Great Projectionists of the 20th Century!

[Geoff Newitt]

In my 30 odd years in projection rooms, I've been lucky enough to meet and work with some real characters; I'm just old enough to have worked with some real 'old boys'.

My first Service Engineer when I joined Odeon in 1997 was a well known Yorkshireman - short, angry and boss-eyed, the atmosphere around him was generally blue - either from the language or the cigarette smoke. He went to school next door to Abram Kershaw's factory in Leeds, and until the day he died would not have a word said against Kalee projectors. He certainly knew his stuff - I remember he once took me and a junior engineer out to breakfast, and held forth at some length on the merits of competing intermittent motion design philosophies.

My last Odeon Service Engineer (I moved on in 2008) used to reminisce about his time as a young Chief in Bournemouth (a well known seaside resort on the South Coast), chasing girls - and especially his right of 'first refusal' on any new usherettes. How times have changed!

In between, I worked for a fella in his last year before retirement at a 9-plex. He'd started in projection rooms in 1951 (the year my mother was born!) - and apart from two years out for National Service, it was all he'd ever done. He had a long spell as a Regional Relief Projectionist, travelling all over southern England by train (he never learned to drive). He was a big Union man, and the travelling fitted in well with this. He was a lovely cheery man, although deeply resentful of the way the industry had changed over the years - when he started, it took 5 men each working 56 hours a week to run a single screen; by the time he retired, we were single manning - 140 man-hours a week for 9 screens.

I got to spend some time with Nigel Wolland and his team from Leicester Square, though I never worked there. Nigel is a real gent, I've never heard him speak ill of anyone. I believe he turned 80 last summer. When he retired, almost the first thing he did was go to the Glastonbury Festival for the first time, assisting with the festival cinema. I gather he had great time! For really big events at OLS, the show would usually actually be run by his senior, while Nigel put on a suit and acted as ambassador for the technical team. Said senior was a quite camp gay man, who used to hit the nightclubs of Soho between an 11-11 and a 9-9 shift, returning to work without going home.

I started in cinemas in Southampton - a major port and home to many cruise liners. A remarkable number of the old boys had taken a year or more out to work the liners - most, if not all of which had cinemas on board. Great way to see the world, and pretty low pressure work, by all accounts - the pictures were not well attended. In fact, I remember in the early 90s the projectionist from the Phoenix Film Society (which traces its roots back as far as the 1920s) had a sideline in film transport for the liners - the QE2 had show prints in those days. DVD saw off film based cinemas on the liners best part of 20 years ago - I forget which was the last, but I remember someone trying to sell the pair of Ernemann 15 machines that had been removed.

I'm self-isolating after a contact with someone carrying the dreaded lurgi; maybe some more memories will come to mind before I'm set free!

[Alan Adler]

Thanks Geoff, sounds like you've been lucky to know the old-school guys. Those guys will soon be gone forever. I have a novice question: If in the old days a projectionist wanted to watch the movie himseld - say in the middle of the night - Would he watch through the window - start up and go below - or what? I figure those guys would have screened a great many films for just themselves. Alan

[Kenneth Wuepper]

Western Electric Sound.jpg The crew at the Temple Theatre here in Saginaw were very constant in their work. From opening night, July 28, 1927 until 1965 these two projectionists held their positions. The tall guy in the middle was the stage manager, responsible for placing the speakers and deploying the screen. This was when the new Western Electric sound system was installed. It was still in use when the theatre stopped running fir Butterfield and the equipment was removed.

[Steve Moore]

Hi all (and sorry to hear that you are "locked up" for the time being, Geoff Newitt!)

The character from whom I was taught my own 35mm repair skills (late 80s, early 90s) was the famous Yorkshire Man, the late Jim Schultz He had so many stories to tell and most usually about Kalee machines. Though the two cinemas I worked at were both Cinemeccanica (Vic 9 and Vic 8.)

