Fox Theatre

At the time of it’s closing back in 1975 the projection booth was equipped with:

2- Motiograph 35mm Projectors Model aa
2- Ashcraft Super Cinex Arc lamphouses Type 160s (ser#1174/1175)
2- RCA Photo phone sound head (optical)
2- Westrex Sound head (magnetic)
2- Motiograph bases

Motiograph (Altec) Stereophonic

2-CinemaScope lenses (ser# RR7797 / RR7314)
6-Standard lenses (ser# 14 7509/ 14 7520/ RE 4916/ RE 4925/ and two without ser #)

This info came out of a book dealing with the sale of the Fox Theatre Transactions with ABC Theatre Holdings/ Georgia State Theatres/ United Theatres Enterprises Inc/ Southern Bell Telephone from the mid 70’s.

Easily the best theater experience in Atlanta, what a beautifully designed building. I saw a number of films there in the sixties and early seventies, and many concerts there later on.
The last movie I saw there was the Rolling Stones' Shine A Light, on my 47th birthday. The keyboard player for the Stones, Chuck Leavell, was there. Before the movie, he talked some and gave a slideshow, and then performed a couple of songs, playing piano and singing (he wrapped up with a Bo Diddle medley, who had just passed away). The Stones love playing the Fox, and Keith Richards kicked off his 1988 solo tour there. Great theater, I hope they continue showing films ther forever!

Here is a 2005 night photo:
http://tinyurl.com/m87hsp

These 1971 photos comes courtesy of LIFE,
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Well, gee, um, thanks, Stan. Here are the specific, permanent links to my trilogy of articles on working the projection booth at the Fox.

“100 Things About Me #170: Fabulous Fun"
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“Fox: In the Box"
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“Back to the Fab: Bygones With ‘The Wind’"
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Looking at your impressive research, it would appear the last movie I projected to the general public at the Fox before my recent comeback for “Gone With the Wind” was — ta da! — “Gone With the Wind” in 1998. I did show a private function screening of the original “War of the Worlds” in 35mm around that time, however.

Of course, you and I and others showed the English translation “supertitles” slides alongside the live Atlanta Opera performances for years to come.

Oh, that employees' 10 cents per cup coffee machine you mentioned (above) was 35 cents a couple of weeks ago. So much for historic preservation at the Fox!

GONE WITH THE WIND premiered at the LOEWS GRAND, not THE FOX.

To whom it may concern,

My name is Robert Napier. I am doing a documentary about Atlanta theaters. I am in search of locating an abandoned theatre and using the documentary as a catalyst to support renovations to the existing theatre. We are also looking for Atlanta locals who are between the ages of 40 & 70 who have exciting stories about their cinema experience at the time.

For more information, please visit:
http://segregatedseats.ning.com/
or e-mail me at

Yes, it is an interesting and inspiring list.

StanMalone:
For someone who claims not to be from the technical side of the field you are very knowledgeable about projection conditions at the Fox and very good at explaining them in an understandable way. The Fox is lucky to have you and your chief projectionist (I ran into a similar combination in Champaign, Illinois last year at the Virginia Theatre which has been restored and run by the Parks Department. It is the site of Roger Ebert’s “Ebertfest” each year, and the venue has a manager and a projectionist that take great pride in the theatre. The 70mm booth is one of the best maintained and equipped I’ve seen. It’s good to know that there are people like you tending our restored classic theatres.)

According to Martin Hart’s American Widescreen Museum, there was an optical soundtrack version of “Ben Hur” that was reased which was slightly letterboxed on anamporphic 35mm film to preserve the 2.55/2.76 ratio. He has a picture of the clip on his site. My laserdisc version of “Ben Hur” was also 2.76 aspect ratio at a time when letterboxing was fairly rare even on laserdisc which more or less created the concept.

The Martin Cinerama mention brings up something that has begun to disturb me. The most impressive of the Cinerama/D-150 theatres, which were as much a symbol of their time as the Fox is of its time, are all disappearing. It’s as if we’ve learned something about preservation, but only consider the oldest examples of something worthy of preservation. I was surprised when I found that until Bob Harris started focusing on some of the 70mm Roadshow epics, that spectacular boxoffice successes of my generation were endangered. (At one point when I was at the Hall, I heard that Fox had misplaced the 65mm negative of “The Sound of Music”. They’ve since used it for the DVD release, and the studios are starting, thanks to ancillary markets, to be more aware of the value of their libraries.) Unfortunately, that doesn’t seem to extend to theatres. I worry the great examples of S.Charles Lee’s theatres will all be gone, since they were built specifically for movie use and didn’t have the stage facilities of the Fox and Music Hall which make them suitable for other performing arts.

The best and most effective sites for large screen presentation of the type Mr. Wade refers to above weren’t the theatres that were adapted for them such as the Rivoli in New York and Eitel’s Palace in Chicago, but rather the Martin and Cooper Cineramas, and the U.A. and River Oaks D-150’s. Of those, almost the only survivors are the Seattle Cinerama and the Dome in L.A. Someday we may look back and regret the demolishing of those sites, even though not as grand, as we now do the Roxy in New York.

