As an aside, I was so happy when I learned the “insider knowledge” about reel change marks in the movie. I started seeing them even on TV showings. And I could tell when the projectionist was slow, and noticed that there was always extra film after the marks of nothing happening, just in case.
Now that’s all gone! 
No waste of time–perhaps you missed the point of what I did: I could leave the building at 12AM with machines all threaded for the morning guy.
If I just turned off the bulb and left it running, it wouldn’t end until 12:30, so I couldn’t leave early.
Not sure what “cut and drop” is, but we did what I described just above your post: shut it off, unthread, pull the inch or so of already-shown film off of the center ring, coiled it up a bit, and plopped it back into the center of the original platter. It never fit neatly, but was good enough for the task.
It’s doing this but by cutting the film and then re-splicing it so you’re only touching the frames around the splice instead of getting fingerprints everywhere trying to re-roll the 25 feet of film between the two platters back onto the ring.
At least digital solved the problem of bad sync, where the frame is split on screen. I had that happen, and the debate is, do you suffer, but follow along and hope it gets better, or do you take the time to go out, find someone, and get them to fix it, and risk missing something important?
And I was going to theaters that would dim their bulbs during shows. “Why is it so dark there?” (In space, no one can see your screen.) I complained, wasting my time and theirs, because yes, they did not remain in business long.
eta: individual reel showings. I went to a college-showing of Robocop, and when they got to the part where Emil falls into the toxic waste and gets splattered by the truck, the projectionist rewound just that part and we all got to see it again. Everyone cheered.
I remember being a kid and sometimes the screen would get blurry and everyone would yell “focus” to get the projectionist to fix it.
In the multireel days you’d see a quick spot show up in the upper right corner which was the cue for a reel switch coming soon.
At least in my booth (and most) that would go unheard. The windows were soundproof, both to keep the clatter of the projector from invading the theater, and to keep the projectionist sane without having to hear the babble of 8 different films.
I could open the window, and often did so to check real sound level.
Out of frame? That’s an unpardonable sin! Go straight to the nearest usher and tell them.
It would often happen not because of laziness at startup (projectionists line up the frame before starting), but because someone made a bad splice in the heat of the moment.
Standard 35mm film is “4-perf” meaning four perforations per frame, so that means that when you splice a broken film, if you aren’t careful, you can splice it with a short frame. Then the film will get a third of the way through, hit your bad splice, and go out of frame. That’s no good.
This was in the 70s before multiplexes were common. When it happened the focus would quickly get fixed. Was the film getting completely blurred out even a thing in your days?
Not really. The Century projectors we used were tanks, and once focus was set, as long as you didn’t bump the focus knob, it was good for weeks at a time, though we would dial it in at startup just in case.
The one time I had a problem was when the knurled grub screw that held the Cinemascope lens in the turret was slightly loose, so with each showing as the turret rotated the lens in place the lens would work itself slightly further out of its holder. That got to the point where we hit the end of travel of the focus knob, then we had to dig in and figure out what was happening.
Reminds me: I was a someone’s house circa 1982 for a showing of their own 16mm print of 2001. Without an anamorphic lens! That was…interesting. Not good, but ..interesting. I would have left, but it was only the second time I’d seen the film (and the first time in color)
Yes. The one projection room I visited had both platters on a truck, one above the other. It was a 25 theater complex, H shaped with the lobby and snack bar in the cross bar and theaters in both legs. The H was duplicated upstairs and the whole was carpeted so pushing the trucks about wouldn’t rumble. There were several work stations where an incoming film would be spliced together and then broken apart when it was time to leave.
There were still two projectors per theater in case of breakdown. At least some of the adjacent theaters had a system of rollers overhead so the film could be carried to the other theater if they wanted to interlock – show the film in more theaters than they had prints. IIRC everything was automated so the start time could be set. The house lights dimmed and show started by itself.
I’m sure the industry has changed, but this was around 1986 or 1987.
I know things have changed, which is why I wondered about current practice.
I thought this was a pretty good overview of a typical modern cinema setup. From 2017, but I’d be surprised if things changed all that much.
Interesting. The platters I saw were horizontal and open at the top. The film was pulled from the center of the top platter, run through the projector, then wound onto the bottom platter. This meant the film layers were sliding past each other on the top platter, but merely wound onto the bottom platter.
