William, thank you. L.A. always confuses me. I visited both MGM and Columbia on that trip,and the Head Projectionist at Columbia who was an ex-Marine, gave me detailed instructions as to how to get there by L.A. Public Transit. When I made the appointment with MGM I was told there was no way to get there from the Ambassador Hotel on Wilshire short of taking a taxi. He was right!
Just a couple of comments on “The Unsinkable Molly Brown” mentioned above. I remember seeing it when it opened in Chicago with a friend from college who was visiting. We had gone in to see the roadshow presentation of “Mad, Mad, World” which I had seen before. Unfortunately, this time there was a terrific hum on one 70mm machine which affected all 6 channels making for a very uncomfortable experience. Coming out we decided to go down the street to see “Unsinkable” which was also being shown in 70mm at the Palace in non-roadshow form. We were delighted to find the projection and sound perfect.
Later that year, I visited the MGM lot in Burbank, and mentioned to the Head Projectionist how much we had enjoyed “Unsinkable”. He said they had not planned to make any 70mm prints, only 35mm and mostly mono-optical when they decided to try a 70mm version at a preview screening. He said it was as if they were watching a completely different picture from the one they had been seeing, with a terrific audience response. While they didn’t release it as a roadshow, they did pull 70mm prints for major cities.
Interestingly enough, Radio City played only a 35mm 4 track print, largely due to Head Projectionist Ben Olevsky’s objection to installing 70mm at the Hall. “Unsinkable” was one of the few pictures in 70mm short enough to fit into the Hall’s stageshow/movie policy at the time, and Ben said he had been told there wouln’t be any more 70mm prints like it released, so it wasn’t worth the trouble to install the equipment. He won the battle, but eventually lost the war when Universal four-walled the house and insisted that Ross Hunter’s “Airport” be shown in 70mm.
(Later we did do three 70mm roadshow features: “Gone With The Wind”, “Dr. Zhivago” and “2001” along with a VERY short stage show.)
Actually, it never ran porn although that was the intention when it was triplexed. A friend of mine (who probably knew techman) did the triplex booth work, and I was in the house while the contractor was there. They had added dressing rooms off to the side of the stage and put a runway for strippers down the center of the orchestra from the stage. Before it opened, Mayor Koch said “no more porno houses in Time Squaare”, and they abandoned the plan, and tried to run it as a normal triplex. They even installed a 16mm projector in addition to Vic 10 in one of the balcony houses.
Again, it’s AlAlvarez' area of expertise, but I suspect that they didn’t have the booking clout to handle non-porn product, and Peter did. Thus he picked the house up. As you mentioned, the maintenance was never great during those days. He did run a couple of 70mm pictures in the downstairs house, but since the light path from the booth was blocked by the two smaller theatres on either side in the balcony, he could never run a really wide picture. (Remember, the triplexing was done for porn which was pretty much 1.33:1 aspect ratio, so they never planned to run a picture as wide as the 70mm image in the pre-triplexing days downstairs. 1.85 aspect ratio material was as wide as they could go. I remember standing on the stage when the theatre was undergoing triplexing and looking up at the center port in the booth and then walking stage left until it was blocked by the wall of the theatre on one side, and then stage right until I could no longer see the port because it was blocked by the other house wall and determining that that was as wide an image as could be projected. Too bad — shortening the length of the two upstairs theatres a bit would have allowed a full proscenium width 70mm or Scope picture to continue to be presented.
As a kind of sad tribute to the days there that Techman remembers, the five stage channel Altecs that were hung from the ceiling for (I believe) “The Concert For Bangledesh” to cover the balcony remained there until the end. No one wanted to go to the expense of getting them down.
Peter Elson (sp?) was the last operator as far as I know. He ran it during the time I worked there on a regular relief basis, and after I left I did get an emergency call to cover the booth near the end and Peter still had the house. Al Alvarez probably knows the full story, but as I heard it Mayor Koch vetoed any more porn houses in the area at the time. Thus the people who triplexed the theatre removed the runway for the strippers that they had installed in the downstairs house and ran the theatre as the Mark for a while until Peter took over. Peter changed the name to the Embassy 2-3-4 since he had a habit of naming all of his theatres “Embassy”. Embassy “1” was the theatre on 7th Avenue which now a New York visitor’s center. I worked relief in most of his theatres with the exception of the Guild and Embassy 72nd St.
He had a way of picking up odd venues. He “inherited” the Mark after the plans to turn the DeMille into a porno house fell through, and he inherited the World (possibly the most famous porno house in the country from its “Deep Throat” days) after Rockefeller Center management became embarrassed about owning the property. Since Peter also operated the Guild next to the Music Hall they thought he would be a good operator and the World went from porn to Disney before it closed. (Again, AlAlvarez probably has some nifty Peter stories to tell.)
Techman: Perhaps you can verify a couple of stories about projection at the Palace. Bill Nafash said that when they installed 70mm for “Ben-Hur” and “Chips” the throw from the temporary booth to the screen was so short that they had to use very short focal length lenses to get the screen size they needed. To get the picture in focus with that set-up the lenses sat so far back in the lens barrels that the gate couldn’t be opened for threading. Thus the lens collar had to be slipped forward to thread and then pushed back into position after the threading was complete. Bill said that more than once the operators forgot to move the lens back into position and the reel came up spectacularly out of focus.
Did you ever work the 35mm/frontlight booth in the Palace? When I came to New York a stagehand at the Hall who also worked a show at the Palace snuck me into the booth to see the show. The Simplex X-L’s were still there, and as I recall it the bases had been cut down and the angle was so steep (as you mention above) that the operators would have had to sit down on cut-down stools to thread the machines.
