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Amid the usual comic relief and arcane bric-a-brac that accompanies the annual Cinefest auction held by the Syracuse Cinephile Society, host Leonard Maltin got somewhat serious last March 17 when he briefly discussed the imminent phase-out of 35mm films from most of America’s bijoux. “The studios are threatening to not service older movies on 35mm—and they’re not kidding,” the film historian emphasized to the saddened audience of movie maniacs. And for Maltin, “making 35mm extinct seems a little shortsighted.”
Indeed, the transition from dependable film projection to the computerized geegaws of the digital age will lead to collateral damage, with scores of independent art houses, second-run venues and hinterlands drive-ins surely being driven out of business in the next year or so, mainly because those mom-and-pop shoestring exhibitors will be unable to bear the economic brunt of the new technology. The costs usually bandied about for a digital projector run in the tony neighborhood of $70,000, not counting techie services when something goes wrong.
That’s a bitter pill to swallow when a reliable 35mm projector, which has been virtually bulletproof and ageless for more than a century, is forced into retirement. After all, only some occasional emergency splicing was ever needed to save a screening from jeopardy, yet there are no easy fixes when a digital server goes down. Still, there is no stopping progress: A June 8 report on the Deadline Hollywood website cites that all major Tinseltown studios will no longer release 35mm prints by the end of 2013.
Film exhibition, however, whether it’s from the photochemical method
or stored on hard drives, is still a business, and area movie houses
have mostly jumped aboard the digital bandwagon. Regal’s 17-screen
Carousel went all digital late last year, with Shoppingtown’s 14
Only a few 35mm projectors are still unspooling at Central New York’s indoor screens: six of the 10 at Regal’s Great Northern, downtown Syracuse’s Landmark Theatre, Eastwood’s venerable Palace and Rome’s Capitol Theatre, while 70mm IMAX movies continue at Armory Square’s Museum of Science and Technology.
Art-house kingpin Nat Tobin wants to stay in the movie exhibition business, too. His Manlius Art Cinema made the digital switch in time for the Memorial Day holiday weekend, preceded by four days when the theater shut down for old-school technology to make way for the next generation of movie projecting.
Aside from those four seismic days in the theater’s 94-year existence, indie-flick patrons would usually see Tobin multitasking as ticket seller, then introducing the feature to the audience, then hustling to the upstairs booth to thread the celluloid on the projector’s platter system to start the show. Meanwhile, Tobin’s wife Eileen Lowell, soon to retire from her Social Studies teaching position in the Seneca Falls school district, would be moonlighting behind the concession stand.
Simply put, Tobin had to go digital. “My wife and I feel that,
in addition to this being fun to do,” he says, “we owe something to the
community, this being the only place that you can see these movies.”
Hang out in the lobby with this twosome, however, and the results are
more like a Stiller and Meara routine, as both dish off the record on
their spry courtship and what it takes to keep their cinema running. As
of September, the couple will be happily ever aftering for seven years,
as the twitterpated Tobin gushes, “Eileen is the best thing that has
ever happened to this theater.” Upon hearing this, Tobin’s better half
responds, “Can I have a copy of that recording?”
The Last Picture Show
Still, breaking up is hard to do, and breaking down the Manlius’ last-ever 35mm print surely stirred the emotions. For the Sunday, May 20, 7:30 p.m. show, the documentary Bully wound its way one final time through the three-tiered platter projector. The controversial yet acclaimed work about peer pressure in public schools ran for five weeks, a healthy box-office run for the 202-seat house that was helped by Bully’s last-minute ratings switch to PG-13, thus assuring that the targeted demographic could actually see the movie.
Although Tobin concedes that the May 4 opening of the mega-popular superhero blowout The Avengers clobbered Bully, so to speak, at the box office, a number of daytime screenings were arranged for groups ranging from professionals to charter-school students. “Bully has got to be the most important film that we have ever shown,” Tobin says, “as far as message and who it’s intended for, and the people it should reach.”
That night Tobin removed the spliced assemblage from the platter’s jumbo single reel and spun each individual reel onto smaller metal reels. Then he packed those reels into an orange shipping crate that rested in the projector booth’s corner. Tobin muses that those film-less reels might have sentimental value to some, while others may want to rehab them as iconic furniture.
On Monday, May 21, Tobin’s 35mm technician and the techie’s son assisted in dismantling the platter projector that morning and taking it all downstairs, a seemingly Herculean job that stretched only an hour and 45 minutes. Then a crew from the MOST loaded the pieces onto a truck that afternoon and embarked for Armory Square.
