CineSea 29 in Pictures!

[Steve Klare]

CineSea 29 in Pictures

A week ago today, Cinesea 29 had its official opening at the Shalimar Hotel in Wildwood, New Jersey. Now, don’t get me wrong: there were people in attendance several days before, it’s just that Thursday begins the official events.

Wildwood is a great place to be, a lot to do and many great places to eat. In my opinion, the ends of the season when CineSea is in Wildwood are the best times of the year to be there. The peak of the season the whole town is crowded and hectic, and parking places are like gold! In April and October enough restaurants and businesses are open to enjoy the town at your own pace: it’s a lot more laid back. You can walk into a restaurant without a reservation and not wait an hour and if (-for some really bizarre reason) you needed to, you could find 10 places to park.

-so a number of us make a little vacation in the days before the big event and just relax!

Everybody that's willing and able, arrives as early as they want. My son came with me and luckily, he was done with school before Thursday, noon. A full tank, a jam-packed subcompact car and not-too-bad Brooklyn and Queens and Staten Island traffic and we found ourselves well on our way!

Setting Up
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Our new screen had its second outing at CineSea 29. It lives the rest of the year at a fairly-local CineSea Regular's home. Getting it in place means renting a van and getting it up two flights of stairs (It’s too big for a car and way too big for the elevator!).

(This is a long way from a one-man operation as you can see here!)
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Once it’s out of the box and in place, it functions kind of conventionally! When you get down to it, it is still a roll-up screen, even if it is kind of immense!
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Of course, a screen requires some manner of projection equipment! These machines and their operation come courtesy several different collectors and cover Super-8, 16mm and 35mm. There is also audio equipment to set up so that all gauges have speakers up by the screen.

Some might just say that it’s better that the large suites above the CineSea room remain vacant when we’re in town. Given the amount of audio capability we bring with us, that just may be so!

Some Housekeeping
Our Main-Photographer for the weekend is Claus Harding, who we are pleased to welcome back! Also contributing is Doug Meltzer and even a few from me!

The Weather
My son and I like to bring bikes and ride the boardwalk. It rained so much at #27 we were afraid we would get washed out to Sea, so we left the bikes in the garage! Every day this time was sunny and cool, yet not arctic. I doubt we’ve ever had nicer weather. We brought the bikes this time and had a great time!
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Well, we’re set up now and it’s getting kind of dark outside. I’d say it’s about time we watch some films!

Coming Up Next: Thursday Night Theme!

[Douglas Meltzer]

As Steve wrote, the weather was perfect for the three hour drive to Wildwood from New York City. The traffic was also perfect...there was none! After dinner on Wednesday night, the early birds watched a few 16mm shorts including Thelma Todd & Patsy Kelly in Beauty and the Bus and the star-studded 1931 film The Stolen Jools.

The view facing south from the upper floors of the Shalimar resort. The parking spaces will be filled up soon!

[Steve Klare]

The Theme of Thursday!

Thursday Night Theme is an audience-participation event: The answer to the simple question “What does the theme mean to you?”. The Leadership throws some idea out there and people bring films they have that fit it.

I think these themes are always best when they are kind of broad in nature: Don’t for example give us “Great News Stories of 1954” (I have absolutely…nothing!), but instead something more along the lines of “The Fabulous 50s!” and watch what happens! We’ll bring cartoons and television commercials and newsreels and vintage educational films and music! We’ll bring films from the fifties and films about the fifties.
(We just might see the Fonz again! Ayyyyyy!!)

This time the theme was “Space Flight”: this is excellent raw material for this kind of thing. It can be Science Fiction or 20^th Century space flight too. Cartoons “really took off” in the Space Age and it was also a rich source of comic material. If Laurel and Hardy were still making Hal Roach shorts after Yuri Gagarin’s flight, we would certainly find Stan wrapped in aluminum foil tearfully saying “-but I don’t want to go to the Moon!” and Ollie: “Isn’t that just like you?! If I go, who will take care of our dog?!!”.

Let the Show Begin!
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Any film show about space travel without Georges Méliès’ Le voyage dans la lune would be missing something. This is a great film, a milestone in the history of film and deserves its place on screen. At the very least, it’s an indication of the State of Art of Space Travel the last year before Mankind could even fly! (There was a long way to go! Robert Goddard was still a teenager and Wernher von Braun wasn’t even born yet!)

-and by the way: we did the right thing here: At least two prints arrived, maybe even three! (-one of ‘em was mine!).

As is entirely right, it led off the show!

There were plenty of laughs in space that Friday night:
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Abbott and Costello went to Mars, even though they went to Venus! (it’s complicated…)

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Venus was a lot nicer in the movie than when the Soviets explored it in the 1970s!