Technically, roadshows of films (limited screenings per day with reserved seats and advanced prices) go as far back as “Birth of a Nation” and “Gone With The Wind” among others which William and Tinseltoes can probably list in great detail. While “Oklahoma” and “Around The World In 80 Days” were the first 70mm Todd-AO features released that used the roadshow policy, don’t forget to include the 3 strip Cinerama presentations which preceded 70mm releases and were all presented with just one or two screenings a day. While it’s possible that the Mayfair/Demille had played 35mm films on a roadshow basis, the Vic 10’s were installed for the run of “Spartacus” making it the first 70mm roadshow there
Radio City’s Dancing Waters were the same as those at the 1939 World’s Fair if I remember correctly. I think I have a Radio City Pictorial from 1956 that pictures them in use on the stage. It may have been a smaller unit, but the Dancing Waters company had touring versions of the Dancing Waters, and Radio City was used to dealing with water on stage in those days. They had a rain pipe that poured real water on the stage with an elevator lowered a couple of inches lined with a tarp and with a drain. We had a rain effect on film that was used if the stage began to warp a bit after the live rain had been used for a while and started to cause problems for the dancers.
The Dancing Waters would have been a logical act since Leon Leonidoff was involved with shows at various World’s Fairs, and was savy enough to bring elements that worked at the Fair to the stage at Radio City. (He also was involved with the Japanese pavillion and specified dimensions for the “Doncho” silk drop that was used, knowing that the only theatre in town with the capability of using it in a stage show was Radio City. It was so big and heavy it took two pipes to hang it, and it was the one drop that remained in the flies most of the time because it was too big to move to the warehouse.)
Techman: Thanks for the clarification. By the time I worked there the house had been tripled so a lot of the information about the past came from the projectionists I worked with who had worked there previously.
The entrance may have always been on 7th Avenue, but it would be interesting to know more about Ben Olevsky’s statement that the auditorium had been reversed (possibly from the Columbia days). The contractor for the triplexing had been confused by the plans of the building filed with the city until I mentioned the reversal to him. He said that made the original drawings he had obtained make sense.
The Potts platters were probably the first in Manhattan. I know Bob Potts came out for the installation and I gave him a tour of the Music Hall. The story (confirmed by Bob himself) was that when the Virginia Theatre in Champaign threw the projectionists out and put in xenon with a Norelco platter (one of the first in the country), Bob and his brother came to the theatre to buy the carbon arc motor/generator set which they wanted to use for welding. When the saw the Norelco platter they asked about it and were told it was made overseas and none were made in the U.S. They said they could make one and did (presumeably the one that eventually became the Christie). Bob after splitting with his brother then went through his “air-platter” phase (a platter driven by a vacuum cleaner), and then the the platters installed at the Embassy.
At least two of the Vic-10’s were still in use the last time I was in the booth shortly before the theatre closed. They had a pretty good run from “Spartacus” to the end.
Thanks also for confirming the story about being able to take an elevator up to the electrical closet. By the time I worked there the electrical panel had been removed and the port used by the stagehand who operated it had become the port for the third machine. The room behind it (where I assume the opening from the electrical closet was) had been pretty much cleaned out.
My guess would be that the feature screen size in 1933 would have been close to 30' x 40'. I had lenses for that size in my lens closet. Remember that the newsreels were run at a larger size, probably closer to 35' x 48'. I had a lens clamp in the closet marked “Newreel”, and Fred Kellers who was director of house operations and started as an usher at the Hall when he was in high school, remembered the newsreel size expanding. As mentioned above the house was equipped for Magnascope masking so the change would be easy to do. (Also mentioned in a post above the size of the screen increased for the train wreck in “The Greatest Show On Earth”.)
None of these are exact figures to the inch. The Hall has about a 19 degree downward angle depending on the format used, so there is keystoning and some picture elongation that takes place. We had to crop our screening of “Fantasia” a bit since I was using the 1.85 lenses with the picture height expanded from around 27' to the full 35', and it overshot the screen despite being mathematically correct. When we replaced the 1.85 lenses a few years later, I deliberately chose a lens a quarter of an inch longer in focal length, which shrunk the 1.85 picture a minimal amount, but allowed the same lens to project a 1.37 aspect ratio film full frame at the 35' height.
We never got an explanation for the newsreel being projected larger, but I always suspected it was to show off the full screen size at the time (all films would have been projected at the 1.37:1 aspect ratio until CinemaScope was installed). Making the feature somewhat smaller gave a sharper and somewhat brighter image for material that would involve the audience for a longer time.
The picture sheet at the Hall has been 35' x 70' (give or take a couple of inches for grommeting since at least the days of CinemaScope. The top and side masking which dates back to the opening of the house and Magnascope can move to cover any aspect ratio in that frame.
I think I mentioned in a post some time back that the Hall was late to install CinemaScope because Fox insisted on a curved screen. While it is possible to fly a curved sheet, at the Hall that would have meant sacrificing line sets for stage drops for the stage shows.
When MGM (which had long ties to the Hall) booked “Knights of the Roundtable” they said they didn’t care whether the screen was flat or curved, so the Hall went ahead with the Scope installation.
I doubt that the VistaVision size listed is correct. Paramount’s contention was that the height of the VistaVision image was more realistic than the 2.55 aspect ratio (at the time) of Scope. As listed above the ratio for VistaVision would have been 2:42 or almost as wide as Scope. The size given for the Paramount screen which would have had a ratio of 1.82 would have been more realistic (and remember the Paramount was the home theatre for Paramount Pictures the developer of VistaVision). I may have the correct size of the VistaVision image somewhere in my files, but it is more likely that while it could have been 64' wide, it would have been higher, probably near the full 35' height of the screen.
The Hall was used to demonstrate VistaVision to the press, and of course, was the first theatre to show a VistaVision film, “White Christmas” in Horizontal VistaVision. It was the only time the process was shown at the Hall.
The Radio City presesntation of “White Christmas” was one of the few nationwide to project the feature in true horizontal VistaVision. The picture ran horizontally with each frame being eight perforations, or two frames, wide. Two horizontal VistaVision Century projectors were installed just outside the regular projection booth walls and interlocked to an optical track running on the Hall’s normal 35mm projectors #1 and #4 inside the booth. Because, unlike 70mm projectors, the VistaVision projectors couldn’t run any other format only the major cities got to see “White Christmas with all its resolution. Only two other VistaVision features got a fairly wide horizontal VistaVision release in the U. S., "Strategic Air Command” and “The Far Horizons”, one at the Paramount (VistaVision was Paramount’s proprietary process), and one possibly at the Criterion.
