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The Projectionist: On the best job that no longer exists
- hedgehog_irl 4y agoWell written and nicely put. I served my time as a projectionist also and miss the job to this day. And digital isn't the same, while they are "picture perfect" with great colours there is still a deadness that I can't explain. Not too long ago I was back in the old projection hall which is now digital and it just sounded wrong I missed the mechanical sound of the old machines. Not everything digital is better.
- devindotcom 4y agoVery true. I can't stand the screen door effect you see on a lot of digital projections. It's horribly distracting. I saw Dune in digital IMAX and spent the whole time thinking there was something wrong with the projector. I think they need some kind of final analog optical step that mitigates the pixelated look many have. Plus with digital you never have the film getting stuck and melting - always a treat to witness!
- wilg 4y agoIt's that most digital projectors in movie theaters are terrible: low resolution and dim.
- hedgehog_irl 4y agoThat's part of it for sure but even on a still scene 35mm projectors still had a small bit of movement because it was mechanical and alignments are never perfect. I know in the cinema I worked in even sat in the screen you could still hear the hum of the machines if you knew what to listen for. To me it was all part of the cinema experience. Digital has improved compared to the early generations yes. But if you gave me the option I'd watch 35mm over digital any day Edited to correct typo
- chrisseaton 4y agoWhy do you want a wobbly picture and extra background noise? Those sound like negatives.
- hedgehog_irl 4y agoThings don't always have to be perfect. It's a personal preference. While I appreciate the helpful suggestion the first part won't really work and but the second part is fair playing the sound at a low level could help with the experience. What I mean is this is my memory of the cinema and what I enjoyed. Digital achieves "Perfection" but in a way which is lifeless for film. From the point of view of a projectionist every machine had it's own quirks when running a film. I used to run 7 machines in one cinema and once you got to know the tone of the place you would often hear something starting to go wrong before seeing it. A click that shouldn't be there or a platter sounding rough as you laced a film up. The work was interesting in ways that digital never will be. I also prefer some things in electronics to be analogue rather than digital. And no matter the bit rate always remember digital is only ever a close approximation of that colour or that shape it's never perfect. However it may get to a point where the eye can't see the difference and the ear can't hear the difference but it's still only an approximation. I get it I like old tech if that's a crime shoot me. Edited to clarify and add more context
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- actionfromafar 4y agoIt looks better. The noise is just nostalgic for me, it doesn't enhance inherently IMHO.
- periphrasis 4y agoAs an example, I recently saw Full Metal Jacket on 35mm. The last Boot Camp scene, the one in the bathroom, while unsettling in any context becomes positively haunting in 35mm. The lower light conditions introduce artifacting even in digital, but the slightly wobbly frame motion and the scratches and dust marks exaggerate that artifacting further. The resulting image is almost expressionistic, as though reality has become so horrifying our very perception of it is starting to breakdown. The same sort of effect recurs with the sniper at the end of the film. In between, the rougher, less pristine frames create a sense of grittiness that amplifies the mood of the film. In short, I thought seeing Full Metal Jacket on 35mm was a fully superior experience over watching it on digital (although I’ve only seen digital presentations of it at home and not in a theater).
- JKCalhoun 4y agoMmmm... "Two-Lane Blacktop" ending.
- jackcosgrove 4y agoWas melting the film that common? I was an usher and witnessed it once at the end of the credits. I radioed into box, as we called it, that the film was melting on screen. Next thing I hear feet pounding from the projection room and the light shone on the screen became dimmer and the burnt corona of the film disappeared from view.
- ghaff 4y agoEspecially once everything was spliced onto one big reel, no not common. But when you were switching from one projector to the other every 15 minutes, there were more things to mess up and it could happen from time to time. More common was just a botched reel change of some sort in which the old reel ran out and the timing to switch to the new one was off for some reason or there was just a problem with the film threading.
