There are two Kerasotes circuit (or were). There was a family argument and some theatres became GKC Theatres (for George Kerasotes), and the other, Kerasotes Theatres. Bloomington and Champaign/Urbana, Illinois were GKC Theatres out of the original Springfield home base, while Galesburg theatres were operated by Kerasotes out of Chicago. The GKC Theatres have now been sold to another circuit (Cinemark?)in the last couple of years.
That’s me. One of the guys here who had also worked on the Music Hall crew posted a bunch of pictures I had put together for an earlier documentary on the Hall. They ranged from one of me taken in a booth when I was 17, to one taken for an article that appeared in Home Theatre Magazine in 1997, with some taken during the run of “Napoleon” at the Hall. He was the one that christened this one “Hippie Bob”, and the one when I was 17 “Bob Jr.” Pretty strange to see your life in a series of photos from 1956 to 1997 in a string of booth pictures!
That’s me. Pat Roberts interrupted a tech screening and called me upstairs to the booth to have that picture taken. I was annoyed at the time, but later glad that she did. That was the last Music Hall Pictorial, which in prior editions featured my predecssors in the Projection Department. I still have a couple of copies in my collection of Music Hall memorabilia (as well as a copy from 1956, the first year I visited the Hall.)
Hey, hey, hey — actually my Century’s didn’t leak much, but they were built when Larry Davee ran the company out in Long Island City,so as with Simplex they may have come from an era when things were better built.
I did most of the maintenance on the equipment at the Hall when I was there, although there wasn’t a lot to do on the machines. Bill Nafash, my predecssor had just rebuilt the #1 original X-L before he died (in fact the crew was putting it in when they found out about his death). The 35/70mm machines were in terrible shape when I went there. The man who was supposed to do the conversion and build them for the Hall had lost his company in a divorce settlement, and the rumor was that his accountant had put them together. When I announced to the crew that we were going to be running 70mm, one of them put his hands around my neck as if to strangle me and said, “We don’t want to run 70mm!” We took the heads off during the hiatus period before the 70mm run was to start and took them out to National Theatre Supply in Paramus where they were rebuilt by Leo Lucas who was in charge of the Simplex plant. He did find spacer washers on the wrong side of the projector frame among other things, which might have explained why they weren’t working well.
At any rate, I did take care of oil-change and general routine care. The Hall had a contract with RCA (naturally) for years with a man assigned just to the Hall to do maintenance on all of the booth and stage sound equipment. By the time I went there thay had hired him full time, but eventually let him go because he kept forgetting to change the oil in the soundheads and we lost several gears that way. After he left Warren Jenkins and I took care of things.
With the format change Warren left, but I had the help of Boston Light & Sound for shows like “Napoleon” with the three projector interlock system, and had a crew which included both a vice-president and tech director of the New York Dolby office. I tried to have crew members who had knowledge in specific areas I didn’t. One of the members had gone to work for Rangertone while still in high school, and by the time he graduated he was in charge of their mag head department. Obvioulsy he had a great background in machining, and also had served in Nam in the air force as an electronic technician as well.
I concentrated on working with the producers doing film effects for the stage shows, which included sheparding them through various effects houses to have them shot, and then coming up with lensing and aperture combinations to make them fit the scenery. (If you access Thomas Haurslev’s 70mm web-site, there’s an article on the Hall written by me which includes a picture of some of the odd aperture plates my predecessors and I had cut for the stage shows.)
I also had to figure out the rewiring of the changeovers for “Napoleon” (getting three to open at once when the #3 pedal was stepped on), and working with B.L.&S. to put variable speed motors with speed counters in for our silent film festival. And of course figuring out throws for equipment which ranged from 16mm to video projection for the various touring shows we did after 1979.
Vito: actually, Ben wasn’t a bad operator. He had started as a reel boy in the silent days, and just wasn’t much into the technical side of projection. He was the last of the original crew when I came there to leave, and the only one to survive the transition. I must admit that when he said that “my” side of the projector had nothing to do with “his” side of the projector, I replied, “You do realize that if "my” side of the projector stops working, “your” side will shortly do the same?"
Well, they do meet your own criteria for being called a “Premiere” (an initial “event” followed by a run in the same house). I will admit most of them were pretty forgettable, which is why it took me a while to remember them. On the other hand, I would classify “Lion King” as a hit that adults seem to love too. Our run at the Hall coupled with the El Capitan in L.A. placed the film in the top ten the week of the premiere with it playing on just two screens in the country.
I was told we could have had “The Godfather”, which certainly had Music Hall class and popularity, but it would have been the Easter attraction and they couldn’t see coming right out of the violence at the end of the feature into the “Glory of Easter”. The whole industry was changing, and it was harder to find adult films that wouldn’t exclude families and still fill the place. After all, a couple of the biggest hits for the Hall, “Airport” and “The Odd Couple” were G-rated, or at least family friendly. To fill 6,000 seats at that time you kind of had to go for a lowest common denominator status as our window of exclusivity kept shrinking and audiences were fleeing the city to the suburbs. Another aspect of “the changing times” noted above.
Ha Vito: For once we’re in disagreement. I liked the Century’s on an RCA soundhead. I would apply grease to the gears, and then wipe any excess thrown off of the inside of the case and found they were pretty clean. They were also simple with just basically a horizontal and a vertical shaft. At one point we had a couple of the Indian made copies of the Century at the Hall in the #1 and #5 positions. While they weren’t as good as the machines made here, and the intermittents leaked, I still enjoyed having them for trial. At one point I took one of my older, skeptical projectionists around to the the gear side and opened the door while the machine was running to show him how simple it was. His comment, “Yes. But this side of the projector has nothing to do with my side of the projector.” !!!
The Hall had a long-running relationship with Simplex, although Ben Olevsky told me that the main booth opened with Brenkerts because the largest tenant of the Center was RCA. Later both Bill Nafash and Warren Jenkins worked directly with National Theatre Supply which owned Simplex, and the relationship with the Hall continued. Obviously, the sound systems both for movie and P.A. use used RCA components and service exclusively.
Since we used condenser arc lamps with a narrow light gathering range, the aperture shadow was fairly sharp with most of the lenses. When we went to xenon the fuzz line widened because of the wider angle of collected light, but masking hides a plethora of sins!
