Reels

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27 highlights

• To keep it from falling apart entirely, the show must go on. But ticket sales will barely cover the cost of screening newly released full-length features. So, Central recycles its old stock of film reels, selecting shorter titles to keep the electricity bills in check.

• Despite its broken seats and dilapidated interiors, Central Theatre is, in the barest sense of the world, still alive. It’s one of the last remnants of an era that began in 1896, when the Lumière brothers came to Bombay to screen six moving pictures at the Watson’s Hotel.

• “No technology dies an ordinary death in India,” the film historian Sudhir Mahadevan wrote, “nor does it undergo an ordinary birth.”

• In 1973, he applied for a licence to become an operator. It was a demanding examination, involving a theory exam and a practical test. The law, even today, mandates that a cinema screen can only be run by a licensed operator.

• The operator kept an eye on the screen through the porthole, the tiny glass window in the projection booth. A little before the end of the reel, a black dot would flash on the corner of the screen for exactly four frames and for a fraction of a second. This was his cue to fire up the second projector, which would already be wound up with the second reel. Another cue mark would flash just before the first reel ran out—this was the signal to switch. The projectionist’s art was in timing this move to perfection. The audience should not have noticed anything.

• In the West, more stable xenon bulbs became the norm in the 1970s. But most theatres in India still used carbon arc lamp-based projectors right up to the switch to digital. This relied on two carbon rods—one positive and other negative—to form an arc of light between them as they burned. The operator, much like a welder, peered at the arc through a tinted window to ensure that the rods were burning correctly. This dazzling light, reflected off a parabolic mirror, passed through the film and projected the image on screen.

• “If the rods are too close, the screen looks yellowish. If they are too far, the screen looks blueish,” Hari explained. “If it’s even further apart, it simply dies out. A good operator needs to keep his eye on all this.”

• first film to be released digitally anywhere in the world was George Lucas’s Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace in 1999.

• Digital projection first appeared in theatres in India around 2003, spearheaded by Adlabs Entertainment in collaboration with director Subhash Ghai’s company, Mukta Arts. Given the picture quality limitations of the technology they employed, Adlabs initially focused the project on smaller towns and cities. The first installations were completed in Trimurti theatre in Sangola and Bharat Cinemas in Mangalwedha, both in Maharashtra’s Solapur district.

• In December 2003, Namrata Joshi reported for Outlook magazine from another unlikely outpost of Bollywood’s digital revolution: the town of Hathras in Uttar Pradesh. In the dilapidated Prakash Talkies, a “small laptop stores images as files and pops them onto a dirty, dusty screen,” while the “giant 35mm Zenith project almost looks like a relic.” Outside, a poster advertised: “Nayi computer machine dwara dekhiye Gangaajal!”

• UFO Moviez’s digital projectors were of 1.3K resolution, as opposed to the DCI standard of 2K. UFO used their proprietary technology to transmit the digital prints via satellite—the low resolution meant that satellite bandwidth was sufficient—and, in the process, became the global pioneers of film distribution via satellite. Qube distributed films on hard disk, also at the 1.3K resolution.

• A 400-foot roll of Kodak 35mm film today, for instance, costs ₹16,000 plus taxes. It provides roughly four-and-a-half minutes of shooting time. Translate this to a two-hour feature film, accounting for retakes, and you’re likely to need ₹50 lakh worth of shooting film.

• Once the film finished its run, all but one or two archive copies would be trashed. The economics dictated that the number of prints was limited by the producer’s budget and risk appetite. So film releases would be staggered, premiering first in the big cities and towns: the “A” centres. Then, they’d move to the smaller towns, and finally to the smallest towns and villages, the “C” centres. This also meant that pirated videotapes and, later, DVDs of the film would reach the smaller centres before the official theatrical release.

• Still, even today, only about half the screens in the country use 2K projectors, Sathesh Thulasi, general manager (south) of Qube told me. Many single screens, especially in smaller centres, continue to use the e-Cinema projectors since they are considerably cheaper and there’s little to no demand for Hollywood titles in these places.

• DCI-compliant projectors are imported and prohibitively expensive, costing upwards of ₹50 lakh. The e-Cinema ones come in at under ₹30 lakh, still a substantial outlay for a non-multiplex theatre owner.

• Hollywood found a way to address this producer-exhibitor imbalance: producers subsidised the exhibitor’s investment in the technology by paying out a Virtual Print Fee (VPF) for each release. This is not how it’s played out in India, where many theatre owners, particularly single screen proprietors, don’t have the financial muscle to put down a ₹30-60 lakh investment for a digital projector. Instead, they end up leasing the system from Qube or UFO, who stand to gain in two ways: they get to keep the VPF from the producers, and the revenue from the advertising that is screened alongside a film.

• In the early days of digital, when his theatre received the print via satellite, things were not as smooth for Sebastian. On days when it rained, the connection could be notoriously unreliable.

• “In the early days with 1.3K, it was quite poor. Then 2K came along and now there’s 4K. The best part is that it looks as good on the hundredth day as it does on the first day.” This marks a change from the days of film. Celluloid is tactile and delicate—every run through the teeth and sprockets of the projector would cause some level of wear and tear.

• “Once we’d install a sound system, we’d call the nearest producer for the cans of a flop film,” Mohan Balaji from Coimbatore, who used to install sound systems and projectors in theatres across south India for Photophone, told me. “Those would have the best prints because they wouldn’t have been through the projector too many times. They were the best to test our systems on.”

• I n their award-winning documentary The Cinema Travellers, Shirley Abraham and Amit Madheshiya tell the story of Mohammed and Bapu, two travelling showmen who would set up and operate temporary tent cinemas at local festivals across rural Maharashtra. Shot over five years, they are seen transitioning—hesitantly—to digital at the end of the film. The tent cinemas are obsolete now.

• In Kerala, miles away from Prakash and the “tent pictures,” is the world of “thundu padams” or “bit padams.” These were put together by splicing film strips of pornography into the reels of otherwise innocuous or nondescript films.

• Mohan Balaji told me about the Odia films screened at the Prakash Theatre in Chinnakarai, Tamil Nadu. Many Odias work in the garment factories of the nearby textile town of Tiruppur. The economics of digital made this a viable proposition. These days, it is not uncommon to watch a Malayalam film in Faridabad or a Bengali one in Bengaluru.

• In the 1980s and 1990s, two theatres in Karwar in north Karnataka—Pallavi and Prasanna—used to procure reels of old Tamil films from distributors. The target audience was fishermen from faraway Thoothukudi.

• Digital has meant that this once unusual phenomenon has become ubiquitous.

• Photographic film has already become an old medium for a young art form. Compared to music, literature or theatre, cinema was born yesterday.

• Filmmakers often speak about the romance of film, and some have tried to put their money where their mouth is. Director Christopher Nolan, for instance, does a lot of shooting on celluloid.

• A vinyl record costs a minimum of ₹1,500. A roll of Kodak Gold photographic film—with 36 exposures—retails for ₹600. Shooting and distributing an entire movie on film, however, is an indulgence on a millionaire scale.