Cinémas Guzzo to spend $2.2 million upgrading with digital technology
Submitted by Martin C. Barry on 18 November 2009 - 2:00am
Cinémas Guzzo, which operates 148 movie screens in the Montreal region, making it the leading independent cinema owner in the province, is taking a big digital leap forward.
The company, which won a niche in Canadian movie theatre ownership over the past 25 years after playing an important role in eroding an industry monopoly, is gradually forsaking the use of conventional 35mm film projectors in its venues, in favour of digital technology.
$150,000 per screen
Cinémas Guzzo plans to continue the trend at a rate of 10 to 15 per cent each year until digital has been implemented at all screens in five or six years time. At $150,000 per screen, the total cost will be more than $2.2 million. Since the industry average for phasing in digital is estimated at about 10 years, Cinémas Guzzo feels it is well ahead of the competition.
While reels of 35mm photographic emulsion film have been the projection standard virtually since the dawn of the motion picture industry in the late 19th century, the new digital benchmark (which is referred to as 2K) allows movies to be distributed to theatres through computer hard drives, optical disks and satellite connections.
Ahead of the game
“We’re ahead of the other guys — we’re actually the first to have brought the new projectors to Montreal,” claims Vince Guzzo, executive vice president of the chain and the son of founder Angelo Guzzo. “Some of our competitors have put some in as well now just because they had no choice. It’s sort of a follow Mr. Guzzo attitude.”
While there are up to a half-dozen players active today in the manufacture of digital cinema projectors, the Guzzo chain steered clear of some big brand names, and opted instead for projectors made by Barco, a Belgian producer, and Christie Digital Systems, a Canadian company based in Kitchener, Ontario.
Projectionists disappearing
Setting up a movie for projection in a theatre has been relatively cumbersome and time-consuming until now. While a projectionist working from a booth in the rear of the auditorium had been necessary all these years, the job is disappearing. Now a movie drive need only be plugged into the digital projection system and its contents are ready for screening.
In theatre multiplexes, which account for eight of Cinémas Guzzo’s operations, a single central server room overseen by one person can replace all the projection booths. And because the movies are in digital format, they’re easier to safeguard from pirating with a number of failsafe methods.
Programming easy
“It’s just grab and drop,” says Guzzo, describing the ease with which the new system operates. “Once your complex is one hundred per cent digital, you are able to do the programming almost the same way a TV station does the scheduling of its shows over time. You can program more personalized presentations.
”In one day, let’s say, you might show one movie five times. It may be playing in five different auditoriums. For example, a horror picture won’t do well in the afternoon show, so you put the kiddie picture in the larger auditorium, and come night you can flip them without any effort. You can do this sort of thing today but there’s more effort.”
Pirates routed
Since Montreal became notorious several years ago as North America’s movie pirating capital, theatre owners, with the assistance of legislators and the police, have instituted a number of measures to get the situation under control. Technology has been put in place in theatres, including the Guzzo chain’s, which detects the presence of camcorder lenses in darkened auditoriums.
“We’ll know, we’ll come in, we’ll call the cops and we’ll arrest you,” Guzzo says, noting that at least one offender is now serving time in jail. A new federal law made camcording in movie theatres unambiguously illegal, while the new technology made it possible to snag the perpetrators. “We’re not fooling around. We’re not giving anybody chances on this.”
Ste. Dorothée theatre
According to Guzzo, the company is finalizing plans for its long-awaited venue in Ste. Dorothée next to Autoroute 13. “That project is now coming more and more to the point where we’ll be able to start digging,” he says. “We needed approval from the city for certain environmental issues, which we got. Now we’re just waiting for the Minister of the Environment’s okay on it, which is a technicality because they’ve already said yes. The city approved so they’re going to approve. It took us a long time to get this project on the road, but we’ll be getting it going soon.”
