The trip to Rochester was a nice break, and a good chance to catch up with old friends, but it was completely exhausting at the same time, and I’m glad to be back home. Sessions started at 8:30, which isn’t so bad, but when we were staying in a hotel in downtown Rochester and the session was up at Kodak Park, reachable by a fifteen-minute commute on a school bus, it made rolling out of bed and into the conference a little more difficult.
We took a tour of the building where they actually lay the emulsion on the film, and though we weren’t able to actually see any of the totally dark processes at work, we did learn about the five secret weapons of their manufacturing process and we got to walk by the smoldering ruins of a building they had just imploded, water cannons spraying the area to keep down the dust. They’ve shrunk to less than half of their one-time 1600 acres of buildings, but as we saw on our driving tour, they’re still pretty huge. They’ve even got their own railway.
Our team did pretty well at the trivia night, coming back from some middle-round doldrums to tie it up with the Eastman House folks for the last two rounds. If only I’d remembered that Red Grange’s nickname was “The Galloping Ghost” rather than “Goose,” we would have been spared the final round tie-breaker in which we had to name as many Katharine Hepburn movies as possible, up against a team of people whom it was mathematically impossible to beat on such a subject. So we were runners-up, and went home not embarrassed but not satisfied, either. Back at home, we’d had two weeks in a row of trivia victory, and were looking forward to returning this past Tuesday, but apparently, it’s gotten so popular that even at 4pm that day, all of the tables had been booked in advance. Weird. That won’t happen again.
We enjoyed the screening of Spartacus in the Cinerama Dome at the Arclight last night as part of the 40th Anniversary of AFI celebration. Kirk Douglas was there to introduce the film. He did a great job, though it was tough to see him struggling to get the words out. He talked about the making of the film, and about the impact it had on the blacklist. He had a strange set of introducers: Sir Howard Stringer and Mayor Villaraigosa. What an odd pair. Oh well.
The print looked pretty good, though it looked like it had been cobbled together from a bunch of different prints; every time the reel changed, I wondered what color the sky would be, as the timing was different on every reel. And it wasn’t 70mm, but oh well, it still looked pretty great on that big, curved screen.
