OTHER TECH

Brothers Peter and Bobby Farrelly are the legendary duo behind some of the most raucous, outrageous, original - and successful - comedies ever, including Dumb & Dumber, There's Something About Mary, and most recently, The Heartbreak Kid. But when Pete started planning a home theater for his Santa Barbara, California house, he found himself dealing not with a comedy but with a particularly fiendish detective story. Call it "The Mystery of the Green Screen."

He originally envisioned a simple room. "I had an image of a little screen and a couple of chairs and some nice speakers," says Pete. "But as my wife Melinda and I looked into it and found out more about the different components, and really started comparing, we went up several notches from what we had first entertained."

What they ended up wth ended up with couldn't be much more high-end: Meridian DSP8000 (front left/right), DSP5000HC (center), and DSP3100 (surround) digital speakers with a Meridian-modified Faroudja D-ILA1080MF1 1080p projector and a screen by Stewart Filmscreen. The electronics are from Meridian, Toshiba, and Furman; the room treatment and chairs are from CinemaTech.

And Pete loves the result. "The home theater is phenomenal. People come in, and it blows their minds. It's the best part of the house by far."

But there's a problem - a lot of problems, actually. The biggest one is that the screen image has a bad habit of turning green. "Bright green," emphasizes Melinda. And it will stay that way for hours or days - even weeks. It will then return to normal, only to revert to that lurid shade whenever the spirit moves it.