When I was a little boy, before I even understood what film was, I used to draw pictures on strips of construction paper and run them through the slats on the saloon doors between the kitchen and the dining room—a rough simulation of the way film works. (This was the mid-’70s, when people liked to pretend they lived in the Old West. We had a player piano, too.) Given my future profession, that’s always been a cute origin story, the innocent beginnings of a lifelong obsession. But if I decide to bore my children and future grandchildren with this story—and bore them I shall—they’ll look at me like I’m a crazy old coot. What do those crude picture strips have to do with the movies?
A couple of months ago, major camera companies like Panavision and ARRI announced that they had quietly ceased production of film cameras in order to focus on developing digital cameras. And that was just the latest sign that film as we’ve known it for 115 years—actual 35mm celluloid, run through a projector—is fading into obsolescence. Smart people have written eulogies for film already, and most have concluded, correctly, that the communal act of sitting in a dark theater and watching movies on a big screen will not die with celluloid. Filmmakers and exhibitors may have to think of more innovative ways to distinguish the theater experience from the home-viewing experience—something other than 3-D or holograms, please—but we are still social animals. Even when The Room is downloaded directly into our brains, we’ll still want to throw spoons at it together.
Yet as the new digital order continues to assert itself—and it’s happening so swiftly that the passing of film feels more like sudden death than a slow fade—it’s become difficult to parse out how much of my grief is rooted in nostalgia and how much of it applies to real concerns about how the landscape is changing. Because working with celluloid was, for a time, my actual vocation: It started in high school, when my strong work ethic and equally strong aversion to customer service put me on the fast track from usher to projectionist at an eight-screen theater in Georgia. (First print ever built: Star Trek V: The Final Frontier. First botch job: Ditto. The final reel makes even less sense when it’s been spliced on tails-up.) It then continued in college, when I logged just enough time in the booth at the campus repertory house to afford a sustaining diet of grated cheese and Saltines. I’ve worked on platter systems and reel-to-reel, enough to appreciate (and, to a degree, master) the invisible artistry of the job. Audiences have the right to expect that a movie will run seamlessly through the projector—in frame and in focus and without bad timing on the reel change—but there’s a world of difference between professionals and the pimply-faced button-pusher at your local multiplex.
Of course, that’s just nostalgia talking. Though the rise of digital has had its share of glitches, it’s largely eliminated the incompetent projectionist as an X-factor, and the framing and focus is spot-on every time. No more dashing out into the lobby, frantically appealing to some weary concessionaire to get someone to pleeease do something about the frame-line in the center of the screen. Designing machines that are more precise and easier to operate may contribute, in some small way, to the numbing automization of society—as prophesied by the chilling science-fiction film Idiocracy—but such is the march of progress. In an age when texting and smart-phone illumination has joined talking, kicking the seat, chewing loudly, and crinkling a plastic bag filled with popcorn smuggled from home on the list of movie-theater annoyances, it’s nice to have one less thing to worry about.
But—and here comes the nostalgia again—there’s a tactile beauty to celluloid that’s so seductive, I can’t let it go without a fight. To me, the words “movie magic” evoke film being run through a projector at 24 frames per second, and the movies themselves routinely treat it with the same romanticism. You can know that persistence of vision is an illusion that isn’t exclusive to the format, but I can’t count the number of hours I’ve spent in a projection booth just watching those frames whirr in front of the light, creating in miniature the effect that’s being splashed on the screen. I’ve held prints of Duck Soup and Once Upon A Time In The West in my hands (and suffered the corrosive effect of the chemicals on my fingertips), and I confess to a love for celluloid that’s analogous to the audiophiles who have kept the vinyl market alive—yes, there are no scratches and pops on digital, but there’s a warmth and vitality to film prints that’s lost in the transfer to ones and zeroes.
Of course, the production and collection of albums on vinyl and the production and exhibition of film on celluloid are different things. Articles like this one, claiming that film will be “dead” by the year 2015—when it’s estimated only 17 percent of global movie screens will run 35mm—talk about celluloid still existing as a “niche projection format,” but the obstacles to that are severe. Pressing albums for a niche market is cheap, and record-owners can drop $20 on a copy and it’s theirs; film is a much more complicated and expensive transaction, because it costs thousands to strike a 35mm print, and there are rental fees and rights issues bound up in screening them. An online petition, drafted by Julia Marchese of the New Beverly in Los Angeles (which only screens 35mm), articulates a big (and immediate) problem for the cinephile niche: