Could you please post a clip of this? I don’t recall a Corvette in any of the Star Wars movies. Thanks!
“Corvette” is a term for a very small fast warship. The massive Star Destroyer in the movie’s opening scene was pursuing a small rebel warship. That’s the ship Darth Vader ended up boarding in the next few scenes where we meet all the main characters. And we learn of the Force. Or at least its dark side.
The modern car is named after the ship type.
Thank you for clearing that up for me! I thought I was being whooshed, like with the alternate ending to Big.
I kept seeing this in my head…
Luke spent some time with his Tatooine girlfriend Annie on a Summer Corellian Corvette. How could you have missed it?
The ship we see the rebels in at the beginning of Star Wars is a Corellian Corvette model CR90 called Tantive IV. Star Wars was a big deal for me when I was a kid.
I remember that movie. I think I saw that one at the drive-in.
Side note - Annie Potts still looks pretty good for her age.
The scene in Galaxy Quest where they switch from a compact format to the largest screen format possible when Taggarr first sees the Thermia in space.A documentary said that theaters had to be told to keep the curtains fully open so the image wouldn’t be projected on them when the switch occurred. According to IMDb the director thought that it was a mistake to switch format but I don’t see why.
I don’t recall noticing that.
Several movies opened in small format and switched to larger. The Todd-AO widescreen version of Around the World in Eighty Days did this, to pretty dramatic effect (going from silent movie proportions to full Todd AO is a BIG switch. And it takes time). In the 1979 Superman they start out with old-time ratio when it opens with the kid reading the comic book on a rug in his living room, but when the camera pans in to the panel with globe atop the Daily Planet building, which turns into a shot of an ostensibly “real” Daily Planet building, to pan up to the sky and the stars, the screen widens significantly.
That is insane! Thanks for searching it out and posting.
I had forgotten the term used for synchronizing projectors: Interlock.
Let me work through this…I’ll put links to timestamps in the video.
First and foremost, if it isn’t obvious from the sketchiness of the setup, this is a “let’s see if we can do this” kind of thing–a one-off. Nobody would ever operate this way. Not only is it super complex and sketchy, but it takes 20 minutes for film to get from one end to the other, and 45 minutes to set up.
One tiny glitch would have caused pandemonium.
Right at the beginning of the video the guy mentions that their projectors aren’t actually connected with the necessary interlock logic. This is key, and proof nobody would ever do it this way.
The motors are very accurate–likely synchronous motors that turn in lockstep with the AC frequency–but I’m not sure if that’s enough for them to all turn the precise same number of turns over a 2H film.
More important, starting a movie involves many different steps–motor starts, opaque dowser shutter closes ,xenon lamp strikes, bulb is verified to be on, motor speed checked to verify up to speed, house lights dim to half power, and so on. If you are running 2 projectors on interlock, you really want the equivalent of two guys standing there saying “One…two…three…GO!” and pressing buttons simultaneously. That is what the interlock bus does.
They achieved their simultaneous startup relying solely on the individual start timers. Our own start timers were electromechanical, so they had an accuracy of about 30 seconds…clearly he has digital timers. That wouldn’t have mattered for my booth since we had real interlock circuitry.
As an aside, I imagine “modern” projection automation is all digital, but in my day it was done with electromechanical relay logic, with a clockwork-driven electrical equivalent of a cam that would turn and trip various switches at different parts of its cycle, kind of like those old heavy duty timers you might use for a pool filter pump that had a dial with little nubs you could move to enable or disable power at certain points during the day.
He mentions cues and shows a theater when one of the cues is detected.
We put metal cue tape in a few places. In our booth, we would put two “cross cues” that were silver tape that went side-to-side across the frame: one at the end of the leader and one after the trailers.
At the end of the film we added an “outboard cue,” a piece of cue tape that went along the sprockets on one edge.
These cues were detected by wires attached to a couple of flanged skateboard bearings at the bottom of the projector, in the same area as the failsafe mechanism.
When the first cross cue passed through, the house lights would dim half way, the dowser would open, and the sound would come on. This is how the trailers are shown. They were all provided in “flat” (i.e. not anamorphic / Cinemascope), so the lens turret automatically selected the “flat” lens.
In the video, the guy discusses the first cue going through projector 8, triggering lights and curtains (we didn’t have the main curtains like he does).
He mentions here how they couldn’t have all of the xenon bulbs start at once because that would have damaged the dowsers…since it would take 20 minutes for the last projector to open, all of that heat hitting the dowser would have probably distorted it and made it jam, at best. The cue tapes are important here since they trigger the dowser opening and letting light through the film.
Once the trailers all passed, the second cross cue would short the sensors, causing the film automation to fully lower the house lights, adjust the position of the side curtains if needed, and rotate the lens turret to swing the anamorphic Cinemascope lens in place.
Just before the credits the “outboard” cue would short the sensors. This would trigger the house lights going up to half-power.
Eventually the tail of the film would go through the projector and the failsafe levers would drop, shutting off the projector. During the time after the outboard cue the film-break alarm was disabled, since it was expected that this was the end of the film. This outboard cue would wear out after a week or so, and then suddenly the alarm would go off when the film ended normally–it never detected the “credits” cue, therefore thought the film was broken. We would then replace that outbound cue tape.
