Will2 wrote:Makes me wonder if there are any 70mm prints laying in vaults somewhere for some older major films that they could bring back out and show...guessing that they'd be pretty beaten up if they were at the end of a run but it I wonder if all those prints are destroyed after their run...
I imagine 70mm prints would end up in some collection, rather than a rubbish tip. You would assume. Where they'd be is another question. Someone's basement, surrounded by candles, and old movie posters. A secret bunker in Norway. A doorstop in the kids den, long after they've left home, gathering dust next to a collection of unsold crystal balls and a snow sled. Or cut up into individual frames, custom mounted in glass, and occupying a thousand boxes on some estate, to whom the late owner bequeathed it to the gardener, who sells one very now and then to the three tourists that pass through each decade.
I met a film projectionist once, for some cinema, at some late night drunken dive, who told me he collected single frames from 35mm movie prints, from which he then made enlargements (still prints) in his own darkroom. He reckons they were the result of some short cuts being left on the floor after projector jams. I suspect this might have been the correct explanation for the first print he'd made from a short cut, but I don't know if that same explanation would hold for the remaining three hundred and forty seven stills in his personal collection ...
C