For the next showing the platters would be switched, bottom to the top and vice versa, possibly after moving them to another theater’s projector.
But many theaters have gone to reserved seating only. In those setups, you can easily tell if no one bought a ticket to a particular showing. If some theater-hopper complains, so what? You know they don’t have a leg to stand on.
I worked at a movie theater for a while. But it was definitely not a standard one. I worked for the US Navy as an employee of the Department of Morale, Welfare, and Recreation (MWR) and we ran the movie theater for a naval base.
There was just one theater, and one film playing at a time. It was definitely using movie reels, because this was the mid-late 90s and digital video just wasn’t really a thing. Also, one of my jobs was being the guy who picked up and returned the massive metal cans that the reels were in. That absolutely sucked, as they were extremely heavy and the handles were skinny metal, like a thick gauge wire, and would hurt your hand after holding it for a while. Not fun at all.
I don’t recall us ever turning off a movie. We always ran them. But I also don’t think we ever had a time where we had literally zero people attending. There was always somebody. I’m sure selling $2 movie tickets helped, which even back then was insanely cheap (because again, we were providing entertainment to service members and their families on base, and weren’t trying to operate a profit). We also had extremely affordable foods in our concessions area, and we actually had people buy a ticket just to be able to enter to buy food, and then they’d leave. (I usually alternated between being the guy who sold tickets and working the food area depending on the night.)
At that particular location, I would imagine my manager would run the film regardless of who was there, because that was our job, and again this was a service we provided as government employees. So, just a different perspective from someone who worked in a different kind of movie theater (but a real movie theater).
Oh I see, you mean that the projector-turnoff policy would prevent moviegoers from theaterhopping only in the screening rooms where NOBODY bought a ticket for that particular showing. Indeed, it would. However, it wouldn’t do anything to prevent anybody with a valid ticket from theaterhopping in any of the other screening rooms which do contain ticketed viewers.
And there are going to be a lot more of those, right? I mean, movie theaters do try to arrange things so that they sell at least some tickets to at least the vast majority of all their showtimes. So completely empty screening rooms are not the norm.
As I said, ISTM that what really discourages theaterhopping (assuming that that’s even something that most theaters are seriously concerned about, which I doubt, as long as every patron has to buy at least one ticket to have access to any of the screening rooms at all) is the staggering of start times between screening rooms. Not the comparatively minor effect of turning off projection in the few screening rooms where no tickets at all were sold.
The one where I had my tour is specific seating post-covid; you select on a screen at the ticket window. Before, though it was open seating but they kept track. About fifteen minutes into the movie a manager would come in and count noses. I don’t know what they’d do if there were extra as I never saw it happen.
The main concern was someone buying a ticket, seeing their movie, then watching a second one. Much smaller was kids sneaking into an R-rated movie after buying a PG ticket.
The local theater has one long open corridor, visible from ticket station. It is embarrassingly obvious is you come out of one theater and go into another.
But it’s even more difficult than that. At the end of the feature, someone stands at the door and watches you all move out the corridor to the exit. Someone else is in the theatre already, cleaning up and making sure everyone leaves.
I could probably pay and slip into the wrong theatre – the door is closed when the feature starts, they would see if they were looking, but it would be very obvious if i tried that at the end of a screening.
Every year until the digital singularity the RISD Film department would have year-end shows for the Senior & Junior 16mm films. The seniors had to have an ‘answer print’ made by a commercial lab, and these were easy enough to show, although precious, as they were the only existing finished copy with an optical audio track. Juniors, due to scheduling and financial realities, had to turn in their ‘elements’ - two separate handspliced spools of picture and sprocketed magnetic tape - which were assembled into master reels of a half dozen short [10-20 minute] films each, and threaded up on a pair of ‘double-system’ playback machines electromagnetically interlocked with selsyn motors that I’d cobbled together from WGBH-Boston’s boneyard. I had to keep each pair of reels in sync, in focus, and framed by constant twiddling at the projector, and occasionally panic’d stop, resplice, guess sync, restart… Good times. At least the theater was always packed, and eager to shout out advice to yours truly, the hapless projectionist.