By STEVE PERSALL, Times Film Critic
Published November 18, 2005
AMC Theatres controls 3,475 movie screens worldwide. Perhaps the one at Tampa's Veterans 24, where a recent showing of Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang was spoiled for 14 minutes, is the only one with projection problems and a staff that can't immediately handle them.
Don't bet on it. Going to the movies and expecting satisfaction is already enough of a gamble.
You should've been there, but be glad if you weren't. A few hundred moviegoers experienced a key reason why fewer movie tickets are being sold in 2005 than any year since Ronald Reagan was president.
Theater owners have blamed the box office slump on several factors: declining Hollywood quality, a wider variety of entertainment distractions and the convenience of DVDs and pay-per-view TV.
What exhibitors don't easily admit - this is what the Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang audience suffered through - is that theaters sometimes get sloppy with their film presentation. Who wants to spend today's ticket and babysitting prices to see a movie that's out of focus, incorrectly framed and screened through the wrong projector lens?
This isn't rocket science, folks. The problem at Veterans 24 could have been quickly solved if the employee pushing the automated projector button had simply looked through the booth window to see if anything was wrong. Instead, the anonymous employee - AMC protects its "associates" - hit the button and walked away.
What he or she would have seen was like something from a fun house mirror, crunching the image from the sides. The picture was that way for the AMC promo with the dancing film guy, through the Warner Bros. logo, and lasted more than 12 minutes into the movie before it was corrected. Who knows how long it would have continued unless someone (in this case, me) hadn't gone to the lobby to complain?
Everyone else in the place remained seated, figuring someone in charge would notice and correct the problem. I knew better.
What I found in the lobby was more upsetting than the distortion: indifference, ignorance of projection techniques and a distinct lack of hustle to correct the situation.
I haven't threaded a projector since my father's last theater closed 30 years ago, but recognized the problem as an incorrect lens aperture. You see, movies are projected in two basic formats: flat and scope. Think of the flat format as your television with a squared image filling the screen, and scope as the wider, narrower image created by letterboxing.
Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang is a scope movie that was being projected through a flat aperture, resulting in the squished image. (If it were a flat movie shown in scope aperture the image would be stretched sideways and vertically crunched.) There's a switch on AMC's projectors that flips between apertures without stopping the movie if there's someone alert in the booth to flip it.
Neither of the two AMC employees I spoke with - a surly young man who didn't appreciate my complaining and a manager whose first words were "I'm not in charge of the screening" - knew what an aperture is. I've since learned that AMC employees go through a training program ironically called PicturePerfect to learn projector operation. Perhaps a remedial course is in order.
"We also have a program called GuestFirst that all associates must complete before working at an AMC theatre," spokesperson Melanie Bell said in an apologetic e-mail. "The fundamentals of GuestFirst build the foundation for our company's mission: To provide guests with the best possible moviegoing experience."
Okay, maybe a remedial course in that, too.
Incorrect apertures aren't the only problems moviegoers face in theaters, and not only AMC venues. Over the years I've heard numerous readers' complaints about blurry focus, dim projection and blaring or inaudible sound systems. (We could add expensive snacks and a lack of supervision of talkers and cell phone users, but that's another column.) Occasionally someone will wonder how movies costing millions can allow boom microphones to be seen hanging over actors' heads, or subtitles to be obscured.
Filmmakers generally don't allow such mistakes to sneak through. But exhibitors create them by framing the screen image too high. (Conversely, framing too low would chop the top off actors' heads.) A film frame is smaller than the light beam projecting it to the screen, so a framing mechanism on the projector trims the edges of the image. A simple lever controls the framing height, if anyone's paying attention.
The framing continues on the screen, where black masking material must be adjusted horizontally and vertically to fit flat or scope images. Even when Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang was finally projected in the proper aperture, the projectionist didn't adjust the masking to match it, creating a distracting spillover of light and prompting another lobby visit.
The grumpy AMC guy wasn't familiar with the exhibition industry term of "masking." By that time, I wasn't surprised.
Warner Bros. paid to rent that Veterans 24 auditorium for the Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang screening and didn't get their money's worth. Neither did those moviegoers who got in for free. These promotional shows are intended to create word-of-mouth advertising for movies. You can bet some people said more to friends about the glitches than the movie. The theater lost valuable capital with potential customers.
Are they likely to return and buy tickets? Maybe, but DVDs and microwave popcorn become more appealing with each exhibition mistake.
We're living in a world in which providing customer service is touted in commercials as a perk, after it used to be an instinctual part of business.
You would think the film industry, faltering as famously as it is, would make it a higher priority for survival.
