it's off to work we what?

June 19, 2008 7:26 PM

for anyone who has trouble hearing, seeing a movie at the theater means missing out on a lot of dialogue and piecing together the story as best they can. thankfully, many movies are now distributed with (optional) captions, and some theaters will have 1 or 2 special screenings where they show the dialogue on-screen. however for some reason, disney/pixar refuses to participate. who at disney do i need to talk to about this, to try and set things right?

for people who are deaf or hard-of-hearing, having on-screen captions includes them in the movie-going experience like you wouldn't believe. the only other option for them is to wait for the movie to come out on dvd -- with captions. but for the summer blockbusters, that's just not the same.

i'm so happy that the alamo drafthouse here in austin shows movies with on-screen captions, but they can't get disney/pixar to send them the captioning info. i'd like to talk to someone at the studio or the distributor who can explain why. maybe all they need is a little nudge to change their mind.

but i can't seem to find any good information on who to get in touch with. can someone with a better understanding of the disney machine help with me names / email addresses / phone numbers?

any other advice or ideas are also welcomed.

posted by phoeniciansailor to media & arts (5 comments total)

I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about, excuse my French, as I have seen numerous Pixar movies with Rear Window captioning and audio description (e.g., Finding Nemo).

Now!

If the issue is your local cinema isn’t getting the disc containing Rear Window captions, contact WGBH and complain.

If the issue is the cinema hasn’t received the disc from DTS with their own unnecessarily competing brand of projected open captions, contact DTS.

If, in the unlikeliest case, the problem is that your cinema never gets burned-in open-captioned movies from InSight Cinema anymore, that’s because they ended their program – quite possibly deservedly, but that’s for another day.
posted by joeclark at 8:09 PM on June 19, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

joeclark: Do you have a problem with open captioning in general, or just the way InSight did it?
posted by spaceman_spiff at 8:56 PM on June 19, 2008

You might check if your theater has an assissted listening device available. A lot of concerts to this, where you wear a Walkman-like device that gives you a clear feed into your headphones via radio.
posted by gjc at 7:06 AM on June 20, 2008

GJC, ALDs often conflict with audio description. There’s only one channel, and in any screening with description, that’s what is funnelled through the channel, not amplified main audio.

Besides, the question was about captioning.
posted by joeclark at 8:36 AM on June 20, 2008

thanks for the DTS contact, joeclark. i got in touch with them and they were super-nice about helping get to the bottom of the problem. apparently there was some confusion somewhere, between the distributor and the theater, but michelle at DTS was able to sort it all out and now we have wall-e playing at the alamo drafthouse theater this sunday!.
posted by phoeniciansailor at 3:00 PM on June 30, 2008