Curtains Up on Go Digital or Go Dark

by Joseph Rossi

Summer is over.  Back to the grind.  Back to big, new, expensive multiplexes.  Back to pristine, digital, projection.  I spent the past several days in the beautiful Adirondacks where such a luxury doesn’t exist.  Nor should it. With all what nature has to offer, who needs such excess? That was until I took in a movie one rainy night.

The new Vin Diesel movie Riddick was playing and I wanted to check it out. This isn’t a review of that film; I won’t waste much time on that. What I want to talk about, or rave about, was that this was the first time I had ever set foot in Lake Placid’s The Palace Theatre.  What a treat. Talk about an old school movie house. It didn’t have the opulence of my old favorite cinema back home, the Lowes, or the grandiose look of The Egyptian.  It was something out of, I’d say, Frank Capra’s time; one box office, low prices, a massive, bright marquee with only 4 titles.

I was so smitten with this place that when I got home, I looked it up to get a sense of its history.   But instead of looking into the past with anticipation, I looked at its future with dread. With the current trend in digital technology lurking around the corner, I was horrified to find out that The Palace, as well as other cinemas in The Adirondacks, need major funds to convert their film projectors into digital ones.  Now if this were part of a chain there would be no problem. But this is a mom and pop store. If they don’t get their money, they will shut down.  Sooner or later films on celluloid will be gone.  Digital downloading from studio to cinema will be the norm.  A whole town will lose a piece of history. Can you imagine? No movies.

Sure we have VOD and home video.  So what?  A cinema experience is one of the true communal experiences we have left.  Movie houses used to seat thousands at one point in time. Imagine watching the original King Kong at Radio City Music Hall or a John Ford Western on Vista Vision.  The huge screen engulfed us; our hero’s looking like Greek Gods lording over the audience. I saw Jurassic Park as a kid in a packed hall of about 400 hundred people. I literally saw an entire theatre of people jump 10 feet in the air. That’s the power of cinema. That’s why I love movies. Just like church, a movie house draws hundreds to a single room to look up at the heavens in absolute wonderment.

And then I hear news that a small town theatre is closing due to lack of funding.  It’s like Loblaw’s running over the corner store. To anyone who loves movies I urge you to check out http://www.adirondack.org/GoDigital/.  What is happening to these theatres is a travesty. They are a part of a regions history. If they are not saved, they will be lost and an entire generation will be in the dark.