Adventures in Projectioneering (part one)

One of the many jobs the Cap'n worked was in a movie theatre. Technically, I worked three jobs inside of the Park Place 16: that of concession salesman, usher, and projectionist. The first two are interesting in their own right, to be sure, but the job of projectionist brought me into a relationship with film that's unlike any you'll find in front of a tv screen.

It's very easy to forget that movies - despite their inherent artificiality - are tangible things. In order to "run" a movie, you first need to take the film delivered to your multiplex/theatre/drive-in and splice it together. They come in separate reels, so a projectionist needs to know the best way to cut one end of a reel with the other so that you, the audience, doesn't notice. If we've done our job wrong, there will be a black frame or, worse, a clear frame. For a good example of the "clear" frame phenomena, watch the beginning of Grindhouse, which does it intentionally to remind you "this is just a movie."

But I don't want to bore you with the details of getting to know a movie frame by frame or how you feed the film through the projector. That's interesting on some technical level, yes, but most of you already know how it works anecdotally or you've done it yourself. It does create a strangely personal relationship with the films, and I think that's what I want to focus on. For this, the first part, let's talk about movies that just won't behave.

Like a stubborn child, a movie can decide not to do what it's supposed to, either jumping frame or coming to a halt and making the audience angry. The worst, especially if you're running sixteen screens by yourself, though, are the films that refuse to run on time.

Now, I hear you saying, this can't be possible. A movie has an alloted running time and there's only enough film to cover that time. I agree, and yet I had no less than five films that REFUSED to end when they were supposed to, even if I started them early. They were:

Bait
Space Cowboys
The Exorcist: The Version You've Never Seen
The Patriot
and Urban Legends: Final Cut

No matter what, I could count on each of those movies ending ten minutes later than they should have, even if I started them ten minutes early (it's a multiplex and to be honest how many people do you think came to the average 3 o'clock showing of Bait?) I'd have every other movie timed exactly so I knew when to start one, to thread another, and to stop another. But then I'd have that showing of Bait that just wouldn't end on time, so I'd spend valuable minutes watching Jaime Foxx in that stupid baseball stadium doing whatever it was he did.

I've seen the endings of Bait and Space Cowboys innumerable times without any sense of context. No idea whatsoever what's going on, but I need to be able to hurry it up and get things started over again for the next crowd. I did eventually see all of The Patriot and Urban Legends: Final Cut, although the "twist" in the latter was utterly ruined for me by that point. Of course, with that movie, it really didn't matter.

Still, it would have been nice if The Exorcist had maybe played nice during those late showings so that I wasn't alone in the dark while all the other projectors were silent. It can get creepy, even if you have a book to read. Speaking of which, that's another good tale to tell one day; I got a lot of reading done in between movies back then. I also had some late showings of movies with friends, including two that you'll never have to, and neither of them were God's Army. True story. Cranpire was there.

I'll save those for another day, as there are plenty of days and plenty of stories to come. Why I don't write about that job more boggles my mind, especially the Eyes Wide Shut stories. Or the number of times I saw the same part of The Phantom Menace over and over again. But they can wait for another day...