Apropos the person who has turned his living room into a Cinerama and/or a Vistavision venue... Sorry to sound unimpressed, but since moving here I have found that Yorkshire is full of nutcases who have built fully-working cinemas in their sheds, attics, living rooms and goodness knows where else. One of said nutcases recently appeared in the local paper (as a space-filler, basically) - the article elicited 17 responses, mainly from retired cinema staff, who have turned their homes into fleapits. The bottom line is that there are at least 18 fully-working 35mm cinemas in private residential properties in the York area alone! I find it really hard to understand the mentality of these people (writing as someone who does not even have a television at home), except to say that it seems to be a variant of the 'home cinema' concept as promoted through glossy magazines on sale in newsagents. The message seems to be that Joe Public can have a cinema 'as good' as any proper one if they are willing to spend enough money. Spend x-thousand pounds and you can have Dolby digital, DTS and a very loud noise, but for the picture you'll still have to put up with a bogstandard telly. Spend y-thousand pounds and you can have a massive LCD screen together with more loudspeaker watts with which to piss off the neighbours. But if you're really rich and can spend z-thousand pounds, you can have your house rebuilt to THX acoustic standards, become the proud owner of a fantastically expensive video projector and fill the room with faersome-looking solid teak objects which, together with the obligatory DVD of TOP GUN, are capable of causing permanent ear damage. Never mind that z-thousand pounds is equivalent to cinema tickets for yourself, your partner and your kids for life, and that you'd probably have enough change for a meal for two before the film. More to the point, never mind that in a cinema, you are watching a film with a large audience around you and that no 'home cinema' can reproduce that. Most of them neither know nor care what bits of kit are sitting in the projection box, just as long as they don't break down. It seems to me that by fetishising the hardware, these people who have rescued the contents of old projection boxes and restored them to operational use in their homes just don't understand what cinema is about. The reason why the Bradford Cinerama theatre has such a following is that the audience is experiencing something unusual (most visibly, the curved screen), but they're experiencing it as a collective audience and that is 99% of what it's about. The only Cinerama film they ever show regularly - THIS IS CINERAMA - is complete rubbish; a crass, two-hour long commercial. But try going to see any film which you consider to be complete rubbish at your local theatre with a like-minded audience, and you'll find it a far richer experience than doing so alone in your living room, however impressive the hardware. Aware of this, the Bradford people look far and wide for Cinerama prints, and when they find them, THEY SHOW THEM TO A GENUINE CINEMA AUDIENCE. The reason I'm interested in seeing Vistavision is not to hold foot-lambert meters up at the screen or to examine the intermittent mechanism of the projector, but to get an idea of whether an audience sitting down to watch a Vistavision film in the 1950s would have thought they were seeing anything technically special or not. In a living room or garage is not where these things were supposed to be used. L ------------------------------------ Leo Enticknap Technical Manager City Screen Cinemas (York) Ltd.. Coney St., York YO1 9QL. United Kingdom Telephone: 01904 612940 (work); 01904 673207 (home); 0410 417383 (mobile) e-mail: [log in to unmask] ---- Screen-L is sponsored by the Telecommunication & Film Dept., the University of Alabama: http://www.tcf.ua.edu