- hedgehog_irl 4y agoOnly time I had it happen in 7 years was when due to failing bulbs not striking so easy I had to strike em manually and left the manual switch in the on position. Well there was a power brown out and that killed the basic automation on the machines that would close a dowser when the film stopped. So the film stopped but the dowser stayed open and the bulb burned through. And for good measure that exact same thing happened on 2 machines at the same time. I believe I was heard in a screen as I responded to the situation with something like "For F*k sake" while restarting the other screens before having to splice the 2 burned films. To clarify these machines were platter fed so no changing reels. The dowser was used to light the bulb while the leader was still running through but not to be on-screen. Edited for typo and to add more details
- ghaff 4y agoOn the projectors I used I think doing the dowser thing was manual although the switchover was somewhat automated otherwise.
- tomcam 4y ago
- mmastrac 4y agoThat's been bugging me since the start of the digital era. Slightly defocusing the projector should work, shouldn't it? Or perhaps someone could create some advanced optics to spread pixels out.
- actionfromafar 4y agoJVC has something which shakes the image slightly.
- AlbertCory 4y ago"screen door effect"? I don't know that one.
- detaro 4y agoThat you can see the gaps between the pixels as a dark grid, as if you were looking through a fine mesh
- xani_ 4y agoIt's just "nostalgia glasses"; only thing that is "alive" is the media being worse and worse after each use.
- hedgehog_irl 4y agoSome of it is nostalgia sure you say film degrades after every run But to counter that argument every time a sound or image is made digital it degrades due to quantisation noise that is added. High bit rates help but it's just an artifact of the digital world
- kevin_thibedeau 4y agoQuantization noise can be dithered below the threshold of perceptibility.
- hedgehog_irl 4y agoTrue and agree and but digital is still only ever a close approximation. The way the tech works is all it ever can be. It gets to the point where you can't notice but it's still a very good approximation
- dsr_ 4y agoI will accept this only if you agree that analog is also only ever a close approximation. The Nyquist limit is real and exists in the analog domain just as much as it does in the digital domain.
- AlbertCory 4y agoOn Oct. 24 I'll be publishing my Substack article about the Google Cinema Club. It is still going even with the pandemic, but when I did it, up to July 2017, it was in-person with a DVD in a big conference room on the Mountain View campus. I still had a "projectionist." Getting the video and sound right in a room that was built for meetings and not for movies was an art in itself, and I hope I can get Craig to write about how he did it. But yeah: not the same as real 35mm.
- mmastrac 4y agoDid the MPAA rake you guys over the coals for licensing fees given Google's size?
- AlbertCory 4y agoWatch for the post and you'll find out! albertcory50.substack.com to subscribe (free).
- mmastrac 4y agoI don't really do substacks, but I'll take that as a yes, hah.
- AlbertCory 4y agoThe thing's already written, and licensing is a major topic, so I don't want to spill it all now.
- ljf 4y agoHey, just ended up reading some of your posts there - really enjoyed them, thanks for sharing.
- AlbertCory 4y agoYou're welcome, and thanks! The last one ("My Summer of Nixon and Watergate") got flagged when it was still New, purely because of its title! Some people are SO easily triggered. I called it "Nixon, the Trump of 50 years ago" which is pretty accurate, if you know your history. Everyone hated him and he was brought down by his own hubris and evil. But no! The mere title was enough.
- ars 4y agoI did that job for a little while - they warned me before I started that once you learn to see cue marks (little black dots in the upper right) you'll never not be able to see them. And they were right. But it was lots of fun yelling out "cue" during random TV shows, or with platter projectors, when there really shouldn't even be a cue mark :)
- hedgehog_irl 4y agoSimilar to that, I used to find it hard to watch a movie in a different cinema where the projectionist didn't pay too much attention to detail when framing. Sure most of the picture was on screen but for like 30second more attention it could be great on screen
- schlauerfox 4y agoThe cigar burns were useful when we would still reel switch at Campus Cinema in the early 2000s on second run movies. We could fit only 3 reels on a medium reel, no platter. Got that job because I worked for Edwards Cinemas on 35 and IMAX. It was fun, but I watched it die as an industry and a trade sadly. Got to listen to lots of memories of the old timers.
- tomcam 4y agoJim Edwards used to show up at one of my local theaters in a sort of usher suit and I loved asking him questions. He was old-school taciturn. They actually had good, fresh popcorn and many very good theaters before they were acquired.
