters a block apart, and there was no way I could guarantee I'd be in the booth when the mis-framed reels ran (and then have to adjust framing back at the next reel. ) I managed to hide the frame line error a bit with the masking, but it was still obvious to the audience, especially in brightly lit scenes, that something was wrong. I had to run the Christmas Eve shows like that. Then, the distributor (a few cites away) said that they would send someone to pick up the bad print after the last show- - but they couldn't get me a new print till the morning. (And we had shows starting around 11am on Christmas Day)

So- - I had to spend my Christmas Eve breaking down & packing up the bad print (Oh, God- - how I HATE platters!) - - AND then I had to be back again early Christmas morning to meet a courier who would be bringing me another print from somewhere. Of course the guy picking up the print arrived later than promised, so I was at the theater till after 1:30am waiting for someone to pick up the bad print, and then I needed to be back at work by around 10am Christmas morning to get the new print and get it platterized in time for the first show. That driver also arrived late due to "Christmas traffic", so I had to rush to get the first show put together. (Did I mention how much I hate platters?) That Christmas really sucked even though in the end I made a crapload of overtime at the holiday pay rate, and the manager even kicked in an extra bonus for in appreciation for me putting up with the whole situation and making it through the entire day without resorting to drinking or slitting my wrists.

But, ya know- - I've probably done thousands of shows over the years. Looking back, I'd say that events such as I described above, as frustrating as they were at the time, in the big picture, were really relatively rare. So I guess I should be thankful for that. After all, if I didn't, really enjoy this business, I would have quit, started drinking, or jumped of the Golden Gate Bridge, a long time ago!

[Leo Enticknap]

Vaguely related to Mitchell's faded print, I was once told about a spectacular lab screwup regarding the Scottish director Bill Douglas's 1972 autobiographical movie My Childhood. He wanted to achieve a low contrast, gritty, b/w aesthetic on a shoestring budget, and did so by the inventive hack of shooting it on color negative stock, but having the prints struck on b/w release print stock.

Following Douglas's premature death in 1991, the Edinburgh Film Festival commissioned a new print for a memorial screening the following year - a showprint to be struck directly from the cut camera negative. It was a color negative, no-one thought to tell the lab that the print needed to be b/w, and a result, the film received its first, and only, screening in color.

[Tony Bandiera Jr]

Waayy to many years ago, I had a print of "Jagged Edge" (Sharon Stone flick) that had the entire b roll of a reel (I think it was reel 3) where the track was printed BLANK. (The old blue background, not even the zero signal modulation lines.)

It ran like that for almost a MONTH, with no customer complaints, I only found it when I happened to do a sound check with the monitor at that point in the movie as I was passing the machine to thread another.

The other was a print of "Batman" (circa 1990) where one of the reels had a serious issue, the entire reel had the image pulling down on the right side at a regular interval (imagine someone grabbing and pulling the lower right corner.)

It took several calls to the distributor and a threat to pull the print altogether before they finally sent me a replacement reel. A week after I sent the bad reel back, I got a letter of apology from the distrib AND the studio, and a nice box of "Batman" swag for me and my staff.

And the most legendary, a print of "Raiders of the Lost Ark" that was so badly scratched throughout, it looked like someone covered it in sand and drove a week's worth of L.A. traffic on it. It was unbearable to watch (and of course the sound was worse than the picture.) That one took a phone call to the film depot by a high ranking Air Force officer (and a threat by me to send it back one frame at a time) to get a replacement overnighted to us. That same film depot later send another horrid print, which came in on five reels and left on eleven (I had spare cans and reels). After that, I never got another bad print.

[Martin McCaffery]

Had a Library of Congress print of, I think, Dracula where the sound track of one reel was on a different reel.
Also, for some reason, Disney used to A/B roll their animated features with lab splices. Once got one where the tail of the A part of the reel was attached to the B part of the reel. The heads and tails of the whole reel were correct and there was no way to tell they were lab spliced together wrong until I ran the show and all of a sudden the picture was upside down. It was on a platter, so ten minutes of animated weirdness for the audience.

[Jesse Skeen]

We mistakenly got one reel of The Fugitive with Spanish subtitles, that didn't get replaced til after it had played a couple shows.

The movie "IQ" opened on Christmas- this was scope and starred Tim Robbins. I watched the main projectionist putting it together, and we noticed that only one reel had Dolby Digital while the rest did not (our theater wasn't equipped for it) but thought nothing else of it. We normally weren't allowed to do pre-screenings so it sat for a few days until the first showing. I was working then and got a call saying it had switched to a different movie all of a sudden- it turned out that reel with Dolby Digital was actually the movie "Ready to Wear" which was also scope and starred Tim Robbins, which was why I didn't see anything funny during the build-up. Being projected I could tell the style of the movie was different though. I pulled out the leaders and sure enough that was the title on it. Being Christmas, nobody at the studios were answering the phones. It took them a few days to send the proper reel and that screen just stayed dark until then- but after that I remembered to always check the movie title on every reel.

I have a reel of "The Birdcage" that mistakenly has the DTS timecode play the sound from the first reel. They caught that shortly after the prints were shipped out and told everyone to hold on til the replacement reel got there. They never asked for the old one back so I kept it- while the movie was showing I played it after hours to verify the problem was there, the reel ran a bit longer than the first one so after the DTS sound was finished it reverted to analog for the last few minutes.

[Scott Norwood]

I showed a Universal print of Journey to the Far Side of the Sun about a decade ago that was original IB Tech, except for one reel, which was an Eastman replacement. About 3/4 of the way through that reel, someone said something about contraception, and the sync went way off for the rest of that reel. Presumably, that scene had been cut from the picture negative, but they printed it with the original soundtrack negative. The track continued thorugh the tail leader and beyond.

I've seen a few reels that were supposed to have subtitles, but didn't, or had subtitles in the wrong language. With some films, they're still runnable for US audiences, especially if not dialogue-heavy and if an apology and explanation is offered before the show.

There is a 70mm reel of Sound of Music out there where the DTS track is unreadable for a few minutes (an obvious printing problem, not a reader issue).

I've seen a couple of prints where a section of the film is repeated (the same scene is shown twice). How does that even happen?

I've never gotten a print with the wrong soundtrack language (or the wrong soundtrack entirely), but I always check that.

Otherwise, the lab errors that I've seen have been pretty boring--bad lab splices (sometimes with a few frames of white tape over them), light leaks, scratches, improper drying, and stuff like that.

[Tony Bandiera Jr]

I just remembered a real lab/recording screwup..The Addams Family "Rap" trailer. The bass hits were severely clipped on the optical track, watching that trailer without the aperture plate in, you can see the optical tracks "clash" on all of the bass hits. It caused the bass hits to basically "Blat" or "fart" every time. I still have that trailer somewhere.

Another was Stallone's "Cobra", again with severely overmodulated optical tracks. In my RCA service days I had countless sound calls due to that film. I seem to recall doing a tweak on the Dolby tone levels to help reduce (but not eliminate) the horrible artifacts...but of course now there was NR pumping to deal with, but that was not as audible to most folks as the overdriven track was.