CONVENTION CRASHING: SHOWEST

By Brendan Buhler (contact)

Friday, March 16, 2007 | 6:54 a.m.

The upcoming "Transformers" movie, in which giant space robots will battle each other with fearsome sound effects and even more fearsome product placement, a movie calculated to appeal to the nostalgia of an audience that remembers the product placement in the badly animated 1980s cartoon, has a trailer.

Two, actually.

One trailer has scenes from the movie - a meteor! Men in a war room receive Serious News! Soldiers flee from space menace! Something with a Chevrolet logo could save us! Giant evil robot walks ominously past a little girl clutching a stuffed animal! - and it's playing on a flat-screen TV mounted on a giant black big-rig trailer.

Inside that trailer is maybe a chance for a "meet and greet" with someone named Shia LaBeouf, who is, we learn later, a) male and b) an actor and not, say, a French stripper. Other people must have known this because the line wasn't very long.

"Transformers" had no competition. It was the only movie with a booth on the exhibit floor in Bally's, host to the 10,000-person ShoWest movie theater convention.

Because really, the movies aren't the point for theaters. They come, they go. Sometimes movies make some money, sometimes none and sometimes less than none. The movies are just the cheese in the trap, there to lure you in and get you to buy a $5 bucket of popcorn or a $4 soda, the most profitable part of the business.

Hence the endless candy counters, hot dogs, warring sodas, ice-cream pellets, add-extra-lime-flavor soda fountains, cheeselike sauces for nachos, deep-fried everything and deep fryers easy enough for bored teenagers to operate.

That's not to say there weren't other movie trailers playing, but they were playing in soda or projector booths.

Oh, the projectors. Digital projection is coming. Again. This time for real. Really.

Kurt Schwenk has been coming to ShoWest for eight years and hearing about digital projection for most of them. There are technical advantages to digital projectors, says Schwenk, general manager of NEC's American digital projector division. To start, there's no film to wear out, there's no limit on sound quality, it's easy to show extra broadcasts of events like concerts or sporting events and they can show the high-profile 3-D movies that will be coming out in 2009.

But theater owners have been reluctant to go digital, and fewer than 3,000 of the nation's 37,000 screens have digital projectors, despite an aggressive push from film studios, which stand to save millions in film printing costs. Even when studios help pay for digital projectors, they still cost thousands more than film.

Mark Smith, president of Big Sky Industries, thinks he's still got a few good years left of selling film projectors. And in his other role as a theater owner (he has one in Mesquite), he says he's not going to make the switch because it doesn't bring in any extra customers.

"It doesn't make a difference in theater revenue and I guarantee you can't tell when you watch it, not yet anyway. So why would a theater owner do what costs him money?" Smith asks. "We've been hearing it forever, but it hasn't happened yet."

But it is happening bit by bit, Schwenk says. He expects another 2,500 screens to go digital this year.

"I can't wait until digital cinema is the norm," Schwenk says, "so we can all start talking about something else."