Re: William’s note about the skylight on the 13th. They did put skylights over the stage in some houses. Radio City had three. They could be swung open if there was a fire on stage to ventilate the area and not fill the auditorium with smoke. When we did the “Lion King” premiere we had a Disney stage show which featured lots of pyrotechnic usage. The first rehearsal where the fireworks were used generated so much smoke that all of the elevators responded to a fire warning, went to the basement and stopped running until the smoke was cleared. Stagehands went up to the roof and opened the skylights. After that, for the rest of the run they were opened for the stage show. Since we were doing matinee performances, we could see a small patch of sunlight from the open skylights hitting the stage floor during the screening of the film. Every day it moved closer to the screen and we were wondering when it would actually get into the picture area. Fortunately, the run ended before that happened, but we were aware of the skylights after that.
I also remember working a Diana Ross concert one really stormy night when the stagehands had to go up and throw tarps over the skylights because the rain was coming down on stage about where Ms. Ross was to make her entrance.
The skylights did contain glass panels as normal skylights would, but the glass was painted black. Thinking about it now, I wonder if that wasn’t done so that a major fire involving the drops hung in the flies would generate enough heat to break the glass, creating a self opening skylight to ventilate the heat and smoke upward.
I would suspect what you saw at the Majestic was indeed a skylight over the stage house.
Yes, those photos are accurate. If you think getting to the top of the balcony was steep, you should have seen the stairs up to the booth. It was a major hike to get from the ground floor up to the booth, and once you got there you stayed! You can’t tell it from the photo of the back wall, but the wall curves out with ornamental plaster at the port level, so looking at the downstairs screen was kind of like looking at a postage stamp through a tunnel. The small ports at the right edge of the picture were the original projector and view ports. There were three of them for the three projectors. After the triplexing the left and right projectors were moved to spotlight and Brenograph ports which were more closely centered on the two screens in the balcony. It was a pretty impressive house before the triplexing, and still retained elements of its former grandeur after it was cut up.
Vito: I haven’t been in the rooms since I left in 2000, but as far as I know they’re still being used for office space, although I understand a number of the offices have now been moved to the Garden. One of the projectors from Preview B is on (or was on) display on a staircase niche out at the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens.
I do have some more information for you about the “Sex and the City 2” screening. They used two digital cinema projectors with 6K lamps. Because one had an E-Fib card, and the other an F-Fib card (don’t ask!) they couldn’t run both superimposed during the show, but did have both superimposed so they had back-up. You will be pleased to note that they agree with you and ran the 35mm print from a Double-MUTT rather than a platter. They did lower the gamma on the digital copies to get a little more light on the screen — the equivalent of my having prints pulled a couple of points lighter. Since the Music Hall asn’t installed red lilght readers for analogue, only the digital track on the film could be used, but by the time they would have needed the SR track they would have lost two digital projectors and the 35mm digital track, so it wasn’t a major concern. Apparently everything looked and sounded fine.
We had been using video projectors in odd places from the time I started at the Hall. In this case they are doubled up on the screen so you have a 100% backup. On one of the Grammy award shows we had four video projectors on the screen at the same time from the rear projection booth. The irony is that growing up in Illinois I always heard that the Hall always ran doubled up 35mm projectors. With the exception of special shows and premieres they never did. Now it’s possible, and the image from two digital projectors can be matched electronically much more exactly than you could match 35mm projectors. In addition, the image is much brighter. I think the “Sex” projectors used 7K bulbs. The Hall uses 7K bulbs for 70mm projection but they would tend to burn 35mm film. I must say that in all the time I was at the Hall using video projection for “Image magnification” (the visual equivalent of the P.A. system) I can remember just two failures of the projectors during a performance. The server is also matched with a back-up so there’s almost 100% redundancy.
One of the problems with both film and digital projection is that the equipment in many theatres isn’t maintained and there are no projectionists left to see that it is. Thus I think the studios would rather have digital equipment brought in for premieres that they know has been kept up by the company supplying it. In many cases it’s easier to move digital equipment into place than it is to bring neglected film projecton equipment back up to spec.
Finally, I’m afraid it’s a moot point. Pictures are being shot digitally, and even when shot on film being processed digitally to create digital intermediates from which film prints are finally generated. It makes sense to keep everything in the same form. Theatres are starting to gravitate toward 4K digital projectors which should be able to generate near 70mm quality. Great strides are being made in digital quality, while film isn’t getting much attention these days since it is a “mature” medium. I’ve been told that Panavision plans no more development engineering on its film cameras, preferring to concentrate on digital. I know of one major producer who insists that his pictures be shown digitally for screenings, and film be used only as a back-up.
I hate to sound as if I’m playing “devil’s advocate”, but having worked for the last decade with state-ot-the-art (and well maintained) digital equipment, I have to say I’m a little wistful about the things I could have done at the Hall if we had the digital capability they do now. There are trade-offs of course, but I think in the next few years you’ll see digital exhibition that will be able to rival (and perhaps even exceed) the best 70mm exhibition – if there are exhibitors around who care enough about presentation quality to make it happen.
Vito: The first time platters were used in the booth was for the premiere engagement of “The Lion King”. For the initial premiere we ran a platter with a 70mm print on Machine 4, interlocked to a 35mm digital print on Machine 5. The picture came from the 70mm print, and the track was Dolby Digital on the 35mm print. Our Dolby rep rigged the CP200 so that if the digital track failed, instead of reverting to the 35mm SR track, the reversion was to the SR encoded mag tracks on the 70mm print. The other two 70mm machines were used to run the backup 70mm print reel-to-reel, with the projectors being rolled on the motor cues on the plattered 70mm print. We did a similar show with platters when we ran “101 Dalmations” at the premiere. (We did use a MUTT for the press converence for “The Lion King”.)
