Saturday, April 28, 2007

Tales From The Crypt #1

All right, so the movie from Iceland came on cores that don’t fit on any spindles I have in my projection booth. No worries! The fine folks at Another Major Competitor have - or had! - a spindle attachment that will do the job. Turns out they had the spindle attachment I was looking for - but the little stub of metal (I’m all about the technical terms, yo) that I really needed to make it work had been - wait for it - filed down so that the spindle attachment would accommodate the little plastic cores that trailers come on, not the bigger cores that whole reels of film sometimes (and most unfortunately) come on.

The movie from Iceland? Yep. Go here, and then go here for the whole scoop, as it were, on the Indianapolis International Film Festival.

So, sans special spindle attachment I had somewhat surreptitiously sought almost successfully for, I set to the unenviable task of building the film up anyway. It actually turned out to be easier than I expected, with the problem being that I won’t be able to tear it down the same way that I built it up. But that is a problem for another day - namely, Friday.

Two days later, and it’s Friday, and the film from Iceland has been torn down (not quite as much of a pain in the arse as I had guessed it would be, but it was also not much fun), along with two others, and three more films have been built up. Oh, and I also built up Year Of The Dog, which is a regular release and has nothing to do with the festival. In the last two days I have built up or torn down something like ten films, not including shorts for the festival.

Ever since I started working at Landmark, I have heard these stories about the festival, and how crazy everything was during the festival; and man, were those stories on the money - although Wednesday was worse, for me, than tonight was. Wednesday night we had lamp trouble with the Sony 4K digital projector, and then we had a brain wrap near the end of the film. Also, I forgot to play a short that was supposed to run in front of the movie that brain wrapped.

And last night we were there until three-thirty in the morning building up shorts and tearing down all of the regular film that closed yesterday - Grindhouse, Aqua Teen Hunger Force, and The Lives Of Others. Tonight I was literally in the booth from when I got there at four-thirty to when I left at a little after one, with exactly one Red Apple break, which did not occur until after all the shows were in.

Number of cans of Campbell’s Soup At Hand (Creamy Tomato) that I took with me to work to drink for dinner: 1
Number of said cans that I brought home undrunk: 1

This festival is intense. But hey - three days down, six to go. And there are some thoughts to keep one going, too, as the days progress. Hillary is bringing cookies tomorrow, there’s a new Rush album on Tuesday, and next Saturday there’s a party in Anderson - which should be a lovely chance to decompress and catch up with a bunch of cool people I haven’t seen in a long time (and at least one cool person I have seen recently).

Current song playing on iTunes:
“Take It To The Limit” by The Eagles

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