Sometimes his methods were "scary"; throwing open xenon lamp house doors, when lit and either blinding me as he looked at the lamp resulting in me taking a leap back, waiting for the bang. Once he blew one of my large screwdrivers in half, by discharging the caps in our T&R rectifier by shorting them out. One time, in absence of a current meter, he wired a 2KW fan heater in series with the incoming mains to the rectifier with the conclusion that if the fan heater didn't blow up, then the rectifier couldn't be pulling too much current. Having said that, he always got the show back on for us or managed to get something botched with seconds to spare before a change-over.

When I worked for a couple of years at The University of Leeds (before I worked at the Uni I now do) I took over from Jim; he had been the "AV technician" for them and as a result many lecture theatres had Jim's specially modified Kalee 19 or 21s which he had fit into impossible spaces. Fun days playing films (16mm and 35) for classes or film societies.

Of course, though hanging onto 35mm at the cinema I have now worked at for nearly 33 years , here we are maintaining (with the aid of a new breed of retrained engineers) a fleet of digital and 35mm machines, today.

Here is a picture of Jim and myself, back in 2012, at my cinema's centenaryScreenshot 2021-01-19 at 01.00.18.png

[Jim Cassedy]

QUOTE (Alan Adler): If in the old days a projectionist wanted to watch the movie himself - say in the middle of the night - Would he watch through the window - start up and go below - or what?

For many years, I worked in a farily large, old movie theater on Long Island, NY. It was old-school reel-to-reel projection and carbon arcs for the light source. My booth was also comfortably larger than many of the projection rooms I've worked in before or since. When I wanted to watch a movie, I was fortunate enough to have a large spotlight window that I could raise the fire-shutter on and sit an an old easy chair to watch the movie. There was even an extension loudspeaker next to the window that was wired up so that when you threw a switch in the main amplifier panel, it would transfer the audio from the main booth monitor speaker over to my "window speaker".

But even though this was a comfortable arrangement, I occasionally wanted to watch a film from in the auditorium. Especially something with "big sound", like Star Wars or a musical.
This theater had a balcony, which was usually closed off during the week, and there was one door from the booth that opened into one of the back rows of the balcony. So, if I wanted to sit in the auditorium, I'd wait till one of the nights the balcony was closed, and then, once I started the movie I would step out and sit in one of the last rows at the back of the balcony, just under the projection ports. We were a first run theater- - so I knew all the reels were in good shape. Since I would never do this on an opening night for a film, it meant that I also had some sense of where the reel changes were, having run it for several nights already. There was also a small bell that would 'ding' 2 or 3 times when there was about 2min of film left on the reel. Also, just from experience, you sort of developed a sense of timing and almost KNEW how long each reel was. So, I'd just sit in the back of the balcony and wait till I heard the little 'ding-ding-ding' and then I'd go up into the booth, and fire up the carbon arc on the "incoming" projector, and wait for the changeover cues.

I never missed a change-over doing this- - except for one time when the booth door closed and LOCKED behind me - - and my keys were inside. The reel ran out, and the screen went white as one of the ushers and the manager came running up into the balcony to see what was wrong. Fortunately, it was a weeknight, and the theater wasn't very crowded, and although I was extremely flustered and embarrassed, the manager (who I had worked with for several years) actually found the incident a bit amusing.

You see, I was (usually) such a damn good projectionist, that when I missed that change-over and they couldn't reach me on the booth intercom phone, they assumed that I might have passed out or dropped dead in the booth, since this was such a grievous mistake on my part, they really thought that something horrible might have happened to me, so they were actually somewhat relieved to see that I was OK, and they found some humor in the situation and my frustration at having stupidly locked myself out. Years later, I heard a story from one of the theaters' former employees that I was such a reliable worker that one night, when I was running a bit later than usual due to some unexpected traffic, and one of the ushers commented that I wasn't at the theater yet, the manager told him something like: "Don't worry, Jim will show up. And if he doesn't , than don't call him at home- - start calling the hospitals and morgues, because those are the only two places he'd be if he missed a show"

You can see some pictures of that booth and myself (back in 1977) at the link below.
(Booth pix are mostly on the 2nd page)

[Leo Enticknap]

In fact, I remember in the early 90s the projectionist from the Phoenix Film Society (which traces its roots back as far as the 1920s) had a sideline in film transport for the liners - the QE2 had show prints in those days. DVD saw off film based cinemas on the liners best part of 20 years ago...

