Mopix opens doors for Lincoln moviegoers
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BY L. KENT WOLGAMOTT / Lincoln Journal Star
Five people clustered in the aisle of an otherwise empty auditorium at the Douglas Grand Theatre to catch a screening of "Elektra." "Where do you guys want to sit?" Ryan Osentowski asked. "Let's take the seats with the best view." Then, laughter -- Osentowski and his companions are blind.
The group settled into their seats, put on headsets and waited.
A couple rows above, Rachel Schmidt and Nikki Gollner adjusted flexible cables attached to rectangular pieces of plastic while signing to each other.
The plastic and the headsets are part of the $15,000 MoPix system in Auditorium 9, the second such system in the state and the first in Lincoln.
MoPix, or Motion Picture Access Project, is made up of two components: the Rear Window Captioning System and DVS Theatrical.
And together, the technology is making movies more accessible and enjoyable for hard-of-hearing and visually impaired filmgoers.
"Now I can go to a movie any time," Mike Rentschler, an avid deaf moviegoer, signed after watching "Elektra."
"Before we could go to a movie only once a month and if you couldn't go on that night, you didn't get to see the movie that month. Now we can go when we want to go, just like everyone else."
How it works
In a DVS headset, a visually impaired moviegoer hears a descriptive commentary in one ear and the soundtrack in the other.
"I imagine it to be similar to a sighted person viewing a 3-D movie without the glasses," said Sara Honnor, who attended her first MoPix film at a viewing organized by the Journal Star. "It's a system that I'm going to have to get used to."
Once the ears become accustomed to the competing streams of sound, DVS provides a wealth of information in its description.
To keep it from interfering with the dialogue, the description sometimes lags a couple of seconds. Sometimes it gets ahead of the action. But the details it provides can bring a movie to life.
"There were so many visual details the evil guys turning green when they disappear into thin air we wouldn't have known that,"said Amy Buresh, Nebraska chapter president of the National Federation of the Blind. "You could enjoy the movie otherwise. But having the MoPix does enhance the experience."
The Rear Window Captioning System displays reversed captions of dialogue and other sound elements such as a door creaking or gunshots on a display mounted on the back wall of the theater.
The transparent panels, anchored in the seat's cup holder, reflect the captions so they appear superimposed on or beneath the movie screen.
Gollner and Schmidt, who are deaf, struggled to get the reflectors into proper position, where they could read the words and watch the film.
"It's a hassle with this at first, but the more you use it, the better you will get with it," Gollner said. "But I don't know why they don't use a different color. When the screen goes to white, you lose all the text."
Gollner hadn't yet learned one of the tricks. When the screen goes white, putting a hand between the reflector and the screen brings the words back up.
Experienced user Angie Tolie, attending her third MoPix movie, said using the screen was now simple.
"The captions are right there where you want them," she signed through an interpreter. "It makes it easy for us to go to movies and enjoy them."
We can come in here at any time'
The Grand's MoPix system cost $15,000. The Douglas Theater Company, which operates all of Lincoln's first-run commercial movie theaters, paid half. The Nebraska and Lincoln chapters of the National Federation of the Blind raised the rest.
"We knew the Douglas Grand was going to be built here," Buresh said. "They approached us and we started working together. It's much easier to do when you build it from the ground up."
The federation chapters were happy to raise the money.
"To have this kind of technology become commonplace, it is going to take theaters to step to the plate and install it," said Shane Buresh, president of the Lincoln chapter. "We applaud their effort. We can come in here at any time. So often, in the past, if something was done for us, it was one-time only. "
Before, theaters would occasionally host a special screening for the blind, during which the description would accompany the film's soundtrack through the auditorium's speakers. That created a cachophonous experience.
More often, blind people would go to films with sighted friends who would describe the onscreen action to them. That method got the point across, but if you think it's easy to describe a movie you haven't seen before, just try it and not talk over the dialogue.
"This is such a great thing for everybody," said Lynette Hansen, who often would narrate for Shane and Amy Buresh.
"It allows them to be independent. They don't have to rely on anybody to tell them what's going on."
The same holds true for deaf and hard-of-hearing people. Until the Grand opened, an open-captioned film was screened every month at the Star Ship 9.
Selections still limited
Getting some of the studios to embrace MoPix technology and increase the selection has been a struggle, Osentowski said.
The MoPix listing of available films with closed captions and descriptions confirms Osentowski's point. Leading Oscar nominees "The Aviator" and "Million Dollar Baby" are available with captions only not the DVS descriptions.
Frank Rhodes, who books films for Douglas, chooses the movies to play in Auditorium 9 from the same list.
"I'm trying to stay totally with both formats, always," Rhodes said. "We ran into that when we first started doing it."
It offered "National Treasure" without realizing the film did not offer DVS descriptions.
"
We had some unhappy blind people," Rhodes said. "We didn't know it then that some didn't have the voice track. Now we're trying to stay with both."
Rhodes chooses the MoPix films each week. But he is open to input. For example, he said, Brad Loos, who attended the screening of "Elektra" and liked the system but didn't care for the movie, asked if "Phantom of the Opera" could be screened.
It is playing in Auditorium 9 this week.
There are still a few glitches to be worked out. Most notably, there are only eight headsets and 15 reflectors, making it difficult for large groups to attend movies together. More of each are expected to be available in the near future, when the National Federation for the Blind is planning to hold an official grand opening for the MoPix-equipped auditorium.
And those at "Elektra" expressed hope that eventually more than one auditorium in Lincoln would have MoPix. Still, they're happy with their increased options.
"Having MoPix in one theater, I think of it as a luxury," Honnor said. "As a teacher in high school for 11 years, when I started we had one computer for the whole department. Now there are computers all over the building. It has to start somewhere. We have MoPix in one theater. Maybe in 11 years, it'll be standard everywhere."
Reach L. Kent Wolgamott at 473-7244 or kwolgamott@journalstar.com.
The MoPix story
MoPix was developed by WGBH, Boston's public broadcasting station, which began researching captioning and description in theaters in 1992.
Rear Window and DVS debuted at the General Cinema Theater in Sherman Oaks, Calif., in November 1997.
There are 84 theaters in 23 states and the District of Columbia with MoPix systems. New Jersey has the most MoPix theaters with 18.
Nebraska has two MoPix theaters at the Douglas Grand in Lincoln and AMC Oak View in Omaha. New York, Pennsylvania, Louisiana and Washington are the other states with two MoPix theaters.
There are no MoPix theaters in Iowa, Missouri and South Dakota. There is one MoPix theater in Kansas and three in Colorado.
For more information, go to: www.mopix.org
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