Wednesday, October 29, 2008

I don't understand some theatres.

We played a Bollywood ( Indian ) film called Drona on the weekend. One of the theatres that had previously played the film did something that makes no sense to me. Bollywood films are almost always long, 2 1/2 to 3 hours and have an intermission about half way through. The intermission is built into the film, the word intermission, or sometimes interval, comes up on the screen.
Every Bollywood film I've played has had an intermission, even one that was only about 2 hours long. So Bollywood audiences expect to have an intermission so they can go to the bathroom etc.
From a theatre's point of view an intermission is great for food sales. We made 75% of our food sales this weekend during the intermission.
So if you are still with me, the audiences expect an intermission and the theatre makes money, everybody's happy.
So why did a previous theatre cut off the section of film that says intermission?! From a film standpoint the only practical reason to do this would be to be able to splice the film altogether into one long movie without an intermission. Why would anyone do that? The only thing I can think of is to save the time of the intermission in order to run more showings of the film per day. Personally I would hate to be sitting watching the film waiting for the intermission to go to the bathroom and it never comes.

It made things a little awkward for us this weekend. A Bollywood film I showed a few months ago had a similar situation. I spliced the intermission titling back into the film. This weekend however one of my projectionists made up the film and didn't know to do that. By the time I found out it was too late to fix it. I knew where the intermission was supposed to be but to the audience it was probably somewhat jarring as the film just stopped without any text warning. Luckily they tend to put the intermissions at either cliffhanger moments or just after pivotal events so it's somewhat predictable. For Drona the intermission came right after the transformation of the regular guy into the Super guy.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

speaking of other theatres. at ubc the theatre is student-run, which is a good and bad thing.

the bad thing about it is that it only plays wednesday through sunday and they don't get movies as early as western film does (or maybe that's because vancouver is a huge city with more theatres than london and it takes longer for movies to stop playing in big theatres).

one of the good thing about it is that they don't seem to be doing it for profit (VERY cheap concession stand). but the very best thing about it is that since they're not in it for the profit, the managers (film students) pick movies they like rather than those that did well at the box-office... so last week we had Vicky Cristina Barcelona (LOVED it), this week we have American Teen and next week we get Flight of the Red Balloon and Sukiyaki Western Django.

These movies are generally hard to find in theatres, so having it on campus is ideal. Plus, since i'm a member of the film society i get in for $2... i love this theatre.

but... i don't get to see some of the big movies in theatres that i would usually wait to arrive at western film because i didn't want to pay a whole $10 for, but was interested in nonetheless.

WesternFilm said...

Western Film used to run similar to the theatre you mention at UBC. Our average loss back then was about $60,000 a year, we now make a small profit. Running that kind of loss wouldn't fly these days.

Some of the movies you mention are good but just can't fill the theatre for a whole week.
One of my recondations for the UCC renovations is a second smaller screen to play smaller films and keep Hollywood films if they are still doing well but we need the big theatre for a new film.

I'm not holding my breath but it might happen.