SHO-WEST ‘86: ALL THAT GLITTER NOT JUST VEGAS

LAS VEGAS —  It all started Tuesday morning with the Las Vegas Western High School Band’s rendition of the Pointer Sisters’ “I’m So Excited.”

You haven’t really heard “I’m So Excited” until you’ve heard it on a tuba.

And you haven’t really seen excitement until you’ve seen 2,000 movie exhibitors standing in line to have their pictures taken with Alan Alda.

It was ShoWest ‘86, a western states convention of theater operators, and the excitement didn’t die down until Thursday night, when the last of the formal three-a-day feedings had ended and the last autograph had been signed.

The ShoWest glitter was in stark contrast to the National Assn. of Theater Owners convention, held last fall in New Orleans at the depth of the year’s box-office slump and with almost no participation from the major studios.

Since then, business has turned around at the box office and the exhibitors’ spirits are up. And at ShoWest the studios were around like elephants in lace.

At luncheons and dinners, and in penthouse hospitality suites high up in the MGM Grand Hotel, exhibitors spent three days looking at clips of the films they may be booking this year, and meeting many of their stars, directors and producers.

The major studios, sporting such themes as “The Right Mix for ‘86” (Orion) and “The Winning Ticket” (Columbia), spent more than $1 million trying to outshine one another at ShoWest.

Orion provided the biggest surprise, ending its Tuesday luncheon with the noisy appearance of Steve Martin, Chevy Chase and Martin Short--dressed in look-alike silver and black gaucho-wear and firing pistols--to promote its Christmas movie “Three Amigos.”

Warner Bros. provided the biggest treat, ending its Wednesday dinner with a hilarious stand-up performance by Robin Williams, who will star in the studio’s “Club Paradise.”

And De Laurentiis Entertainment Group, which didn’t exist three months ago, provided the biggest incentive, telling exhibitors of a contest that will net one of them $100,000.

DEG, which will release its first movie, Roman Polanski’s “Pirates” in early May, said it will give $1 million to the moviegoer who solves the puzzle presented in its “One Million Dollar Mystery Movie,” to be released in November, and $100,000 to the operator of the theater where the winner entered the contest.

De Laurentiis’ new company, built on the rickety foundation of Embassy Pictures, announced a slate of 22 films over the next 12 months, casting itself as an instant major studio.

DEG’s product ranges from an Arnold Schwarzenegger action-adventure (“Raw Deal”) and a sequel to Jerry Lewis’ “The Nutty Professor” to an adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize-winning play “Crimes of the Heart,” which will star Diane Keaton, Sissy Spacek and Jessica Lange.

When the exhibitors weren’t watching clips and listening to sales pitches, they were getting advice from studio distribution heads and other industry people about how to run their theaters.

The theme of ShoWest ’86 was “If I were an exhibitor . . . seeing ourselves as others see us.” The exhibitors heard, maybe a hundred times, the admonitions, “Clean up your act” and “Upgrade your equipment.”

Whether they will do these things, the exhibitors deserve credit for sitting there and taking the heat and admitting they have the problems.

They sat through one long session being scolded by the heads of distribution of the major studios, whom they heard in other convention venues hyping lineups of coming movies that look every bit as mediocre as last year’s.

The best images seen at ShoWest were not on the studios’ product reels. They were in the six-minute promotional film prepared for theaters by the Directors Guild of America--a fabulous montage of the most familiar scenes from the last 50 years of movies--and in “New Magic,” a 23-minute demonstration film for Douglas Trumbull’s revolutionary Showscan.

Trumbull, the special-effects designer for Stanley Kubrick’s “2001” and Steven Spielberg’s “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” has developed a process that may be the exhibitors’ best defense against the VCR and this was their first chance to see it.

Showscan is not a gimmick. It is state-of-the-art film making, a process of photographing and projecting at 60 frames per second (the standard has been 24 frames per second for more than 50 years) to heighten the image and its sense of reality.

It is potentially the most important technological advancement in modern movie history, but because it requires different equipment in theaters, Trumbull says he cannot persuade a studio to make a Showscan feature.

“It’s Catch-22,” Trumbull said. “The studios say they’ll shoot Showscan features when there are theaters to play them in. The theater owners say they’ll convert when there are Showscan movies to show.”

Trumbull estimates that it would cost exhibitors from $40,000 to more than $100,000 to set a theater up for Showscan. He said it would add less than 10% to the production budget to shoot a feature in the process.

Trumbull said he set up the MGM Grand’s Revival Theater for “New Images,” hoping to get enough exhibitors interested to make a persuasive argument back in Hollywood.

The goal was to get 200 exhibitor signatures. By Thursday, Trumbull said he had them.

At the other end of the spectrum, the worst idea heard at ShoWest was the video theater.

John Colasanti, a New York City theater operator, said he came to Las Vegas to try to buy products for his video-tape operations.

Colasanti said that for the last year he has been showing video tapes of old Warner Bros. movies and action films by independents in his Roxy III, a small triplex in the midst of a neighborhood of first-run houses.

Patrons can see as many as four movies for $3, he said, and business has been so good, his company is about to convert another theater to video.

Colasanti acknowledged that there is no information outside the theater to let customers know they’ll be watching video tapes that are projected onto 7-by-10-foot screens. But with the tape machines suspended from the ceiling they are hard not to notice.

And have there been many complaints?

“Not one,” he said, seemingly surprised by the question. “The quality is really pretty good and most of the people just come in to kill time.”

Sigh.