Yo Brad, don't go dissin' the circuit, bro!

Speaking as someone who's worked primarily in the art-house circuit, I've been under the assumption it's the NON-arthouses who do all the chopping (present company excepted)!

Nobody I've been trained by, worked with nor trained myself cuts off extra frames - unless necessary. You and I see eye to eye on cutting heads and tails with no reference frames and although most of my colleagues frown upon that, I've never seen any of them cut more than one off. I think we're mostly a bunch of tape-peelers.

The times I spent working union shifts at GCC, Cineplex, or prints moved over from the 'big guys', I've seen MASSIVE QUANTITIES OF FRAMES cut from the heads and tails. You'd think that the changeover cue had a big sign saying "cut here".

However it occurs to me that there is a local art-house chain who has, in my opinion, a horrible presentation in all the theatres I've been to (and they're union!).

So whatever. I think half the people out there suck and the other half do a fine job whether they're union or not, whether they're 16 or 60, whether they're in Podunk, Podunkia or New York City. It boils down to presentation and those who care/vs/those who don't.

Having enjoyed running film in a number of art houses, my experience has been that most of the projectionists at these places are either really good or really bad, while those who work at mainstream theatres seem to be more middle-of-the-road in terms of quality. For the most part, those who work in art and rep houses seem to be above average, at least in my experience, even though the pay is often lower than for their mainstream counterparts. There are, of course, plenty of others who either don't care, are poorly trained, or both.

Art houses seem to either really care, or really suck at taking care of the prints. Do remember that for every nice art house with good equipment and well paid and trained operators, there are probably two art houses with Edison vintage equipment that has never been maintained and the people handling the prints don't give a flip. Unfortunately I think I can honestly say that the majority of art houses have terrible equipment with operators who don't care. After all they don't have to...they have the exclusive on the movie!

The other point Scott raised is of course that I think it is common for an art house print to have a small run of say 100 prints (or less). Because of this those prints tend to get sent out everywhere for trade and press screenings and film festivals. By the time the opening date comes for a regular engagement, the print looks like shit! Again, this is not necessarily a "masses" thing, because it only takes one crappy theater to ruin a print. Unfortunately I've seen prints that have 10 chops on the leaders, each one leaving ID frames from the last chop. Some of the theaters whack away one more frame over, but more commonly I see an original cut that "preserves" 5 ID frames, then another cut 3 more ID frames over, then a cut one ID frame over, then another cut 8 ID frames over, then another cut 5 more ID frames over, etc. This is very frustrating, even moreso because art house prints are commonly analog ONLY! At least with digital the effect can be covered up reasonably well.

Then there are the prints that are basically flawless, except of course 30 seconds before and after each reel change where they look like they have been dragged across the desert.

So no, I am not picking on you or your theater directly, I am just annoyed at the way the art house circuit *in general* treats films.

I was just thinking about these limited run prints. They play a lot of colleges and festivals (and the press screenings) and those are who I've blamed in the past for mis-handling art house prints. Perhaps it was a Seattle thing. The only good presentations I saw there were at our theatres until the Cinerama opened - saw a couple nice presentations there.

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