TBA

4/7/26

6/9/2026

I've never seen the movie but the artwork looks kinda cool.

You missed this and Moneyball?

How could you

I saw The Patriot in theaters when it was released in 2000. I had never had this happen before but there were several scenes where you could see the boom mics in the frames and I was wondering what kind of actual shoddy production was this big budget studio movie???

Someone explained to me (possibly here, way back when) that they sometimes ship prints with that kind of stuff in frame and the theater is supposed to mat it out. That was shocking to me.

It really ruined the movie for me. I am not sure if I have actually seen it since.

Now I have to see it for a 3rd time

It was like the Braveheart battle scenes but set during the Revolutionary War.

I'm a bigger horror or sci-fi fan

You can skip horror since most of them are bad movies.

I disagree with your opinion. Which genre has 100% "good" movies?

But horror has a lot more with the bad acting and mostly gore and violence the main attraction of those movies.

Fight Club 4K Steelbook pre-order now up on Amazon. Currently at $39.99

The Mel Gibson movie The Patriot? You sure you're not confusing that with another movie? Or talking about watching it at home rather than the theater? There is almost no circumstance where that movie would have had microphones visible on a theatrical print.

A frame of 35mm film has a 1.37:1 aspect ratio on the camera negative. A movie can be photographed with either spherical ("flat") lenses that expose extra picture information on the top and bottom of that frame, which is intended to be matted down to widescreen later, or with anamorphic lenses that squeeze a wider 2.35:1 image into the 1.37:1 container, utilizing both the full width and height. The anamorphic image would be unstretched by a reverse type of anamorphic lens on the theater projector, restoring the correct widescreen aspect ratio.

The Patriot was shot in the Super 35 film format for an aspect ratio of 2.35:1. While the Super 35 format used spherical lenses and had extra vertical picture information on the camera negative (potentially including boom mics), the theatrical prints were created by taking only the center 2.35:1 portion and squeezing it into the 1.37:1 container, the same as movies shot with anamorphic lenses. Although the camera-to-negative capture process was different, the print-to-theater process was the same. There was no extra vertical information on a print that could be accidentally projected.

(Because Super 35 used a much smaller portion of the camera negative, it was an inferior format and was known for looking pretty grainy on theater screens.)

The later home video transfer would have been scanned from either the camera negative or (probably more likely at the time) an Interpositive, which would have the full camera capture. A letterboxed DVD should crop out microphones, but open-matte VHS or TV broadcast masters may not have. If that's what you watched, a sloppy video transfer would be the culprit.

All of this is different than movies shot for an intended 1.85:1 aspect ratio. Those utilize the full 1.37:1 camera negative with no anamorphic squeeze. They capture extra picture info at the top and bottom. Theatrical prints were shipped to theaters with the full 1.37:1 image. They were meant to be projected with a spherical lens (not anamorphic), but with mattes in place inside the projector to blank out the top and bottom. Unfortunately, if the print was misaligned in the projector, it could result in losing too much picture on the bottom and exposing too much on the top, which is how you might see those microphones.

I saw a festival screening of You Can Count on Me (1.85:1) that was projected that way. In the Q&A afterwards, a bunch of people complained about the movie's "poor production values." I actually had to stand up and explain how this was a theater projection error, not a movie production error.

If the anamorphic release print for The Patriot was misaligned, however, what you'd see would be the bottom of the picture showing up at the top of the screen. That would very obviously look wrong, and I'd hope someone would run out to the lobby to complain and get it fixed.

I swear it happened. I even remember one of the scenes it happened in, it was so jarring to me. And it was The Patriot at the theater. No false memory or movie confusion.

It has been a long time, but I need to revisit it. It was boom mics and I cannot remember for certain if they were all front top, side or bottom but I do seem to remember seeing some coming from the bottom pointing at them. And it happened in a couple of scenes, not just one. The main scene that I remember was an outdoor scene and I think it was around a campfire during the day (or something of that sort). It has been 27 years since I saw it so I would have to watch the movie again to recognize the scene for sure.

Trust me, I was stunned. And pissed.

thanks

Yep. Thank you from me as well. I ordered as soon as I saw your post. Now that link is no longer working!

https://www.walmart.com/ip/seot/1997...egistryType=WL