- sonofhans 4y agoOh, I’ve always thought this would be a great job. I agree with other posters about 35mm films. It’s very like my preference for vinyl — there are aesthetic aspects of the experience beyond perfect reproduction of the source material. And maybe similar to liking mechanical watches — there’s something attractive to me about mechanical complexity, even again at the cost of precision. Cinema 21 in Portland had a union projectionist for many years. Per union rules, he projected his license during the opening reel. One day it stopped, and I never got the story why. https://www.cinema21.com/ https://www.cinema21.com/ The Hollywood in PDX also shows a lot of 35mm films. They’re a non-profit, and some years ago they had a funding campaign to buy a new 70mm print of the 2001 re-release. Seeing that on the big screen was unreal. https://hollywoodtheatre.org/ https://hollywoodtheatre.org/
- jamal-kumar 4y agoMaybe not for the cinemas as much anymore but people who do projection mapped art installations are having quite a great time these days. It's pretty specialized knowledge on how to project for stuff like the inside of domes.
- CharlesW 4y agoHey, this is a thing I did at a movie theater in Le Mars, Iowa, population 10K or so. I loved coming in after school to assemble the film on the large reels used for the projectors from the small reels used for shipping. It meant I was the first person to touch new releases, which was a cool feeling for a high schooler who loved movies but was a million miles from Hollywood. Part of that process was to etch cue marks into the film at the end of reel 1 so that projectionists would know when to fire up and then switch to projector 2. Sometimes I kept a few frames from the head or tail as a secret memento of films I loved. The movie theater projectors used giant xenon lamps. When they died and had to be changed, one had to be very careful because they exploded real good. There was also a drive-in theater, powered by an absolute beast of a carbon arc projector. They were rare enough at the time that almost nobody knew how to run and maintain them — I was trained by a transient Hell's Angel who enjoyed sharing his erotic poetry. The arc itself was so improbably bright that it was like like looking into the soul of a god.
- hedgehog_irl 4y agoMan that's cool I never worked on the carbon arc machines. I remember having a Xenon lamp weld itself into the holder which was also the cathode connection. All because someone didn't tighten a grub screw which ment that the gap between the thread on the screw in end welded themselves to the nut mount the lamp screwed into. Had to remove the mount just to break the lamp in a dodgy way just to be able to force the threaded end out.
- CharlesW 4y ago> Had to remove the mount just to break the lamp in a dodgy way just to be able to force the threaded end out. Ooof, I'm flinching just thinking about it.
- tomcam 4y agoWhat vivid and well-written slice of life. Thank you. > I was trained by a transient Hell's Angel who enjoyed sharing his erotic poetry. I almost never get to enjoy erotic poetry from Hell's Angels
- 4y ago
- throwyawayyyy 4y agoI went to a screening of Vertigo in 70mm at the Castro recently. Its projectionist came out of retirement specially for the event (which was marvellous!).
- kjellsbells 4y agoThat is the most gloriously Old San Francisco thing I've read in months. It must have been an epic experience to watch Scotty and Madeleine roam over the city, in the city, with Bernard Hermann's score. Magnificent.
- Uhhrrr 4y agoI got to see it at the Castro a few years ago. There was a fair amount of chuckling at: "It's a Mission number." "That's Skid Row, isn't it?"
- jtmetcalfe 4y agoIf you are a fan of The Castro please consider supporting the campaign to maintain it's historic seating: https://www.savethecastrotheatre.org/ https://www.savethecastrotheatre.org/
- spoonjim 4y agoI have an enduring resentment of projectionists because a projectionist deflowered my high school crush on the floor of the projection booth while I was in the theater, and everyone knew it was happening and was kind of giving me "sorry bud" looks.
- tomcam 4y agoThat's either a quote from some TV show I don't recognize or a living nightmare. If the latter... sorry, bruh.
