Unless you’ve been living under the proverbial rock or taking an actual odyssey on the John Muir Trail like one of my friends is, you know that The Odyssey is in town. Specifically, in some towns, it is in IMAX 70. Well, barely. Already the number of theaters that could provide for Christopher Nolan’s latest epic at full resolution is small. IMAX film projectors have not been made in nearly 50 years, which makes me feel old. So these days they get retrofitted and rebuilt (like they sometimes used to be when they were newer if I recall) and sometimes that works. And sometimes not. Apparently a technical issue at Regal UA Colorado Center caused the theater to cancel all IMAX 70mm showings. And during a showing at San Antonio’s Rivercenter Mall, guests said that the film stopped three separate times before the showing was canceled altogether.
Since I go way back with IMAX this just makes me want to try to see The Odyssey in IMAX more. I’m sure it’s overwhelming. There’s something about huge projectors trying and even sometimes failing that I guess feels familiar and somehow comforting, that brilliant inventions are not letting perfection stand in the way of scale.
Speaking of brilliant inventors and large projectors (that weren’t always perfect), the great Don Iwerks died not quite one month ago as I write this, almost exactly two weeks before his 97th birthday. He was a fellow Santa Barbaran, and our paths had crossed for over 30 years in various places in the world. He started in the Disney machine shop in the early 50s and made the projectors for the iconic America the Beautiful surround attraction that I loved as a kid. His dad Ub Iwerks was a legendary Disney animator. How I knew him was as a founder of Iwerks Entertainment in 1986, as a competitor to IMAX. His 8perf/70mm and 5 perf/70mm projectors were staples in world’s fairs and other theme park attractions I worked on and adjacent to. Iwerks introduced its 70mm Quatro system in 1996 to try—as many have done—to popularize 70mm on a smaller regional scale. I seem to recall he had a go at motion simulators too, and built the largest library of custom motion simulator films in the industry. A life well lived in AV.
And again, on the topic of film, if you’re not doing anything else on September 26th, and you can get to Sony Pictures Studios in Culver City, I have a suggestion.
My colleagues at Mix have been doing Mix Sound for Film for a dozen years, and although it is production and film-based, it’s a good time, technically speaking. Just getting to see the four sound stages at Sony is a treat—the Cary Grant, the William Holden, the Burt Lancaster, and the Foley Stage. And you’ll get to see the rack rooms and network infrastructure that go with them. You can get the 30-minute penny tour, or there will be a 45-minute Engineers’ Tour.
The agenda is strong on Foley, which is really such a wizardly art form. And unlike most magicians, Foley artists are willing to share the how-to of the gag.
The newest panel is one I want to draw extra attention to because it’s for students, and presented by the heads of post-production at Sony, Fox, and NBC Universal, alongside some up-and-coming technical talent. So if you have young, ambitious sound engineers in your family, hoping to carry the torch of movie technology, this could be a good day out.
