To many film industry professionals, the change from 35mm film to digital technology has been a positive thing – not least because making and screening digital films is cheaper. But those who work in projection rooms say that the change has led to a less colourful work life, and fewer funny anecdotes to share with their peers and children.
Broadway Circuit senior projection manager Steven Chan has worked in film projection for over two decades, and still vividly remembers many of the discussions he had with colleagues about their screening experiences. “In the past, screening quality varied from projectionist to projectionist, but now everywhere is pretty much the same,” he notes.
Technical problems seemed to have occurred with greater frequency in the days before digital technology. Chan remains amazed to this day that a riot didn’t break out when a technical error caused a midnight screening of the 1996 female gangster film Sexy and Dangerous in Mongkok to be cancelled, with a very different work – Ridley Scott’s 1492: Conquest of Paradise – being shown in its place.
Another Broadway Circuit veteran, cinema manager Lee Chi-wai, remembers the 35mm era as a time when the reels of each film were shared by a few cinemas. After the first reel of a film had finished screening in one cinema, a delivery man would immediately transport the reel to a nearby cinema for another screening.
This practice sometimes resulted in an unexpected viewing experience. “We were showing a film by Wong Kar-wai, and the delivery man got lost and failed to deliver the final roll,” Lee recalls.
“But the audience were used to Wong’s fractured narrative style, and thought that the film finished like that. So they happily left the cinema without seeing the last reel!”