Digital Cinema the Old-Fashioned Way

Digital cinema is the wave of the future. It?s grand, it?s expensive, it?s fabulous. Hollywood is abuzz about the abundant promise of getting celluloid out of the cinema, but perhaps the real revolution comes with the small digital projectors that have become the stock and trade of every power-point wielding road warrior; When paired with DVD players, digital cinema can end up just about anywhere.

Sometime before "Attack of the Clones" stormed in as the first end-to-end digital movie, my first experience watching a digitally projected movie in public involved nostalgia as well as high tech.

In this case, the digital gee-whizzery was not the star of the show; the real star was a classic theater organ. The venue was the Organ Loft in Salt Lake City. The Organ Loft is a small theater-like building built from a chicken coop. Probably more than half of the structure holds the pipes, drums, and other sound making machinery of the organ. One of the main attractions of the place is the showing of classic silent movies accompanied by the sounds of that organ. The organ is at center stage with the movie projected onto a screen above the organ. hidden in a small box hanging from the ceiling is the one non-nostalgic piece of equipment: a digital projector.

The movie that I saw was the classic version of Phantom of the Opera. But just as the equipment of the show was a blend of old and new, so was the show itself. Much of the music played on the organ was based on the Andrew Lloyd Webber Broadway show of Phantom of the Opera.

It was my first, and most nostalgic, encounter with digital cinema.