I see that this thread's been around for a long time, but not many new postings. I just joined to say "Thank You."
I recently saw the restored "Spartacus" again, one of my all-time favorite films, on TV, and it made me think of the times I ran Spartacus as a 70mm print at a theatre in Edmonton Alberta.
We had an 800-seat stand-alone theatre with a full Dolby rack (pre SR days) and a Cinerama screen, Altec Lansings all around, and Cineplex left us alone. They were leaving the theatre to die, because Cineplex was not, and still is not, a theatre chain: they're in the real estate business, and they wanted the theatre to die in favor of their mall-based megaplex theatres. They'd been forced to take my theatre as part of the Canadian Odeon acquisition, but that didn't mean they had to book it.
After hectoring my district manager for a couple of months, I managed to get them to book a 70mm festival. Kwai, Lawrence, Spartacus, 2001, Top Gun, Blue Thunder, Gone With The Wind and a couple of others I don't recall right now for a half-week each. Clean prints (nobody else was running 70mm, so I got the best available) and we cranked the sound to Dolby optimal levels. Out of 800 seats, i think we got about 600 one night for Gone With The Wind, and that was just word of mouth, because Garth Drabinsky wasn't about to pay for advertising for a theatre he wanted to kill.
That was pretty much the last time I saw a film look that good. I have a very expensive and very good home-theatre rig now, and friends come over on a regular basis to watch films they've never heard of, and they come away impressed, which is great, but it makes me a little sad to think they'll probably never see a film like Spartacus in Cinerama, especially with your gorgeous restoration. Thank you so much for your work restoring these films. It does not go unnoticed.
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