Exit: Thanks for reminding me about “Pete’s Dragon”. Warren above questioned whether Radio City did any premieres, defining them as immediately preceeding a run of the film, rather than a one event rental. I listed a few that I remembered that met his standard, but forgot about “Pete’s Dragon” until last night and meant to post it but forgot until your post. It certainly was a premiere, complete with a Disneyland type parade around Rockefeller Center with a dragon float ridden by Helen Reddy and Mickey Rooney, and perhaps the children starring in the film. And it did lead into the Christmas run as I recall. It was one of our bigger premieres in the days of the “classic” Music Hall format.
Vito: You’re welcome to use my BC to AD comment — it goes along with the other comment I’ve been credited with, “You ain’t been booed ‘til you’ve been booed by 6,000 people!”
For all the lamenting about the digital onslaught, I got to thinking last night of some of the advantages. We now have access to our favorite films at any time we want them. I have over 500 Laserdiscs (the equivalent of vinyl) in my collection as well as 500 or so DVD’s. Louis B. Mayer wouldn’t have had been able to have the access to films for screening in his private screening room that we do (and his secretary would have had to book a projectionist to show them.)
One irony is that Stewart makes a curved screen with movable masking for home use that matches almost exactly the specifications for CinemaScope, and there are anamorphic lenses for video projectors that enable “films” to be seen as they were meant to be seen with a common height and Scope being wider that 1:37 or 1:85. That means we can see pictures at home presented more correctly than they can be seen in most theatres. Sad perhaps, but I do appreciate the capability.
On the other hand, I did have one of the nicest cinema experiences in quite a while this summer. The Normal Theatre is an art-deco theatre like the Music Hall built in the town of Normal, IL in 1937 and now owned by the city. It was the first theatre in the area designed specifically as a “movie” theatre. They do a cinema retrospective program called Secret Cinema and show films of interest to people of our generation. Last summer they screened “Wake Up and Live” with Walter Winchell and Ben Bernie. It was made in 1937 the same year the theatre opened, and the nightclub and radio studio sets fit perfectly with the Normal’s art-deco coved ceiling and walls. That kind of experience with an appreciative audience can’t be duplicated at home. Its nice to know there are still a few theatres around that can create the experience we grew up with.
Vito: The Preview Rooms are now offices (or at least were when I left in 2000.) At one point they became CineMix, a re-recording facility that moved out about the time I started in 1974. We used preveiw B, the smaller of the two rooms originally used as as an RKO screening room, to screen shorts and film effects we were editing for the stage shows. Preview A was the larger room, and at one point they screened a movie every evening during the dinner break for the cast and crew. Since the Rockettes could never make it out to a movie on the break, “Gone With The Wind” was screened in Preview A over two evenings for them. The cast and crew screenings were probably not enitrely altruistic on the part of management, they helped keep everyone from getting soused during the break! We did restore Preview A to some extent, but never really used it. The booths are (or were) still there, since they are nitrate booths, and it would take some doing to knock them out, but they were filled with office supplies and files the last time I saw them.
The real loss was the broadcast studio which was to originate Roxy’s show. It contained a two manual Wurlitzer which was a smaller relative of the one downstairs, and was copper shielded to prevent RF interference. It contained tie lines to NBC across the street. It became Plaza Sound when I was there, and the tracks for the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade were recorded there. It was large enough for the whole Radio City orchestra to rehearse, and really was a state of the art studio with adjustable acoustic panels on the walls. The organ was ripped out an exiled to the Harlem warehouse, where without heat or air-conditioning I’m sure its turned to dust by now. (Maybe one of the Bishops can update us.) The space was then turned into more office space, although I think most of that staff is now working from MSG headquarters at the Garden. I do have a vinyl L.P. Riverside recording of the Broadcast Studio Wurlitzer made in the early days of stereophonic L.P.’s which tracks from the inside out to give the best sound to the widest grooves at the outside of the disc. I was also lucky enough to hear the instument played in person. We all felt that loss when it was removed.
Ed, Thanks for your interest. A lot of people over the years have made that suggestion, but I’m afraid that the audience would be to narrow to get a book into publication. However I’m hoping Cinema Treasures will kind of fill that role. If you click on my name you can pretty much follow my history from Illinois to New York by accessing the theatres listed. Perhaps someone who is doing a history of theatres will be interested enough to compile some of my recollections into a cohesive whole. I’ve been very lucky. I say I’ve been hanging around projection booths learning my craft from B.C. to A.D. — “Before Cinerama” to “After Digital”. Obviously the Hall is the peak (and still shows up in my dreams more than any other venue I’ve worked in), but I’ve worked in movie and television studios, re-recording facilities, film labs and even projected a three-projector montage on the front of the Metropolitan Opera House from a cabin on a fork lift that raised it 15' in the air. I can’t think of another time where being a projectionist could have been more fun. And the amazing thing is — I’m still at it at least 40 hours a week!
Vito, When I started at the Hall in 1974 it was a museum of Simplex gear. Rear Projection (sorry to hear that its really gone) had a Simplex Regular on an RCA soundhead with a Hall & Connelly lamp which was a predecessor to the Peerless HyCans in the main booth. Preview A had Simplex Supers, Preview B Simplex E-7’s, and the main booth had the original black case XL’s in 1 & 5 positions, and Simplex 35/70’s in 2, 3 and 4 spots. The original main booth just had four machines, but they knocked out the wall between the booth and the rewind room/Brenograph booth to make room for the #5 machine as we always had three machines in the feature format, another for shorts and trailers and one for use for film effects in the stage show. Leon Leonidoff always wanted more projectors than we had available for use in his stage “spectaculars”. At one point I was pictured in a National Theatre Supply handout pointing out that every model Simplex machine made was in place in the Hall.
I must say, that while I’m not usually sentimental about the past (and indeed am really enthusiastic about the potential for digital cinema) I am sorry to see the booths at the Hall being eliminated. (I used to have nightmares while I was still there about the booths being sacked. I remember some suit from another venue remarking about how the space would make really nice Sky Boxes. Now its happened.) When I was at the Hall there was still a clear line to its past. I’d like to remember it that way. I’m glad I got out when I did.
“McArthur” was at least one “Premiere” at the Hall in the days when I was there. The opening evening featured a contingent from West Point, and the stars including Gregory Peck. Among those attending was Frank Sinatra and his wife. The next day the regular run commenced. I think we also did a premire event for the dreadful “Matilda” just before it started its run. And technically, “The Lion King”, “Black Cauldron” and “Return To Oz” premieres preceded runs, although in the latter cases the house was indeed “four-walled” to Disney.