Vito, I believe the digital projectors were indeed set up on the 1st Mezzanine. I think a platter was used for the back-up film in the booth. I gather it took a little while to get the 35mm machine running since the two main 70/35mm projectors are used for the 3-D opening in the Christmas Show, and the others are only used for special events like the “Sex” premiere. I’ll try to get some more information next week.
Digital cinema is indeed projected, but with higher resolution and color space than home format high definition. The most common means of delivery at the moment is to send a hard-drive in a lunch-box sized plastic case. Technicolor’s cases are orange, just like their film cases. The drives measure about 7" x 4.5" x 1.5", and may have a slip on extension, with a power connection to a power transformer and a USB output connection. The data on the drive is then input to a server either by USB or by slipping off the extension and plugging the drive directly into an opening in the server. The offload into the server takes about half to three-fourths of the time it takes to run the movie.
Once loaded into the server, the data shows up in a menue which shows all of the material being stored locally, and may include trailers as well as features. When the show is made up the traiilers may be dropped in ahead of the feature by moving a cursor on a computer screen and the total running time of the package is calculated automatically. The same drive may be used to program as many auditoriums as needed, and the shows complete with start/end and lighting cues may be programmed to start automatically.
Before the picture may be shown a digital key must be generated to tell the server that the dates and times of exhibition have been O.K.’d by the studio. The digital data is robustly encrypted, and doesn’t exist in analogue form until it is ready to be projected inside the projector. If the server is opened or connections are interrupted, the show is shut down. The “key” can be sent by e-mail, downloaded onto a memory stick and then loaded into the server.
Shows may swapped from one server in a multiplex to another, or stored in a show library if more storage capacity is needed. During operation all of the data about what is being shown on which screen can be displayed on a computer monitor along with the start and end times of the shows currently running. This makes digital presentation convenient since you don’t need a separate print for each screen.
Vito, digital with a film backup. I wasn’t there, but a couple of the guys I work with were sound techs hired by the studio, one of them a former projectionist. He said it went well once they tuned everything up. I’ll try to get some details when he returns from the gig he’s on over the weekend.
In a sense everybody may be right, since the seat count at the Hall frequently changes. When I first started learning about the Hall when I was in Illinois, it was listed as having 6,200 seats. Fred Kellers, who was a Vice President of House Operations told me that Roxy wanted to claim that the Hall had more seats than his former venue theRoxy. Thus, they counted even the toilets as “seats” along with the furniture in the lobby.
While that story may be fanciful, the number of seats did change. Even before the concert and telecast age, if the pasarelle (Sp?), or ramp along thefront of the orchestra pit was in for the Rockettes to move out into the audience for their finale, one or two rows of seats at the front of the orchestra were lost, thus reducing the number.
As oldjoe points out above, seating on the orchestra pit itself added seats for some concerts (they’re regarded as “VIP” seats, although I’ve always thought the sightlines were not particularly good unless the performer was working far downstage.)
The move of the house sound board from the Projection level to the 2nd Mezz. lost some seats, and the number constantly changes to accomdate various pieces of equipment as well as the demands of the various telecasts which originate there. Thus all of the above seating estimates may be correct at any given point in time.
I must disagree with the statement that the Easter Show wasn’t as memorable as the Christmas Show. The “Glory of Easter” prelude always blew me away, and I was actually kind of disappointed when I first saw the “Nativity” Prelude as originally done. The “Glory” is all about choreography, and you don’t realize where it’s heading until the final chords of music when the “novices” kneel and form a living cross on the steps to the altar as the contour comes in.
That cross was lit by two high intensity spots in th projection booth, the brightest of all the spots in the theatre. The only lamps run by projectionists rather than stage hands, they could project patterns as well as having cutters that could mask the image to strips, with one lamp doing the horizontal bar of the cross and the other doing the vertical. As the contour just ticked the tip of the vertical strip lighting the cross the lamps faded.
The incident Vito is referring to came about because the previous cue for the lamps was a blue strip across the front of the stage as the Rockettes came down from their positions on the Choral Stairs. When that cue was finished the blue gels in the lamps were pulled out and the lamps were put into “spot focus” mode which reduced the spread of the lamps and produced a very intense white light for the cross. As the girls kneeled, the stage manager would buzz the booth for the lamps to come on together.
At one performance, the two operators must have gotten into a conversation (or an argument) and forgot to pull the blue gels, so when the cue came, the light on the cross wasn’t the brilliant white it was suppoosed to be. After the show an angry stage manager called the booth to chew out the crew. “What was that?” he asked angrily. The projectionist on the phone was unfazed. “What? Haven’t you ever heard of Blue Cross?!”
As far as I know, when I left the Hall the asbestos curtain was still in use (although it isn’t publicized as being asbestos.) It is in two sections because it is over 70' in height (the proscenium is an arch with a 60' radius which starts 10' off the deck.) The two sections are easier to handle in terms of sheer weight as well as not requiring over 140' plus in fly space as a single piece would require. As I think has been mentioned above, the curtain in free fall is stopped by weights hitting water in pnuematic tubes. No one, or thing, is allowed to stand on the curtain line, since that would block it’s fall. As of the time I left, the curtain was still tested in a free fall drop on a regular basis — a truly impressive sight (and sound).
I didn’t start there until “Close Encounters” in 1979. (I came to the Music Hall from Illinois in January of 1974.)
In thinking back I did remember one other note posted on the Zeiss rack in the booth that might have been a reference to the good Dr. It just said, rather cryptically, “Henry — Vats mit der Ding-dong?”
Bill, I heard a Dr. Jetske (?) from Zeiss discuss the console at an SMPTE meeting. He was very German, “Und here ve haff the controls for the Overturemusic…” While he was enthusiastic about the automation equipment, the booth crew seemed to have been less so. When I started there, there was a simple sign at the top of the automation rack in the booth that said “HAL”, a rather witty reference to the evil computer in “2001”. It was a very complete system, with a small TV camera aimed at each projector so the operator at the console see how they were running on monitors in that position. At least it was an automation system that was designed to have a human monitoring the screening!
