Although I work as a producer and director in the film business, I live in communities with technologically challenged movie theaters. In Telluride, Colorado, the Nugget plays one movie a week on its single screen most of the year. Because of the Telluride Film Festival, it has decent projection and sound, but it's a bit dismal and long in the tooth seat- and comfort-wise. In East Hampton, New York, where I have my primary residence, the Regal Cinema Sixplex could be the worst-maintained theater in the United States, if not the entire planet. Perhaps there's a movie palace in Uzbekistan with drearier ambiance, but I doubt that it has worse equipment.

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Only two of the Sixplex's six theaters have digital sound, something that's been available for decades. The subwoofers have been disconnected for years because it was easier to unhook them than to repair them, and the only thing coming out of most of the surround speakers is an incessant hum. The only time the projection is bright enough is the few weeks after I have a premiere of one of my movies there, since Sony hires a team of experts to cobble together a decent venue. Add to all this the fact that most shoes you own will disintegrate in the toxic mix of Diet Coke and melted Milk Duds that has created a swampy, sticky mess on the floor; the mysterious stains on the screens; and the fear that malaria, cholera, and toxic mold reside in the walls and sprung seats, and you can see why Sweetie (the wife) — who has very little interest in anything electronic — prefers to watch movies in our home screening rooms.

Several years ago, when we moved to East Hampton from nearby Amagansett, we put a dedicated digital high-def screening room in our basement (see My Digital Adventure). After 8 years of owning our second home in Telluride, we decided it was time to upgrade our electronics and finish our basement screening room there, which until then had been used as an ad hoc space for Christmas-present wrapping and a yearly Ping-Pong tournament.

The Telluride house presents a series of challenges, including lack of air and, in the summer, glorious lightning strikes that are both thrilling and dangerous. Recently, a tree exploded in our yard and took out a bunch of windows. It turns out that lightning instantaneously superheats the water inside a tree, and the only thing for the expanding water and steam to do is to blow up the tree. Lightning often takes us off the electrical grid, and even though we have a generator that could run a midsize city's hospital, the initial surge of power when it starts up plays havoc with our electronics.

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Plasma TVs rarely work well at 10,000 feet, and because Telluride is our second home, anything that goes wrong electronically tends to fester for months at a time when we're not there, in spite of our full-time housekeepers. So the new system had to be, on one hand, sophisticated and extraordinary enough so I wouldn't be forced to spend time outside doing physical activity in the beauty of the San Juan Mountains. On the other hand, it had to be simple enough that it wouldn't be always breaking, which would force me to spend time outside doing physical activity in the beauty of the San Juan Mountains.

With the above contradictory knowledge hovering over me like a nagging mother, I convinced Sweetie to let me build out the space that was designed to be our screening room, and I undertook the daunting task of upgrading the entire house's A/V system. The idea was to start from scratch, getting rid of all of our tube TVs and rewiring the house's audio system and controls. Like all remodeling, it ended up costing more than I wanted and was full of stupid decisions, but it turned out to be incredibly rewarding.

The house in Telluride has the same size screening room as the one in East Hampton — 22 x 24 feet with a 10-foot ceiling. This is not ideal, in that it's a little too square. (Square rooms aren't great for sound.) But I advise you that there's nothing better than a dedicated screening room — no windows to glare-out your image and no foot traffic wandering from the kitchen to the living room — to change your entire home-viewing experience.

In Telluride, we have a 12.5-foot Stewart Filmscreen microperforated screen. Since you want your three front speakers behind the screen, not below or alongside, microperf (tiny holes that let the sound come at you from directly behind the picture) is the way to go. Using a gray screen like the one here, instead of a white one, helps make the blacks in the picture even darker and richer.

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I'm a big fan of subwoofers, and as you can see in the photos, I have six of them across the bottom of the screen. This is total overkill, but there's nothing like feeling the heaviness of something in my stomach — whether it's the force of the fecal geyser in RV or the profound weight of the mysterious metal box in Big Trouble — to make me laugh.

The screening room is filled with smallish yet manly NHT speakers — the front left/center/right speakers, six surrounds, and the six subs. The sound from the NHT system is bright and clean — surprisingly good, when you consider the speakers' relatively small size. I almost bought chairs with built-in under-the-butt subwoofers, but Sweetie and I both prefer screening rooms with couches and comfortable chairs and ottomans rather than theater seating. And the truth is, six subs up front is more than stupid.

