Sometimes Its the Venue that Matters

You know how things go; you have a beautiful natural paradise and the first thing that happens is that it gets paved over to accommodate the people who came to see it. It's ok to pave over worthless desert, But Hawaii still has beautiful things that haven't been paved over quite yet. But the tourists come, and they want entertainment, and entertainment venues typically involve pavement. Waikiki has always been the most paved bit of paradise, but its beautiful beaches must be preserved.

The Waikiki cinema was recently closed due to lack of profitability. After all, if you sit people in dark room to watch movies, it could be in Buffalo, NY in the dead of winter and it would make no difference. But cinema has not left Waikiki.

One of the best innovations in city support for tourism is the Sunset on the Beach events on the eastern end of Waikiki. The real revolution in cinema here is portability. All of the structures are tents. The floors are wooden floorboards placed on the sand that can be removed later. Everything is right on the beach, but not an extra inch of pavement had to be done to have it there. And when it?s all over, they can pack it up and store it until next week.

Thanks to the increasing availability of portable stuff such as tents, furniture, and projectors, cinema can spring up anywhere. Once I was driving around near Hauula, one of the most unpaved bits of Oahu, and there was a "movies on the beach" event going on there too.

As portable technology progresses, you can develop paradise without destroying it.

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.