Shortly after I emigrated from Britain to America, my wife and I did a tour of the Queen Mary. We split up (just for the duration of the tour!), because she wanted to see the exhibition of Princess Di's dresses and I ... err ... didn't. Eventually I found myself in the tourist class dining room, and noticed a projection porthole on the back wall. I found a docent who was able to unlock the booth and show me inside. In there was a Cossor 9.5mm optical sound projector of a model I hadn't seen before, but it appeared to be basically a classroom projector with a large reel reel pedestal on the front of it. Maybe you had to go first class to get 35mm for your movie shows! Presumably 9.5mm was used to make feature film prints for ships in those days, I'm guessing to save weight and to avoid the safety issues involved with using 35mm nitrate.

My first Service Engineer when I joined Odeon in 1997 was a well known Yorkshireman - short, angry and boss-eyed, the atmosphere around him was generally blue - either from the language or the cigarette smoke. He went to school next door to Abram Kershaw's factory in Leeds, and until the day he died would not have a word said against Kalee projectors.

Reminds me of the chief I worked for at a London arthouse in the early 1990s. He was also a Kalee loyalist (he was even a staunch defender of the GK-37), and antagonist of any other machine though which film passed, but most vehemently those made by Philips. Once of the few technical subjects I disagreed with him over was his hatred of the DP-70, which he described as a "fucking mickey mouse pile of chickenshit equipment." He even had a large photo of what remained of the Philips factory in Eindhoven after the RAF had bombed it in World War II on the wall above his workbench!

His equivalent of your chief's "right of first refusal" of usherettes was what we would now call homophobia (I don't think term had been invented then). This usually took the form of gratuitous references to buggery whenever a gay co-worker was within earshot. They took it with remarkably good humor, sometimes giving as good as they got and putting on a camp act and calling him "darling" in order to wind him up. Needless to say, the annual gay and lesbian film festival was one of the, shall we say, lowlights of his year. He also invented a film genre: the "gin and razor blade movie." Its attributes were that it had to be in a foreign language, subtitled, usually black-and-white, probably made between around 1955 and 1975, at least eight reels long, 1.66, mono audio, admired by critics and professors, and either with a downbeat ending (ideally involving the protagonist committing suicide), and/or utterly incomprehensible subject matter.

One of his cast iron rules was that the last show had to be over in time for him to get to the pub across the road for last orders (in those days pubs had to close at 11pm, with "last orders" at 10.50). I remember on one occasion him doing a back-of-the envelope calculation, and instructing me to run Seven Samurai at 30 FPS (the projectors were equipped with 16 to 30 variacs, to enable everything from silents to Todd-AO). With a 7.30pm show start, that would reduce the running time to a 10.38 finish. I protested that increasing the speed that much would surely cause complaints (and besides, the film failed to meet the gin-and-razor-blade criteria for aspect ratio and downbeat ending (unless you skipped the last reel altogether) or incomprehensible), to which his response was that the Japanese run everywhere and talk in high pitched voices, so no-one would notice.

I'm afraid to say that he was right - no complaints, and we got our pint. His strong opinions even extended across the road to the pub: Young's, or any other beer brewed inside the M25 (or at a stretch, in Kent or Suffolk), was a respectable drink, whereas any European lager was "liquid brain damage," and gin and tonic was for poofters (because he'd once projected a movie in which Dirk Bogarde has one).

