Don't know if you read Jeff Wells' Hollywood Elsewhere blog -- it's a good ornery read, nicely plugged into the studio news, rife with rumors 'n' fact -- but Wells is in Boston for a spell (he has family here) and he's not too happy about it. He just blogged about the dire experience of seeing "Sweeney Todd" in a critics' screening at the AMC Boston Common, which, according to Wells, doesn't compare with watching it in Los Angeles at a screening room in or near the studios' home offices.
Well, no, it doesn't and it never will. I was at the "Todd" screening, too, and while there were a few focus problems in the beginning, by and large it was typical of press screenings in Boston and, I'm betting, everywhere outside of L.A. and New York. Which is to say about as good as you can expect from a non-union projectionist who either doesn't care about creating the very best audio-visual experience, or doesn't know how, or isn't pressured by his bosses to provide one. Where Wells heard a muddy sound mix, I heard acceptable music and dialogue (my larger beef was with Helena Bonham Carter's singing voice: She doesn't have one). Where he was driven into conniptions by the "exit" light bleeding onto the screen and the (in his opinion) low wattage of the projection beam's throw, I was reveling in Burton's gloomy, diseased color scheme. What's the difference between perfect and imperfect murk?
I guess I don't share Well's horror because I'm jaded: The state of movie theater projection in 99% of the country is simply and purely pathetic. The multiplex corporations have long since broken the projectionists' union and chased away the only people who knew or cared about what they were doing, and your average booth is run by a button-pushing kid whose main job is selling you overpriced Junior Mints. The focus is often less than crisp, the sound levels are random, the masking or curtains can be screwed up -- and if there's a problem during the showing itself, good luck finding a human to deal with it.
The worst part about this? Audiences don't care. That's right: You don't care. I or Jeff Wells or Jim Verniere at the Herald or any other persnickety film critic can huff and puff about how lousy the movie looks, but a theater manager has no incentive at all to make changes for the better if the customers aren't voting with their wallets. On the contrary: I've been in a theater where the film was so misaligned the actors' heads were cut off at the neck and watched the audience sit there, unmoving, like sheep. You pay that much for tickets and popcorn, you think you'd want a professional-level show.
We've been brainwashed to be passive, though, and what other choice is there? Since the closing of the Copley a few years back, there are now only two -- count 'em, two -- movie theaters in Boston proper: The Common and the Fenway. And both of them have a tradition of half-assed movie projection.
Look at the comments going back and forth at the bottom of Wells' article and you'll see a lot of moaning about the city's slipping prominence as a movie town. If you don't count the Coolidge and the theaters in Somerville and Cambridge (and don't even get me started on the woeful Harvard Square), the complainers are right: Boston's no longer even on the second-tier. When I was a kid, there were dozens of theaters in the city, but they're all gone, single-screen dinosaurs that couldn't keep up. Now if someone in, say, the South End wants to see a decent indie film or one of the upcoming Oscar nominees, he or she has to schlep to Kendall Square or Coolidge Corner. Which, if you haven't got a car, is a problem.
So much easier to just stay home and watch a movie on DVD, right? Or just BitTorrent it like the students who used to support adventurous moviegoing here now do. Because forward-thinking exhibitors have bailed from Boston and because the two companies who've stayed -- the Fenway's Regal and the Common's AMC -- don't want to spend the money to hire the professionals to provide a better-than-average moviegoing experience, the business is slowly digging its own grave. And digital 3D isn't going to save it.
Oh well. At least the "Sweeney Todd" screening wasn't as bad as the one for "About Schmidt" at the Fenway a few years back. That time the reels were out of order and the movie burned up in the gate. Trust me, if they don't care how they show a film to the critics, they're not going to care how they show it to you.