William, thank you. L.A. always confuses me. I visited both MGM and Columbia on that trip,and the Head Projectionist at Columbia who was an ex-Marine, gave me detailed instructions as to how to get there by L.A. Public Transit. When I made the appointment with MGM I was told there was no way to get there from the Ambassador Hotel on Wilshire short of taking a taxi. He was right!
Just a couple of comments on “The Unsinkable Molly Brown” mentioned above. I remember seeing it when it opened in Chicago with a friend from college who was visiting. We had gone in to see the roadshow presentation of “Mad, Mad, World” which I had seen before. Unfortunately, this time there was a terrific hum on one 70mm machine which affected all 6 channels making for a very uncomfortable experience. Coming out we decided to go down the street to see “Unsinkable” which was also being shown in 70mm at the Palace in non-roadshow form. We were delighted to find the projection and sound perfect.
Later that year, I visited the MGM lot in Burbank, and mentioned to the Head Projectionist how much we had enjoyed “Unsinkable”. He said they had not planned to make any 70mm prints, only 35mm and mostly mono-optical when they decided to try a 70mm version at a preview screening. He said it was as if they were watching a completely different picture from the one they had been seeing, with a terrific audience response. While they didn’t release it as a roadshow, they did pull 70mm prints for major cities.
Interestingly enough, Radio City played only a 35mm 4 track print, largely due to Head Projectionist Ben Olevsky’s objection to installing 70mm at the Hall. “Unsinkable” was one of the few pictures in 70mm short enough to fit into the Hall’s stageshow/movie policy at the time, and Ben said he had been told there wouln’t be any more 70mm prints like it released, so it wasn’t worth the trouble to install the equipment. He won the battle, but eventually lost the war when Universal four-walled the house and insisted that Ross Hunter’s “Airport” be shown in 70mm.
(Later we did do three 70mm roadshow features: “Gone With The Wind”, “Dr. Zhivago” and “2001” along with a VERY short stage show.)
Actually, it never ran porn although that was the intention when it was triplexed. A friend of mine (who probably knew techman) did the triplex booth work, and I was in the house while the contractor was there. They had added dressing rooms off to the side of the stage and put a runway for strippers down the center of the orchestra from the stage. Before it opened, Mayor Koch said “no more porno houses in Time Squaare”, and they abandoned the plan, and tried to run it as a normal triplex. They even installed a 16mm projector in addition to Vic 10 in one of the balcony houses.
Again, it’s AlAlvarez' area of expertise, but I suspect that they didn’t have the booking clout to handle non-porn product, and Peter did. Thus he picked the house up. As you mentioned, the maintenance was never great during those days. He did run a couple of 70mm pictures in the downstairs house, but since the light path from the booth was blocked by the two smaller theatres on either side in the balcony, he could never run a really wide picture. (Remember, the triplexing was done for porn which was pretty much 1.33:1 aspect ratio, so they never planned to run a picture as wide as the 70mm image in the pre-triplexing days downstairs. 1.85 aspect ratio material was as wide as they could go. I remember standing on the stage when the theatre was undergoing triplexing and looking up at the center port in the booth and then walking stage left until it was blocked by the wall of the theatre on one side, and then stage right until I could no longer see the port because it was blocked by the other house wall and determining that that was as wide an image as could be projected. Too bad — shortening the length of the two upstairs theatres a bit would have allowed a full proscenium width 70mm or Scope picture to continue to be presented.
As a kind of sad tribute to the days there that Techman remembers, the five stage channel Altecs that were hung from the ceiling for (I believe) “The Concert For Bangledesh” to cover the balcony remained there until the end. No one wanted to go to the expense of getting them down.
Peter Elson (sp?) was the last operator as far as I know. He ran it during the time I worked there on a regular relief basis, and after I left I did get an emergency call to cover the booth near the end and Peter still had the house. Al Alvarez probably knows the full story, but as I heard it Mayor Koch vetoed any more porn houses in the area at the time. Thus the people who triplexed the theatre removed the runway for the strippers that they had installed in the downstairs house and ran the theatre as the Mark for a while until Peter took over. Peter changed the name to the Embassy 2-3-4 since he had a habit of naming all of his theatres “Embassy”. Embassy “1” was the theatre on 7th Avenue which now a New York visitor’s center. I worked relief in most of his theatres with the exception of the Guild and Embassy 72nd St.
He had a way of picking up odd venues. He “inherited” the Mark after the plans to turn the DeMille into a porno house fell through, and he inherited the World (possibly the most famous porno house in the country from its “Deep Throat” days) after Rockefeller Center management became embarrassed about owning the property. Since Peter also operated the Guild next to the Music Hall they thought he would be a good operator and the World went from porn to Disney before it closed. (Again, AlAlvarez probably has some nifty Peter stories to tell.)
Techman: Perhaps you can verify a couple of stories about projection at the Palace. Bill Nafash said that when they installed 70mm for “Ben-Hur” and “Chips” the throw from the temporary booth to the screen was so short that they had to use very short focal length lenses to get the screen size they needed. To get the picture in focus with that set-up the lenses sat so far back in the lens barrels that the gate couldn’t be opened for threading. Thus the lens collar had to be slipped forward to thread and then pushed back into position after the threading was complete. Bill said that more than once the operators forgot to move the lens back into position and the reel came up spectacularly out of focus.
Did you ever work the 35mm/frontlight booth in the Palace? When I came to New York a stagehand at the Hall who also worked a show at the Palace snuck me into the booth to see the show. The Simplex X-L’s were still there, and as I recall it the bases had been cut down and the angle was so steep (as you mention above) that the operators would have had to sit down on cut-down stools to thread the machines.