RCDTJ: Has the rear projection booth been eliminated? There’s a Dave Matthews Radio City concert Blu-Ray DVD that’s being used for demo purposes at the new Best-Buy at Columbus Circle, and with HD on a 65" plasma screen the exposed back wall can clearly be seen. Either they bricked (tiled?) up the opening to rear projection, or they styled the audience side of the fire shutters to match the back wall to make the opening invisible. That booth and the storage space above it was actually a “bubble” on the back wall of the theatre that extended into the A.P. building space which was built around it. (There’s a picture of the back of the theatre before the A.P. building was built and you can see the rear projection booth hanging outside the theatre.) I could see why the A.P. building management might want to eliminate it and reconfigure the space, but on the other hand the theatre has extended into that building in the last overhaul. The use of rear projection has probably been negated by the video wall for scenic use, but I always enjoyed working up there.
Gosh! I was on TV? I did that interview several months ago, and wasn’t sure they would use any of it. The last time I was interviewed for a documentary on the Hall I ended up on the cutting room floor. Thanks for letting me know I made the cut. I’ll try to watch for a re-run sometime this week.
Vito, I think the Criterion may have installed horizontal VV projectors for “The Far Horizon”. I don’t think any of the “Ten Commandments” engagements were done with horizontal prints. The main advantage of VV was in reduction printing to standard 35mm prints, so I don’t think there were many “real” VV screenings after the first two or three features in this country. Theo Gluck in researching his Master’s Thesis came upon a few screenings of the Hitchock VV prints in London. I also saw a reel of “Vertigo” projected horizontally at the Boston Light & Sound shop in Boston. (They have two of the original VV Century projectors, albeit with Brenkert intermittents — one of those was the one I ran the VV dailies on here in N.Y.) As with Cinerama projectors, its possible that the Radio City machines went back out to Century for refurbishing as straight 35mm machines, although that would take a lot more work than converting the Cinerama heads. Of course the most notable use came when someone saw a used VV camera on the west coast and decided it would be a good device for plates for Industrial Light & Magic, reviving an interest in the process. In the years before digital effects there was probably more VV footage being shot for background plates than by Paramount in its heyday.
The VV machines at Radio City were just outside the walls of the projection area of the booth. One in the high-intensity/Brenograph room which adjoined the Rewind Room, and the other in Center Spot Booth. If I remember correctly (not a given these days)there’s a picture of the machine in the high intensity booth on the AWSM VV site, taken looking across the high intensity spots. They would have been locked to machines #1 & #4 in the Projection Booth itself. They were so new that I still have a hand-drawn threading diagram in my collection of Music Hall memorabilia at home.
That could very well be the case, as they were probably doing demos at the Paramount. The machines we had at Radio City were installed just for that premiere, and taken out after the run. They didn’t have soundheads on them, so they were interlocked with the end two 35mm machines. According to Ben Olevsky, who was head projectionist at the time, they almost didn’t use them and then decided the picture looked so good they had to. He said you could hear them running when you got on the Executive elevator and it reached the 2nd Mezzanine. Since they were outside the main booth in spotlight booths, the spot ports which were open had to be draped with duveteen to quiet the projector noise during the feature.
Well, for starters, my former theatre Radio City Music Hall did “White Christmas” with horizontal VistaVision projectors. In addition, I believe both the Criterion and the Paramount installed them for the runs of the next two VistaVision films. It was Paramount’s proprietary process, so it would have made sense for them to do the initial runs with horizontal projection (I believe the two films were “The Far Horizons” and “Strategic Air Command”, but I’d have to check Martin Hart’s Wide Screen Museum site to make sure.) In Chicago I believe “White Christmas” premiered at the State-Lake with true horizontal projection. Theo Gluck of Disney found that there were probably more screenings in England than here (possibly because there was an additional tax on 70mm prints, and VistaVision was 35mm). Those machines are still running. I did VistaVision dailies on “Men In Black”, “Michael” and “Jungle2Jungle” a few years back. The problem of course was that a horizontal VistaVision projector could only run that process, while 70mm projectors could also run 35mm film.
A couple of notes: When I first came to New York there was a picture of taken in a booth showing Cinemiracle which I assume was the Roxy on the Local #306 meeting room wall. Cinemiracle used extremely large reels as did Cinerama, but in that case both were mounted below the projector.
A friend and colleague of mine Milton Olshin was the projectionist sent to run the test footage and dailies in a theatre in Westchester. Milt was short, and one of the Cinemiracle people told Steve D'Inzillo, the B.A. of #306 that Milton was talented but perhaps a little short to lift the reels to the top of the projector. Steve replied, “Oh we’ve got lots of TALL projectionists!” implying that Milt could be replaced, but not with the same results. As a result, according to Milton, they redesigned the magazine layout so that both reels fed from the bottom of the projector which actually made sense, since Cinerama later developed a large hoist system to lift the reels to the top magazine.
I also remember Bill Nafash my predecessor at Radio City talking about the “Chips” installation at the Palace. They built a special booth down in the balcony or mezzanine at about a zero degree angle for 70mm, both for the “Ben-Hur” re-release and the “Chips” premiere. As has been noted above, the throw was so short, and the focal length of the lenses was so short to achieve the picture size they needed, that every time a projector was threaded the lens had to be unlocked and slipped forward to allow the film gate to be opened, and then put back to show the reel in focus. There were times when it was forgotten to reinsert the lens to the proper position, resulting in a very out-of-focus picture at the changeover.
By the way, I was in the original spotlight/projection booth at the top of the Palace balcony during a legit presentation. The 35mm projectors were still there, and the angle was so steep that the projectionists would have had to sit down to thread the machines.
