Last week, I posted about the Fight For 35mm petition, which if you haven’t, I urge you to consider signing. Since then, a very good article about the current state and icky future of theatrical projection has appeared on the AV Club website.
I grew up in a house full of film, usually 16mm. To me, the texture of film, a few specks of dust, changeover cues and the purr of a projector are as much a part of movie-watching as color, sound and popcorn. (One of my problems with DVD and Blu-ray is that they look too good.)
The cinema experience of today is nothing like the one some of us remember — the way these 50s Westerns were seen, incidentally. We’ve gone from movie palace to multiplex, which I don’t see as progress. So if the times they are a-changin’ again, I don’t see me heading out to the cinema too much. After all, we can watch a digital picture at home — on a screen not that much smaller than found in most theaters.
I will now step down off my soapbox and get back to cowboy movies.
Photo by Edward M. Pio Roda, from the TCM Classic Film Festival (and lifted from their website). Thanks to Laura for bringing this article to my attention.
50 Westerns From The 50s. 
Hear, hear. I signed this as soon as I read your first post on this.
No need to get off the soapbox on this. What you say is so right, and can’t be said enough. Already, I rarely go to movies anymore, and am most likely to go to a revival of a projected film. When you talk about the kinds of theatres in which we saw 50s Westerns, you are talking about me and my own experience and why I came to love movies so much.
I’ve signed the petition and encourage everyone to do so. The New Beverly Cinema, which originated the petition, is a theatre about a mile or so from where I live and is a theatre I’ve seen movies at for many years. I wish them well with this.
Maybe I just can’t help but be contrary, but I think movies/TV shows on DVD is a great leap forward in technology over film, reels, noisy projectors, and just the plain bulk and work involved in showing a film as opposed to simply popping in a DVD. Not to mention the forever present problem of film breaking while being run through the projector, frames being forever damaged with burning, splicing, gluing, taping and threading and rethreading reels of film. (Talk about time consuming over the split second ease of putting a DVD in a player.) Then having to have the room dark in order to watch anything, I tell you the more I think of all the problems & intricacies actually involved in showing reels of film, I don’t see how anyone could long for the “good old days” of heavy film reels and projections. I love old movies, I love old dial telephones [I still have never owned a cell phone or a “walk around phone” all mine are “land lines” and all my phone are vintage ’60’s design] and I love old TV shows and don’t own a computer, in fact old movies and old TV shows is all I watch (except for Judge Judy & Modern Family). If the show is newer than 1975, I don’t know about it. But I can’t say for all my love of old shows/movies that I love the old film showing technology, projectors and heavy bulky space hogging reels. I love the efficiency of DVDs, they’re light, have excellent pictures, don’t take up hardly any room, never burn up while showing, never break, are silent, other than being careful not to smudge them with greasy fingers, I can’t think of any disadvantage from reel films. I have always been ahead of the game when it comes to the average person recording shows (first radio shows, then TV shows with beta tape and on thru laser discs and now DVD-/+ R recordings) but as far as opting for film over DVDs, I just don’t have the time it involves nor the space in my house to hold all the movies on reels as opposed to having a library of films on DVD in 1/8 the amount of space.
I am in agreement with Johnny Guitar. I am 70 and so went to the movies during the old days of real film, etc. But give me the dvd generation anytime. I have a 42 inch HD tv with an adjustment for aspect ration and watch tons of movies at home and love the dvds.