Technically, roadshows of films (limited screenings per day with reserved seats and advanced prices) go as far back as “Birth of a Nation” and “Gone With The Wind” among others which William and Tinseltoes can probably list in great detail. While “Oklahoma” and “Around The World In 80 Days” were the first 70mm Todd-AO features released that used the roadshow policy, don’t forget to include the 3 strip Cinerama presentations which preceded 70mm releases and were all presented with just one or two screenings a day. While it’s possible that the Mayfair/Demille had played 35mm films on a roadshow basis, the Vic 10’s were installed for the run of “Spartacus” making it the first 70mm roadshow there
Radio City’s Dancing Waters were the same as those at the 1939 World’s Fair if I remember correctly. I think I have a Radio City Pictorial from 1956 that pictures them in use on the stage. It may have been a smaller unit, but the Dancing Waters company had touring versions of the Dancing Waters, and Radio City was used to dealing with water on stage in those days. They had a rain pipe that poured real water on the stage with an elevator lowered a couple of inches lined with a tarp and with a drain. We had a rain effect on film that was used if the stage began to warp a bit after the live rain had been used for a while and started to cause problems for the dancers.
The Dancing Waters would have been a logical act since Leon Leonidoff was involved with shows at various World’s Fairs, and was savy enough to bring elements that worked at the Fair to the stage at Radio City. (He also was involved with the Japanese pavillion and specified dimensions for the “Doncho” silk drop that was used, knowing that the only theatre in town with the capability of using it in a stage show was Radio City. It was so big and heavy it took two pipes to hang it, and it was the one drop that remained in the flies most of the time because it was too big to move to the warehouse.)
Techman: Thanks for the clarification. By the time I worked there the house had been tripled so a lot of the information about the past came from the projectionists I worked with who had worked there previously.
The entrance may have always been on 7th Avenue, but it would be interesting to know more about Ben Olevsky’s statement that the auditorium had been reversed (possibly from the Columbia days). The contractor for the triplexing had been confused by the plans of the building filed with the city until I mentioned the reversal to him. He said that made the original drawings he had obtained make sense.
The Potts platters were probably the first in Manhattan. I know Bob Potts came out for the installation and I gave him a tour of the Music Hall. The story (confirmed by Bob himself) was that when the Virginia Theatre in Champaign threw the projectionists out and put in xenon with a Norelco platter (one of the first in the country), Bob and his brother came to the theatre to buy the carbon arc motor/generator set which they wanted to use for welding. When the saw the Norelco platter they asked about it and were told it was made overseas and none were made in the U.S. They said they could make one and did (presumeably the one that eventually became the Christie). Bob after splitting with his brother then went through his “air-platter” phase (a platter driven by a vacuum cleaner), and then the the platters installed at the Embassy.
At least two of the Vic-10’s were still in use the last time I was in the booth shortly before the theatre closed. They had a pretty good run from “Spartacus” to the end.
Thanks also for confirming the story about being able to take an elevator up to the electrical closet. By the time I worked there the electrical panel had been removed and the port used by the stagehand who operated it had become the port for the third machine. The room behind it (where I assume the opening from the electrical closet was) had been pretty much cleaned out.
My guess would be that the feature screen size in 1933 would have been close to 30' x 40'. I had lenses for that size in my lens closet. Remember that the newsreels were run at a larger size, probably closer to 35' x 48'. I had a lens clamp in the closet marked “Newreel”, and Fred Kellers who was director of house operations and started as an usher at the Hall when he was in high school, remembered the newsreel size expanding. As mentioned above the house was equipped for Magnascope masking so the change would be easy to do. (Also mentioned in a post above the size of the screen increased for the train wreck in “The Greatest Show On Earth”.)
None of these are exact figures to the inch. The Hall has about a 19 degree downward angle depending on the format used, so there is keystoning and some picture elongation that takes place. We had to crop our screening of “Fantasia” a bit since I was using the 1.85 lenses with the picture height expanded from around 27' to the full 35', and it overshot the screen despite being mathematically correct. When we replaced the 1.85 lenses a few years later, I deliberately chose a lens a quarter of an inch longer in focal length, which shrunk the 1.85 picture a minimal amount, but allowed the same lens to project a 1.37 aspect ratio film full frame at the 35' height.
We never got an explanation for the newsreel being projected larger, but I always suspected it was to show off the full screen size at the time (all films would have been projected at the 1.37:1 aspect ratio until CinemaScope was installed). Making the feature somewhat smaller gave a sharper and somewhat brighter image for material that would involve the audience for a longer time.
The picture sheet at the Hall has been 35' x 70' (give or take a couple of inches for grommeting since at least the days of CinemaScope. The top and side masking which dates back to the opening of the house and Magnascope can move to cover any aspect ratio in that frame.
I think I mentioned in a post some time back that the Hall was late to install CinemaScope because Fox insisted on a curved screen. While it is possible to fly a curved sheet, at the Hall that would have meant sacrificing line sets for stage drops for the stage shows.
When MGM (which had long ties to the Hall) booked “Knights of the Roundtable” they said they didn’t care whether the screen was flat or curved, so the Hall went ahead with the Scope installation.
I doubt that the VistaVision size listed is correct. Paramount’s contention was that the height of the VistaVision image was more realistic than the 2.55 aspect ratio (at the time) of Scope. As listed above the ratio for VistaVision would have been 2:42 or almost as wide as Scope. The size given for the Paramount screen which would have had a ratio of 1.82 would have been more realistic (and remember the Paramount was the home theatre for Paramount Pictures the developer of VistaVision). I may have the correct size of the VistaVision image somewhere in my files, but it is more likely that while it could have been 64' wide, it would have been higher, probably near the full 35' height of the screen.
The Hall was used to demonstrate VistaVision to the press, and of course, was the first theatre to show a VistaVision film, “White Christmas” in Horizontal VistaVision. It was the only time the process was shown at the Hall.
The Radio City presesntation of “White Christmas” was one of the few nationwide to project the feature in true horizontal VistaVision. The picture ran horizontally with each frame being eight perforations, or two frames, wide. Two horizontal VistaVision Century projectors were installed just outside the regular projection booth walls and interlocked to an optical track running on the Hall’s normal 35mm projectors #1 and #4 inside the booth. Because, unlike 70mm projectors, the VistaVision projectors couldn’t run any other format only the major cities got to see “White Christmas with all its resolution. Only two other VistaVision features got a fairly wide horizontal VistaVision release in the U. S., "Strategic Air Command” and “The Far Horizons”, one at the Paramount (VistaVision was Paramount’s proprietary process), and one possibly at the Criterion.
