bluetoast

I know a few people have trailers at least. I would be interested to know more about how you got them. I've seen a ton on eBay and didn't know there was such a market for them. I have no way to run them of course, but it seems like a fun piece of a movie to have.

Solid Snake

I wish I could do that.

bluetoast

Yeah, it would be cool to have a legit projector. The trailers themselves aren't that expensive for the most part though, from the little looking around I've done. Now films themselves, yeah those aren't cheap.

Another thing I wanted to know about that:

Who/how decided to strike 16 mm prints of films for home usage, and were these for sale, or what was the distribution model there?

How do the 35 mm prints get out into the public if the studios try to maintain control and require them to be delivered back after the film has run? I guess some of them get lost in the shuffle but that can't be the case for all of them.

Solid Snake

That part I never understood. Maybe they just got left behind? I know that I would love to own an old not too shitty print of TGTBTU. I'm sure the film would still rock in that form.

For some reason that is the one that I would kill to have an old print of.

bluetoast

Snake, I saw this and thought you would love it:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Sylvester-St...item338377a7b9

DonnachaOne

35mm prints of major films aren't made available for the public today. In very rare cases, some films are - like Trash Humpers - but no-one legitimately purchased a print of The Dark Knight from Warner Bros. The distributors would have Technicolor or Deluxe send out 35mm prints, which the theatres would rent for a while, then the prints would be sent back to be destroyed. A lot of older flicks, especially from now-defunct production companies or distributors, are easier to collect because there isn't a company dedicated to protecting its investment by limiting its availability.

Sometimes a print might get "damaged" or "lost" and the theatre would be billed/fined thousands for its replacement. My old theatre had this happen with a 35mm print of Matchstick Men, which we would use for training new projectionists with.

Trailers would in theory have to be sent out for recycling too, but since they were seen as promotional materials like one-sheets or banners, the studios never asked for them back (well, Disney did with theirs, a LOT, but no-one cared). I still have a good few. A few years ago it was great to run a 35mm print of Sleepy Hollow, rented from Paramount, to which I then attached my own trailers for Terminator 2, Dark City, Blade and Carrie.

bluetoast

Yeah I remember you were one of the users who said they had trailers. I thinks someone else said he had Jurassic Park's or something. Question about that, how do you put them together, both physically and in terms of placement for the movie itself?

For the former, I've been reading that they're about 187-200 feet so you'd need a few to even get half a reel, so what's the process there? As for the attachment, are there some that are attached to Reel 1 of the feature, and for the others, do they request to be with certain studios, stuff like that?

Also the 35 mm prints are destroyed?! Damn.

DonnachaOne

35mm is "spliced" together, where you use a device (called a "splicer", since we're so original) to hold the ends of two 35mm reels together using their sprocket holes, then taping the ends in place.

Every reel of 35mm has a "head" and a "tail" - the head is the beginning, the tail is the end - and you make a "trailer pack" (an assembled number of trailers, along with any policy trailers, ads and brand bumpers) by splicing the trailers together.



The tail and head are placed end-to end. I tape them together. I press down with the top arm to cut the tape cleanly and to punch through the tape where the sprocket holes are.

We would get trailers in the mail/UPS/FedEx and other trailers would be shipped to us in the 35mm cans along with the movie, and would be given a list of trailers by our home office to play with a certain feature.

So, let's say I'm running a 35mm print of Man of Steel. The print itself would probably come delivered in two (most likely three, for the length that it is) metal cans, or one large corrugated-plastic box. Inside I'd probably have five-to-ten reels of film, each with around ten to twenty minutes-worth of film (you don't want reel changes to be ostentatious, so the reel change is often timed to when it might be most subtle), and half a dozen trailers. I'd get a list from home office for what trailers to attach; let's say I've been instructed to make a trailer pack of Wolverine, Pacific Rim, Turbo, RIPD and Red 2. I look in the can to see what trailers are there - sometimes I'm sent trailers I'm not going to use - and if there's any missing, I check on my shelf to see if I have the trailers handy from previous deliveries. Pacific Rim, since it's the next big Warner Bros flick, is most likely already attached to reel one of Man Of Steel.

