And not only in the movies:
"Digital projection threatens some community theaters" by Ty Burr | Globe Staff, January 27, 2013
The future has arrived for New England’s small-town movie theaters. Unfortunately, it’s consigning some of them to the past....
As is the web to newspapers.
“Business is business. Nothing is fair in the real world.”
True enough, and what’s being asked of independently owned movie theaters across the country — the real mom-and-pops, some of them Main Street cinemas that have been around since the days of silent film — is hardly fair.
I attend the one in town a couple times a year at the request of others.
Sometime in the next 18 months, according to many in the industry, new movies will cease being released on celluloid film. An era will end, taking the stragglers with it.
Asked to bear most or all of the cost of digital conversion, small-town theaters, from nonprofit art houses to for-profit theaters showing studio releases, are resorting to a variety of measures to scrape up the necessary cash. Kickstarter campaigns have been launched, grant proposals written, bank loans taken out, and patrons asked to open their wallets. In most cases, the very existence of these picture palaces is at stake.
So is the critical community gathering place they provide....
And the AmeriKan social fabric is further rent.
National multiplex chains have had few problems bankrolling the conversion....
The push to convert the industry from 35mm film prints to digital files began more than a decade ago, but it only picked up steam in recent years with the success of 3-D movies like 2009’s “Monsters vs. Aliens,” “Up,” and James Cameron’s “Avatar.” The latter was a watershed moment for the technology, with the worldwide number of digital screens more than doubling in the film’s wake.
Yeah, blame Cameron (and others?).
The major US multiplex chains (Regal, AMC, Cinemark, and Carmike are the “big four,” with about 17,000 of the country’s 39,500 screens) have for the most part already converted their theaters....
Those theaters that haven’t converted will have nothing to show but classic films on aging prints.
Hmmmmm.
Carol Johnson, executive director of Amherst Cinema in Western Massachusetts, says “35mm film served the industry for over 100 years and it’s been a really stable medium. But you don’t have a choice. You have to convert if you want access to the popular films, and those are the films that pay the bills.”
I saw "South Park: The Movie" there! That movie had me laughing the whole time.
Like many of the small-town theaters facing conversion, Amherst Cinema plans to keep one of its 35mm projectors around to screen repertory prints of older movies.
Johnson has already had to close one movie house, the Pleasant Street Theater in Northampton. A haven for film-lovers in the Five-College Area since the 1970s, the Pleasant Street faced a host of physical limitations, but the cost of installing a new projection system may have been the final nail in the coffin.
I've seen a few movies there, and hadn't realized it was gone.
“We probably would have kept it open [if not for digital] but it’s hard to say,’’ Johnson said. “People really loved that theater. It was the iconic, legendary destination — the place to go — when you needed to see an art house film.’’
Related:
"the holiday-show boom has shadowed the slow, steady growth of the economy."
Yeah, some folks are not hurting at all these days.
She is currently exploring ways to convert the three screens at Amherst Cinema and has received a $75,000 matching grant from the State of Massachusetts Cultural Facilities Fund.
So tax dollars need to be spent to keep the movie theater open? After all the taxpayer-funded subsidy checks Hollywood already gets from this state?
The total costs, she estimates, will run between $200,000 and $300,000. Small exhibitors across New England and the United States are staring down the same barrel....
Staring down the same barrel? A rather unfortunate choice of words regarding the recent gun violence being shoved in our faces, even for a movie-review reporter. Then again, there are some out there arguing that is exactly what news coverage of Sandy Hook has been -- a scripted psy op and total fiction.
The studios recognize that many theaters may not have ready funds, and have set up a complicated — and controversial — system to help out.
Meaning they will somehow be benefiting from it.
FEI Theatres signed up with an “integrator,” one of a handful of third-party companies who act as middlemen, installing the projectors and charging the studios a Virtual Print Fee, or VPF, for each screening of their films. That money then goes back to the theater to offset the cost of the conversion.
The VPFs, which Fithian says can eventually cover 50 to 70 percent of the outlay, are tempting for a small theater owner but can come with strings attached, since the contracts give integrators and the studios computerized oversight over what gets played and when.
Dave Fuller, owner of the Rialto in Lancaster, N.H., said the VPF program “ is a huge Big Brother. It’s got a direct line to the projector so that it’s always seeing what the projector is doing. If you have an extra show or don’t have a show, they’re going to question why you’re doing that.”
Many of the small theater owners interviewed for this article avoided signing with an integrator. “I should be able to do what I want in my theater,” Gibson said.
Repeated requests for comment by spokespersons for the major distributors were turned down.
There are other problems with the new technology, which requires some retraining for most projectionists to master. When a 35mm projector breaks down, it’s a mechanical fix, but when a digital projector malfunctions, it’s a computer problem.