Back to the video:
The guy discusses the kind of leader they were using and the risks involved. This was a very real risk: some leader stock was so sturdy that if there were to be a jam anywhere the projector would likely tip itself over as it pulled on the leader.
With regular film, any jam would cause the film to break and everything would shut down safely.
Here is a good view of the status panels I mentioned in an earlier post. We had Century projectors, so our panel was different, but the layout is similar. That panel would be replicated in the manager’s office and in the lobby, if not more places.
At the same place in the video we see a Christie platter being used as the source: the film is being pulled from the center, through the “brain”, which meters the platter speed as film is pulled. Normally the output of the projector would to through pulleys to one of the other two platters for takeup–in this wild setup the film is going half a mile away to a different platter.
Later on, he mentions that there are no accumulator rollers anywhere for this setup. Normally there would be two pulleys in the ceiling about 3 feet apart, with a swingarm attached to the bearing of one. The swingarm is about 3 feet long, dangles straight down, and has a pully at the other end. You thread the film over one pully, under the swingarm, then over the other pully. This gives you a bit of correctly tensioned slack between the projectors.
They used what we called “Mutts” all over the place to redirect the film. They call them “make up tables” which explains why we called them MUTs…I never thought of that before.
In this section you can see the Make Up Tables (mutts). They are not intended to be used for this purpose. Their purpose is to load or unload film from a Christie platter.
Finally, at the end of the line, we can see a good view of a Christie platter taking up the film after projection.
This is an absurdly long post, so it probably is missing some stuff and has disjoint sections, but I tried to cover the high points.
That is an insane process! I think the risk of wrecking the film would be quite high. In a much lower tech effort I saw a guy change reels on a single projector while the movie was running at a drive-in theater in the 70s. He only had one working projector left so while the current reel was running he’d unwind the rest of the it onto the floor, mount the next reel, pull out the leader to find the start, then when the dots showed up on the screen to mark when he was supposed to switch projectors he’d pop the lens assembly open, slap the new film in right on top of the old one then pop the lens shut again, both films running through together until the last of the original ran out on it’s own while the new spewed film out that he’d start winding onto a take up reel, then when the last of the first reel wound up on the take up reel he’d switch to the new one. All this while standing on a chair because he’s lost his legs at the knees in Korea, and drunk too as he always was.
That’s a bold move: there are 4 sprockets per frame, thus 4 different positions when the shutter opens, of which 3 will cause the frame line to appear somewhere on the screen. He must have done some ninja move to make sure he matched the frame as well.
He was good at it. I’m sure he didn’t get perfectly every time, but it was pretty damn impressive. Now that you mention I don’t remember if he was lining up the frames on the two reels together as the original was running out. It was over 50 years ago and I knew nothing about movie projectors at the time. I don’t know if could have let the overlaid film wind through without opening the lens assembly, but he did quickly pop it open and shut, so the screen would blink. Maybe that’s when he did a final alignment for the frame.
My projector (a Century SA head) has a big FRAME knob, which makes me think it would be easy to get things right quickly.
Nope.
That knob will quickly eat up your top loop and/or your bottom loop. It’s meant for fine tuning, not fixing completely botched framing with a line in the middle of the screen.
ETA: The crazy thing is, it has been over 30 years since I worked in film projection and I instantly could imagine the feel of the framing knob in my hand as I leaned over to peer out at the screen and make those fine adjustments.
Just to clarify: it’s intended for < 1 full sprocket of error.
You never see those misalignments anymore. Sometimes you could see the frame line on the screen until the projectionist got back from whatever. I don’t know what a projectionist does at all now. I knew someone in the 80s working at theaters that were rapidly upgrading the projection systems. He thought his job was becoming mostly obsolete, probably is largely so now.
Good to know if I ever find myself in a booth with someone screaming “Make it work!” 
Thought the frame knob would fix being off +/- two perfs as it shifts the lower loop up and down about an inch.
My projector is actually a bar - I gutted a Xetron console with a Strong automation controller that was otherwise destined for scrap after the theater went digital.
Not much these days, if they even still exist. Last time I was in a booth, about all there was to do was slot hard drives into the server. Now it’s more likely that the movies are downloaded via broadband or satellite, and the theater gets a license key that allows them to exhibit the movie x times, or from this to that specific date, and on x screens. Set it all up from the manager’s office.
The whole run of pre-show ads and trailers is either put together in-house, or it comes bolted onto the main title. The theater schedules the shows and it’s all hands-off after that unless a projector lamp blows, and with the advent of laser projectors, even that’s gone so it could be possible to go through a day at the multiplex with nobody in the both at all.
There was a good example I saw tonight. War Games was on TV. The final scene when Joshua starts playing all the war scenarios faster and faster the music gets louder and louder. I remember in the theater the brightly flashing lights and the crescendo of music pushed the tension higher until silence and comparative darkness. On tv it works but the tension is greatly diminished.
I always remember those final scenes because they talked to that young airman (with the squeaky voice) at Presque Isle AFB, and my sister and BiL lived in Presque Isle for a while. My niece and nephew were born there.