Movie moments that are only effective in the theater

Cafe Society
61

That particular night wasn’t an issue since we were showing Batman in our two largest theaters anyway.

[tangent]
For those who aren’t familiar with film platters, here’s a video of a Christie platter system, the ones I am familiar with. Notice how the film is pulled from the center of one platter through a complicated thing in the middle (called the “brain”) and the film is wrapped around an aqua-colored 12 inch wide center ring on the other platter (barely visible). This is a nifty system because when the film starts, the tail is on the outside of the platter, and when the film ends the tail is on the outside of the new platter, with no rewinding necessary.

Moving a film from one platter to another wasn’t a big deal, there were a few ways to accomplish it.

When I was being trained, the other projectionist once asked me to help him swap the entire Christie platter: it could be picked up off of its bearings and carried to another projector, film and all, and then placed on the awaiting spindle (having previously removed the platter from that one). They weren’t really intended to be moved this way, but in a pinch two guys could do it rather quickly. Just don’t set it on the carpet like we did–the grease will stain the carpet.

The proper way to move a print was to place a platter clamp or two on the print to keep the coils from coming apart while you pick it up and move it to another machine.

I never liked those clamps because not only were they fussy to work with, they scratched the platter when you tried to shove them under the print.

I would move the movies without clamps at all. In the video above you can see that the film is wrapped very tightly around the green center ring, so it was enough to tape the loose end in place, pop the green center ring up enough so its two nylon alignment pins would clear the platter, then slide the pancake of film off the edge of the platter while simultaneously flipping it vertical. For a short film (e.g. 90 minutes) I could then carry it under my arm like a tire to the target projector and reverse the process.

One fateful Sunday morning I took my wife in before hours to watch Backdraft. It wasn’t in our largest theater, so I went to do my clamp-free flip the film up trick in order to move it over to the theater with the best audio. This film was substantially longer–more than 2 hours–so it was heaver and larger. As I approached the new platter, I watched in absolute horror as the center ring dropped out and two miles of film simply collapsed in loose coils all over the floor. The words that I spoke have been lost to the mists of time.

My wife was smart and she simply backed away and took a seat on the couch without saying a word.

It took me almost all of the time we would have been watching the film to repair that mess. I had to break the film in dozens of places in order to separate sections that had remained more or less intact, then I unraveled the loops up and down the fifty or so yards length of the booth (common practice), taking care to take loops off alternating sides so as to not introduce twists. I then used a motor drive reel hub at the work bench to reassemble the mess onto two giant make-up reels. I then went over to the correct machine and assembled the two halves just like I was building the new films on a Friday morning.

We ran the film cleaner on that print for the next few runs to clean off the dust from my episode. I can guarantee that nobody ever noticed the few dozen splices I had to add–our splicing tools were quite good and since I used the splicer’s guillotine to make the break, we didn’t even lose any frames.
[double-tangent]
One of the more interesting things we did with platters was show films in multiple theaters. There were two electrical busses along the wall that projectors could be synchronized to via a “sync” switch. If two projectors were synced to bus A then their motors would run in perfect synchronization. By doing this, we could thread the film from the platter on Projector #1 through the projector, then up through a bit of a Rube Goldberg contraption of pulleys to carry it to Projector #2, then eventually it would be taken up by the platter system next to Projector #2.
That’s why back in the day you might see “Die Hard” showing in two theaters as you walked down the corridor, and you might see a scene in the first theater appearing in the second after a 30 second delay.

We could do more than two. The most I did was 3, for Ghostbusters II. That sucked because the pulleys weren’t set up right for it so we had to move one of the pulleys for each showing. You would get it all set up, press the Start button, and pray that all three lamps would light (if one didn’t the whole mess would shut down).

The most I heard about that was done before I got there was Fatal Attraction: they ran that in five theaters, using the jankiest of setups to get the film to go around the corner. I can only imagine the sweat dripping off the brow of the guy as he nervously pressed the Start button after triple and quadruple-checking everything.
[/double-tangent]
[/tangent]

62

A movie moment that is only effective in the theater.

63

The near-entirety of Rocky Horror Picture Show.

