talking abt The Last Emperor specifically - local used-record chain is doing their yearly purge of slow/non selling mdse including a lot of specialty titles like this that should have been retained back at the sorting station and put up online under that category to get the highest prices - but instead - maybe 30 titles were in the Dollar Bin.
Picked em all up - ripped em and then flipped a few for 10-15 times what I paid for `em.
This one I'm keeping tho even if it is only for the opening track and the closing track is because in my first indoor non drive in movie projectionist job - and my first scope pic - was this film at the City Cinemas’ 57th Street Playhouse.
We started off with the 35MM scope print bec there was apparently a shortage of 6-track stripe film stock - so the choices were A) run 70MM with 6-track full-coat a'la IMAX or B) run the normal 35MM 4-track optical matrix prints.
Since only a few guys knew how to run track and film (I wdnt be allowed to run it solo until a year later) they opted for the 35MM pretty much throughout the Xmas Season.
When we came back after New Years a brand new never before run 70MM 6-track print was there waiting for us to put together and run, so that was also my first 70MM print as well.
What was odd was they had also sent us the discrete M&Es on 6-track mag 35MM - like they couldn't decide what they were going to do - so they sent us both.
So of COURSE I bugged the guy until he let me run the T&F WITH him even tho I never got to run it by myf - and even tho we only ran the T&F for the second week in Jan before migrating to the normal 70MM striped 6-track - it was still great to have it bec the score was on 1,3,5 and 6 leaving 2&4 for isolated D&E.
We had normal 1/4 inch 4-track tape recorders up there by then and one ran 15 IPS - so I scared up as much leftover radio station 10-1/2 tape as I could find and over the course of the week-plus we were running the T&F - I was taping direct off the track every night (two shows 6:30 and 10PM - no daytime shows yet) and it's a good thing bec now 30+ years later I go back to my tapes I made and there's lots of ``quadraphonic'' sections I have doubles of where the doubles are better than the first few nights I was copying this.
Once I get time to pop em all into the DAW and stitch em all together - I'm going to see if the 4-track music stems they sent us by accident with the D&E on the other two tracks back in 1987 is equal or better than the SACD or not.
But the SACD mix can't be that far off because it gives me very close to the same feeling I'd get twice a night for six months plus (we had the 70MM like I said for all but the first six weeks of release) AND because the SACD takes a few instruments and isolates it - like the xylophone in the opening track and closing track, and the Chinese string instrument (pizzicato sections) in the opening track.
Since the D&Es are split up on 2 and 4 (normally reserved for boom/LFE sounds) it's very strange because often the dialogue will be on one by itself and the effects will be on the other one by itself - to the point where for the time we used that - we had to have one guy in charge of panning track 2 (dialogue mostly) following the actor's on screen action and then on track 4 doing the same thing for the effects.
So for both of those isolated music tracks I am going to split them up hard left and hard right so it does like a ping pong effect like old quadraphonic demo records for the 70s - and then once I bake my radio station reels I recorded in 1987 to get rid of sticky-shed syndrome I'm going to see if there's any big differences in the 4 track music stems mix vs the DM&E mix from the 70MM where the sound effects are panned where the visuals need them to be - overlaying the music where the track-and-film is just discrete music with the D&E on the other two tracks.
