the last picture show

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Greetings fellow film fans:

Film, that is a term which is largely outdated. Most movie presentations these days are not film, but rather they are based on digital media.

The last picture show in Laramie to be presented with a 35mm film projector will be on Thursday, Nov. 14 at 7 p.m. in the Wyo Theatre, a nondescript animated family film, "Planes."

The theater will be closed to the public from Friday, Nov. 15 until the theater reopens on Friday, November 22 with some movie or other being shown using a digital projection system.

So what happens to the old projector? Rumor has it that it will be dismantled and stored behind the screen, back there where the roof leaks.

For those of you who are technically inclined. The digital projection system consists of a Digital Cinema Initiatives (DCI) compliant computer system, a digital sound processor and a 2K digital projector (2K is a horizontal digital resolution just slightly higher than the so-called 1080 HD standard).

The computer system is designed to decrypt the encrypted hard drive, which is how a digital movie is delivered to the theater. The computer then sends the video signal to the projector and the audio signal to the sound processor, which in turn sends an analog audio signal to the theater's old analog sound amplifier.

The reason for the switchover to digital media is cost. It costs about $100 to ship a single film, which is both bulky and heavy. It also costs a lot of money to develop the film and make thousands of prints for a major release.

The last 35mm show will be "The Wolverine" over the weekend, but the theater has been rented by Ivinson Memorial Hospital for those shows, so if you are not invited by IMH to attend those shows, you can't see that movie. The theater will not be open to the general public for those showings.

We had hoped that "The World's End" would be the last 35mm film shown in Laramie, but that plan fell through.

The other commercial theater in town, the Fox, stopped using 35mm projectors some time ago.

So why is it that the Laramie Film Society announced that it was going to raise $40,000 to buy a digital projector for the Wyo Theatre when the theater owners went ahead and bought one all by themselves?

That is a long story for a cold night by a hot stove. I'll tell it to you sometime, if you are really interested.

I'm having trouble with my usual email distribution service at Topica, so I am using this one as a backup. If I get Topica working you will get a duplicate of this email.