- shadowgovt 4y agoI had the privilege of running projection for a couple summers at a local theater where I grew up. It really is the best job as long as you don't mind the isolation and the hurry-up-and-wait parts of it. What I enjoyed most was the machines themselves. Far from the stereotypical "lens, light, and two vertical reels" image of a projector from the early era of Hollywood, a modern projector is (was, since I'm not a couple decades out of date) a fascinating piece of engineering. Most interesting to me is that the film reels (now massive horizontally-oriented platters, because you need a lot of space to fit one entire Peter Jackson movie) and projector communicate with each other entirely through film tension. On one side is a tension switch that cuts a motor in or out if the film has slack, and on the other side is a W-shuttle: the film is fed back-and-forth between a static and a travelling pulley rack in a W-pattern, and as it grows taut it pulls the travelling rack towards the static rack, which indicates to the payout engine that it has to let out film faster. The end of the film causes the shuttle to drop and a loss of tension on the pickup, which shuts the reels off. Flip a couple switches to reverse directions, re-thread, and show again. It was even possible to cross-thread one film through multiple projectors to show multiple rooms from one stock, though I never had to do that. Brilliant machines that were clearly the product of a lot of fast "better mousetrap" evolution in an ecosystem of both high competition and a lot of surplus capital.
- teeray 4y ago> It was even possible to cross-thread one film through multiple projectors to show multiple rooms from one stock, though I never had to do that. omg, I always just assumed those mega blockbusters with parallel showings were always just two reels and two projectors. That’s brilliant.
- acedio 4y agoI was a projectionist at a local 14-plex for a couple of years back in college. It was a really excellent job for getting homework done while the machines buzzed in the background. I miss the simplicity and meditative quality of threading the machines and keeping everything on schedule, and often find myself wishing I could retreat to a job like that again. The occasional brain wrap (or worse, a thrown film) always kept us on our toes, but otherwise it was generally low stress and gave me plenty of time to think about whatever hobby I was into at the time :)
- xiaodai 4y agoThe Emperor of China job no longer exists. I heard it was pretty good
- aurizon 4y agoWe had an old theater called The Crown, and Gerrard and Broadview in Toronto. In 1948 I went to the Saturday Matinee = 2 republic serials, a main feature and 'The Eyes and Ears of the World' = Pathe News every week. The Crown is long gone = Vietnamese market now. It was built in the silent era when they had nitro cellulose film. You have to nitrate cellulose highly, dissolve in acetone and create the film via evaporation and light heating. Nitro cellulose = gun cotton = a high explosive. So the projector had a long light path to reduce the danger of film combustion and they also built the projection rooms with steel walls with asbestos lining. Back in the teens/twenties there were a number of projection room fires and many deaths - the film did not explode, but once initiated decomposed at a high rate with great heat and dense high volume black smoke. Film changed to safe film in the 20's, but the laws mandate the old vaults due to the large number of prints done the old way. There were a number of archive fires back then. Some rabbit holery for you... https://www.google.com/search?q=projection+room+fire+nitro+cellulose&rlz=1C1CHBF_enCA924CA924&oq=projection+room+fire+nitro+cellulose&aqs=chrome..69i57.15886j0j15&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 https://www.google.com/search?q=projection+room+fire+nitro+c...
