Well, if you listen to the interview, he was the one doing it and they set the setting at the beginning if the day and only changed things if the machine started to drift.
I haven’t listened to it, it’s 90 minutes - could you give some timestamps?
From what he said, the machine was too strong and if you moved the film you risked breaking it.
Well that explains why they used a release print in bad shape (I’m assuming this is the 1982 transfer?) A machine rough on film would be far more likely to damage or tear lab film, and if you didn’t have a telecine print on hand you probably wouldn’t want to risk putting through an interneg or interpos. But it still doesn’t mean it would have come out looking like a projected print, that’s just not how telecine transfers worked.
So I believe that his telecines on that machine had a uniform setting for every reel and they tried to stay consistent between reels. When you really think about it, there shouldn’t be any need to change the settings in the middle of a properly timed and processed itermediate.
Yes they do, particularly because black points on film can vary a lot. In the movie theatre it’s forgiving, but in home viewing it isn’t. Even if this guy said he didn’t do much scene-to-scene tinkering I would still think scenes with a higher black point to the rest of the reel he would adjust.