Fill your summer with Cool Film Series at Victoria
Themed weekends ‘Disaster Movie Marathon,’ ‘Christmas in July’ part of the fun.
The folks at the Victoria Theatre Association have dreamed up some new ideas they’re hoping will draw a wide variety of audiences to this year’s Cool Film Series.
Themed weekends this summer will include a “Disaster Movie Marathon” and “Christmas in July.” In addition to the $39-for-10-tickets passbooks, individual tickets can be purchased in advance for the first time.
Mechele Pritchard, the VTA’s director of contracts and licensing, is one of five staffers responsible for programming the summer attraction. The group begins working on the project in February.
“It becomes an adventure on our part to find something people are going to want to come down and see,” she says. “With Netflix and Turner Classic Movies, there’s a lot more competition than there was 10 years ago and our audiences in the last few years have been dwindling. A lot of theaters are now doing summer film series as well. So we’ve been trying to put things on the list we haven’t ever done or haven’t been done in a long time.”
Here’s what makes the Victoria series special:
■ The venue: An historic theater, which dates back to 1865 and was once a first-run Warner Brothers house and then a Disney cinema.
■ The eats: Free popcorn
and soda before the film.
■ The projection: A huge screen and the original 35mm format, the way films were shown before digital days.
■ The pre-show: Cartoons and organ singalongs or recitals before selected shows.
■ For night owls: The “Reel Late at the Vic” films feature a cash bar and live music by C. Wright’s Parlour Tricks
■ The deal: With a Cool Films Passbook, you get 10 passes you can use in any combination across the entire series (with the exception of the Reel Late at the Vic showings) for $39. That means you can bring 10 people to one movie, or attend 10 movies by yourself or you could bring a date to five movies. A passbook saves you $21!
Picking the films
The selection process begins with Pritchard coming up with a couple of sample lists of films and taking it to the others on the programming team. The group has the option of picking one of those lists or suggesting other film options. She says it’s always an adventure for the committee to find films that people will want to come down to see.
Audiences are surveyed to determine what movies are most in demand. “We always make sure to incorporate films that have been requested by our patrons,” Pritchard says.
Sometimes they hit the jackpot. That happened a couple of years ago when they chose “The Princess Bride.” It was so popular that the film will be back this summer.
“Dayton audiences like the classics and the big splashy musicals,” she explains. “Now we’re trying to build a bit younger audience by expanding those classics to include films from 20 years ago as well. So now the series is a balance between true classics from the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s and new classics from the ’70s and ’80s.”
“The Rocky Horror Picture Show,” the 1975 musical science-fiction horror-comedy, has been “wildly popular” and a sellout, according to Pritchard, and will be back this summer. Films like “Casablanca” and “Gone with the Wind” have already been screened a number of times since this series started in 1985 and will be skipped this season.
Sometimes, it’s fun to come up with a theme. Over the years, there have been Hitchcock and James Bond and Mel Brooks weekends. “This summer we’re doing the Christmas in July weekend in conjunction with the fundraiser to refurbish the animated Rike’s Christmas windows,” she explains. “I’m a sucker for the old disaster movies and we’ve had the idea of a disaster weekend on the back burner for a long time.
Anniversaries are also celebrated. For instance, this summer the VTA will mark the 50th anniversary of “The Planet of the Apes” and the 30th anniversary of “Die Hard.”
A ‘reel’ challenge
One of the greatest challenges these days is showing the old films that aren’t digital.
“The original films were shown reel-to-reel and those are getting harder and harder to find,” Pritchard explains. “This year we got lucky and all but four of our films are 35 mm.”
The condition of the films can also be an issue. “When you get a 35 mm, you don’t know how it’s been treated by other theaters,” she explains. “We play them reel-to-reel, which means when the first reel is playing, the projectionist gets the second reel ready on a second projector. He watches for a certain point and starts the second projector so the audience doesn’t know that one reel has ended and the second has started. Our audiences like that because it’s the traditional way these films were shown.”
But since the 1970s, theater owners began switching from the reelto-reel system to “platters,” large spools that can play a film through a single projector. “It makes it easier for the projectionist, but when you splice it together and put it on a platter, ” says Pritchard, “the film can fall off the platter and you end up with thousands of feet of film laying on the projection room floor. That’s how they get dirty and scratched.”
And though a DVD may be cleaner, Pritchard says the VTA — and its audiences — like the idea of showing a film in the traditional manner.
“Our audiences like hearing the sound of the projector and knowing that film is being shown in its pure form,” she concludes. “They can’t really hear the projector, but they like to imagine they can!”