The rest of the screening-room gear consists of an excellent Sony VW100 projector [since replaced with a Sony VPL-VW200 — see Barry’s New Projector], which produces almost a three-dimensional quality, together with a Sony Blu-ray Disc player, a 400-disc Sony DVD megachanger, a Harman Kardon DVD player, and beautiful McIntosh A/V preamp and seven-channel power-amp units.

The control system, in both the screening room and the rest of the house, is a relatively simple setup made by Control 4. I've used expensive universal control systems from AMX and Crestron, and I've always been frustrated. If I replaced a piece of equipment, adding new codes and software to the controls was expensive. And in Telluride, at least, I had many problems with batteries and reliability.

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The Control 4 system includes a house-dedicated hard drive. I downloaded my MP3 collection to the drive, and each room has a controller that gives me my entire collection, including cover art. In certain places — such as the screening room, the office, and the master bedroom — it also gives me complete control of the various TVs, DVD players, and satellite systems. The Control 4 touchscreen remote in the screening room also gives me access to the Sony DVD megachanger. I can look up any of the 400 discs by name, director, actor, genre, or even MPAA rating. (For about another 18 grand, I could have had this megachanger hooked up to every TV in the house, but I was already over budget.) The Control 4 was easy to set up and didn't require rewiring my house. It could have also controlled my heating and lighting, but I already have a dedicated LiteTouch system (which my father sold me at what he claims was a steep discount) to handle all the lighting.

We installed the brilliant Sonos music system throughout the house. It has an iPod-like wireless remote that gives you command of your iPod and, via subscriptions to the Rhapsody and Pandora sites, lets you use the over 3 million songs on those services to create your own music stations. You can choose by artist, song, genre, and subgenre, and then queue your selections for an evening of eclectic music. (One bit of warning: Having both the Control 4 and Sonos systems running on 2.4-GHz wireless networks will really slow down your wireless Internet connection. If there is a God, Qwest will deliver 7.5-GHz service to my home soon.)

There's no cable TV in my area of Telluride, so my only option is satellite TV. Because I have so many rooms and TVs, and rely on the satellite system so profoundly, I decided to go with DirecTV's Titanium option. Although this is quite a layout of money — $7,500 a year — it provides me with 10 HD DVRs and allows every set to receive every channel offered by DirecTV, from pay-per-view, special events, and the NFL games to adult channels (it took me many hours going around to each box to block those). You also get a special concierge number to dial when things go wrong, but so far, so good. The images on the HD channels are fantastic, and the boxes have decent-sized hard drives so you can TiVo some football games and have some pay-per-view movies waiting for you when you get home after your wife convinces you it's time to actually get out of the house and take in the beauty of the San Juan Mountains.

In my office is an extraordinary 57-inch Sharp Aquos flat-panel LCD monitor. As I mentioned before, plasma doesn't work well at 10,000 feet, and this Aquos is as contrasty and brilliant as any other flat-panel TV I've owned — especially at this size. Because of the height of the placement, a rear-projection set wouldn't have worked in my office. Although viewing rear-pro TVs from the left and right has gotten quite good, up and down is still challenging, and if you're not on axis with the height of the TV, the screen quickly darkens.

In the den, since height wasn't an issue so much as size, we went with the excellent JVC 61-inch HD-ILA rear-projection TV. At only $2,600, nothing can match its size-to-cost ratio.

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The six bedrooms, the kitchen, and the bathroom all have variously sized Sharp flat-screen TVs. I like them because they have black cases, they don't have side speakers that stick out way beyond the picture area, and they produce images that are sharp and crisp, with decent, contrasty blacks.

Everything in Telluride is a challenge — including the Internet. I met Sean Greer, who installed all of this equipment, when he was a consultant for the technology company that supplies me with Internet service via microwave from a mountaintop a couple of miles above Tom Cruise's spread. Before the microwave setup, I was getting Internet via dial-up, a slow, dreary process for me since I have to download all sorts of video for the movies I direct. Being out on the edge of the microwave system created some challenges, of course, so I got to know Sean quite well.