Tobin doesn’t know what’s going to happen to his formerly indispensable projector, either. “They said that they had some use for it,” he said later that week. “They were looking for a machine that worked for some reason. I’m hoping they’ll display it as an example of recently obsolete technology.” Whether it will be a repurposed as a historical treasure or simply used for parts, its pieces are now sitting in a MOST storage room.
And since there is no more 35mm projector, there’s no need for a 35mm technician. “Actually, the people who are installing it will be able to do the technical work remotely, unless a bulb blows or something like that,” said Tobin. Later during the afternoon of May 21 came the arrival of those installers: the team of Sheldon Liberty and Jeff Keithly from the Sonic Equipment Company, out of Iota, Kan.
On Tuesday, May 22, the conversion process commenced. The out-of-towners began work not only on the booth’s new digital equipment, a Christie 2K that was delivered at 9 a.m., but also the far end of the narrow auditorium in order to take down the screen and replace the speaker behind it. “I have never seen it in my life,” Tobin said of the speaker, because there is no access door, but the old screen had to go in order to install a subwoofer and two front speakers. An electrician also had to come in to handle the upstairs wiring for “the new gimmick,” according to Tobin. The eight overhead speakers that flank both sides of the walls will remain in position, although they will now pump out a 5.1 Dolby surround sound setup.
On Wednesday, May 23, Liberty and Keithly were still tinkering with the old screen’s secrets. It turned out that the Manlius’ original speaker behind the screen, a behemoth “Voice of the Theater” contraption, was deemed too unwieldy to remove and will stay put, at least until talkies go out of fashion. The new screen’s size, a boxy 9-by-17 feet, is slightly smaller than the old canvas, so that the corners at the top of the auditorium won’t cut off anything pertaining to the movie’s image.
For widescreen movies, a two-foot-high black board of wood is now at the bottom of the screen, with the board folded upward and attached with two eyelet hooks in order to approximate the CinemaScope dimensions, about 7-by-17 feet, for the rectangular presentation. For a film presented in the standard “flat” ratio, the board will not be used.
The Kansas team continued through the day to carefully calibrate the digital projector’s visual output with an image, bright and crystal-clear, that takes place 100 feet away from the booth. Meanwhile, the next attraction, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, with Judi Dench and Maggie Smith, arrived on a hard drive for an opening just two days later. The clock was ticking.
For Thursday, May 24, it was a back-to-school crash course for the Manlius owners, who soon learned the ultimate power of a right-click on a mouse. “They went through the whole training with me,” Tobin recalls, “and I took the opportunity on Thursday night to program a test for myself and run it, and I was able to do it, so it was just remembering the steps. Now it’s just a matter of tweaking the program to add a coming attraction or change the order of them.”
Thankfully, the Friday, May 25, opening for Marigold Hotel went off without a hitch, although there was some behind-the-scenes tension. “Yeah, there were butterflies,” Tobin admits. “In fact, Eileen had taken notes and on the title page she wrote, ‘Now what do we do?’ The Kansas guys had a 4 p.m. plane and they were incommunicado. They had told me to program three 10-second pauses in between the coming attractions, and I found that I only needed two. I thought the third one was just nerve-wracking. Originally you had to click the Play button and you had to wait 20 seconds for the film to hit the screen. And there were a lot of butterflies during those 20 seconds.”
Back to the Future
Tobin’s gamble with the new technology assures that the Manlius Art Cinema will maintain its position as Central New York’s longest-running theater. Born in 1918 on what was originally Episcopal Church property, the venue is older than the Landmark or Palace, as amazing as that sounds.
“This coming digital conversion is the biggest change this theater has seen in about 80 years, since sound was introduced to a silent theater on East Seneca Turnpike,” Tobin says. “It’s 94 years old this year, and when it first opened, there were two other theaters across the street! I think one was an opera house and there was a nickelodeon.”
Indeed, change has happened more frequently to the theater’s name than its technical equipment. Previous monikers included the Seville, the Strand (which played The Story of G.I. Joe on Dec. 17 and 18, 1945, as a 30-cent ticket benefit for the American Legion Post 141), the Lincoln, the Colonial and the Rathburn. At the Billings Theater, moviegoers who dialed the number OV2-7411 on May 29, 1963, would have learned the showtimes for Days of Wine and Roses. In June 1968 it became the F-M Theater and screened second-run product on weekends; one 1970 ad promised a Sunday matinee of the James Bond thriller On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, albeit “only if it rains.”