Howard: Well, yes and no. The TI DLP chips for DCinema are 1.89 aspect ratio (2040x1080). Thus 1.85 material essentially fills the whole chip. 2.35/2.40 materal can be letterboxed across the chip as you see on television (although since the chips are wider than the HDTV 1.79 ratio, the bands top and bottom are thinner.) Then if the lens is zoomed out (or another focal length is used) the picture can fill the whole screen top to bottom and side to side. The other approach is to scale the material to the chip size, in essence squeezing it. Then an anamorphic lens stretches the squeezed image out to full screen width. The squeeze is less than for film — about a 1.25:1 stretch rather than 2:1. There’s much discussion about which is better. I know a couple of screening techs who prefer to zoom the image up because they feel the anamorphic softens the picture. On the other hand, by filling the chips with the squeezed image you get more pixels of resolution. When “Blade Runner” was run at the Rose they used an anamorphic lens, as did the Ziegfeld when they did the pre-screenings of the last “Star Wars” picture since they had a TI prototype projector in the booth. Everyone who’s commented on the “Hairspray” screenings above seemed to think the picture was great even without the extra pixels, which is why I asked how people felt about “Blade Runner”. When I was back in Illinois on vacation this summer, I was shocked to find that all of the screens in the town I was in were now digital except for the restored theatre owned by the city. I had dinner with the motion-picture critic of the paper who said that the picture was “letterboxed”. I take it that either the screen he was watching was in a narrow house which would have similarly letterboxed 35mm Scope films, or that when they had a Scope film they just projected it in the 1.85 sized digital picture because they didn’t want to zoom the image up or add an anamorphic lens. It’s a new world out there, and everyone is still kind of feeling their way.
I was wondering if anyone had any comments about the picture. The Ziegfeld is presenting “Blade Runner” in letterboxed rather than anamorphic form I’ve been told because the NEC 2500 doesn’t put out enough light to compensate for the anamorphic lens. (My NEC here requires a boost from 19% brightness to 38% when adding the anamorphic.) Nonetheless, the picture should look pretty good, albeit not the wraparound size at the Uptown mentioned above.
As an aside, for those of you who are interested (Vito?) and in the area: the Museum of Modern Art is screening David Strohmaier’s “Cinerama Adventure” documentary on October 24th at 6:15 and 8:30 P.M. Strohmaier will be there for a Q.&A. as well. Since many of the comments on showmanship at the Ziegfeld are based on memories of the original Cinerama presentation, you might be interested in the documentary. I’ve saw a rough cut on tape several years ago, and even in that form it’s really excellent.
Our D-5 and HDCam tapes are standard HD with a 1:79 output some are letterboxed, some squeezed. It does vary. I have an HDCam deck that offers “Edge Crop”, “LetterBoxed” or “Squeeze” functions. The latter actually unsqueezes the output of a squeezed tape for 1.79 (or 1.85 with slight top and bottom cropping). We also use a 2K server for file based material which arrives on USB drives from Technicolor or on Dolby drives. I can take a 1.79 tape with a letterboxed 2.35/2.40 image and format it in our NEC IS8 projector to fit the panels widthwise which squeezes the image and fills more of the chip, then use the anamorphic lens to unsqueeze it. The projector chips are 2048 x 1089 native res.
Our NTSC DigiBeta tapes are upconverted to 1080 in the HDCAm deck. Other NTSC material is upconverted by a Folsom scaler. Oddly enough, a couple of years ago all the producers wanted 2K digital cinema projectors with anamorphic lenses installed in screening rooms, which makes running standard def NTSC material a lot more difficult. We’re still discovering the best way to do so, but digital cinema projectors really are designed for that, and I know of one post house here in N.Y. that doesn’t even want to touch 30 frame NTSC stuff in their screening room anymore. Fortunately, I’m surrounded by a knowledgable tech staff who know lots more about this than I do.(Sorry to use up the space with tech stuff — but celboy did ask.)
Cellboy: You’ve got it — the files are squeezed to fit the chip, and then the anamorphic lens unsqueezes the image to 2.35/2.40. I think the squeeze is around 1.25, much less than the 2x squeeze used for anamorphic 35mm. The result, at least as far as I’m concerned, is the same as with 35mm. You’re gaining much more resolution. The height of both formats stays the same. It’s actually easier going between 1.85 and 2.40 here on the digital projector here. Most of the D-5 transfers I’ve been getting are actually 2.4 rather than 2.35, but I can just slide the anamorphnic into place and I’m set. (I do have to increase the light from about 19% to 38% to compensate for the light loss in the anamorphic, but that’s not a problem).
I don’t know how many digital projectors the Ziegfeld has had. They had a prototype Texas Instrument unit in for the premiere showings of the last “Star Wars”. They’ve had the NEC which they own in for a while. They may change with the requirements of the production company. Warners screened “Blade Runner” at the Rose Theatre in the Time-Warner Center for the NYFF over the weekend and used a Christie with an anamorphic lens. I talked to a tech who was there and said it was really impressive as the Rose has a very big screen. There was a studio post-production rep there as well, so hopefully the Ziegfeld’s presentation will match that one.
The Ziegfeld has an NEC 2500 2K projector and a Dolby Digital Showplayer. I have seen the first 30 min. or so of the new digital transfer of “Blade Runner” on a 25' wide screen, and while I didn’t see it in 70mm, it really looks good. I was particularly interested in the 65mm plates which are scanned in at 8K resolution. There are a number of considerations. I have in the last few months done sevral demos of split screen 35mm vs. 2k digital on a 14' wide screen for companies considering doing previews digitally, and even at 2k, the results are impressive. Film motion between negative and positive layers degrades the resolution, and with more layers involved in order to strike enough printing negatives for a 4,000 print run, the image can degrade markedly compared to the check print pulled from the camera negative. I’ll be interested in all of your responses to the presentation at the Ziegfeld (one caveat: we use an anamorphic for digital 2.35 projection, the Zigfeld may letterbox, although “Star Wars” was presented anamorphically. Even that raises quetions, as some techs feel the added glass of an anamporhic softenes the image, although you gain resolution by squeezing the image across the full DLP chips.)
I too would like to see a three-strip Cinerama experiment done digitally. Many of the original Cinerama liabilities would be overcome: video images can be seamlessly matched with “video wall” software; there would be no vertical jiggling between panels, and color would be consistant (another problems film labs have with striking prints — color can shift during the work day). I had kind of hoped Paul Allen might experiment with this in his Seattle Cinerama, since it is set up for both three-projector Cinerama presentation and for digital projection. It would be fun to transfer some Cinerama footage from the classics to see how it would look, but the real test would be to shoot some new footage digitally for three screens.
While there may be no 4k projectors in general use in cinemas now, the D-5 screenings I did of “3:10 To Yuma” were scanned into a server from the negative at 4k resolution and then down-converted to 2k for the screening copy. They’re making 4k archival copies of “Blade Runner” for future use. We’re at the “Edison” stage of digital exhibition right now — it will get better, and probably sooner rather than later. Nonetheless, I don’t think you’ll be disappointed in “Blade Runner” at the Ziegfeld.
