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Avon Theatre projectionist Chris Saxe weighs the
transition from film to digital.
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Digital deadline: More classic movie houses make the transition
Sept 16, 2013
-By Andreas Fuchs
“Two years ago we began the preliminary
discussions at the board level to assess what we
needed to do and when,” Adam Birnbaum,
director of film programming at the Avon Theatre
Film Center in Stamford, Connecticut
(www.avontheatre.org), says about the Avon’s
approach to the new digital era. (As president of
Nova Theatre Circuit, Birnbaum also buys and
books film for some 30 independently owned and
operated theatres “that are all going through the
digital conversion.”) At that time, the consensus
at the Avon was “to just sit tight and let things
unfold a little bit longer until we got to a point
where it would become a necessity.”
Just like it did for the equally classic movie houses that Film Journal International profiled last month
(http://bit.ly/fji0913dciordie), that point has arrived. In the second part of our exclusive survey, we
continue to look at various challenges in financing and technology implementation that these classic
theatres are facing due to their unique building structures and market positioning.
Birnbaum gives credit to 20th Century Fox and Fox Searchlight for having made “cautionary
announcements” about the possibility that they would no longer strike 35mm prints at some appropriate
time in the future. “It was a very responsible step to alert theatres rather than leaving them in the dark.
A lot of people didn’t know what was going on and weren’t able to get answers from any of the film
companies. So this was the closest we ever got to a distributor taking some form of accountability for
what was going to happen.”
There were two other indicators that helped Birnbaum determine the urgency of making the move.
“Some of the smaller independent distributors that we do business with, due to economic
circumstances, were going all-digital first.” That was towards the end of 2012, he recalls, before
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