What Movie Are You Seeing, Really?

 

My neighborhood theater is now showing a Kubrick retrospective. My first thought was “Ah! Four Kubrick masterpieces on The Big Screen, in 35mm!”

Not quite.

The theater’s website explains “ALL FILMS IN 35MM / EXCEPT ‘DR. STRANGELOVE’ / DIGITAL RESTORATION (DCP)”.

So, it is projecting Dr. Strangelove digitally (using the commercial Digital Cinema Package standard). Which “restoration” is this? Is it really a “restored” version, or was it just scanned and cleaned up a bit?

They do not say.

I would hope that it’s some fancy, 4K-resolution Criterion Collection-or-better restoration, but unless the theater tells me, I can only noodle around on the web and guess. (Or I could call the theater—but why wouldn’t they just put this information on their website in the first place?)

This is the Brave New World of digital projection, which is basically caveat emptor. Anything can be digitally projected, so how do you know what your hard-earned dollars are paying for? DVD quality? 2K? 4K? A restoration by a reputable company that specializes in such work?

A few months ago I dropped in on another theater in Portland that was showing Casablanca for free. It turned out to be DVD quality, projected in the wrong aspect ratio.

This problem has also been creeping into film festivals for the past few years. The Telluride Film Festival now routinely charges at least twenty dollars (much more if you’re a passholder) for a digitally-projected movie—maybe it’s a classic that you very much looked forward to seeing in the native format. But TFF won’t tell you on their program how it’s being projected.

And this is unacceptable. Without knowing how a movie is being projected, how can you make an informed decision as to whether or not the movie experience is worth the asking price?

Film festivals are trying to get away with withholding this information because it’s cheaper for them to project digitally, and they hope only a few people will get pissed off enough to demand a refund. It’s a cold, calculated business decision. But, without telling a potential customer upfront exactly what is being shown, and in what format, it is dishonest.

I don’t think my local theater is trying to be shady, but this half-assed way of describing what exactly they’re projecting is probably going to be the norm, unless we as cinephiles demand they do better. If theater owners realize that customers are withholding dollars because they’re not getting enough information, they’ll hop right on that.

And, oh yeah:

THE INTERNATIONAL FILM SERIES ALWAYS TELLS YOU HOW THEIR FILMS ARE PROJECTED!!!

Because that’s the kind of stand-up dudes they are.