Edit/postscript: Neither my former chief nor I were ever able to identify a film that met all of his "gin and razor blade movie" criteria. We came up with a long list of those that met most of them, though. The big disqualifier was usually that a nominee was in English, too short, not in 1.66, or the ending wasn't depressing enough. The nearest I was able to get was The Wages of Fear. It's b/w, subtitled (apart from about three lines in English), mono, and eight reels long, and the subject of much critical attention, most of it positive; but it's 1.37, made just outside the qualifying time period (1953), and the two nastiest characters get what they deserve, calibrated to the extent of their nastiness (a slow and painful death, and a quick and merciful one, respectively). So the ending isn't really depressing, unless you're rooting for them to get away with their selfish behavior or believe that an "everybody dies" ending is by definition depressing.

[Jim Cassedy]

Great Projectionists Of The 20th Century?- - While not actually a projectionist, I do believe Chuck McCann deserves honorable mention here, having played the eponymous character in "The Projectionist" (1970) and also in the "Double Exposure" episode of the Columbo TV series in 1973.
TRIVIA: In the 1960's Chuck McCann had a children's TV show in NY. My dad worked for an advertising agency which had some connection to the TV station McCann was on, so I got to meet him and be in the studio for several of his tapings, and I still have a couple of autographed photos of him around here somewhere.

[Martin Brooks]

The last quotes have gotten me thinking. It feels like not only the projectionist, but the avid movie lover - maybe more so in the analog days - was an introvert, too. When I was a kid and even to this day (I'm 72), going to the movies has always been like therapy for me. Sitting in the theater, good movie or bad, it took me out of myself. The monsters in the monster movies were my best friends when I was little. I don't think I've ever been depressed and a movie not cheered me up. So, maybe the art form is about being alone - and in an audience - and the whole experience is geared for the individual experience and satisfaction - are not all movie lovers loners while watching the big screen - and I suppose the little one, too.

While I experienced all the same feelings you do about the movies and seeing them in theaters, it's not just about being alone (unless you patronized theaters that did poorly) because it was a shared experience with the rest of the audience, even if you didn't know any of them, and I believe that created a vibe that made a big difference to the perception of the films. I think one of the reasons the original Star Wars was such a huge success was because when it opened in 1977, it played in a lot of very large theaters to sellout crowds. Seeing a film with a thousand or more other people is a completely different experience than seeing it with 20, which often happens today during the week. There's an energy and electricity that doesn't exist when there's hardly anyone there.

When I was a kid (I'm just a few years younger than you), there were two theaters within walking distance to my apartment. The larger one was an RKO, which had about 1600 seats. The smaller one, and one which we considered to be a "tiny" theater, had 590 seats, but quite large by today's standards. And a bus ride away was the Loews Paradise, one of the Loews "Wonder Theaters" with almost 3900 seats. I don't think I ever saw a movie in those theaters when they weren't at least 60% full. I saw Jaws in a single screen neighborhood theater in Brooklyn with 2500 seats in an almost sold-out show on a Saturday night. There was a projection problem and the patrons came close to rioting, but calmed down once it was finally fixed The energy was incredible. Even revival theaters used to get decent sized audiences.

In the early 2000's, I gigged for a company that evaluated presentation and print quality on opening day. If a film was playing in a multiplex, we had to watch it on every screen. To my surprise, I found that the experience was totally different on each screen and that affected how the audience reacted to the film. I think that's one of the reasons why there's so many divergent opinions on any given film.

[Alan Adler]

Very perceptive take on the audience experience. I, too, enjoyed the full house. Especially for comedies or action pictures. But when I was about 10 I used to take a cab from elementary school to my local theater to see monsters movies for the first (3 PM) screening and I was the only one in the house most of the time - maybe a bum sleeping in the center of the back row - It was like my private screening room. I almost didn't want company to distract me. I first saw Star Wars on 3 3-minute 16mm clips I projected at the CBS affiliate in Charlotte back in 1977. I was the movie reviewer for the station and I bet you I saw the first images of that film that could have been viewed in the whole town - maybe the state. The projected image was probably the size of a TV screen and I was alone. I was a very motivated audience of 1. Later saw the premier in Charlotte of the film by invitation and flipped out again (along with the full house.) I totally flipped out, quit my job (and 2 others) and moved from NC to LA to make monster movies!