The Manlius that most area film buffs tend to know began programming art-house fare by the mid-1970s and hasn’t looked back. The theater’s ownership timeline, however, experienced some bumps along the way. “{In the early 1980s} Robert Sorkin owned it prior to Sam Mitchell,” Tobin says about two well-known Syracuse-area cinema entrepreneurs from yesteryear. “Then Mitchell sold it to Ghaleb Al-Nwairan, who had it for The Last Temptation of Christ {in 1988}. He tried to auction it off but it didn’t work, they didn’t get what they wanted. So Sam got it back and then Sam sold it to me in 1992.”
Tobin recently celebrated two decades of ownership with an April Fool’s Day free screening of the 1988 Italian import Cinema Paradiso, one of the many Miramax art-house hits that have kept the Manlius afloat for years, a list that includes The Crying Game, The Piano and The English Patient. “You don’t have good box-office runs like that anymore,” Tobin laments, “{but the success of} The King’s Speech was an anomaly.” The 22-week engagement of My Big Fat Greek Wedding (2002) still hasn’t been topped during Tobin’s reign, although he does label The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel as “the Big Greek Wedding for the senior set.”
Along the way, Tobin also dodged a mid-1990s overture by Hoyts Cinemas to transform the former Fayetteville sixplex into an art-house showcase (the chain unceremoniously shut it down in 1998; it’s now a YMCA). He also ran the Westcott Cinema from 1997 to 2007, where he first began his introductory comments to the audience about the movie they paid to see, then transported his well-researched shtick to the Manlius. Tobin often wings it but on a recent Saturday-night showing of Marigold Hotel, he was upstaged by a 91-year-old patron:
“We had a packed house, only the front two rows were open, and I was in the middle of talking to the audience when this elderly couple walked down the aisle. And the gentleman put his hand on my arm and said, ‘Can I ask you a question? Is this a dirty movie? There are so many people here, this has got to be a dirty movie.’”
Up Close and Personal
No April fool, Tobin has logged considerable time in the movie biz. Born in Manhattan in 1948 and spending his wonder years in Queens, Tobin is a 1970 graduate of SUNY New Paltz. Ironically, his wife was also on the campus at one point. “We were in college together but we didn’t know each other,” says Lowell. “I later transferred and he was a year ahead of me anyways, but we were in the same art history class.”
Of course, it helps to have an in, and Tobin could not have had a more impressive connection. “My parents’ best friend was Fred Goldberg, senior vice president of worldwide advertising and publicity for United Artists,” he remembers. “I started off doing summer jobs for their advertising agency and I just got way involved.”
Tobin’s pretty quick with answers, too, such as the recollection of the first movie he ever saw at the Manlius (The Gods Must Be Crazy) and his secret for creating tasty popcorn (“Making it with love,” he deadpans; feel free to insert a groan here). So we’ll let him fill in the biographical gaps:
Q: The studios want out of 35mm films because of the expense, correct?
A: It costs about $3,500 for a movie print. For a digital copy, they have a master and a hard drive so it costs nothin’. They’ll just have to have all these hard drives in stock. Another thing they’ll save on is subtitled prints because the digital system will be programmed to accept subtitling rather than having them burned onto the print.
Q: When you took over in 1992, the Manlius still had a two-projector system.
A: They were 1940s-vintage drive-in projectors. At some point one of the old union projectionists was trying to put a theater in Tully and he had collected all of this equipment for it, and he had a deal to buy this old auto dealership. But it turns out there was a lot of asbestos and he couldn’t buy it, so he gave me the front parts of the projectors; the back parts were part of the original equipment.
Q: You then switched to the 35mm platter projector, which was your buddy for the last 19 years. Did you know anything about film projectors before you bought the Manlius?
A: I didn’t know a damn thing! I had to learn the original projectors in like three days.
Q: Did you know how to build a film before you took over the theater?
A: Not really, but I’ve only made one mistake: I attached a coming attraction upside-down and backward. That was at the Westcott. And luckily for me, the same coming attraction was also attached to the film {I was playing}.
Q: Any platter catastrophes?
A: For Raise the Red Lantern I tried starting it four times and the film broke every time, and there were 50 people in the audience that night. So I had to give back all their money and I came upstairs; I figured I’d have to take off the print from the end, and so I started. But then the collar wasn’t on in the middle and the film started to form a cone on the top platter. And I was so angry that I just took the film and I threw it! And I was still here at 7 in the morning, putting back together a two-hour, 20-minute Chinese film. I had to figure out what end was what, and where the reels ended to splice it back together. And I heard they could never use that print anymore.
Q: So you’re a jack-of-all-trades. Did you learn this stuff on the fly?