There are two Kerasotes circuit (or were). There was a family argument and some theatres became GKC Theatres (for George Kerasotes), and the other, Kerasotes Theatres. Bloomington and Champaign/Urbana, Illinois were GKC Theatres out of the original Springfield home base, while Galesburg theatres were operated by Kerasotes out of Chicago. The GKC Theatres have now been sold to another circuit (Cinemark?)in the last couple of years.
That’s me. One of the guys here who had also worked on the Music Hall crew posted a bunch of pictures I had put together for an earlier documentary on the Hall. They ranged from one of me taken in a booth when I was 17, to one taken for an article that appeared in Home Theatre Magazine in 1997, with some taken during the run of “Napoleon” at the Hall. He was the one that christened this one “Hippie Bob”, and the one when I was 17 “Bob Jr.” Pretty strange to see your life in a series of photos from 1956 to 1997 in a string of booth pictures!
That’s me. Pat Roberts interrupted a tech screening and called me upstairs to the booth to have that picture taken. I was annoyed at the time, but later glad that she did. That was the last Music Hall Pictorial, which in prior editions featured my predecssors in the Projection Department. I still have a couple of copies in my collection of Music Hall memorabilia (as well as a copy from 1956, the first year I visited the Hall.)
Hey, hey, hey — actually my Century’s didn’t leak much, but they were built when Larry Davee ran the company out in Long Island City,so as with Simplex they may have come from an era when things were better built.
I did most of the maintenance on the equipment at the Hall when I was there, although there wasn’t a lot to do on the machines. Bill Nafash, my predecssor had just rebuilt the #1 original X-L before he died (in fact the crew was putting it in when they found out about his death). The 35/70mm machines were in terrible shape when I went there. The man who was supposed to do the conversion and build them for the Hall had lost his company in a divorce settlement, and the rumor was that his accountant had put them together. When I announced to the crew that we were going to be running 70mm, one of them put his hands around my neck as if to strangle me and said, “We don’t want to run 70mm!” We took the heads off during the hiatus period before the 70mm run was to start and took them out to National Theatre Supply in Paramus where they were rebuilt by Leo Lucas who was in charge of the Simplex plant. He did find spacer washers on the wrong side of the projector frame among other things, which might have explained why they weren’t working well.
At any rate, I did take care of oil-change and general routine care. The Hall had a contract with RCA (naturally) for years with a man assigned just to the Hall to do maintenance on all of the booth and stage sound equipment. By the time I went there thay had hired him full time, but eventually let him go because he kept forgetting to change the oil in the soundheads and we lost several gears that way. After he left Warren Jenkins and I took care of things.
With the format change Warren left, but I had the help of Boston Light & Sound for shows like “Napoleon” with the three projector interlock system, and had a crew which included both a vice-president and tech director of the New York Dolby office. I tried to have crew members who had knowledge in specific areas I didn’t. One of the members had gone to work for Rangertone while still in high school, and by the time he graduated he was in charge of their mag head department. Obvioulsy he had a great background in machining, and also had served in Nam in the air force as an electronic technician as well.
I concentrated on working with the producers doing film effects for the stage shows, which included sheparding them through various effects houses to have them shot, and then coming up with lensing and aperture combinations to make them fit the scenery. (If you access Thomas Haurslev’s 70mm web-site, there’s an article on the Hall written by me which includes a picture of some of the odd aperture plates my predecessors and I had cut for the stage shows.)
I also had to figure out the rewiring of the changeovers for “Napoleon” (getting three to open at once when the #3 pedal was stepped on), and working with B.L.&S. to put variable speed motors with speed counters in for our silent film festival. And of course figuring out throws for equipment which ranged from 16mm to video projection for the various touring shows we did after 1979.
Made for an “interesting” place to work!
Vito: actually, Ben wasn’t a bad operator. He had started as a reel boy in the silent days, and just wasn’t much into the technical side of projection. He was the last of the original crew when I came there to leave, and the only one to survive the transition. I must admit that when he said that “my” side of the projector had nothing to do with “his” side of the projector, I replied, “You do realize that if "my” side of the projector stops working, “your” side will shortly do the same?"
Well, they do meet your own criteria for being called a “Premiere” (an initial “event” followed by a run in the same house). I will admit most of them were pretty forgettable, which is why it took me a while to remember them. On the other hand, I would classify “Lion King” as a hit that adults seem to love too. Our run at the Hall coupled with the El Capitan in L.A. placed the film in the top ten the week of the premiere with it playing on just two screens in the country.
I was told we could have had “The Godfather”, which certainly had Music Hall class and popularity, but it would have been the Easter attraction and they couldn’t see coming right out of the violence at the end of the feature into the “Glory of Easter”. The whole industry was changing, and it was harder to find adult films that wouldn’t exclude families and still fill the place. After all, a couple of the biggest hits for the Hall, “Airport” and “The Odd Couple” were G-rated, or at least family friendly. To fill 6,000 seats at that time you kind of had to go for a lowest common denominator status as our window of exclusivity kept shrinking and audiences were fleeing the city to the suburbs. Another aspect of “the changing times” noted above.
Ha Vito: For once we’re in disagreement. I liked the Century’s on an RCA soundhead. I would apply grease to the gears, and then wipe any excess thrown off of the inside of the case and found they were pretty clean. They were also simple with just basically a horizontal and a vertical shaft. At one point we had a couple of the Indian made copies of the Century at the Hall in the #1 and #5 positions. While they weren’t as good as the machines made here, and the intermittents leaked, I still enjoyed having them for trial. At one point I took one of my older, skeptical projectionists around to the the gear side and opened the door while the machine was running to show him how simple it was. His comment, “Yes. But this side of the projector has nothing to do with my side of the projector.” !!!
The Hall had a long-running relationship with Simplex, although Ben Olevsky told me that the main booth opened with Brenkerts because the largest tenant of the Center was RCA. Later both Bill Nafash and Warren Jenkins worked directly with National Theatre Supply which owned Simplex, and the relationship with the Hall continued. Obviously, the sound systems both for movie and P.A. use used RCA components and service exclusively.
Since we used condenser arc lamps with a narrow light gathering range, the aperture shadow was fairly sharp with most of the lenses. When we went to xenon the fuzz line widened because of the wider angle of collected light, but masking hides a plethora of sins!
