(Sorry, Steve.) “What’s so great about 70mm anyway?”īefore digital cinema projection took over in the last 10-15 years, the standard for filming, projection, and photography for the 20th century was 35mm. Let's just say Nolan and his team turned up a 70mm preservation print of 2001 that had hardly ever been touched and used it as the starting point of the re-release. I'm not going to get into the weeds about " interpositives," " internegatives," and " release prints," if for no other reason than because my eyes started to glaze over when my friend Film School Steve did his best to explain them to me.
That's partly why, whenever you see a movie on film, you're actually watching a copy of a copy of a copy.
The new print, Sotelo assured me, was "less than a year old." He was joined in this sentiment by the theater's program manager, who assured the audience that the print had been shown "about 150 times." I point this out, in part, because I was fortunate enough to watch a 70mm version of 2001 years ago-and amazing as it looked, I could still tell that it had been projected regularly for years or even decades. The picture can still look great, but you're losing color." "It kind of turns to a reddish hue and tint. "As time goes on, film stock starts to lose its color," Sotelo says. If you can see past his astonishing dreads, you'll notice that Lenny Kravitz's video for "Believe" (2001) is an Odyssey homage.Ģ001's FX genius Douglas Trumbull was an advisor on the birth-of-the-universe sequence from The Tree of Life (2011).Ĭhris Nolan's Interstellar (2014) is basically 2001 with recognizable human behavior.Ī movie shot on HD and stored digitally with regular data migration, on the other hand, never loses its 1s and 0s. Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986) shares 2001's implication that traveling through spacetime has a direct effect on human consciousness. The 1984 sequel 2010 had to rebuild sets from scratch after Kubrick had them destroyed.
The Nostromo's sickbay in Alien (1979) bears more than a passing resemblance to the spaceship Discovery. AdvertisementĢ001 has influenced:David Bowie was one of the first to get on the 2001 train, because David Bowie was one of the first to do a lot of things. Every time you think about a film, a version of it preserved in a vault somewhere decays just a little bit. Every time you make a new release print of a film, your source print gets damaged, too. Every time you project a film, it gets a teensy-bit more scratched. One of the downsides of film that led to the triumph of digital cinema is that, no matter how careful you are, everything you do with a film print will ever-so-slightly damage it. The less-good news: the Ritz is in the state capital of Austin, and I live three hours away in Houston. We talked movies, formats, and how what was once a summer job for pimply teenagers-film projectionist-is on the verge of becoming a dying art.
While studying media production at Florida State, he learned his trade while working at the university's on-campus movie theater, which was one of the last first-run theaters in the state to still use 35mm. Like Alamo's other Austin projectionists, he works at all six Alamo locations in the state capital. Further Reading The Ars Technica science fiction bucket list-42 movies every geek must seeThe good news: not only did I get to see 2001 in all its 70mm glory at the Alamo Drafthouse Ritz, but I also had the good fortune to chat with David Sotelo, the projectionist at my screening.