>>Almost assuredly. We don't get anything but polyester.
><snip>
>>Um, you must have some cheapass projectors man, when our film and
>>projectors decide to have a fight, the film loses, usually getting
>>stretched. Unfortunately our failsafes are designed to deal with
>>*breaks*.
>
>Had. This was 6 years ago, and the theater was one of the oldest ones
>in town, so I wouldn't be surprised if the projector equipment was 10
>or 15 years old by the time I got to it. The platter motors were

Probably closed then. There's been a real shakeout in the business since then. Half the theaters in our ditrict closed in the past three years.

>twitchy and high strung, and the failsafes probably nowhere near as
>sensitive as what you might have now. And we were just starting to

Our failsafes are damn nigh useless. The usual serious problem is brain wraps, not film breaks. When the brain wrap gets bad enough to slow the film enough for a melt-through (cause the failsafe to go off) the brain wrap is 2 inches thick and takes 20 minutes to unwrap. A more effective failsafe is the occaisional walkthorugh and making sure you threaded right.

>Someone in the history of the place decided it would be a great idea
>to paint the surface of the two oldest platter trees with they
>wankyest motors with glossy white enamel paint. I'd still like to
>have five minutes alone with the moron who did that. It threw the
>last 10 minutes of Apollo 13 on the floor so many times I lost
>count. I have vivid memories of the head projectionist hand feeding
>the film through the projector from a pile on the floor. Or opening
>the door to the booth behind concession to be greeted by film spilling
>down the steps. Bad juju.

Wow. Never had anything that bad. The second Sunday after The Mummy Returns came out I was working the "morning" shift alone and we were interlocking it. I thread it up (which involves hanging a weight on the film to ensure proper tension) and check it. The feed platter was running a little fast, but other than that it looked good. I start the movie and walk away. As the movie went on and the film was removed from the feed platter, the inertia of the platter decreased and a little too fast becomes alot too fast. 2 hours later I'm walking down to thread up a different move I notice that the platter is spinning too fast and that the tail has come away from the stopper. I attempt to replace the stopper, but in doing so I push the film off-center. Geuss what happens next. It took me and a manager with projection experience 30 minutes to get the film back on the platter. We had to corral it with about a dozen stoppers and cut out 3.5 seconds of film. We also pissed off ~400 customers. It turned out that the weight was a half inch away from where it needed to be. Not a good day.

>
>>But here's how you get a long IMAX movie: sequential interlock.
>That's just wrong. :)

Well, you know, I'm all about wrong.

Polychrome