- js2 4y agoA terrific companion piece I found trying to locate an explanation of "brain wrap": http://www.hypocritereader.com/11/brain-wrap http://www.hypocritereader.com/11/brain-wrap The whole piece is worth your time to read, but here's the essence of brain wrap: > Matt also shows me how to work the platter system. Forget everything about film being stored in upright reels, the classic two-humped silhouette of the old-school projector. In the modern multiplex, film is stored off to the side of the projector on horizontal platters. This saves theaters time by eliminating the hassle of rewinding. A basic reel-to-reel system can only move film from the outside of one reel to the inside of another, reversing its order in the process. In a platter system, film is pulled up from the inside of one platter, run through the projector, and collected on the inside of another platter, ready to be shown again. Of course, every solution carries along its own problems, and the problem with spooling film from the inside can be best illustrated by wrapping a string around your finger, then yanking on it. Instead of unwrapping neatly, the coils of string just get pulled tighter around the center. Similarly, a projector’s endless hunger for film can pull the reel into thousands of tight, black ringlets. If these twists ever enter the projector, you have a gigantic mess on your hands. > The machine responsible for preventing this disaster is called the brain, a squat cylinder that sits at the center of the sending platter. Film moves from the inside of the reel, through the brain, and out to the projector. When the brain’s arm is up, the projector pulls film as normal, but now the film coils around the brain instead of around itself. When the tension from this wrap builds up, it pulls the brain-arm down, telling the platter to rotate in reverse and unwrap the excess film. The brain can malfunction in many ways, but the most common is called a “brain wrap.” This happens when the brain fails to sense the tension building up around it and allows the film to wrap forever. Friction builds up and the rate of film going to the projector slows, or tries to slow. Projectors must take in film at a rate of 24 frames per second, and they will bring the entire booth crashing down around them before accepting anything slower. The film may slow down, but the sprockets keep their own time, and their teeth will shred any film that resists. Usually, the film just breaks, but sometimes, Matt tells me, the friction can build up so high that it burns instead.
- wcerfgba 4y agoGreat to see Pipe Wrench mag on here, their last two issues about fat liberation and non-binary gender identity were great!
- lemursage 4y agoMy grandma and her friends were projectionists in a small town cinema. It really did have a climate of the early scenes from Cinema Paradiso (although it wasn't that long time ago). I snuck into the balcony gallery for every movie I wanted to see. Though, I distinctly remember I came more for the atmosphere rather than the movies themselves. The cinema building was in a church-adjacent old theatre, over 250 years old. Before or after the film, I'd often hang out in the ticket booth, which was the cosiest place on Earth I know till today. Tiny, wooden enclosure lit with, I believe, sodium lamps. And of course, I had access to all the merchandise, particularly the posters. There were couple of old ones, and I feel like they don't really make them so artsy nowadays, so a bit of that poster magic eloped for me over time.
- eternityforest 4y agoWhat a great read and amazing perspective! I was born in '94, and by the time I was old enough to really appreciate the arts, analog media was already something you used because it was cheap or because digital hadn't quite caught up yet. And I never did much of anything creative myself until well into the digital era. There was definitely still a real mystique to things that were more than ones and zeros, but it's not the same as growing up or having strong early experiences close to analog. So I didn't really form much of an attachment to physical media. It's just a way to make it so faraway people can see your performance, and digital was the cool new thing that does it with less resources.. But I wasn't quite expecting the art itself to change so much. These days almost all music is very heavy on effects and synthesized sounds. I wasn't expecting CG to replace practical effects to that degree. Seeing CGI become more common than Jurassic Part style animatronics, and Autotune become it's own style, was my death of film moment. There might really be something to be said for the idea that the medium is the message. Maybe film really was an important part of filmmaking after all, and not just "The thing people had to use because they didn't have digital yet". I don't see any reason why so much should change on an emotional and creative level just because the tech changes, and I don't actually want analog to take over again... but it does seem like digital tech can change anything it touches. Maybe one day digital will seem like a normal part of life, but for now, adding tech sometimes does change the feel. It almost makes me sad I never experienced analog film directly, aside from a week long class(Mostly digital). But I'm also very glad to live in the digital era, where I can share a picture on Facebook and people can see it without burdening their lives with another object. Where we don't have to mine silver for every frame. Where only pros need a camera that doesn't fit in a pocket, and sometimes not even pros do.
- rurban 4y agoGreat to see this horrible job finally gone for good. What a horror it was to mess with celluloid, the constant fight of sprockets vs teeth, the horrible sound systems, and cinema people messing with film rolls. Thanksfully I never had to mess with it since 1985 or so, but it still gives me shrills. When I became projectionist again in the last decade it was all digital, I could produce my own trailers and subtitles, all was much better.
- hedgehog_irl 4y agoInterlocking 16 projectors https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZdPKGNCw7lM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZdPKGNCw7lM
- jackvalentine 4y agoI love this, I simply love this. Most we ever did was 4.
- jackvalentine 4y agoThis story could have been written by me, it mirrors my experience in projection almost identically. I loved that job, I still do.