(To be continued almost immediately!)

[Steve Klare]

(-aaaand we're back!...did anything happen while we were gone?)
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Don Knotts wound up in orbit (-accidentally, of course!)

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-ably assisted by a young Leslie Nielsen in Mission Control (Eventually he became a Doctor...I AM serious!)

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Popeye was in Astronaut training: 40 days locked in a capsule. He found out that while he was away Bluto was stalking Olive!
(You can figure out the rest!)

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Meanwhile, where space wasn’t nearly as funny, (-they say no one can hear you scream!),
we joined a space walk with the Gemini program.

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“Houston, we’ve had a problem!”

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-and of course, why wouldn’t we go where no man,…where no one, has gone before?!

Did you notice what’s missing here? In the days after we started compiling pictures I noticed and then I asked the others and it was confirmed: No Star Wars! Granted, other than two trailers I brought, Star Trek came pretty close to falling off the table too, but absolutely no Star Wars was kind of shocking! (We made up for it later on in the weekend!)

Coming Up Next: Friday and the Features

[Douglas Meltzer]

The Space Travel theme brought out an interesting mixture of films. In addition to Joe Copsetta's 16mm print of A Trip to the Moon, Shorty Caruso brought an earlier Méliès film (1898) that also features the moon: The Astronomer's Dream; or, The Man in the Moon.

Other space films include:

Castle's War of the Planets (This Island Earth) - 16mm (from Greg May)
The Black Hole scope trailer - Super 8mm
Walton's Saturn 3 cutdown - Super 8mm
Porky Pig & Sylvester in Jumpin' Jupiter - 16mm, stunning IB Tech print (from Todd Tuckey)
Universal 8's Silent Running cutdown- Super 8mm
Rocket's Roar - newsreel, Super 8mm (from Steve Klare)
Space Angel - 16mm, animated TV series from the early '60s. Done in Syncro-Vox, a cost saving process that puts live action mouths on cartoon characters! (from Evan Samaras)
Ken Films' Journey Into Space, actually an episode of the TV show Johnny Sokko and his Flying Robot - Super 8mm (from Shorty Caruso)
The Milky Way - Oscar winning 1940 animated cartoon directed by Rudolf Ising - a gorgeous 16mm print! (from Reggie Simpson)
Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster, Ken Films silent digest that I striped and added audio to - Super 8mm
Little Buck Cheeser, a 1937 Happy Harmonies cartoon about mice that travel to the moon for cheese! - 16mm (from Al Warner)


The Black Hole


Saturn 3


Jumpin' Jupiter


Silent Running


Space Angel


The Milky Way

[Steve Klare]

Friday and the Features

Friday turned out to be a pretty busy day!
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There are a lot of great places locally to go for breakfast, but the Cape May Uncle Bill’s is such a CineSea tradition it just feels a little bit…wrong somehow if we go any other place on Friday.

A side-benefit for people at CineSea is getting to know southernmost New Jersey. It’s not a rare thing for us to go to Cape May County even without a projector in the car and if we do, Uncle Bill’s is a must-do then too! (There are restaurants in my own neighborhood I eat in less than this one!)

Friday Matinee
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Evan is ready to start Terminator using his 16mm Long Play unit

The winner of CineSea 29’s honored matinee showing was Evan’s 16mm LPP print of Arnold Schwarzenegger in The Terminator!
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This is a personal benefit to me: I was in college at the time of the original release and until this show I had never seen an inch of it!

Not a great date movie, but a swift moving, quite violent 80s style feature than has a pretty satisfying ending.


Friday Feature

This Friday Feature was Al’s Song of the South!
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We were given a rare opportunity. Because of the controversies this film has accumulated over the decades, it’s become pretty difficult to access. In the USA, it hasn’t ever been released for home viewing, whether recorded or streaming. It has not been televised or released into theaters for a long time, either. Yet that Friday and probably just once, we were offered an opportunity to view it, and in the form of a beautiful 35mm IB Tech print, no less!
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It was meant to be a standard Disney live action feature that tells a story in a friendly, engaging way. In the decades that followed, it was more openly discussed that the post-Civil War era which Song of the South is set in was often pretty brutal, and a sweet story about people of all races and classes getting along so well and respectfully in the same time and place when the Ku Klux Klan was a rising force and Jim Crow laws were being written, gradually began to seem sugar-coating at best.
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We often change lenses to see a picture on screen in appropriate ways. People at CineSea that Friday got to see Song of the South both through the lens of the people that produced it and also the ones that noticed its shortcomings.

