"Some application forms are 50 pages long," said Doug Bean of the Des Plaines Theater Preservation Society.

"Our Town," the film shown this weekend, is in the public domain, and available for anyone's use.

However, films such as Independence Day and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid are copyrighted and come with considerable fees.

In addition, companies such as Warner Brothers, Disney and their subsidiaries require that all of their pictures are shown on 35 mm film.

"We're not shying away from that, but that is an added expense for the shipment of the film and the film operator," Bean said.

Studios charge varying fees that are either flat or may be tacked to the number of viewings and the percentage of gross revenue generated. Fixed fees can range from $125 to $700, Bean said.

Theater organizers said a great find in the film industry was a company in Minnesota called Festival Films. The company houses high-quality films that are transferred with the correct aspect ratio on to DVDs for the theater to display on its 10,000 lumin digital projector. Festival Films sells the DVDs in the public domain for the theater to own.

Theater event organizers plan to extend that ownership to movie-goers as soon as the technology is ready. A copy of this weekend's "Our Town" film will soon be available to the public on DVD, accompanied by short films that were shown in the theater.

"We're building a library of all the films we will be showing," Bean said.

The Theater Preservation Society finds movies directly from film companies, from firms that represent film companies, and some directly from the distributor.

Not surprisingly, companies have surfaced that act as middle-men and brokers to take the headache out of movie acquisition. Such brokers help navigate through the maze of whom to contact and how to set up accounts.

"It isn't always easy," Bean said. "Some odd titles are stuck off in odd places."