Which is what we called it in my small town back in the day. We had one movie theater in town and thus one movie available to us per week. Hence, “the show.” Not “a” show, and not even “a” movie or “the” movie. The. Show.
I belong to a Facebook group called “Friends of 70 mm,” the membership of which is extremely knowledgeable about cinema history from a projection perspective. I found out about it from one of my friends, a software engineering professor who comes to be a guest speaker in my film and media studies class every year. His dad was a movie theater technician who traveled around the state (sometimes multiple states!) to repair projectors and keep them in good working order. My friend knows a lot about the technical end of cinema, and he always brings cool things to share with my students, like a 1920s hand-cranked miniature film projector he threads up with film before switching on the tiny light bulb inside and throwing the image onto the white classroom wall. He can crank one frame at a time and then speed it up to create the motion picture, which is fun.
But I digress. The “Friends of 70mm” Facebook group that my software engineering prof friend introduced me to has lots of intriguing, often highly technical discussions about movie sound, screens, theaters, projectors, reels—just really interesting and informative stuff! I come to film and media from an English and rhetoric perspective. But I teach mostly engineering students, and plus I just always like to understand things as completely as possible, because you can find “aha” moments in the most unlikely connections. This Facebook group has helped fill in some rather sizable gaps in my understanding of the technical side of filmmaking and exhibition.
In the past week I’ve seen postings and conversations in the Facebook group to the effect that many movie theaters are scrambling to find projectionists experienced with 70mm willing/able to travel to one of the handful of theaters in the U.S. (only 19, according to the Washington Post) currently showing Oppenheimer in 70mm. Both the film itself and perhaps more significantly the 70mm viewing experience have proven so successful that theaters have extended the movie’s run by 2-3 weeks—but are finding it difficult to staff the projection booths for all the additional showings because so few people are trained to operate the equipment nowadays.
Wouldn’t it be cool if this movie’s popularity, alongside the voices of a small but notable group of filmmakers committed to shooting on film (e.g., Tarantino, Gerwig, Nolan, Spielberg), helped to spur a shift toward revitalizing the larger than life, communal moviegoing experience that “cinema” used to encompass? Although I can appreciate streaming for what it offers (serendipitous discovery of new titles, for example, not to mention the convenience of viewing them on your own schedule), it is certainly not the only way to watch a movie.
And definitely not the ideal way.
(UPDATE: 8/11/23 — I just saw this Variety article from earlier this week about the various extended runs of Oppenheimer in 70m. Link: https://variety.com/2023/film/news/oppenheimer-imax-70mm-extended-tickets-1235689899/)
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Katherine Wikoff 
One issue, even with 35mm, is that the cost of shipping prints around the country to various theaters is a large budget item for distributors. Theaters can just download digital movies, which cuts costs significantly.
That said, 70mm is pretty gorgeous! (But I suspect it will be like vinyl records. Beloved by a select few but not widely popular.)
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You’re probably right about 70mm being beloved by a select few but not widely popular. It has been really interesting to see how this film and Barbie have been treated as events worthy of seeking out a special viewing experience as part of a larger, collective moment in popular culture—whether in terms of theater/projection (Oppenheimer ), pink-costumed outings for groups of girlfriends or mothers and daughters (Barbie), or marathon double-feature thematic mashup (Barbenheimer).
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Oppenheimer may not save the cinema as you would like. But the quality of the film making may have greatly helped to revive a fading horror of the awesome technology created by Oppenheimer and his Manhattan project crew. When I viewed the film I expected to see multiple depictions of the terrible devastation the bombs inflicted on tens of thousands of Japanese civilians. There was none of that. And that, in my opinion, was good because we have almost become immune to such horrific scenes. Instead Christopher Nolan depicted the internal explosion to Oppenheimer’s moral sensibilities brought about by this new technology. Nolan turned several ordinary scenes into surreal creations of light that mimicked the first few seconds of an atomic blast. It was a fresh and novel approach to the terror unleashed. I should emphasize the scene showing Oppenheimer’s victory speech to his crew after the first successful test. The visual depiction of the cognitive dissonance between Oppenheimer’s warlike victory speech and the moral conflict he was experiencing was overwhelming. This film is great!
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Beautifully said! Helping us see and understand things afresh (and in this case, with a revived sense of horror) is surely a mark of great art.
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Thanks! That is much appreciated coming from you. I would like to know, by the way, what your film students—a generation that did not live through the Cold War—think about the film.
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I won’t be teaching film studies this fall, but I do have two sections of political science. I’ll ask my students if they have seen the film and what they thought. Then I’ll come back here and reply to you in the comments.
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