Exit: Thanks for reminding me about “Pete’s Dragon”. Warren above questioned whether Radio City did any premieres, defining them as immediately preceeding a run of the film, rather than a one event rental. I listed a few that I remembered that met his standard, but forgot about “Pete’s Dragon” until last night and meant to post it but forgot until your post. It certainly was a premiere, complete with a Disneyland type parade around Rockefeller Center with a dragon float ridden by Helen Reddy and Mickey Rooney, and perhaps the children starring in the film. And it did lead into the Christmas run as I recall. It was one of our bigger premieres in the days of the “classic” Music Hall format.
Vito: You’re welcome to use my BC to AD comment — it goes along with the other comment I’ve been credited with, “You ain’t been booed ‘til you’ve been booed by 6,000 people!”
For all the lamenting about the digital onslaught, I got to thinking last night of some of the advantages. We now have access to our favorite films at any time we want them. I have over 500 Laserdiscs (the equivalent of vinyl) in my collection as well as 500 or so DVD’s. Louis B. Mayer wouldn’t have had been able to have the access to films for screening in his private screening room that we do (and his secretary would have had to book a projectionist to show them.)
One irony is that Stewart makes a curved screen with movable masking for home use that matches almost exactly the specifications for CinemaScope, and there are anamorphic lenses for video projectors that enable “films” to be seen as they were meant to be seen with a common height and Scope being wider that 1:37 or 1:85. That means we can see pictures at home presented more correctly than they can be seen in most theatres. Sad perhaps, but I do appreciate the capability.
On the other hand, I did have one of the nicest cinema experiences in quite a while this summer. The Normal Theatre is an art-deco theatre like the Music Hall built in the town of Normal, IL in 1937 and now owned by the city. It was the first theatre in the area designed specifically as a “movie” theatre. They do a cinema retrospective program called Secret Cinema and show films of interest to people of our generation. Last summer they screened “Wake Up and Live” with Walter Winchell and Ben Bernie. It was made in 1937 the same year the theatre opened, and the nightclub and radio studio sets fit perfectly with the Normal’s art-deco coved ceiling and walls. That kind of experience with an appreciative audience can’t be duplicated at home. Its nice to know there are still a few theatres around that can create the experience we grew up with.
Vito: The Preview Rooms are now offices (or at least were when I left in 2000.) At one point they became CineMix, a re-recording facility that moved out about the time I started in 1974. We used preveiw B, the smaller of the two rooms originally used as as an RKO screening room, to screen shorts and film effects we were editing for the stage shows. Preview A was the larger room, and at one point they screened a movie every evening during the dinner break for the cast and crew. Since the Rockettes could never make it out to a movie on the break, “Gone With The Wind” was screened in Preview A over two evenings for them. The cast and crew screenings were probably not enitrely altruistic on the part of management, they helped keep everyone from getting soused during the break! We did restore Preview A to some extent, but never really used it. The booths are (or were) still there, since they are nitrate booths, and it would take some doing to knock them out, but they were filled with office supplies and files the last time I saw them.
The real loss was the broadcast studio which was to originate Roxy’s show. It contained a two manual Wurlitzer which was a smaller relative of the one downstairs, and was copper shielded to prevent RF interference. It contained tie lines to NBC across the street. It became Plaza Sound when I was there, and the tracks for the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade were recorded there. It was large enough for the whole Radio City orchestra to rehearse, and really was a state of the art studio with adjustable acoustic panels on the walls. The organ was ripped out an exiled to the Harlem warehouse, where without heat or air-conditioning I’m sure its turned to dust by now. (Maybe one of the Bishops can update us.) The space was then turned into more office space, although I think most of that staff is now working from MSG headquarters at the Garden. I do have a vinyl L.P. Riverside recording of the Broadcast Studio Wurlitzer made in the early days of stereophonic L.P.’s which tracks from the inside out to give the best sound to the widest grooves at the outside of the disc. I was also lucky enough to hear the instument played in person. We all felt that loss when it was removed.
Ed, Thanks for your interest. A lot of people over the years have made that suggestion, but I’m afraid that the audience would be to narrow to get a book into publication. However I’m hoping Cinema Treasures will kind of fill that role. If you click on my name you can pretty much follow my history from Illinois to New York by accessing the theatres listed. Perhaps someone who is doing a history of theatres will be interested enough to compile some of my recollections into a cohesive whole. I’ve been very lucky. I say I’ve been hanging around projection booths learning my craft from B.C. to A.D. — “Before Cinerama” to “After Digital”. Obviously the Hall is the peak (and still shows up in my dreams more than any other venue I’ve worked in), but I’ve worked in movie and television studios, re-recording facilities, film labs and even projected a three-projector montage on the front of the Metropolitan Opera House from a cabin on a fork lift that raised it 15' in the air. I can’t think of another time where being a projectionist could have been more fun. And the amazing thing is — I’m still at it at least 40 hours a week!
Vito, When I started at the Hall in 1974 it was a museum of Simplex gear. Rear Projection (sorry to hear that its really gone) had a Simplex Regular on an RCA soundhead with a Hall & Connelly lamp which was a predecessor to the Peerless HyCans in the main booth. Preview A had Simplex Supers, Preview B Simplex E-7’s, and the main booth had the original black case XL’s in 1 & 5 positions, and Simplex 35/70’s in 2, 3 and 4 spots. The original main booth just had four machines, but they knocked out the wall between the booth and the rewind room/Brenograph booth to make room for the #5 machine as we always had three machines in the feature format, another for shorts and trailers and one for use for film effects in the stage show. Leon Leonidoff always wanted more projectors than we had available for use in his stage “spectaculars”. At one point I was pictured in a National Theatre Supply handout pointing out that every model Simplex machine made was in place in the Hall.
I must say, that while I’m not usually sentimental about the past (and indeed am really enthusiastic about the potential for digital cinema) I am sorry to see the booths at the Hall being eliminated. (I used to have nightmares while I was still there about the booths being sacked. I remember some suit from another venue remarking about how the space would make really nice Sky Boxes. Now its happened.) When I was at the Hall there was still a clear line to its past. I’d like to remember it that way. I’m glad I got out when I did.
“McArthur” was at least one “Premiere” at the Hall in the days when I was there. The opening evening featured a contingent from West Point, and the stars including Gregory Peck. Among those attending was Frank Sinatra and his wife. The next day the regular run commenced. I think we also did a premire event for the dreadful “Matilda” just before it started its run. And technically, “The Lion King”, “Black Cauldron” and “Return To Oz” premieres preceded runs, although in the latter cases the house was indeed “four-walled” to Disney.
