If anyone here remembers me, you might recall that I was talking about getting a job as a projectionist around the time I stopped posting. Now, as a former projectionist, I may be able to help in this matter. Yes, the sound track is still on the film, can be digital or analog, and us usually assisted by a CD (DTS, THX, etc.) Modern film stock is made out of polyester and is much harder to break than celluloid or whatever else has been used in the past.
I doubt very much that the slide projector could have turned on durring the film. They are (at my theater, anyway) programmed to turn on whenever the film projector is not on. But if the slide projector was activated somehow, there is practically no way you would see anything, except in a darker part of the frame (not Hopkin’s forehead,) because film projectors use Xenon halogen short-arc lamps, which are pretty much the closest thing we have to reproducing sunlight. Little halogen light in a slide projector : Xenon light :: M-80 : Mark 5 Nuclear Warhead.
The only way this could happen is if (1)it is part of the master print. That is, it’s part of the movie, which is illegal and the Studio would never allow. (2) The projectionist or manager has 1-800-COLLECT stock and is trying to get rich. The ads that you see before a film are in a slide projector carousel, and are cut from regular 35mm film stock. I tore apart a slide to examine it one day, and it had sprocket holes and everything. Except they have 5 sprocket holes to a frame instead of 4, and the sprocket holes are on top and bottom of the advertisement, which would put the ad sideways on the screen if it were spliced into a film. And the sound track is set 20something frames early and late. That is, the sound head that reads the sound track cannot be in the same place as the projector lens, so if there is an extra splice, you will hear a very quick sound blip (or nothing at all) less than a second before or after you see that frame.
I don’t know how else this might happen. To know for sure, you would have to view the same print again and see if it’s there. If not, it’s some sort of fluke. I’m sure you won’t see it again.
Did you ever do Tyler Durden-esque stuff while being a projectionist?
They Live is one of my favorite movies. John Captenter made it either right before or right after Prince of Darkness, another one of my favorite movies (which didn’t age as well as They Live, but you have that cool Alice Cooper cameo, so it’s OK.) It’s great for about the first 40-50 minutes, then the wheels fall off the wagon, so to speak.
They Live plot synopsis:
A down-on-his-luck-but-honest drifter (“Rowdy” Roddie Piper, in his finest screen role) from the midwest ends up in a shantytown in L.A. located right next to a church-run soup kitchen. He gets a job in construction, where he makes a friend (a black guy whose name I can’t recall right now). Then the weirdness starts. A pirate television station is breaking into normal TV broadcasts. The announcer claims that aliens are among us, controlling our thoughts and actions through the television. The police (assisted by, you guessed it, unmarked black helicopters) raid the soup kitchen and haul most of the staff away. Rosedy Roddie gets curious, goes into the ruined church, and finds several boxes of ordinary-looking sunglasses hidden in the walls of the church. The police return and raise the shantytown where he has been living, dispersing the hundreds of homeless and sending Rowdy Roddie fleeing into the city. At some point, he puts on the sunglasses and is stunned to find that he can now see aliens roaming the streets disguised as human beings. All of the billboards now say things like “CONSUME” and “OBEY”. Apparently, the aliens are using mind control machines on the entire human population, and releasing CO2 into the atmosphere (using what? cars.) to heat up the planet so they can colonize it openly. Rowdie Roddy is chased by police, gets some guns, robs a bank, kills a bunch of aliens, and then the movie comes to screeching halt with a 10-minute wrestling sequence in which Rowdy Roddie tries to convince his friend from the construction site to put on the glasses and see the aliens for himself while they’re beating the shit out of each other.
The first half of the movie has a great paranoid feel about it. The premise is essentially a critique of the effect of mass media advertising on society, with a little Regan-era no-justice-for-the-poor protesting thrown in for good measure. I’ve actually seen this movie, which was pretty much regarded as a throwaway Carpenter sci-fi horror B-moive when it was released, written up in film textbooks for the backdoor social commentary aspects. It’s well worth the two or three bucks it would take to rent it at the video store.
Nah, I kinda wanted to keep my job. I hate to break it to ya all, but not all projectionists are Tyler Durden.
ElDestructo,
I agree. They Live is a great film, even though Roddy Piper can’t act very well and there’s a fight scene that goes on forever. Let me note, however, that the messages being hidden in everything by the aliens are not, strictly speaking, subliminal. They are consciously visible to anyone who hasn’t had their minds clouded by the alien’s mind-controlling beams and unconsciously visible when you’ve had your mind clouded. The weird sunglasses were somehow supposed to be able to counteract the effect of the mind-controlling beams. In effect, then, the messages put on everything by the aliens are like the word “fnord” supposedly hidden in books and newspapers by the Illuminati in Shea and Wilson’s Illuminatus trilogy, which are visible to everyone and yet simultaneously prevent people from consciously noticing them. In effect, what Carpenter in They Live and Shea and Wilson in the Illuminatus trilogy were each trying to do was to have a device that works like subliminal advertising is supposed to work but which avoids the problem that, in reality, subliminal advertising doesn’t work.
I you can say subliminal, you’re too smart to be president. 