Forgotten old movie tech

Last night, Scarlet and I went to Davies Symphony Hall and watched the 1925 film "The Phantom of the Opera" (starring Lon Chaney) with the original accompaniment score performed on solo organ (and Foley board) by Dennis James. Mr. James played the renowned Ruffati organ installed in Davies 25 years ago this year. It is the largest concert hall organ in North America. It was a spectacular evening, but the real highlight for me was a re-introduction to early motion picture technology.

Advances in the state of the art in any field always obsolete prior technology, resulting in the loss of specialized techniques used to optimize the technology of the time. Case in point: the iambic keyer. It represents the state of the art in optimizing the transmission of morse code. Morse code is an obsolete technology, relegated largely to the amateur radio bands nowadays. With the advent of satellite based search and rescue beacon technology, the last non-amateur use for morse code (namely the maritime service) has gone by the wayside. Apart from Amateurs, nobody therefore has a use for an iambic keyer. And I think it won't be too long before you'll need to go to a museum to see an Iambic keyer - the furthest development of a technological cul-de-sac.

Thus is it with film. When we think of early films, we think of black-and-white silent films. We think of that because we're used to television, and before color television, TV was itself monochromatic (black-and-white is a misnomer: both TV and film offer a continuous greyscale). But, as I discovered last night, early cinema was not monochromatic. Early TV was monochrome because the actual color that the viewer saw depended on the color of the phosphors that were built into his own TV set. Thus, everybody saw exactly one color - which tried to be as close to a neutral grey as possible.

This was not the case for film, however. While the actual photographic process was greyscale, the film stock itself could be tinted. Within the single film we saw last night, I counted at least 3 different film-stock tints. These differing tints were used by the film's creators to change the tone of the scenes. This is something that was impossible for television before the advent of full color broadcasting in the 1960s. When you saw a film on TV, it was greyscale, period (unless you put colored films or other such trickery in front of the tube).

Not only that, but certain scenes in the film we saw last night were actually in full Technicolor! Color photography was in its infancy in the 1920s. It was nightmarishly expensive, but it could be done. In addition, it was possible for much less money to highlight a single color - the Phantom's red cape, for instance - in a particular scene. This was also done in the film we saw last night.

In addition, it was not unheard of for some filmmakers to have certain elements of their films hand tinted. An example of this is still preserved today in the Chriterion Collection edition of Jacques Tati's film Jour de Fête, where the french flag is tinted red and blue.

Lastly, before the advent of synchronized soundtracks, it was customary for the projection frame rate for films to be variable. Usually, instructions were provided to the projectionist along with the reels of film for what speed various scenes were to be shown. Sometimes the projectionist would ignore those instructions and do whatever they felt was right (or perhaps they were just lazy and set one speed at the start). Because of that, individual experiences in viewing a single film could actually vary. Essentially, there is a tradeoff between slower speeds that flicker a bit less and use less feet-per-minute of film, versus faster speeds that make fast action less blurry.

With the advent of synchronized soundtracks, it was necessary to stick with a standardized frame rate (the industry chose 24 fps) to insure that the pitch of the sound didn't vary, but at the same time, one of the tools used for decades to customize the performance was lost.

With modern digital video technology, resolution and frame rate are, once again, adjustable. There's nothing that would prevent someone from varying the frame rate by scene. But the problem is that it likely wouldn't do any good, since most displays simply adapt the incoming material's frame rate to the native refresh rate of the display. Making matters worse, some displays either do a lousy job of this, or fail if faced with non-standard refresh rates. For instance, most cartoons are animated at only a maximum rate of 12 fps (with adjacent frames of 24 fps film being identical), and that's only during action sequences. The reason for this is the enormous cost of animation. It would make sense, therefore, to MPEG encode such cartoons at 12 fps. But this typically isn't done. Instead, the encoding is done at 24 FPS and redundant, empty I frames are sent in the extra time.

With the advent of television and full color movies, these techniques were rendered obsolete. In the case of television, the viewer could only see monochrome anyway, and in the case of movies, full color made the other tricks unnecessary. It is only in experiencing what must be characterized as an early cinema museum performance that we in the audience were privileged to get a glimpse of the highest state of the art of early cinema.

MST3K lovers rejoice: RiffTrax!

Those of you more connected to MST3K than I am will deride me for being so out of touch, of course, but better late than never.

Since the MST3K crew reunited as The Film Crew, I've come to realize how much I missed MST3K. I also managed to connect to a bit of my own personal history having found some clips of Disasterpiece Theatre, which was an MST3K like show that aired on XETV in San Diego when I was 12. I used to stay up way late to watch Sal U. Lloyd and The Other Guy skewer bad 50s B movies. They mostly used chroma keying and Chyron rather than voiceovers, but it was still funny stuff.