Re: William’s note about the skylight on the 13th. They did put skylights over the stage in some houses. Radio City had three. They could be swung open if there was a fire on stage to ventilate the area and not fill the auditorium with smoke. When we did the “Lion King” premiere we had a Disney stage show which featured lots of pyrotechnic usage. The first rehearsal where the fireworks were used generated so much smoke that all of the elevators responded to a fire warning, went to the basement and stopped running until the smoke was cleared. Stagehands went up to the roof and opened the skylights. After that, for the rest of the run they were opened for the stage show. Since we were doing matinee performances, we could see a small patch of sunlight from the open skylights hitting the stage floor during the screening of the film. Every day it moved closer to the screen and we were wondering when it would actually get into the picture area. Fortunately, the run ended before that happened, but we were aware of the skylights after that.
I also remember working a Diana Ross concert one really stormy night when the stagehands had to go up and throw tarps over the skylights because the rain was coming down on stage about where Ms. Ross was to make her entrance.
The skylights did contain glass panels as normal skylights would, but the glass was painted black. Thinking about it now, I wonder if that wasn’t done so that a major fire involving the drops hung in the flies would generate enough heat to break the glass, creating a self opening skylight to ventilate the heat and smoke upward.
I would suspect what you saw at the Majestic was indeed a skylight over the stage house.
Yes, those photos are accurate. If you think getting to the top of the balcony was steep, you should have seen the stairs up to the booth. It was a major hike to get from the ground floor up to the booth, and once you got there you stayed! You can’t tell it from the photo of the back wall, but the wall curves out with ornamental plaster at the port level, so looking at the downstairs screen was kind of like looking at a postage stamp through a tunnel. The small ports at the right edge of the picture were the original projector and view ports. There were three of them for the three projectors. After the triplexing the left and right projectors were moved to spotlight and Brenograph ports which were more closely centered on the two screens in the balcony. It was a pretty impressive house before the triplexing, and still retained elements of its former grandeur after it was cut up.
Vito: I haven’t been in the rooms since I left in 2000, but as far as I know they’re still being used for office space, although I understand a number of the offices have now been moved to the Garden. One of the projectors from Preview B is on (or was on) display on a staircase niche out at the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens.
I do have some more information for you about the “Sex and the City 2” screening. They used two digital cinema projectors with 6K lamps. Because one had an E-Fib card, and the other an F-Fib card (don’t ask!) they couldn’t run both superimposed during the show, but did have both superimposed so they had back-up. You will be pleased to note that they agree with you and ran the 35mm print from a Double-MUTT rather than a platter. They did lower the gamma on the digital copies to get a little more light on the screen — the equivalent of my having prints pulled a couple of points lighter. Since the Music Hall asn’t installed red lilght readers for analogue, only the digital track on the film could be used, but by the time they would have needed the SR track they would have lost two digital projectors and the 35mm digital track, so it wasn’t a major concern. Apparently everything looked and sounded fine.
We had been using video projectors in odd places from the time I started at the Hall. In this case they are doubled up on the screen so you have a 100% backup. On one of the Grammy award shows we had four video projectors on the screen at the same time from the rear projection booth. The irony is that growing up in Illinois I always heard that the Hall always ran doubled up 35mm projectors. With the exception of special shows and premieres they never did. Now it’s possible, and the image from two digital projectors can be matched electronically much more exactly than you could match 35mm projectors. In addition, the image is much brighter. I think the “Sex” projectors used 7K bulbs. The Hall uses 7K bulbs for 70mm projection but they would tend to burn 35mm film. I must say that in all the time I was at the Hall using video projection for “Image magnification” (the visual equivalent of the P.A. system) I can remember just two failures of the projectors during a performance. The server is also matched with a back-up so there’s almost 100% redundancy.
One of the problems with both film and digital projection is that the equipment in many theatres isn’t maintained and there are no projectionists left to see that it is. Thus I think the studios would rather have digital equipment brought in for premieres that they know has been kept up by the company supplying it. In many cases it’s easier to move digital equipment into place than it is to bring neglected film projecton equipment back up to spec.
Finally, I’m afraid it’s a moot point. Pictures are being shot digitally, and even when shot on film being processed digitally to create digital intermediates from which film prints are finally generated. It makes sense to keep everything in the same form. Theatres are starting to gravitate toward 4K digital projectors which should be able to generate near 70mm quality. Great strides are being made in digital quality, while film isn’t getting much attention these days since it is a “mature” medium. I’ve been told that Panavision plans no more development engineering on its film cameras, preferring to concentrate on digital. I know of one major producer who insists that his pictures be shown digitally for screenings, and film be used only as a back-up.
I hate to sound as if I’m playing “devil’s advocate”, but having worked for the last decade with state-ot-the-art (and well maintained) digital equipment, I have to say I’m a little wistful about the things I could have done at the Hall if we had the digital capability they do now. There are trade-offs of course, but I think in the next few years you’ll see digital exhibition that will be able to rival (and perhaps even exceed) the best 70mm exhibition – if there are exhibitors around who care enough about presentation quality to make it happen.
Vito: The first time platters were used in the booth was for the premiere engagement of “The Lion King”. For the initial premiere we ran a platter with a 70mm print on Machine 4, interlocked to a 35mm digital print on Machine 5. The picture came from the 70mm print, and the track was Dolby Digital on the 35mm print. Our Dolby rep rigged the CP200 so that if the digital track failed, instead of reverting to the 35mm SR track, the reversion was to the SR encoded mag tracks on the 70mm print. The other two 70mm machines were used to run the backup 70mm print reel-to-reel, with the projectors being rolled on the motor cues on the plattered 70mm print. We did a similar show with platters when we ran “101 Dalmations” at the premiere. (We did use a MUTT for the press converence for “The Lion King”.)
