Audio Video News

Can't believe Porky's beat the all time greatest Star Trek movie of all time, oh well. As much as this sounds like a good idea, I fear it will be a failure. Not that it will cost much to show with satellite digital downloads to the theaters, just not much of an audience. Who is going to cough up 10 or 12 bucks to see a movie they probably already know line per line when they can buy a Blu ray for like 5 bucks? With a 70 inch 4K flat panel costing a grand, and most people with at least 50 inch HDs in the house, most people now watch at home where the popcorn is cheap, the beer available, and a potty break to coincide with a pause in the movie? Oh, DO love the idea of a big screen release, I even pondered about opening up a theater to show old flicks on a big screen 30+ years ago when I lived in Rochester, Minnesota. There was a grand old art deco movie house called The Chateau that had been closed for several years, right down town, a block from the Mayo Clinic. It had the most incredible outside marque that I have ever seen, a rainbow of light, truly awe inspiring. Inside, the lobby was unique, and the theater itself, had painted wood carvings on the wall to make it look like a mid evil village. Wow, so amazing. It closed down right after I saw the third Star Wars movie there, apparently people liked the mall theater complex better, hmmm? This was during the heyday of VHS and all my friends at Mayo loved being able to watch movies at home and esp. liked rediscovering old flicks, but most of us watched them on fuzzy 27 inch CRTs. I thought, it would be great to restore the old Chateau and not compete with modern movies, show the classics, you know, the Bond films, film noir, Hitchcock, stuff like that. Rochester would have been the place for this, a great town with an upper middle class population, of doctors, nurses, and IBM engineers, college educated people, who work hard, and enjoy unique forms of entertainment when off. I never really looked too deep into it, I wasn't a business man, and a loan would not have come to me, I was a medical guy, not a film expert. Just a dream, but what a dream it was. The place sat empty for years then it became a book store of all things, quite a disappointment, lost forever. Of course, like I said, now it would never fly, we all have big screes, heck, I even do highdef in my place in a dedicated theater with a ten foot screen and a 50 terabyte computerized movie collection at my beck and call...but in the mid eightys, how awesome it would have been!