At least when we are confronted with the controversy of this feature in the future, we will have the benefit of actually having seen it. This is what film collecting is all about, the freedom to watch a film and form our own opinions.

Friday Pizza
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There’s something great about this meal when the weather is friendly to it: just a bunch of friends enjoying some pizza out on the sundeck. It’s got a certain lightness to it: we go, and we enjoy. it's not complicated in any way. We don’t even need to go downstairs and drive somewhere.

Speaking of Old Friends: that’s the hulk of the Ocean Holiday Motor Inn in the background. It was the home of CineSea from #2 through #19. Theoretically it has been “under renovations” for more than five years now, but in truth, it’s been stuck in a zoning dispute for almost that long.

Now, there’s something going on here that’s a little extraordinary. The Matinee was at noon, the Friday “Night” Feature was at 3 PM (In many "somewheres" around the world, it really was night!). We had something special scheduled for the normal Friday Night Feature time and needed to make room!

Coming Up Next: Friday Night Surprise!

[Douglas Meltzer]

Nicely written, Steve. The Terminator & Song of the South. Not a double feature theaters would probably think of programming, but it made for a very enjoyable Friday!

Both prints were stunning.





Here's a video of the Long Play unit in action.

[Steve Klare]

Nice!

I like that video, and the long-play unit too!

[Graham Ritchie]

Just curious why are your cups upside down at the dinner table?

[Douglas Meltzer]

Ha! Very observant, Graham!

We had just sat down at the table for breakfast. When the coffee shop/restaurant staff set the tables before anyone comes in, the coffee cups are placed upside down. That keeps the cups clean until the customer is seated. They do get turned over before they pour your coffee!

[Brian Fretwell]

I'm used to cuo being upsaide down on charter train trip that provide food. The cups don't rattle on the saucers upside down when the train moves, as much as they do when empty and the other way up.

[Eivind Mork]

Seems like you all had a great time! It is always great to see pictures from other parts of the world sharing the same hobby, so thanks for sharing!

[Steve Klare]

A Special Friday-Night Presentation

On Friday night, we had a presentation from Team Negative One, a group of fans dedicated to restoring the original trilogy of Star Wars films to their state before the “Special Edition” changes were imposed. They use the best available film elements, including release prints in any number of gauges. These are then scanned in and wear and fade are digitally cleaned up. A recreated version of the original film is edited together from a compilation of the best resulting sequences.
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They explained the challenges of even defining what an “original Star Wars” really is. That summer there were already multiple editions of the film. Just viewing a 35mm vs. 70mm print from that time yields slight differences in the content on screen. This is even before we start considering editions meant for markets worldwide in different languages.
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We saw comparisons of various prints that they are working with and the end results, too. This way of restoring something from best available parts often makes the work endless: they find new footage quite often and sometimes what was once best will be replaced by something even better.
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Video: Team Negative One, 4K77 Before & After

The team emphasized that this is their labor of love for Star Wars: their best effort to experience the movies in the original form they remember seeing in the theaters starting that summer. This is not for profit: their work is not for sale, but the expenses incurred, and the time involved are all theirs.

Following their presentation, TN1 screened a 16mm print of the 1983 television documentary From Star Wars to Jedi: The Making of a Saga. George Lucas explained his legendary need to go back and change the original film. It’s basically that the means weren’t there to make Star Wars fit his original vision for it, and to him it was too compromised. When the funding and technology to fix these compromises came about, he felt the audiences deserved to see it even better than the first time.

This is how an audience sees a motion picture differently than the people that create it. For example, for the general public there can never be a “better” Wizard of Oz than the Judy Garland version because it is so culturally ingrained within us that it’s become self-perfect. The original filmmakers and present-day ones knew then and know today that there are compromises within the original and better technologies have since become available in areas such as special effects and soundtracks that would really improve the film, at least in the purely technical sense.

-for those of us out in the seats with the popcorn, we really just want it to remain as it always was!

These kinds of events are becoming more and more common at CineSea, and that’s good thing too! It’s to our benefit that we can appreciate our shared hobby more when we know more of the background stories.

Coming Up Next: Saturday Film Deals!
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[Douglas Meltzer]

A huge thank you to Team Negative One for coming to see us in Wildwood. Their passion for this really came across. TN1 kindly stayed to chat way after the presentation was done.
When the team started this decades long project, they built their own hi-res film scanners for gauges from Super 8mm to 70mm. There were people in the CineSea audience that had done the same thing!

[Osi Osgood]

Gawd! Now I REALLY envy you guys. I am so proud that Team Negative has done all of they're work with Star Wars, as well as the other two original trilogy films!