Vito, I believe the digital projectors were indeed set up on the 1st Mezzanine. I think a platter was used for the back-up film in the booth. I gather it took a little while to get the 35mm machine running since the two main 70/35mm projectors are used for the 3-D opening in the Christmas Show, and the others are only used for special events like the “Sex” premiere. I’ll try to get some more information next week.
Digital cinema is indeed projected, but with higher resolution and color space than home format high definition. The most common means of delivery at the moment is to send a hard-drive in a lunch-box sized plastic case. Technicolor’s cases are orange, just like their film cases. The drives measure about 7" x 4.5" x 1.5", and may have a slip on extension, with a power connection to a power transformer and a USB output connection. The data on the drive is then input to a server either by USB or by slipping off the extension and plugging the drive directly into an opening in the server. The offload into the server takes about half to three-fourths of the time it takes to run the movie.
Once loaded into the server, the data shows up in a menue which shows all of the material being stored locally, and may include trailers as well as features. When the show is made up the traiilers may be dropped in ahead of the feature by moving a cursor on a computer screen and the total running time of the package is calculated automatically. The same drive may be used to program as many auditoriums as needed, and the shows complete with start/end and lighting cues may be programmed to start automatically.
Before the picture may be shown a digital key must be generated to tell the server that the dates and times of exhibition have been O.K.’d by the studio. The digital data is robustly encrypted, and doesn’t exist in analogue form until it is ready to be projected inside the projector. If the server is opened or connections are interrupted, the show is shut down. The “key” can be sent by e-mail, downloaded onto a memory stick and then loaded into the server.
Shows may swapped from one server in a multiplex to another, or stored in a show library if more storage capacity is needed. During operation all of the data about what is being shown on which screen can be displayed on a computer monitor along with the start and end times of the shows currently running. This makes digital presentation convenient since you don’t need a separate print for each screen.
Vito, digital with a film backup. I wasn’t there, but a couple of the guys I work with were sound techs hired by the studio, one of them a former projectionist. He said it went well once they tuned everything up. I’ll try to get some details when he returns from the gig he’s on over the weekend.
In a sense everybody may be right, since the seat count at the Hall frequently changes. When I first started learning about the Hall when I was in Illinois, it was listed as having 6,200 seats. Fred Kellers, who was a Vice President of House Operations told me that Roxy wanted to claim that the Hall had more seats than his former venue theRoxy. Thus, they counted even the toilets as “seats” along with the furniture in the lobby.
While that story may be fanciful, the number of seats did change. Even before the concert and telecast age, if the pasarelle (Sp?), or ramp along thefront of the orchestra pit was in for the Rockettes to move out into the audience for their finale, one or two rows of seats at the front of the orchestra were lost, thus reducing the number.
As oldjoe points out above, seating on the orchestra pit itself added seats for some concerts (they’re regarded as “VIP” seats, although I’ve always thought the sightlines were not particularly good unless the performer was working far downstage.)
The move of the house sound board from the Projection level to the 2nd Mezz. lost some seats, and the number constantly changes to accomdate various pieces of equipment as well as the demands of the various telecasts which originate there. Thus all of the above seating estimates may be correct at any given point in time.
Actually, at one point the ruse was carried even further with a dummy placed at one console.
I must disagree with the statement that the Easter Show wasn’t as memorable as the Christmas Show. The “Glory of Easter” prelude always blew me away, and I was actually kind of disappointed when I first saw the “Nativity” Prelude as originally done. The “Glory” is all about choreography, and you don’t realize where it’s heading until the final chords of music when the “novices” kneel and form a living cross on the steps to the altar as the contour comes in.
That cross was lit by two high intensity spots in th projection booth, the brightest of all the spots in the theatre. The only lamps run by projectionists rather than stage hands, they could project patterns as well as having cutters that could mask the image to strips, with one lamp doing the horizontal bar of the cross and the other doing the vertical. As the contour just ticked the tip of the vertical strip lighting the cross the lamps faded.
The incident Vito is referring to came about because the previous cue for the lamps was a blue strip across the front of the stage as the Rockettes came down from their positions on the Choral Stairs. When that cue was finished the blue gels in the lamps were pulled out and the lamps were put into “spot focus” mode which reduced the spread of the lamps and produced a very intense white light for the cross. As the girls kneeled, the stage manager would buzz the booth for the lamps to come on together.
At one performance, the two operators must have gotten into a conversation (or an argument) and forgot to pull the blue gels, so when the cue came, the light on the cross wasn’t the brilliant white it was suppoosed to be. After the show an angry stage manager called the booth to chew out the crew. “What was that?” he asked angrily. The projectionist on the phone was unfazed. “What? Haven’t you ever heard of Blue Cross?!”
As far as I know, when I left the Hall the asbestos curtain was still in use (although it isn’t publicized as being asbestos.) It is in two sections because it is over 70' in height (the proscenium is an arch with a 60' radius which starts 10' off the deck.) The two sections are easier to handle in terms of sheer weight as well as not requiring over 140' plus in fly space as a single piece would require. As I think has been mentioned above, the curtain in free fall is stopped by weights hitting water in pnuematic tubes. No one, or thing, is allowed to stand on the curtain line, since that would block it’s fall. As of the time I left, the curtain was still tested in a free fall drop on a regular basis — a truly impressive sight (and sound).
I didn’t start there until “Close Encounters” in 1979. (I came to the Music Hall from Illinois in January of 1974.)
In thinking back I did remember one other note posted on the Zeiss rack in the booth that might have been a reference to the good Dr. It just said, rather cryptically, “Henry — Vats mit der Ding-dong?”
Bill, I heard a Dr. Jetske (?) from Zeiss discuss the console at an SMPTE meeting. He was very German, “Und here ve haff the controls for the Overturemusic…” While he was enthusiastic about the automation equipment, the booth crew seemed to have been less so. When I started there, there was a simple sign at the top of the automation rack in the booth that said “HAL”, a rather witty reference to the evil computer in “2001”. It was a very complete system, with a small TV camera aimed at each projector so the operator at the console see how they were running on monitors in that position. At least it was an automation system that was designed to have a human monitoring the screening!