RCDTJ: Has the rear projection booth been eliminated? There’s a Dave Matthews Radio City concert Blu-Ray DVD that’s being used for demo purposes at the new Best-Buy at Columbus Circle, and with HD on a 65" plasma screen the exposed back wall can clearly be seen. Either they bricked (tiled?) up the opening to rear projection, or they styled the audience side of the fire shutters to match the back wall to make the opening invisible. That booth and the storage space above it was actually a “bubble” on the back wall of the theatre that extended into the A.P. building space which was built around it. (There’s a picture of the back of the theatre before the A.P. building was built and you can see the rear projection booth hanging outside the theatre.) I could see why the A.P. building management might want to eliminate it and reconfigure the space, but on the other hand the theatre has extended into that building in the last overhaul. The use of rear projection has probably been negated by the video wall for scenic use, but I always enjoyed working up there.
William: Thanks for the “Diamond” schedule. I’ll try to catch it, or have someone record it for me.
Gosh! I was on TV? I did that interview several months ago, and wasn’t sure they would use any of it. The last time I was interviewed for a documentary on the Hall I ended up on the cutting room floor. Thanks for letting me know I made the cut. I’ll try to watch for a re-run sometime this week.
Vito, I think the Criterion may have installed horizontal VV projectors for “The Far Horizon”. I don’t think any of the “Ten Commandments” engagements were done with horizontal prints. The main advantage of VV was in reduction printing to standard 35mm prints, so I don’t think there were many “real” VV screenings after the first two or three features in this country. Theo Gluck in researching his Master’s Thesis came upon a few screenings of the Hitchock VV prints in London. I also saw a reel of “Vertigo” projected horizontally at the Boston Light & Sound shop in Boston. (They have two of the original VV Century projectors, albeit with Brenkert intermittents — one of those was the one I ran the VV dailies on here in N.Y.) As with Cinerama projectors, its possible that the Radio City machines went back out to Century for refurbishing as straight 35mm machines, although that would take a lot more work than converting the Cinerama heads. Of course the most notable use came when someone saw a used VV camera on the west coast and decided it would be a good device for plates for Industrial Light & Magic, reviving an interest in the process. In the years before digital effects there was probably more VV footage being shot for background plates than by Paramount in its heyday.
The VV machines at Radio City were just outside the walls of the projection area of the booth. One in the high-intensity/Brenograph room which adjoined the Rewind Room, and the other in Center Spot Booth. If I remember correctly (not a given these days)there’s a picture of the machine in the high intensity booth on the AWSM VV site, taken looking across the high intensity spots. They would have been locked to machines #1 & #4 in the Projection Booth itself. They were so new that I still have a hand-drawn threading diagram in my collection of Music Hall memorabilia at home.
That could very well be the case, as they were probably doing demos at the Paramount. The machines we had at Radio City were installed just for that premiere, and taken out after the run. They didn’t have soundheads on them, so they were interlocked with the end two 35mm machines. According to Ben Olevsky, who was head projectionist at the time, they almost didn’t use them and then decided the picture looked so good they had to. He said you could hear them running when you got on the Executive elevator and it reached the 2nd Mezzanine. Since they were outside the main booth in spotlight booths, the spot ports which were open had to be draped with duveteen to quiet the projector noise during the feature.
Well, for starters, my former theatre Radio City Music Hall did “White Christmas” with horizontal VistaVision projectors. In addition, I believe both the Criterion and the Paramount installed them for the runs of the next two VistaVision films. It was Paramount’s proprietary process, so it would have made sense for them to do the initial runs with horizontal projection (I believe the two films were “The Far Horizons” and “Strategic Air Command”, but I’d have to check Martin Hart’s Wide Screen Museum site to make sure.) In Chicago I believe “White Christmas” premiered at the State-Lake with true horizontal projection. Theo Gluck of Disney found that there were probably more screenings in England than here (possibly because there was an additional tax on 70mm prints, and VistaVision was 35mm). Those machines are still running. I did VistaVision dailies on “Men In Black”, “Michael” and “Jungle2Jungle” a few years back. The problem of course was that a horizontal VistaVision projector could only run that process, while 70mm projectors could also run 35mm film.
A couple of notes: When I first came to New York there was a picture of taken in a booth showing Cinemiracle which I assume was the Roxy on the Local #306 meeting room wall. Cinemiracle used extremely large reels as did Cinerama, but in that case both were mounted below the projector.
A friend and colleague of mine Milton Olshin was the projectionist sent to run the test footage and dailies in a theatre in Westchester. Milt was short, and one of the Cinemiracle people told Steve D'Inzillo, the B.A. of #306 that Milton was talented but perhaps a little short to lift the reels to the top of the projector. Steve replied, “Oh we’ve got lots of TALL projectionists!” implying that Milt could be replaced, but not with the same results. As a result, according to Milton, they redesigned the magazine layout so that both reels fed from the bottom of the projector which actually made sense, since Cinerama later developed a large hoist system to lift the reels to the top magazine.
I also remember Bill Nafash my predecessor at Radio City talking about the “Chips” installation at the Palace. They built a special booth down in the balcony or mezzanine at about a zero degree angle for 70mm, both for the “Ben-Hur” re-release and the “Chips” premiere. As has been noted above, the throw was so short, and the focal length of the lenses was so short to achieve the picture size they needed, that every time a projector was threaded the lens had to be unlocked and slipped forward to allow the film gate to be opened, and then put back to show the reel in focus. There were times when it was forgotten to reinsert the lens to the proper position, resulting in a very out-of-focus picture at the changeover.
By the way, I was in the original spotlight/projection booth at the top of the Palace balcony during a legit presentation. The 35mm projectors were still there, and the angle was so steep that the projectionists would have had to sit down to thread the machines.
