[Richard W. Haines]

Many if not most Hollywood insiders had 35mm screening rooms which was a status symbol in the past.
It's referenced in movies like "Sunset Boulevard" and "Words and Music". Most celebrities were film
collectors.


Scorsese had a 35mm and 16mm screening room in his NYC apartment back in the nineties but
I'm not sure if it's still in use. I would guess he has a DLP set up now. Sylvester Stallone had
a 70mm set up in his house. Michael Jackson had a very strange screening room to show 35mm
in his ranch way back when. It was featured in an inteview with Oprah. It had theater seats
but also a bed for him to screen the features...


Hugh Hefner had a 35mm screening room at the Playboy mansion. Roddy McDowall had a screening
room as well.


I have a screening room with 35mm, 16mm and an Optoma DLP.


In the seventies the late Jack Valenti and the MPAA instituted a major crackdown on home theaters
and film collecting. The reason was the emerging home video market on VHS. While the studios
had no problem with celebrities owning copies of movies in 35mm or 16mm and screening them privately
at home, there was another group of people who were transferring copyrighted films onto VHS and
selling them as bootlegs. Valenti refused to distinguish between film collectors and film pirates and
gave speeches calling collectors 'a cancer in the belly of the industry'. He claimed that anyone who
had a print of anything was a potential 'film pirate'. To set an example, he had the FBI arrest Roddy
McDowall, one of the most beloved actors in the industry and terrorize and intimidate him into 'naming
names' of other collectors he had purchased prints from. They seized his collection. McDowall was
quite shocked and said everyone had prints of movies in Hollywood and most of his were given to
him by the studios upon request. McDowall eventually got his prints back and he donated them to
a University Film Department. Hugh Hefner also got into trouble by privately screening "Star Wars"
for guests at the mansion. Other people in and outside of the industry were harassed too and film collecting and home theaters went underground for a while. This was around the same time that Universal and Disney sued Sony Betamax and almost destroyed the home video market before it began. The Supreme Court ruled it was not piracy to tape movies off of television as long as they were for home use and not sold and that ended the persecution of film collectors in general. On top of that, it turned out that some studios had been negligent about preserving their movies and they had to turn to film collectors to help them restore them. "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World", "King Kong" and others were restored with the help of collectors who had saved the missing footage in their prints.


Today home theaters are very common and virtually everyone is a film collector but back in the seventies it was a real problem and people were afraid that the FBI would knock on your door and bust you for 'unauthorized exhibition' or 'piracy' for screening movies in 35mm or 16mm in your livingroom.
Here's what makes it even stranger. Shortly before the VHS format was introduced, studios were selling
complete Super 8 sound prints of films like "Gone with the Wind". How could it be piracy to screen a different film format if the movie was released for home use? Most of the FBI cases were dropped because it was impossible to prove them and most of the prints circulating in film collecting circles
had be slated for destruction anyway. Only a handful of release prints were saved for revival screenings
and drive ins after a movie had played the rounds. The rest were either junked or just left at the theaters or exchanges which is where collectors went garbage picking or purchased them directly.



Today, the only way to see an original 35mm or 16mm Technicolor print of a movie is through film
collectors since the process was eliminated and you cannot replicate the specific 'look' of these
prints on Eastmancolor or video. Few studios have Technicolor copies of their classics, they were
junked years ago. You can simulate it on DVD but it's still not the same.