random bits

[cellio]

While we were in Sears waiting for Dani's new tires, he noticed a "bilingual tire gauge". Yes, it talks to you (in English or Spanish). It also has a decent-sized digital display. So I went looking for one that has the display but doesn't talk, because I have a lot of trouble reading a conventional gauge and thus do not check my pressure as often as I ought. Alas, there is a hefty surcharge for silence. So I got the noisy one and will hope for minimal annoyance.

Erik (the underweight cat) has developed a voracious appetite (for him) in the last several days. I'm happy to oblige, but I wonder what the difference is. I did buy a new type of food to try out on him on spec, but he's also chowing down on the food he had previously shown little interest in. Maybe he just needed some new flavors to jump-start his appetite. It's probably pretty boring (culinarily, at least) to be a domestic dog or cat, getting the same stuff day in and day out. Think back to childhood and those "tuna casserole again?" moments, and that probably wasn't daily. :-)

Dani and I finally saw The Incredibles this afternoon. Fun movie. They probably should have included a family pet, who would exhibit absolutely no powers but keep you wondering. But maybe I'm being influenced by The Crossovers. :-)

We saw a matinee and all the previews were aimed at kids. Is that because that's what's attached to this movie, or because you get different previews at matinees than at evening shows? There was also a short feature -- haven't seen one of those since I was a kid -- and it, too, was pretty clearly for the kids. Well-done technically; insipid artistically. (I didn't catch a title.)

Comments

[sekhmets-song.livejournal.com]

Most people are familiar with the reel to reel systems (just like the ones your kindergarten teacher had, just much bigger in the case of a movie theater). Those reels only hold about half of a two hour movie. Those little yellow dots you mention were put on the end of the reel to let the projectionist know that it is about time to change projectors (theaters that use a reel to reel system must have two projectors, so that the film runs smoothly. Originally, the second projector had to be manually started, so the yellow dots (they are actually a timed series of dots) would alert the projectionist and then tell him to press the start bottom on time so that there was a relatively seamless flow between the two. Later, a "hot shot" system was invented that would read a magnetic tape (added by the projectionist in the build of the film) on the film in the one projector to start the second machine automatically. A projectionist still needed to be around to make sure everything happened smoothly. The yellow dots, again, would alert him to when the change over should be happening (the number one failure of the hot shot was that nothing would happen. Then, somebody had to be around and aware to push the start button).
Incidentally, when a film arrives at the theater it comes in several small reals (vaguely around 20 minutes of film). The yellow dot occurs at the end of every one of those reals, as it is up to the discretion of the theater how they divide the film into two big reels and, therefore, the distributor wouldn't know which little reel would end up being the spot where the cross over occurs. The projectionist knows well enough the part of the film where the change over will occur so that he will ignore any that aren't relevant (and they are designed to be ignorable unless you are looking for them). If a film is at a given theater long enough, the dialogue of the cross-over segment becomes lodged forever in the brain of the projectionist. Little snippets of meaningless dialogue will forever use up some of the precious brain cells in my head. Oy!
In the seventies, most theaters who had the resources, switched over to the platter system. This system meant the film was loaded onto one enormous horizontal reel (shaped like a giant platter, thus the name), with no need to have a cross over (the cross over was where most problems would occur). The film winds off one platter, runs through the projector and respools onto another platter, backwards, also eliminating the need to rewind the spool before being rerun (unlike the reel to reel system, where the reels had to be loaded onto another piece of equipment to be rewound). The platter system paved the way for the multi-plex, as now many fewer projectionists were required to run many film at once. How many? Depends on the state (and its collective bargaining laws) as well as the theater chain and whatever agreement they have with the Projectionists Union (if they are unionized). Once the film's built, it doesn't take much, as long at nothing goes wrong (brief power outages are a projectionist's worst nightmare). But, Thursday nights are the crunch time. That is the night that the outgoing films must be stripped of whatever trailers where on it, broken back down into separate reels, after their final showing of the night, to be ready to be picked up Friday morning to go back to the distributor. The incoming films must be built and watched, from beginning to end to check for problems (one reason the yellow dots remain on the film strips is so that the projectionist can make sure he did his splices seamlessly during this prescreening). At a theater with more than two or three new movies per week, it can be basically impossible for a single projectionist to get all of this done.
Those dots aren't relevant to anything other than film technology, but I think they do end up getting recorded onto some of the video and DVD master copies, as I end up seeing them, too (and as a former projectionist, damn are they distracting!).

[sekhmets-song.livejournal.com]

(Had to break this into two pieces, because it was over 4300 words. Can you say long-winded? I knew you could.)
Trailers are generally added at the discretion of the theater (though it is possible this has changed in the decade or so that I have been out of the industry). It used to be that the distributor would send out the trailers of films the theater itself had booked to screen. The industry has changed since those days of the independent theaters. In the era of the multi-plex, every theater gets pretty much every preview, as it is assumed that somewhere in the chain, every movie will get shown. When I was getting out of the industry, we were beginning to see movies arriving with preloaded trailers, but it was not the industry norm at all. My guess, as the distributors have grown more powerful, that has increasingly been the trend. However, there is nothing to prevent a theater from removing trailers and they will almost always add trailers that are relevant only to their theater chain (Let's Go Out to the Lobby, and the like).
Back in the day, there were no restriction of what we could put on a film (other than ratings appropriateness; very tacky to run a trailer for Nine and Half Weeks before Lady and the Tramp). My guess is that this has changed some. The distributors have much more power than they used to. I could see them threatening to pull all of their products from a chain if someone didn't play ball. Remember, the theaters make almost no money on the sale of the tickets. They need to movies to get you to buy popcorn. If you don't get the hot new movie, no popcorn sales. The distributors know that if someone can't watch a movie at one theater, there is another right done the street that they will go to instead. They kind of have the theater chains over a barrel.
I'm glad all of my years spent in dark warm spaces was good for something!