Howard: Well, yes and no. The TI DLP chips for DCinema are 1.89 aspect ratio (2040x1080). Thus 1.85 material essentially fills the whole chip. 2.35/2.40 materal can be letterboxed across the chip as you see on television (although since the chips are wider than the HDTV 1.79 ratio, the bands top and bottom are thinner.) Then if the lens is zoomed out (or another focal length is used) the picture can fill the whole screen top to bottom and side to side. The other approach is to scale the material to the chip size, in essence squeezing it. Then an anamorphic lens stretches the squeezed image out to full screen width. The squeeze is less than for film — about a 1.25:1 stretch rather than 2:1. There’s much discussion about which is better. I know a couple of screening techs who prefer to zoom the image up because they feel the anamorphic softens the picture. On the other hand, by filling the chips with the squeezed image you get more pixels of resolution. When “Blade Runner” was run at the Rose they used an anamorphic lens, as did the Ziegfeld when they did the pre-screenings of the last “Star Wars” picture since they had a TI prototype projector in the booth. Everyone who’s commented on the “Hairspray” screenings above seemed to think the picture was great even without the extra pixels, which is why I asked how people felt about “Blade Runner”. When I was back in Illinois on vacation this summer, I was shocked to find that all of the screens in the town I was in were now digital except for the restored theatre owned by the city. I had dinner with the motion-picture critic of the paper who said that the picture was “letterboxed”. I take it that either the screen he was watching was in a narrow house which would have similarly letterboxed 35mm Scope films, or that when they had a Scope film they just projected it in the 1.85 sized digital picture because they didn’t want to zoom the image up or add an anamorphic lens. It’s a new world out there, and everyone is still kind of feeling their way.
I was wondering if anyone had any comments about the picture. The Ziegfeld is presenting “Blade Runner” in letterboxed rather than anamorphic form I’ve been told because the NEC 2500 doesn’t put out enough light to compensate for the anamorphic lens. (My NEC here requires a boost from 19% brightness to 38% when adding the anamorphic.) Nonetheless, the picture should look pretty good, albeit not the wraparound size at the Uptown mentioned above.
As an aside, for those of you who are interested (Vito?) and in the area: the Museum of Modern Art is screening David Strohmaier’s “Cinerama Adventure” documentary on October 24th at 6:15 and 8:30 P.M. Strohmaier will be there for a Q.&A. as well. Since many of the comments on showmanship at the Ziegfeld are based on memories of the original Cinerama presentation, you might be interested in the documentary. I’ve saw a rough cut on tape several years ago, and even in that form it’s really excellent.
Our D-5 and HDCam tapes are standard HD with a 1:79 output some are letterboxed, some squeezed. It does vary. I have an HDCam deck that offers “Edge Crop”, “LetterBoxed” or “Squeeze” functions. The latter actually unsqueezes the output of a squeezed tape for 1.79 (or 1.85 with slight top and bottom cropping). We also use a 2K server for file based material which arrives on USB drives from Technicolor or on Dolby drives. I can take a 1.79 tape with a letterboxed 2.35/2.40 image and format it in our NEC IS8 projector to fit the panels widthwise which squeezes the image and fills more of the chip, then use the anamorphic lens to unsqueeze it. The projector chips are 2048 x 1089 native res.
Our NTSC DigiBeta tapes are upconverted to 1080 in the HDCAm deck. Other NTSC material is upconverted by a Folsom scaler. Oddly enough, a couple of years ago all the producers wanted 2K digital cinema projectors with anamorphic lenses installed in screening rooms, which makes running standard def NTSC material a lot more difficult. We’re still discovering the best way to do so, but digital cinema projectors really are designed for that, and I know of one post house here in N.Y. that doesn’t even want to touch 30 frame NTSC stuff in their screening room anymore. Fortunately, I’m surrounded by a knowledgable tech staff who know lots more about this than I do.(Sorry to use up the space with tech stuff — but celboy did ask.)
Cellboy: You’ve got it — the files are squeezed to fit the chip, and then the anamorphic lens unsqueezes the image to 2.35/2.40. I think the squeeze is around 1.25, much less than the 2x squeeze used for anamorphic 35mm. The result, at least as far as I’m concerned, is the same as with 35mm. You’re gaining much more resolution. The height of both formats stays the same. It’s actually easier going between 1.85 and 2.40 here on the digital projector here. Most of the D-5 transfers I’ve been getting are actually 2.4 rather than 2.35, but I can just slide the anamorphnic into place and I’m set. (I do have to increase the light from about 19% to 38% to compensate for the light loss in the anamorphic, but that’s not a problem).
I don’t know how many digital projectors the Ziegfeld has had. They had a prototype Texas Instrument unit in for the premiere showings of the last “Star Wars”. They’ve had the NEC which they own in for a while. They may change with the requirements of the production company. Warners screened “Blade Runner” at the Rose Theatre in the Time-Warner Center for the NYFF over the weekend and used a Christie with an anamorphic lens. I talked to a tech who was there and said it was really impressive as the Rose has a very big screen. There was a studio post-production rep there as well, so hopefully the Ziegfeld’s presentation will match that one.
Vito: Old Projectionists never die — our changeover dousers just get stuck in the “closed” position!
The Ziegfeld has an NEC 2500 2K projector and a Dolby Digital Showplayer. I have seen the first 30 min. or so of the new digital transfer of “Blade Runner” on a 25' wide screen, and while I didn’t see it in 70mm, it really looks good. I was particularly interested in the 65mm plates which are scanned in at 8K resolution. There are a number of considerations. I have in the last few months done sevral demos of split screen 35mm vs. 2k digital on a 14' wide screen for companies considering doing previews digitally, and even at 2k, the results are impressive. Film motion between negative and positive layers degrades the resolution, and with more layers involved in order to strike enough printing negatives for a 4,000 print run, the image can degrade markedly compared to the check print pulled from the camera negative. I’ll be interested in all of your responses to the presentation at the Ziegfeld (one caveat: we use an anamorphic for digital 2.35 projection, the Zigfeld may letterbox, although “Star Wars” was presented anamorphically. Even that raises quetions, as some techs feel the added glass of an anamporhic softenes the image, although you gain resolution by squeezing the image across the full DLP chips.)
I too would like to see a three-strip Cinerama experiment done digitally. Many of the original Cinerama liabilities would be overcome: video images can be seamlessly matched with “video wall” software; there would be no vertical jiggling between panels, and color would be consistant (another problems film labs have with striking prints — color can shift during the work day). I had kind of hoped Paul Allen might experiment with this in his Seattle Cinerama, since it is set up for both three-projector Cinerama presentation and for digital projection. It would be fun to transfer some Cinerama footage from the classics to see how it would look, but the real test would be to shoot some new footage digitally for three screens.
While there may be no 4k projectors in general use in cinemas now, the D-5 screenings I did of “3:10 To Yuma” were scanned into a server from the negative at 4k resolution and then down-converted to 2k for the screening copy. They’re making 4k archival copies of “Blade Runner” for future use. We’re at the “Edison” stage of digital exhibition right now — it will get better, and probably sooner rather than later. Nonetheless, I don’t think you’ll be disappointed in “Blade Runner” at the Ziegfeld.