A Fantastic Interview With Fantastic Fest's Tim League

Jordan Hoffman:  What movie-going experience did you go to as an impressionable person and said "this is the greatest night, I love this, I want to try and capture this again!" And if there was something you saw where you said, "this is a f**king disgrace, this theater-going experience and I have to change this."

Tim League: A lot of my movie-watching from youth was VHS...I lived in a small town, 5000 people, we had a United Artists, six bucks, at the mall which was ten miles away, and I would go occasionally but it was a mall multiplex, not a good one. I saw Evil Dead 2 there; I saw Hotdog...The Movie there...both of which I snuck into...

Jordan Hoffman: Well, you were learning about skiing, right?

Tim League: [laughs] More informative was watching VHS with my buddies; that's what we did. I systematically rented everything at the video store, the mom-and-pop video store. My two big ones from when I was really young at the theater, though, super-cliché but their true...my mom and my sister went to the opera and my father said "screw that, I'm not going to the opera" and so he said "Tim, let's go see a movie" and I was seven or so and he took me to see Jaws...I remember it very well; I was horrified, completely freaked out for years and years because we would always go to Florida for a beach vacation...and then I went on opening week, not opening day, but I made my mom take me to go see Star Wars and again I was seven years old...six years old?....

Jordan Hoffman:  Jaws was '75, Star Wars was '77. So either way you were an impressionable lad

Tim League: So I was seven, I guess, for Star Wars and I had to go to the bathroom so bad but I couldn't leave the theater, and I ended up wetting my pants.

Jordan Hoffman: Oh sh*t! That's awesome! Do you remember what scene it was when you finally...

Tim League: Yeah, it was during the Death Star attack.

Jordan Hoffman: At the end! You almost made it! 

Tim League: I'm just like "I can't leave, I can't leave!"

Jordan Hoffman: Oh, that's awesome...

Tim League: My mom was furious; she was like "You're seven years old" and she made me come to the ladies room with her to clean my pants...

Jordan Hoffman: That says so much.  And was there a time, before the Alamo was up and running and working the way it is, where people were talking and the projection system was a mess and you said "I must build my empire to change this"?

Tim League: I don't think there's any one instance but I definitely get annoyed whenever I go and it's a sub-par presentation because it's just sheer laziness; it's really not that hard.

Jordan Hoffman: Is it just getting those bulbs in the projection booth?

Tim League: It's not just the bulbs; what a lot of places do is, they'll either a) buy the cheaper bulb because for a big screen the bulbs are really expensive and burn out quicker so you can save money by going down a notch and not burning them so hot. It saves a lot of money, but then you should also take them out of service before they start to fail. There are a number of hours they're made for, so a lot of places will run to projectionists to say "Oh hey, I saw that the bulb is flickering", but how many months have gone by before somebody says this?  A projectionist at most places is a really low-paid employee.

Jordan Hoffman: Yeah, when I worked at a Loews in New Jersey, it's just one of the guys that's also in charge of making sure the candy is counted correctly.

Tim League: Right, it's rough.  With sound too, people don't even realize it really but if the sound is too low or it's not crisp, you're not processing, you're not fully engaging, you're not losing yourself in the movie, you're not feeling it as much.