Matthew Daneman

Staff writer;

A pair of small crates sat in the Cinema Theater lobby, ready to be shipped out. Inside were reels of film — acetate prints of TheLego Movie and Muppets Most Wanted, the last movies on film the iconic Rochester movie theater ever will screen.

Simultaneously, installation crews from Buffalo’s Entertainment Equipment Corp. were installing the South Wedge movie house’s $70,000 digital projection system. And the theater’s 7 p.m. screening Friday of 12 Years a Slave will be one of the last nails in the coffin locally in the era of motion pictures coming out on film.

The Cinema’s swap this week from film to digital projection marks one of the last area theaters to make that switch. Rochester’s Little Theatre converted to digital last year, as did Avon’s Vintage Drive In. The George Eastman House’s Dryden Theatre added a digital projector last year. Rochester Theater Management — which operates movie theaters in Brockport, Geneseo and Canandaigua — did not return a message seeking comment. But according to its website, all three movie houses also have converted to digital.

And according to the Digital Cinema Implementation Partnership — owned jointly by movie chain giants AMC Entertainment Inc., Cienmark USA Inc. and Regal Entertainment Group — Cinemark’s multiplexes in Gates and Brighton; Regal’s in Henrietta, Greece and Irondequoit; and AMC’s in Webster all have made the digital switch.

The costs of switching to digital — often $60,000 to $70,000 — have been traumatic for many small, independent theaters.

“Over the last several years, there have been many small theaters across the country that have had to close and many others are afraid that they will be going out of business unless they can raise the money to buy this new equipment,” said Barna Donovan, associate professor of communications at New Jersey’s St. Peter’s University.

That move to digital is one of the chief woes of Eastman Kodak Co.’s chief businesses. The company this week said that in its most recent quarter, sales in Kodak’s Graphics, Entertainment & Commercial Films business were down 18 percent from a year ago, with most of that decline due to sliding sales of motion picture film.

Cinema Theater owner John Trickey knew digital conversion was coming when he became sole owner of the South Wedge neighborhood movie theater in 2012 — he previously had been a partial owner.

But that conversion day was supposed to be three or so years away, Trickey said. “It was maybe three months in when I found out I had maybe a year, year and a half,” he said.

The conversion was a big financial burden on a business that was losing money when he bought it and today is only close to breaking even, Trickey said.

Paying for it is a mix of donations — the theater has raised thousands of dollars in a succession of Indiegogo campaigns — $50,000 in grant money and a low-interest loan from City Hall; and out of pocket, Trickey said. The theater currently does not plan to raise ticket or concession prices to cover the costs, he said.

With much of the Cinema’s customer base being older people on fixed incomes, Trickey said, “Going from $3 (admission) to $4 for a senior, or $5 to $6 for an adult, a dollar doesn’t seem like a lot, but I wanted to try to keep our patrons able to come and afford it.”

For most Cinema customers, the movie-going experience won’t be noticeably different than it was a week ago, said David Long, chairman of the bachelor’s Motion Picture Science program at Rochester Institute of Technology. While digital projection means an end to analog defects like scratches on or dirt stuck to the film, film also has a somewhat better dynamic range, as digital has trouble doing deep shadows and bright highlights as well as film.

“I’ve long thought of them having different problems and different benefits from one another,” Long said. “Filmmakers are audiophiles in a picture sense. If you went to Hollywood, where they’re making the master content, they’re concerned every day up and down about these differences. The movie-going public at the end of the day ... as long as the story’s good, you lose some of your concerns.”

Motion picture studios have been the driving force behind the digital conversion, as mailing a small computer hard drive is far cheaper than spending close to $2,000 to make a print and then shipping it to a theater, Long said. Digital conversion only started in earnest when studios agreed to help subsidize the cost of conversion for major theater chains — a subsidy that independent theaters like the Cinema and the Little don’t receive, said Long, who also is chairman of the Little Theatre Advisory Board.

Studios turning out fewer and fewer prints of films has meant a constantly slimmer selection of films the Cinema could show. “It used to be, the whole country would be flooded with thousands of prints,:” said Jim Lewis, a longtime Cinema employee. But when the Cinema recently screened the Robert DeNiro/Michael Douglas comedy Last Vegas, he said, there supposedly were only 10 prints available nationwide.

And while the theater previously had wanted to screen 12 Years a Slave, “We weren’t able to show show it,” Lewis said. “It was digital only.”

The digital projector basically gives the theater access to the kind of lineup it had two to three years ago, Trickey said.

“It doesn’t increase business one little bit,” he said. “This thing is strictly a cost of doing business.”

MDANEMAN@DemocratandChronicle.com

Twitter.com/mdaneman