David the Projectionist wrote on Apr 18^th, 2015 at 7:46pm:


Yeah, but, do you have the newfangled Laser projection?




But, yes, I would love to see WILD BUNCH in 70mm.

Hopefully, there will be a better turnout than in the past. I'd love to be there myself with ALIENS being a nice dinner-break flick (the 2nd most overrated SF film ever).

I could see MONSTER THAT CHALLENGED THE WORLD at the Marathon - pass the salt. 

SECONDS has played the 'thon, but, might be worthy of a second shot.

Good luck with the screenings!


David the Projectionist wrote on Sep 18^th, 2015 at 9:36pm:

David the Projectionist wrote on Oct 21^st, 2015 at 6:52pm:



Congrats on that.
Saw an article that they're only making up 100 copies of the 70MM print so it's a pretty exclusive club. Supposed to be 6 minutes longer than the one that will open wider in January. And that's not including the overture and intermission.

Yeah I know you don't count intermission in a running time. Although Tarantino is saying the intermission for Hateful Eight will be 12 minutes. I think the last film I saw with an intermission was Grindhouse.
I remember running re-issues of Gone With The Wind and Dr. Zhivago and intermissions for those lasted as long as their were lines at the concession stand.

I was going by this article about the number of 70mm prints. And I misread it since it says they're trying to get UP TO 100 prints.
http://variety.com/2015/film/in-contention/quentin-tarantino-hateful-eight-roads...

As Dave pointed out at the start, they secured six pretty great prints for what was not a bad selection of movies at all.  The highlight for me was West of Zanzibar, whose racial attitudes may be pretty ugly but which is a fun silent melodrama beyond that.  I still can't say I love the Lugosi Dracula or Seconds the way I should, and Aliens is even more solidly in the same category as Terminator 2 for me (fine execution of a bigger scale that inadvertently loses much of what made the original great).  I'd never seen The Lost Boys, though, and that is a hoot.

Turnout...  Well, Ian said at the start that he kind of wished there were 500 more people there, but I understand that not being the case - noon to midnight on Halloween means sacrificing a lot of fun other activities, especially with the Coolidge's running at midnight the same day.  You kind of had to commit to this as your only Halloween activity, which is tough to do with a slate movies that, while good, has three probably seem more sci-fi than horror to many.

I wonder if a tighter theme would help.  Dave ran a lot of trailers for Corman/Price/Poe movies, and maybe just doing those as the marathon next year would be more enticing. I love that Ian & Dave build these things as chronological samplers across a broad range of films, but I don't know how many other potential ticket-buyers feel the same way.

That's a great slate of films (and I do mean FILMS...always a pleasure to see David project from those magnificent machines), but as several of you have noted, there are probably a lot of factors working against the event in its current incarnation. Holding it on Halloween is challenging enough, and knowing that the Coolidge event is that night probably cuts into your audience even more. And as cool as the lineup is, it's leans too heavily on Sci-Fi titles and not enough on films that will appeal to a younger crowd (70s and 80s fare, a newer film or two.)

For decades now in Columbus, we've held the 24-Hour Horror Marathon at least one weekend before Halloween, and preferable the third weekend of the month. We had to move it one weekend later a few years back, and attendance dropped precipitously, mostly due to a large handful of regulars telling us that they had parties to attend that weekend.

With horror fandom in full flush these days, a 24-Hour Horror Marathon should be able to work at the Somerville...or even a reduced version. It would probably just take some tweaking of the concept.