64

:laughing:

(apologies for the super long post…it’s not often that I have an opportunity to geek out about old-school film projection)

65

Speaking of film projection, in those days of actual film use, was someone in every projection booth for the length of the movie or did you leave once the reel started? Because I can’t imagine that anyone bothers staffing the projection rooms now that it’s all digital and automated.

And yet, occasionally there is an issue with sound or the picture, and it means someone has to leave the theater and walk all the way to the lobby to report the issue.

66

Don’t apologize. I wish I’d had a job that cool in my younger days.

I would swear I’ve seen a youtube video of a theater that set up a bunch of temporary pulleys in the hallways and had one film reel running through the whole building. Can’t find it now, though.

67

[continuing tangent]

I was one guy running nine theaters.

I could thread them all up as needed and use built-in glorified kitchen timers to start them in my absence (i.e. dial in “33 minutes” on the analog dial and it will start 33 minutes later)–I preferred starting them by hand since there were things that could go wrong.

There were three projection alarm panels: one in the booth, one in the manager’s office, and one in the main lobby. Each panel had 9 columns of LED lights (one for each projector), indicating if the house lights were on, if the projector was running, and if the projector was in a failed state.

At the bottom of each Century projector, where the film exits, there were two “failsafe” levers, about 2" long each, that had small roller bearings like those used for skateboard wheels. These levers would swing up to the horizontal position, and the roller bearings would rest gently on the edges of the film as it went by. If either lever dropped, due to a film break, it would trip a limit switch that would shut down the entire projector and set off the alarm.
The other thing that would trigger the alarm was if the lamp failed (a spectacular event indeed) or if the lamp did not ignite when I had the projector set to start on the timer.

So I could be wherever I wanted in the theater, munching on free popcorn and nachos and chatting with the other employees, then if an alarm went off I could instantly see which projector it was, dash to the stairs, grab a splicer, find the break, splice it, rethread, and restart the projector. At my best I could repair a break and rethread and restart in less than a minute.

Such repairs are often challenging because each frame is 4 sprockets long, so there are 3 “wrong” places to cut a frame. With non-Cinemascope films the frames had obvious gaps between them, but Cinemascope used the entire thing, so in a night scene it might be darned near impossible to see a frame line–we would have to spool out enough film to find a good frame line and then feed it through a frame counter gadget to make sure we cut on a frame line.

Today I would expect the only real remaining projection emergency would be related to the lamp. If it doesn’t ignite then you have to go and sort that out (usually just turning it off and on), and if it explodes…

The worst thing that we worried out was a lamp explosion. The multi-thousand-watt xenon bulbs we used were under high pressure and had a thick quartz envelope that looked as thick as Coke bottle glass. These lamps would last about 1,500 hours, and if you didn’t keep on top of that, one day you would be just relaxing and then you would hear a loud explosion in the projection booth–it really did sound like a bomb went off. The lamp shards would trash the salad-bowl reflector.
Our lamp houses held the bulb vertical, so there was a 45-degree mirror that pointed the beam forwards. This mirror was made of super fancy glass that let IR heat through to a giant heat sink but reflected visible light. The top electrode of the bulb (with the heavy cable attached) would inevitably smash that very expensive mirror.

Changing one of those hand-grenades was an exercise for nerves of steel. We were supposed to have all kinds of protective gear, but all they gave us was a thin rubber apron and a face shield. Had one of them gone off while I was handling it, I am certain I would have spent hours at the hospital having shards of quartz tweezed out of my bleeding hands and arms.

Here’s an ephemeral link to a photo of what I am describing below…

When we built up the films we put the film onto two 1-hour reels at the workbench. We then dragged a device called a “mutt” over to the Christie platter to assist in loading the film onto the platter.
The mutt was a metal box-shaped table about 18" on a side with wheels on its two back legs, speed controls, a cable to connect to the platter system, and a spindle for the 1-hour reels.
Crucial to this story is the single pole that stood about a yard above the rest of the little table, with a pulley on it. That was where the film was threaded in order to load it onto the platter.

One can imagine, however, that in time of need you could wheel a couple of these “mutts” over somewhere and use their high pulleys as part of an ad-hoc Rube Goldberg contraption to route film where you needed it to go.

