"In my experience, most presentation problems come from the people who run them," says Andrew McEathron, who oversees all projection issues at the Alamo Drafthouse's Austin theaters. "If you have management that just doesn't care or doesn't have the resources to fix it, the presentation overall — image, focus, sound — gets knocked down a key. It's a lot about the personnel and the training."

McEathron suspects that most major chains "have teenagers making minimum wage running the projectors, sometimes 16 or 17 at once, so there's no way they're going to notice problems."

Jack Dumas, head of a projectionist's union in Long Island, N.Y., says it's unlikely a minimally trained employee can maintain several projectors and their many optical parts, which go well beyond the bulb, simultaneously. "There are proper procedures that the manufacturers and professionals recommend, and you have to cut corners when the kid has to go down and sell popcorn again," Dumas says.

Regal's Nunley says each projector operator in the chain goes through training and that a "certified (projection) booth trainer" is based in the Austin-San Antonio area "for ongoing development and advancement in training."

While Cinemark's Falk confirms that teenagers with some training run their projectors, she says, "It's not like it's rocket science, frankly. It's just flipping switches."

In Austin, theaters commonly praised by buffs for good or superior picture quality are the Alamo Drafthouse Cinemas at Downtown, Lake Creek and the Village, Regal Gateway, the Paramount, the new Arbor Cinema and Regal Metropolitan. All of these theaters use 3,000- and 4,000-watt bulbs. At the Paramount and the Alamos, if a bulb starts to dim or flicker, it is promptly replaced.

When a movie is playing exclusively at a theater with crummy projection there's often no recourse but to wait for the sharp perfection of DVD. It's assumed that theater presentations will be uniformly improved with the spread of all-digital projection, which shines with light that is twice as bright as old-fashioned bulbs. In Austin, only the Landmark Dobie has a digital projector used for the occasional digital movie, and other venues, such as the Paramount, bring in digital projection at the request of digital-moviemakers such as Robert Rodriguez ("Spy Kids").

This eradicates murky facsimiles of what directors intended when they made their movie, and means no more bright afternoon skies being mistaken for dawn or dusk or London in the winter.

"How can a theater advertise that they're showing a movie when they're not really showing you the movie the filmmakers made?" asks Alvarado-Dykstra. "How can you even consider presenting a sneak preview of a film — with the intention of building positive word-of-mouth — only to screen a poor, pale misrepresentation of it? Projection this bad is tantamount to fraud."

McDaniel, for one, was not going to take it anymore. After his bleary "Finding Nemo" experience he complained to the manager, who wondered if the projector lens was dirty. Getting nowhere, McDaniel says, he called a Cinemark representative in Dallas, who apologized, showered him with free movie and popcorn coupons and said the company would look into the problem.

McDaniel used one of the free passes to see "Thirteen" at the same theater, Cinemark Barton Creek.

Nothing had changed. The picture was as crystalline as bath water.

cgarcia@statesman.com; 445-3649

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