So, I make my trailer pack. I take several feet of "leader" - clear film with marks every four sprocket holes to indicate frames, which I use to lace up the projectors without damaging the movie and so I'm not lacing it up out-of-frame - and attach it to several feet of "black leader", opaque black film that plays for a few seconds when the lamp turns on (you need this so the lamp doesn't turn on when the clear leader is going through, which will be very bright on the screen). I attach the "tail" of the black leader to the "head" of a short reel of 35mm that says "coming attractions". The tail of that gets spliced to the head of RIPD, the tail of RIPD is spliced to the head of Turbo, and so on. Pacific Rim gets played last because it's the flick Warner Bros wants everyone to remember for next time; the last trailer gets the most retention. But, I have to stick a "feature presentation" bit and a policy trailer between the Pacific Rim trailer and the feature - so I use the splicer to line up where the tail of Pacific Rim trailer would be (I use a device called a frame counter, which measures how many frames into the solid black film I might be, allowing me to make the cut along a frame line, so I'm not cutting into the middle of a frame), then cut it using an attached swinging razor, like a little guillotine. Tail of Pacific Rim gets spliced to the head of the policy trailer, the tail of that gets spliced to the head of the feature presentation trailer, and that's my trailer pack. Runs about eighteen minutes, and fits on one reel.

The tail of that gets spliced to reel one of Man of Steel. Man of Steel is itself compiled into one large print from all its individual reels attached in order.

Little silver stickers, called "cues", are stuck to the bits in the trailer and print in certain spots. These "cues" are read by the electronic components of the projector to turn the lights on or off. Sure, we can do that manually, but when you're running eighteen screens who has time for that?

When the film's run is over, we break the print apart (a "teardown") and send the individual reels back in the box or cans it came in. The trailers we keep, winding them into little reels and putting them on a shelf for use in later prints, or we send them away for recycling.

There's a lot of little details I'm slipping over here, mainly about the make-up tables and workbenches which we use to physically spin the 35mm reels onto very large reels called hubs, and which we then use to spin the 35mm prints onto large spinning shelves called platters, which the projectors play the film from, but that's the gist.

Solid Snake

I'd pay the full price they're asking for for just the Rocky 4 trailer.

bluetoast

Thanks for that explanation DonnachaOne! I worked in a theater for a summer so I did rotate the platters a bit to get all the film on there and cover them up with a tarp, which was my limited interaction with the film. But...now I'm interested in doing projectionist work for them. Wonder if that's feasible to learn quickly.

Ash Ketchum

I once had two 16mm reels of trailers. (Each reel was close to a half-hour in length. I now have only one of the reels. I'm not sure where I lost the other one. I believe I lent it to a film collector friend who never gave it back and denied ever having it.) These were all designed for use as ads on TV stations, which used to run everything on 16mm. Some of the trailers are in b&w even when the films being advertised were in color because once upon a time most homes had b&w sets and it was cheaper to make prints in b&w. Most of the films were from the 1960s and '70s and included ONE MILLION YEARS B.C. (a color film for which the trailer was in b&w) and some Italian westerns, like ADIOS SABATA. There was a really rare one for a film called DRAGON'S BLOOD, which was an Italian remake of Fritz Lang's SIEGFRIED, that I've never seen any reference to anywhere else. I can't remember the others I had.

I used to get these trailers from dealers at science fiction and Star Trek conventions, all in the pre-home video era.

I have a projector and screen but haven't used them in years. I also have a bunch of 16mm prints of "Little Rascals" shorts that were thrown out by a TV station once, including a very rare one that starred only Farina and Stymie and that was never aired on TV in my lifetime, as far as I know.

Solid Snake

I'd say get to learn it ASAP cuz we're pretty much big on the digital now.

Alan Smithee

Yep, every theater I've been to in the past few years has used digital (and the trailers for those come on USB sticks. Not sure exactly how those work however as I've never gotten to play with one.)

I have almost every trailer from 1991-2001 though, from my time in the theater business. Just started renting a storage unit to keep them in since my apartment's too small and my parents wanted them out of their house. Hoping to get my own 35mm projector soon, as many theaters have just been throwing them out. A guy I used to work with says he saved one for me that he took out. I have one complete movie, "Tunnel Vision" from 1976 (a sketch comedy flick) that a friend of mine traded me for some trailers and other stuff. I also have a few odd defective reels that my theater replaced but never sent back, including reel one of "Independence Day" with a black splotch on the side. Recently got the last two reels of "Amanda By Night", a 1979 porno movie- those are really hard to find as porn went to video projection by the end of the 80s. Prints are showing up more often on Ebay now I guess since the studios don't care about them so much anymore.

Mabuse

In the 1960's there was a home movie distribution system in place where you could rent 16mm reduction prints of popular films through the mail. At the end of one of Pauline Kaels books (I think it's Kiss Kiss Bang Bang) she lists her recomendations of what is worth renting from the list of then available titles. This home distribution model was never large, but lasted a long time. In the 1980's I can still recall the major central library in my city had rental 16mm prints of relatively new films.