When he started his own company, Experience AV, integrating all of my equipment became his problem. (And I essentially doubled his problem by supplying him with gear from many different manufacturers for the different rooms and functions. Reading the equipment list, you'd think I'm schizophrenic.) Nothing arrived when it was supposed to, some of the gear had difficulties with the altitude, and halfway through the job we got that single Godly bolt of lightning that not only shattered the tree but fried computers, components, cables, and nerves. When we replaced all of the dead equipment, we made sure every piece was plugged into a manly surge suppressor. (For Sean's recounting of this disaster, see Danger Zones.) Of course, just like building a house, one element couldn't be installed until the next arrived — and of course, being on the cutting edge of new technology, the DirecTV DVRs with the new HD hard drives were delayed for months.

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From the initial negotiations with Sweetie (for her okay to go ahead with what she knew would be an expensive, drawn-out, and frustrating experience) to the final installation, the whole job took, believe it or not, a year. I was slow and picky, and this could have been done in a quarter of the time if I had made all the decisions before we started and the work were being done in our primary house in East Hampton. Telluride time is not unlike island time. Weeks and months go by without an electrician coming to run the necessary wires to the screening room. Weeks and months go by before the HVAC guy can come to put in the manly air-recirculation system (now that the electrician has run him power) so I can smoke cigars in the screening room without any of the smell getting into the return vents to the rest of the house. The HVAC guy comes and announces he needs 220-volt service to his equipment, not 110. Weeks and months go by before the electrician comes back and rewires the air-recirculation system for 220 volts, instead of 110, as now requested. Weeks and months go by waiting for the HVAC guy to come back, because he's working on the air system for a hospital in neighboring Montrose. And when he does come back, more weeks and months go by because the HVAC guy forgot to tell the electrician that although the recirculator needed 220, the control for the recirculator, which was changed from 110 to 220, should have stayed at 110. Meanwhile, Sean can't install the wall of electronics in the screening room without the air conditioning working. And the circle of life continues.

Upon arrival in Telluride this past winter, with the installation completed, every evening I would e-mail a list of questions to Sean, and he would patiently answer them. I now understand the system, love it, and rarely leave the house to spend any time in the beauty of the San Juan Mountains that surround our spectacularly engineered home.

Equipment List

SONY VPL-VW100 SXRD 1080p front projector (screening room) BDP-S1 Blu-ray Disc player (screening room) DVP-CX777ES 400-disc DVD changer (screening room) SHARP LC-57D90U Aquos 57-inch LCD HDTV (Barry's office) LC-46D62U Aquos 46-inch LCD HDTV (master bedroom) LC-37D62U Aquos 37-inch LCD HDTV (bunkroom) (4) LC-32D62U Aquos 32-inch LCD HDTVs (kitchen, master bath, daughter's room, and guest bedroom) JVC HD-61G787 61-inch HD-ILA rear-projection HDTV (den) STEWART FILMSCREEN 12.5-foot (diagonal) FireHawk projection screen (screening room) NHT (6) M6 speakers (front L/C/R) (screening room and Barry's office) (6) L5 speakers (surrounds) (screening room) (6) U2 subwoofer systems with amps and crossovers (screening room) McINTOSH MX135 A/V control center (screening room) MC207 seven-channel amplifier (screening room) HARMAN KARDON (2) AVR 745 A/V receivers (Barry's office and den) AVR 645 A/V receiver (master bedroom) (4) DVD 47 DVD players (screening room, office, master bedroom, and den) CONTROL 4 (8) Home Theater Controllers Media Controller (2) 16-channel amplifiers Audio Matrix Switch-16 (4) 10.5-inch wireless touchscreens (9) Ethernet Mini in-wall touchscreens (4) Wi-Fi Mini in-wall touchscreens (3) Ethernet speaker points Wi-Fi speaker point (14) Wireless outlet lamp dimmers SONOS (3) Sonos ZonePlayer 100 wireless music players (3) Sonos ZonePlayer 80 wireless music players (6) Sonos wireless controllers DIRECTV Titanium package, with 10 HR20-700 high-def DVRs MONSTER CABLE System wired with THX-certified cables MISCELLANEOUS Airport Extreme for iTunes input into Control 4 system (2) APC S15 battery-backup power conditioners (4) Middle Atlantic rack systems

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