Anyway, by chance I managed to learn that Mike Nelson came up with a compromise allowing him and his co-riffers to skewer movies without having to actually obtain rights to them. How? By writing and performing commentary tracks that you play along with the movie. Of course, you need to synchronize the two streams, but they have a pretty ingenious method for doing so - a disembodied computer-like voice periodically chimes in during the commentary with lines from the movie that should synchronize precisely with an actor in the movie delivering the same line. If the movie line is late, you pause the commentary for a little bit. If the movie is early, pause the movie. It even works with Netflix's instant watching feature (I tried The Matrix).

Keeping them in sync isn't as hard (or as critical) as it sounds, and the riffing is just as good as it ever was on MST3K or The Film Crew. And to top it all off, the RiffTrax are for movies you've actually heard of!

Go check it out. Most of them are either $2.99 or $3.99 and they're DRM-free MP3 files.

Casino Royale

So a while ago, before I created this blog, I saw Casino Royale and, since they played a lot of poker, I'd been asked by a couple of friends for my opinions on the depiction of poker in the film.

The very first scene, where Bond was at a ring game and the dealer insisted on table stakes was my first "Yes!" moment. So often in the movies they make a big deal about one player or another trying to either add a marker to a bet or what not, where the reality of modern poker games is that table stakes is all you ever see. I don't think the casino would have (or should have) allowed the car as a bet, since there was no way to quickly establish the value of it so that Bond could correctly match the bet, but whatever.

That takes us to the tournament. Which had some issues.

1. They splash the pot a lot when making bets, particularly all-ins. If you are a monster chip-lead at the table and you go all-in, the usual move is to put out a small token stack of chips as you say "all-in," not to take your hands and mush a big pile of chips forward. After the hand, if you win, you don't have such a mess to clean up if you do it the right way. If you lose, the dealer will count your opponent's stack and tell you exactly how much to count out to double him up.

2. This was a tournament. That being the case, the apparent relationship between the buy-in amounts and the tournament chip denominations is fiction. The players were regularly making "million dollar" bets and raises, but it would be far more likely for them to start with T$10000. And if this was Montenegro, wouldn't it all have been in Euros?

3. Vesper should not have had any qualms about giving Bond the re-buy. His entire explanation should have been, "Bad beat (shrug)." Her response, "That's poker. Go try again." If he was bluffing with 72o, it would have been a different story, but he had LeChiff beat until the river.

4. The last hand had some issues. When the two short-stacks moved all-in, there was $30M in the pot. LeChiff's raise of $6M was way, way, way too small. Given his hand, he should have pushed all-in at that moment. The showdown was also wrong. Bond was the last player not all-in to take aggressive action, so he would have been first to show his hand. He would have shown the straight-flush and everybody else would have mucked. Not nearly as dramatic, of course. But if LeChiff had raised the correct amount, then he would have had to show first and Bond would have shown second - the side pots always come before the main. Another way that play could have gone would have been for LeChiff and Bond to just check the hand down. Their real interests were in getting rid of the short stacks and going heads-up for the tournament. It's hard to make a case for that play with a boat and a straight flush, but it would have been a reasonable alternative. The saying is, "Never bluff into a dry side-pot." Finally, What was Bond doing anywhere NEAR that last hand with 57s? That's a donkey play. It would have been defensible if he was the big blind and was allowed to check, but from what I could tell, he was on the button. Maybe he raised on the button to steal, but then I'd be surprised that he got 3 callers. It would have been far more plausible for him to have shown A8 for a better boat than LeChiff's Aces-over-6s (he would have had top two pair on the flop, too, though at that point the two short stacks had a set of 8s and a flush and were both beating him). In the film, until the turn, all he had was the 7-flush with an outside straight-flush draw. Yes, it's a flush, but it's vulnerable to an over-flush (which in this case the short stack actually had). Last, but not least, if there was $20M in the pot before the flop, why weren't the short stacks already all-in? ESPECIALLY the guy with 8s? What, exactly, were they saving the extra $5M and $6M for? He could have easily pushed Bond out pre-flop, and probably LeChiff as well. The two blinds would have battled it out and the flush would have been sent packing and the 8-boat would have doubled up. The three-handed chip-stacks would have been not entirely unreasonable, with LeChiff and Bond both about even with about 40% chips each and the short stack with 20%.

5. At the end, Bond tipped the dealer with what would have been a tournament chip with no actual monetary value. Asshole. You know that's the case because of all of the real money shenanigans with the passwords and the telephoning into swiss bank accounts and on and on that followed. If the chips were money, then he wouldn't have bothered with any of that. He simply would have cashed them out.

MST3K mark 2

The Mystery Science Theater 3000 guys are back. They call themselves The Film Crew, and their first effort is available via Netflix's Watch Now feature.

The silhouettes are gone, but the commentary is as good as it ever was. There are also fewer skits and more taking apart of the movie.

This effort appears to be direct to video.