Utah Crowd-Funding: Theaters going digital

This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2013, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.

The campaign in this week's Utah Crowd-Funding entry is coming down to the wire, and needs a lot of help.

The Salt Lake Film Society's massive Digital Deadline campaign — to replace the old film projectors in the Broadway and Tower theaters with up-to-date digital projectors — is trying to raise $50,000 in individual pledges via Kickstarter.

With six days to go, the campaign has only raised $9,765 — just under 20 percent of the goal.

The new projectors are a necessity in today's movie-exhibition world, as many studios and distributors have either stopped striking film prints or plan to stop in the next year or so.

Most commercial theaters in the United States have made the conversion, in part because of studio subsidies. But those programs are out of reach for most independent, art-house and small-town theaters.

The Salt Lake Film Society's Kickstarter campaign is part of a larger $700,000 fund-raising drive that will ultimately put seven projectors (which go for about $100,000 a pop) in the Tower's single theater and the Broadway's six auditoriums.

Some of that fund-raising has already happened, and three projectors — one at the Tower and two at the Broadway — were installed last week.

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