Reel progress

When the Thompson family opened the Starlight Cinema in Independence in July 2006, it was a state-of-the-art movie theater.

Flash forward to a recent Monday when Roger Bockert, owner of Heartland Theater Services in Council Bluffs, was installing Dolby Digital 3D Cinema equipment in the projection room of the twin-screen theater.

“Digital projection has pretty much taken over,” Bockert said. “Many of the theaters in small Iowa towns have made the switch from film to digital and 3-D is helping fuel that activity.

“The 2-D image in digital is sharp and crisp. You just can't duplicate that quality with film.”

Dorothy Thompson, co-owner of the Starlight Cinema with her husband, Larry, and their children, Ben and Beth, said making the substantial investment to upgrade from film to digital projection and installing 3-D capability came about for several reasons.

“We felt that we needed to install Dolby Digital 3D to maintain and continue to grow our customer base,” Thompson said. “We're in competition with theaters in larger communities like Cedar Rapids, Cedar Falls and Dubuque that offer movies in 3-D. We also compete with theaters in smaller towns that are able to keep their prices low.”

Thompson said access to the latest movies also drove the replacement of film projection equipment with digital projectors.

“To continue getting the movies that we want, we almost had to go digital,” she said. “The studios are not making as many film prints as they did in the past, so digital projection is becoming a necessity.”

Bockert said upgrading to digital projection and 3-D also boosts the image of a community.

“We installed a system like this in a theater in Holdrege, Neb., a town of about 5,600 that really needed a boost,” he said. “After the theater installed a 3-D system, other businesses in the community started to repaint their storefronts. They saw someone spending a lot of money on improvements and they followed suit.”

Dolby Digital 3D Cinema, one of two digital

3-D systems on the market, uses special glasses. The glasses are cleaned between shows.

“We had to purchase a special washer along with the glasses,” Larry Thompson said. “The glasses cannot be used to view a DVD on a home 3-D system. If we have to replace them, it costs us about $20 per pair.”

Digital projection also changes how movies arrive at the theater.

“We used to get 60-pound crates filled with reels of film,” Ben Thompson said. “Those had to be lugged up to the projection booth. “They've been replaced by a 5-pound box holding a computer hard drive. We plug cable into the hard drive and download the movie and trailers to the digital projector.”

Ben Thompson said a computer is programmed with the time to start local commercials, movie trailers and the feature film. Volume levels also are programmed in

advanced for each

segment.

“All we have to do each day is turn on the (power) breakers and the computer does the rest,” he said.

Industry estimates peg the cost of converting to digital projection and 3-D technology at about $100,000 per screen, but the trend toward 3-D movies appears to justify the investment.

Fresh on the heels of the box office blockbuster “Avatar,” major movie studios have announced more than 20 major 3-D releases for this year. And theater owners like the Thompsons understand the public is willing to pay $2 or $3 more per ticket to see popular films in 3-D.

The last two Harry Potter films, “Toy Story 3,” “Iron Man 2,” “Shrek Forever After” and the next Spider-Man will be shown in 3-D. But only about 8,000 screens in North America have been converted to digital projection, and roughly 3,800 of those screens are 3-D-capable.

Fridley Theatres of Des Moines, a family-owned chain, operates movie theaters in a number of Iowa towns. In Eastern Iowa, Fridley has upgraded theaters in Decorah and Muscatine to offer movies in 3-D.

Fridley also has sold off older theaters in Manchester and Oelwein to local investors or non-profit community organizations in recent years.

Todd Leach, who bought the New Strand Theatre in West Liberty in July 1996, has paid for physical and technical upgrades for the 100-year-old movie theater. Leach, who also installed Dolby Digital 3D Cinema in his single-screen theater, agreed that access to the most popular movies was a major factor in his decision.

“To compete with things like $1 Redbox DVD rentals and Netflix downloads, you have to offer new movies or lose your audience,” he said.

Some of the major movie studios are pledging some money to help theaters make the conversion to digital and 3-D, but Leach said there are strings attached.

“You give up control of your equipment because it's been purchased by another party,” he said. “You lose control of what movies you book.

“We have to be pretty careful about what we get because we have a limited audience. We can't run the same movie for four weeks.”