They did. The father of the public relations director at Radio City when I was there managed the Fox and I guess became an exec for the circuit that ran it. Patricia always said that he was the one that put CinemaScope in the Fox over the initial objections of higher management. The standard was for a curved screen at the time. That curve is always a problem for theatres that do stage shows and have to fly the sheet. It kept Radio City from showing CinemaScope for a year after its development because the depth of the curve would have eliminated at least a couple of the fly lines used for scenery in the stage show. In essence a frame would have to be built around the whole screen to stabilize it and provide fly points, and that means giving up line set space.

A big curved Todd-AO screen would look great, but if you check out the Rivoli N.Y. page for the last couple of weeks, you’ll find a number of negative comments about what the installation of U. A.’s D-150 did to the classic architecture. Purists object (with good reason in many cases) about what those screens cost in terms of keeping a theatre’s unique design, as with the Egyptian in Hollywood. I liked those screens, and being much younger at the time, didn’t mind what they had done to the structure. Now I would say, “Fine”, but only if the screen could be removed at the end of a run and the theatre retain its unique features. Judging from what StanMalone said, they would still have to kill a number of rows of seats in the orchestra under the balcony or the height would be restricted. (Some of that would be done automatically by placing a booth at the back of the orchestra under the balcony .) I believe Atlanta had a Martin Cinerama at one time, and that would be a more appropriate venue for Todd-AO or D-150 had it been saved since those formats were a product of that time, and as has been pointed out on the Rivoli page, were better adapted to achieve the effect you’re looking for. Disney’s restoration of the Paramount into the El Capitan shows how great those theatres looked when the wrap around curtains were taken down. The Atlanta Fox is glorious as is — we’re so lucky it was saved.

Terry Wade: There are a couple of things about “Ben Hur” that may have affected how you felt about the width of the image you saw, and StanMalone can probably verify them. “Ben Hur” was shot in MGM’s proprietary process Camera 65, which was an anamorphic 65mm process. Thus as with CinemaScope, the image was squeezed slightly on the 65mm film. Normal 70mm release prints have an aspect ratio of 2.21:1 which is less than the Scope print you saw at the Fox, but Camera 65 with its squeeze had a 2.76:1 ratio which was the widest of the 35 or 70mm formats. As Stan mentioned above, the sightlines at the Fox under the balcony limit the height of the picture. Thus if you had seen a Camera 65 70mm print projected there, the screen would have been much wider side to side than the 2.35 print you saw. It’s doubtful that the 70mm “Ben Hur” prints today are anamorphic, since the lenses to show them aren’t available (I did have one 70mm reel of the Camera 65 “Ben Hur” to use as a test reel at Radio City, and was always perplexed by the slight squeeze in the image.) The original 35mm prints were 4 track magnetic stereo, and had a 2.55:l ratio. You could well have seen one of those at the Fox, and it too would have been wider than the 35mm print with optical track they just showed. If they do strike a new 70mm print for the 50th Anniversary, they could keep the original ratio without the squeeze by “letterboxing” the image on the 70mm frame although the image quality wouldn’t be quite the same since they would be using less of the full frame. If you look at the DVD of “Ben Hur” you’ll notice that the image is “skinnier” across the frame than other Scope titles. This caused a furor when Turner ran a letterboxed version on its movie channel in the days before letterboxing was a familiar as it is now, since it really produced a small image on the tv screens of those days. StanMalone: any comment?

Stan — Bravo for your comments above. You did a great job of explaining the issue of sightlines and their affect on screen size, something we lived with to some extent at Radio City. I was in your beautiful theatre once with my boss from Radio City when we attended a NATO conference in Atlanta. We walked over to the Fox to see if we could get a peek inside, and met Alex Cooley (?)outside who was the promoter for a BTO concert going on at the time. We asked if we could take a look and he let us in and gave us the run of the place. Warren and I wandered up to the booth, but the operators (were you one of them?) were busy manning the spots. We did take a quick look around so as not to bother anybody, and left. I believe you still had Motiograph projectors at that time before the 70mm install. That has to be one of the deepest booths in the country, as I recall the rewind bench and film cabinets were actually in the middle of the room a long way from the back wall which is where they would normally be. Very impressive!
Your comments about digital are also interesting, in that Mr. Wade was complaining about what he thought was bad digital projection, but which was 35mm projection with a normally used print. It’s too bad he didn’t get a chance to see your presentation of “Enchanted”, since good digital projection can really alter misconceptions. I work in a screening room which has done split screen comparisons with digital and film, and they can be almost identical. What is perhaps more enlightening howerver is that we run a lot of first edits transferred from 4K servers to D-5 H.D. You tend to forget you’re looking at digital, until months later when you screen the same thing on film, and even with a new print, you tend to see occasional specks of dust that you never would have noticed in the days before digital.

Most of the material we work with either film or digitally originated is transferred to 4K servers for post production work, and now the discussion in the industry is whether or not to archive at 4K. The studios have been archiving at 2K, but there’s a growing sympathy to save the “best” version of the material just as they saved the camera negative with 35 and 65mm. Be assured that digital material is being archived, its just a case of at what level of quality. (And now Bob Harris who restored “Lawrence” is pushing for 6K archiving, and NHK is demonstrating their 8K capture and projection system in Japan — “the times they are a-changin”.