Chase Whale
The Texas Theatre Needs Your Help In Bringing More Movies To Its Screen.
In the never-ending battle between print and digital, digital is going to win every time. Why? Because times have changed. You're smart and already knew this, of course.
But thank goodness for record and book stores that fight the good fight to keep vinyl and books alive as well because as — and very important to this writer — revival houses for making sure 35mm will never go away completely. (If they do, I will leave Earth.)
It's great these companies holding things down on the analog front. It really is. But the real deal is that they still need to adapt to ever-changing technologies if they want to keep thriving. And many do: Record stores sell records with free digital copies included, books stores have e-readers that you can buy on-sight, and now a lot of arthouse movie theaters are adding Digital Cinema Package projectors to their movie-playing formats so they can expand their catalog of new releases.
And this is where things currently sit at the Texas Theatre in Oak Cliff. Currently, the theater can screen anything on 16mm, 8mm, Super 8mm and 35mm (in 2.35, in 1.85 and in 1.37 formats), in addition to video tapes, DVDs and Blu-rays. Now, though, they're hoping to expand that by adding DCP to their arsenal — a move that will allow them to play all new major studio releases.
The sad truth is that most studios don't transfer to 35mm anymore, and, at present time, that leaves the Texas Theatre limited as far as what current releases it can premiere. With the DCP, however, they'll be able to play any upcoming blockbuster.
And that's an important thing.
“Having DCP opens us up for special event screenings, film festival screenings, premiere screenings and also many theatrical bookings that simply are only available in DCP,” Texas Theatre partner Barak Epstein says. “The major Hollywood studios have been going back and forth on whether they are 'retiring' 35mm, but they are begrudgingly, for the most part, still making a certain hand full of prints for major releases. However, smaller studio films and films from smaller distributors are now only available in DCP because it costs the producers and the studios less to create them.”
In other words: Bringing a DCP projector into the fold has become a necessary evil of survival in the arthouse realm — especially when considering that companies such as the Criterion Collection are seeing their digital re-masterings release on DCP, too.
Now, here's where you come in: Getting a DCP is expensive, so the Texas Theatre team has teamed up with Seed & Spark out of Brooklyn in a fundraising effort to get one. And they need your help, both in the form of donations and just spreading the word. With 30 days left in their efforts, the team is still about $60,000 short of its goal. So, if you have a rich uncle, give him a call and point him in the direction of this link, OK?
