Universal Stupidity
Tomorrow should prove to be a thoroughly exhausting and horrible day at work, and I believe I am completely within my rights to blame it all on Universal Studios and their handling of the release of King Kong. Bear with me a moment while I explain this.
King Kong is, according to the information I’ve seen, a 3 hour and 20 minute long film. Add trailers and it begins to approach 4 hours in length without even blinking. This is a movie which opens everywhere Wednesday, December 14, but which will have midnight screenings the night before in many markets, including Cincinnati. I happen to be working at a theatre which will be running just such a midnight screening.
Now, allow me to briefly wax self-important for a moment. You may think that an audience’s enjoyment of the film rests entirely upon the crew that actually created it. In this, you’re rather mistaken, for there’s a final link in the chain from script to screen: the projectionist. In fact, the film industry is quite possibly unique in how much the final impact of a product relies on the actions of someone not even remotely related to the product’s development. You’d really never know that my job is so important given how appallingly little I get paid to do it, but there you go. Anyway, it is the responsibility of myself and everyone else working in the projection booth to ensure that the people who show up to the midnight premiere of King Kong get their $9.50’s worth (the money they blow in concession is no concern of mine, that’s all up to the concessionists). In order to do this, it is customary and pretty much a required practice that the films we show are tech-screened before being shown to the public. In this way, we can identify problems and replace damaged film as quickly as possible. In the case of the midnight show, this enables us to put the best of all prints on screen for our patrons, as replacement parts don’t come the same day we need them.
Now, here’s the important part. The midnight show is at midnight (obviously) at the close of business Tuesday night. That’s tomorrow. This means that we have to have the film ready to run for the public at that time, tech-screened or not (and obviously, we prefer it to be tech screened). This means that we have to have at least 4 hours of lead time to get the film tech-screened. Typically, when a film has a midnight premiere, we get the films a day before that (in this case, Monday) to allow us enough time to assemble them, screen them, and verify their quality. Unfortunately, Universal Studios doesn’t seem to understand this fact.
In fact, Universal Studios seems to be going out of their way to be as much of a pain in the ass as humanly possible. Because of their paranoia about potential theft of the prints, they decided not to send us our five prints Monday. We get them tomorrow, the day of the midnight screening. As if that’s not asinine enough, they did decide to send us one reel of the film Monday… reel 8 (the movie, being 3:20 in length, is at least 10 reels long). A reel we can’t possibly do anything with. If it were the first reel we could have attached it to the trailers. If it were the last reel we could have added lighting cues to the credits. But no. We get reel 8. Bastards.
Now, I must admit, I can sympathize with Universal’s paranoia about film theft (even though I really don’t understand it… it’s not like your average Joe is going to have the assembly tools, the $10,000 35mm projector, and the digital sound processor needed to actually watch the film anyway), but their approach really is just beyond asinine. If they wanted to protect the film from theft (or even piracy), just ship it with one reel missing, like the last reel, and then send it separately. It’s what they’re doing now anyway, just in an order that actually makes some degree of sense. But instead of being intelligent, they’ve decided to totally screw the projectionists over by holding onto the film until the last possible moment, which could potentially have a negative impact on the viewing experience of thousands if not tens of thousands of movie-goers nation-wide. And for as much as I try not to sometimes, I really do give a damn about the experience people have at the movies, because I watch movies too, and it drives me insane when there are problems with the presentation.
So thank you, Universal Studios, for shitting all over the people who actually make it worth people’s time to come see the products that you release. But then, you don’t care, because you’re getting the film rental money regardless of how many refunds we hand out at the theatre for crappy presentation, so really it’s only the theatres that will feel the ill effects of your crappy-ass anti-piracy maneuver. Though I imagine that, for the end-consumer, this really isn’t much different from the boat-load of technical problems software anti-piracy tools have begun instigating, so in this regard the film industry really isn’t all that unique.