Mike Hurley, who owns the Colonial Theater in Belfast, installed a recommended software upgrade on his new digital projector and suddenly was unable to show movies. “We lost more shows in a month than we had lost in the previous 17 years,” he says. “We just couldn’t get the movie going. You try everything, you call for help. You don’t need a projectionist. You need a computer genius.”
Now that would make me angry as I'm sitting in my seat. Start the show!
Then there’s the issue of obsolescence. Many small-town theaters have projectors that have been in operation since the 1950s, and they look askance at digital systems that may be out of date within a decade.
That'$ why I jumped of the technology upgrade bandwagon a long time ago.
Steve Dignazio, who runs the Colonial Theatre in Bethlehem, N.H., opened in 1915 and is possibly the oldest continually operated movie theater in the country, feels he has no choice. If the Bethlehem Colonial wants to show any new releases from the major studios or their art house boutique wings — let alone 3-D films or 48 frames-per-second blockbusters like “The Hobbit” — it’s convert or die.
There are some who see a larger conspiracy in the background, an attempt by the entertainment corporations to control the remaining independents and shut out smaller film distributors through the new digital pipelines....
That isn't a far-fetched con$piracy at all, and is likely the reason for the upgrade.
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"At least 30 dead in protest of Egypt court ruling; 21 fans received death sentence after soccer riot" by David Kirkpatrick and Mayy El Sheikh | New York Times, January 27, 2013
CAIRO — The Egyptian government appeared to have lost control of the major city of Port Said on Saturday after a court sentenced 21 fans to death for their role in a deadly soccer riot, and their supporters attacked the prison where they were being held, as well as the police and court buildings.
By evening, fighting in the streets of Port Said had left at least 30 people dead, mostly from gunfire, and injured more than 300.
Fearful residents stayed in their homes. Doctors in the city said the local hospital was overloaded with casualties and pleaded for help. Water had run out in some places. Rioters attacked the Port Said power plant, and for a time closed off the main roads to the city.
A spokesman for the Interior Ministry acknowledged that its security forces were unable to control the violence and urged political leaders to try to broker a peace agreement. President Mohammed Morsi met with the National Defense Council, which includes the nation’s top military leaders, and the information minister announced that the council was considering imposing a curfew and state of emergency.
By 8 p.m., a spokesman for the Egyptian military said its troops had moved in and secured vital facilities, including the prison, the Mediterranean port, and the Suez Canal. But in telephone interviews, residents said the streets remained lawless.
Ahmed Zangir said: ‘‘Thugs are abusing the opportunity. They are everywhere.’’
The violence that engulfed Port Said may be the sharpest challenge yet to Egypt’s new Islamist rulers as they try to reestablish public order after the two years of turmoil that have followed the end of Hosni Mubarak’s brutal autocracy.
Now I'm starting to see one.
The uprising in support of the soccer fans sentenced to death coincided with the third day of clashes between protesters and the police in Cairo and in other cities around the country, which were set off by the second anniversary of the revolt against Mubarak.
Those battles were more isolated, typically confined to clashes around symbols of government power, like the Interior Ministry headquarters in Cairo or the headquarters of the provincial government in Suez.
But by Saturday night, those clashes had killed at least 12 people, including nine in Suez Friday, state media reported.
The anniversary battles were fueled by a combination of frustration with the meager rewards of the revolution so far and hostility toward the new Islamist leaders. But the escalating chaos in Port Said arising from the soccer riot verdict posed a far greater challenge to those leaders and their promises to enforce the rule of law.
It was unclear how the fledgling government might rein in the protesters without either a brutal crackdown or a capitulation to their demands. Either alternative could further inflame the streets in Cairo and around Egypt.
‘’The solution isn’t a security solution,’’ General Osama Ismail, a spokesman for the Interior Ministry, said in a television interview. ‘‘We urge the political and patriotic leaders and forces to intervene to calm the situation.’’
The case that set off the riot grew out of a deadly brawl last February between rival groups of hard-core fans of soccer teams from Cairo and Port Said at a match in Port Said, which has about 600,000 people. The hard-core fans, called Ultras, are known for their appetite for violence against rival teams or the police. Some had smuggled knives and other weapons into the stadium, security officials said at the time.
Seventy-four people were killed and more than 1,000 injured in the soccer riot. Many died after being trampled under the stampeding crowds or falling from stadium balconies, according to forensic testimony later reported in the state media.
It was the worst soccer riot in Egyptian history and among the worst in the world. Many political figures, including members of the Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood, initially sought to blame a conspiracy orchestrated by Mubarak loyalists or the Interior Ministry....
I get a kick out of seeing that word in my war organ, and many times (thought not all) it means you are getting a nugget of truth.
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Related: Egyptian Government Gets Its Goal
All of a sudden that conspiracy talk doesn't seem so out there, does it?
Trial coverage got a little lost during the creation of the new Egyptian Constitution.