That’s precisely how we would handle the film path in our our more unconventional multi-theater sync setups.
[/continuing tangent]

68

Fun Fact - When Rocky Horror first started playing midnights at a theater near Washington University in St. Louis, university chancellor William Danforth would go to the showings with students and sometimes lead the audience in singing Time Warp.

That’s not gonna happen in your living room.

69

'Zactly. It’s cool to hear about all this “back-stage” stuff most of us never did experience, and now can’t because it’s become obsolete. Keep the stories of movie theater hijinks coming.

70

I once saw what I’m pretty sure was a giant reel of film. It was so big that it stood about six feet high when mounted vertically on a trolley for transportation. I was going to start a new thread to ask if it could have been a reel of film, because I might have mistaken it for one of those giant spools of cable that they use in construction. At the time, though, I was sure it was a reel of film (I had to stare at it for a while from the sidewalk across the street), and I’ve just found some online images of similar-looking reels of IMAX film.

So… IMAX films. I might have seen one many years ago. Seems like something that could never be the same on a TV, even on one of those big-screen monstrosities they sell nowadays.

Heh, my neighborhood is decidedly low-rent, and I have to snicker to myself when I see that friends and neighbors have giant TVs in their tiny apartments. The model I have now is smaller than I’d initially wanted because I downsized my choice just before the purchase on the basis of online recommendations about matching screen and room sizes.

71

I met a guy in the 80s who was in dental school. He did projection work to help pay his way through school, was in the union, and told me all about the job.

He was actually kinda bummed out that graduation was looming ahead and he’d have to step down from the job.

72

During the animation part of Trail of the Pink Panther there was some “hair” on the screen. It looked like there was a hair on the lens of the projector (which apparently happened occasionally in the theater). Then the hair became part of the sequence. That would only work if you were in a theater

.

73

There are plenty of such “projector gags” Tex Avery used it in his cartoons Aviation Vacation(1941) at Warners and Magical Maestro(1952) at MGM

Woody Allen’s What’s Up, Tiger Lily? has an apparent film break, followed by a silhouette on-screen romance briefly. Monty Pythoin and the Holy Grail famously ends with the film break. There are film breaks, burns, and jumps throuighout the two halves of Gindhouse (Planet Terror and Deathproof, released separately on video.

Warner Brothers cartoons had lots of silhouetted audience members appearing onscreen (“Is there a doctor in the house?” “I’m a doctor!” “Eh…what’s up, doc?” or Yosemite Sam pointing his gun at a departing audience member and scaring him back to his seat.)

None of these really makes any sense unless you’re watching in a theater. But I saw most of the cartoon ones on TV as a kid

74

Funny you should mention those together. We had an “arthouse” theater that played two classic films every night as a double feature (and Rocky Horror at midnight).

Coming right out of a small college in a small town, it was so exciting to see so many great films on the big screen (I saw a couple hundred in my first year).

One Saturday they started in the afternoon and showed Lawrence of Arabia followed immediately by Dr. Zhivago. With their old cracked wooden seats, they were right to call it their butt-buster.

(The Majestic, Madison, WI… here’s a newspaper ad from the late '70s)

75

If you have a vr headset there are apps such as BigscreenVR that make it seem as if you’re watching a movie on a giant theater screen.

76

16 screen interlock.

77

The beginning of that reminded me of the curtains they used to have at movie theaters, that would be drawn when the movie started.

78

At the end of Casanova’s Big Night, Bob Hope talks to the audience, showing two possible endings to the film. In one he’s a victorious hero, in the other he’s guillotined. Then Bob asks the audience to vote by holding up your Raisinettes for the first scene, and Jujubes for the other. He appears to be looking out and counting, then snarls, “What’s the matter? Doesn’t this theater sell Raisinettes?” End credits.

[I have probably misremembered the names of the actual snacks. ]

79

That is absolutely nuts. I cannot imagine how you would get 16 theaters full of people all at the same time wanting to watch the same thing. I also could not imagine handing out refunds for those 16 theaters full of people if anything at all goes wrong at any time during the 2-3 hours it’s playing.

80

I remember a midnight showing of “Monty Python’s Meaning of Life” back in my college days where they got the reels out of order. That ain’t going to happen at home!