A: Most of the time, and I’m still learning. It’s fun. I mean, how can you beat doing something that people appreciate? And there’s something about seeing a movie in a theater with other people that makes funny movies funnier and scary movies scarier.
Q: Tell me about what exhibitors have to do regarding the digital switch.
A: If you wanted to be part of the reimbursement program, the deadline for signing a contract with an integrator was the end of April. For those who have signed contracts, the last date to have it installed is, I believe, the end of January {2013}. However, that being said, these VPF {virtual print fee} programs end, they don’t go on forever; some are seven years, some are nine years. So, the earlier that you can get into one and get rolling, the better off the theater is.
I was reading an article that noted that when sound was introduced, there were no deadlines.
Q: Well, they were often making both silent and talkie versions of the same movies, so the switchover to all-sound movies took a few years.
A: Yeah, but this is the first time the industry has imposed deadlines on theaters to make the switch. It is estimated that a thousand theaters will go out of business, and we didn’t want to be in that position.
Q: But it’s such a financial undertaking for the little guy. It’s easier for chains such as Regal, not the independents.
A: We will recoup some of the money from this program, but we both think that it is worthwhile doing. We both enjoy what this theater is and who we serve and what we show.
Q: How did you hook up with Sonic Equipment?
A: I actually read a story about them in a trade magazine and called them for an estimate because it said they specialized in smaller, independent theaters. After I had gotten the initial estimate their vice president of operations was in the area, so he stopped by with another gentleman and they did a site survey. Then they revised their estimate and I ran with it.
Q: So while this projector is your purchase, they still have access to it.
A: Which is part of the requirements for reimbursement through this virtual print fee program. So a lot of this stuff is mandatory: the 5.1 Dolby surround sound, the remote access to the system through the GDC digital cinema server. They will be able to monitor how many times I have it on screen, they will be able to monitor if I play something else, what trailers I’m playin’.
Q: So if you’re doing something at 2 in the morning, they’ll wonder, “Why is he doing something at 2 in the morning?”
A: Right. I don’t think I need to give them a schedule of my showtimes, but I do have to tell them if I’m going to play something else, like a one-time-only show or a concert film or a midnight show.
As part of the requirements, I was required to keep a 35mm backup projector until the end of 2013. However, because the booth is so small {about 14 feet wide} and would have required extensive reconstruction {to accommodate both projector formats}, I was allowed to get out of it. I think it’s for the smaller houses and second-runs, and for some reason they put that in the contract.
Q: Do you miss the Westcott Cinema?
A: I do miss it in some regards and I don’t miss it in others. I do miss the Westcott’s people and its environment, the atmosphere, but the place really drained the money out of both theaters.
Q: When did you first arrive in Central New York?
A: I came up here in 1982 when the Cinema National chain was running {then part of Carrols Corporation, the theaters were sold to USA Cinemas in 1986}, and I was named director of Crescent Advertising, which was later renamed Allied Advertising. I was at Carrols’ James Street office for two weeks in 1982 and then the office was moved to the Cinema East {in an upstairs area adjacent to the projection booth} on Erie Boulevard East. Before that I was at United Artists in New York City for about 11 years.
Q: And the reason you left UA to come here was. . . the box-office disaster known as Heaven’s Gate (1980)?
A: {Laughs} Pretty much. You know, the writing was on the wall, UA was not gonna remain in New York City for very long. We certainly had a pool of potential employees out on the West Coast and they weren’t going to offer us the right incentive to make the move. When I got this {Crescent/Allied} offer and was contacted about coming up to Syracuse, it was an extremely good move.
Q: What was the turmoil like at UA with Heaven’s Gate crashing and burning?
A: It was a really black period, from the moment that the five executives who left UA {including Arthur Krim, Robert Benjamin and Eric Pleskow} to form Orion Pictures {in 1978} they couldn’t seem to hold on to a president, {then-parent company} Transamerica was trying to unload United Artists and eventually it was sold to MGM {in 1981}, which was a complete reversal because when I first got to UA, they were distributing the MGM films. So we went through a lot of executive changes, and the only reason UA was still in New York City was because the chairman {Krim} and the president {Pleskow} were very active in the New York Democratic Party. So once they were out there was no reason to stay.
Q: Did you meet any big-time movie stars when you were at UA?
A: I did ride in an elevator once with Chevy Chase. Woody Allen used to come up on our floor once in a while because he used to play cards with the vice president. But I did shake the hand of the orangutan that felt up Bo Derek in Tarzan the Ape Man (1981). And I haven’t washed it since!