Next Week's Film May 8 -14

There were a couple choices this week.

FAST AND FURIOUS - I booked this for the 7 pm show. I'm not sure how it will do. It opened huge, biggest April opening ever, and did quite well but I can see it being one of those films where most who wanted to see it already did.

TAKEN- Fox was finally willing to let me split it but I decided not to play it. It comes out on DVD on Tuesday and there's no one here to see it right now.

CRANK 2 was available but I never planned to play it. It's a fun completely over the top film but wouldn't do much business at Western Film even during the school year.

Looks like I made one of my occasional misjudgments. I was away for the weekend and came back and my jaw just about hit the floor when I saw the numbers for OBSERVE and REPORT. It had done $72 all weekend as opposed to several hundred for I LOVE YOU, MAN?! I haven't had a film do that bad in years. I thought there was a chance it might not do great but had no idea it could do this bad. I don't think it's just based on the movie although it seemed to be one of those movies where people either liked it or hated it. It's mostly timing, exams are over and summer school hasn't started yet so there's few students around. It also occurred to me tonight that a lot of our regulars saw it at the advance screening we did.

So there's no late show next week based largely on that. I don't like running single shows for the sake of my staff who get about half the hours they normally would but if there isn't anything I think people will come see then I can't play a late show. This is generally the worst time of the year for us so I just kinda hunker down and try to lose as little money as possible.

This is why we watch the films first time through.

The first time a film plays at Western Film the projectionist or I always sit and watch it or at least stay in the booth and keep an eye on it. Last night was the first showing of Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian. It was fairly busy. As is the subset of Murphy's Law that applies to movie theatres we had problems tonight, not a quiet night like Street Kings.

First in reel 4 it went out of frame twice. In one case the top half of the screen was suddenly on the bottom! That's easy to fix while the movie is running by turning a knob. It happened in the middle of the reel so it had come in that way from another theatre. There was a reel change just after the second bad splice. I'd seen the film before so when people were suddenly returning injured and dead from a battle they had not yet fought I knew something was up. Reels 5 and 6 and been put in the wrong order so the battle occurred later in the film. A reel is about 15 minutes long.

I stopped the film and went up to the front and let the audience know what had happened. I said they could get their money back if they wished to leave now or watch the rest of the film and we would give them a free pass. Only a few left.

It was interesting that when I finished telling them they sort of clapped. I think it's because someone told them was had happened instead of just shutting the film off and sending them away as most theatres would have done. In most theatres no one watches the film so who knows how long it would have been before someone realized something was wrong. The rest of the film was fine after the two reels that played out of order.

I had planned to go home after the early show started but I had to wait around until the end of the night to fix Narnia. Unfortunately the late show, Iron Man, is long so it wasn't over until midnight.

I had put the small plastic cores trailers come on in the rolls of film to mark the places where there were problems. I then had to take the last few reels off to switch reels 5 and 6. This took a while since the film was no longer round with the cores in it. After I had the last few reels off I had to go into reel 4 and fix the bad splices. Whomever had last played it must have only played it once, they had obviously had it break on them a couple times and fixed it without making sure it was in frame. Both splices had been made badly. There really isn't a good excuse to make a bad splice in a CinemaScope film. The image fills the full frame so it's easy to tell where to cut. I fixed them.

After that was all done I put the film back on the platter, in the right order, and was finished. Altogether it took me 2 hours.

I'm writing this from the projection booth while keeping an eye on the Saturday afternoon showing of Narnia to make sure I fixed everything properly. So Far So Good.

This is the first time in since I started here in 2000 we've had reels out of order. The projectionist who last played it had mixed up the reels, my projectionist should have caught it but didn't. In his/her defense the images at the beginning of both reels were very similar so it would haven't have been hard to make the mistake.

Hopefully this doesn't happen again anytime soon.

Almost had a major problem with Juno.

I book films on Monday and they usually come in by courier on either Wednesday or Thursday. Occasionally I pick them up at other theatres in town if there aren't a lot of prints around.

A film comes in metal cans in small reels that are about 20 minutes each, I've included a pic. Most movies are 6 reels. We then splice the movie together and play it as one continuous film.

Juno came in on Thursday as usual. The projectionist took it into the booth and opened it. I was just about to leave for my class (my last.one. ever!) when he said he had bad news. Reel 3 was missing!

Obviously this could have been a major catastrophe as we can't really play a film with 20 minutes missing from the middle.

In previous cases I would call our Booker who would have a print shipped out on the bus on Friday. Juno didn't have a lot of prints so I didn't know if there would be an extra.

Luckily I thought to check with the theatres that had just finished playing it and Rainbow still had their print. I went and picked it up Friday afternoon, took reel 3 out of it and finally had a complete print of Juno.

Fox's asked me if the Fox seals were still on the metal cans, they still were so the missing reel didn't get stolen in transit as one would suspect. Fox isn't too happy with Deluxe in Toronto, the warehouse that ships their prints. The print was supposed to be checked before it left and obviously wasn't.