No Platter No Problem! (Crazy Video)

[Ryan Gallagher]

TWO people texted me this when it showed up on reddit r/toolgifs last month. I'm sure maybe such madness has been witnessed before, do not click play if you have anxiety about film handling.

Outdoor event screening on a single carbon arc projector with no platter. Live splicing on 15in reels. If you look closely it appears to be a two projectionist operation, I saw some hands in frame adjusting the rods. The dance with the film is impressive (the dragging it all over the frame of the projector not so much), but the half baked tape splices would give me a panic attack!! Note the near disaster when he accidentally flings the film compartment door open. Hopefully no one we know interprets archive instructions "NO PLATTERING ALLOWED" to mean this method as a viable aternative. (Which does still require breaking down prints). LOL

Shucks, I was hopeful the youtube version would embed, but it's a youtube short. Here's the original reddit post.

EDIT: Pro tip: replace "shorts" in url with "watch" to get a traditional video interface.

[Ryan Gallagher]

A few 70s projectionists in the reddit threads commenting they were also trained to do this in the event one changeover projector was down. I had no idea. Crazy times... back when the screening mattered more than the print.

Then there is this comment:
"He hands over the reel for the moto bike messenger to send to the next cinema. That is how 1 print ends up serving many screens."

Part of me wants to believe it too.

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

Good grief! That poor little Tokiwa is going to turn into a molten blob of AL U. Minium with that Arc behind it. He is likely doing this because the projector is way too hot to touch.

[Tim Reed]

I saw some hands in frame adjusting the rods. .

That's another thing that's annoying about these videos; they're always futzing around with the feed controls and opening the doors of the lamphouses during the show. If they'd just leave them alone long enough, they could be properly adjusted with the speed controls and then track accurately.

[Ryan Gallagher]

That's another thing that's annoying about these videos; they're always futzing around with the feed controls and opening the doors of the lamphouses during the show. If they'd just leave them alone long enough, they could be properly adjusted with the speed controls and then track accurately.night.

yeah, I’ve never run a carbon projector, but I have run carbon-arc follow spots, same concepts on the feed adjustments, but instead of changing over to swap rods, you hand off your pickups to another operator, unless you happen to be between cues. A well cued show could time the rod swaps and give everyone the same track every night.

[Tony Bandiera Jr]

[QUOTE=Ryan Gallagher;n46053]A few 70s projectionists in the reddit threads commenting they were also trained to do this in the event one changeover projector was down. I had no idea. Crazy times... back when the screening mattered more than the print.

Then there is this comment:
"He hands over the reel for the moto bike messenger to send to the next cinema. That is how 1 print ends up serving many screens."

Part of me wants to believe it too.[/QUOTE]

Believe it. When I worked for an art circuit chain in L.A. we once did a screening of a sneak preview where we filled our two neighboring locations (about 6 blocks from each other) to capacity. We scheduled one show after the first to allow time for the first reel to arrive, then it was a mad dash to rewind and send the next reel down the road. Both were changeover houses. It was myself and the only other projectionist in the chain who knew how to do fast accurate threading. IIRC the delay to the second start was like 10 minutes AFTER the reel got to the second location to allow for rewind and threading. But any delay in transit would have resulted in the second screen going dark.

In many other less developed countries shuttling reels between theatres is (was) very common and the audiences there were understanding of, and patient with, delays between reels.

[Ryan Gallagher]

Good grief! That poor little Tokiwa is going to turn into a molten blob of AL U. Minium with that Arc behind it. He is likely doing this because the projector is way too hot to touch.

I wasn't even considering that aspect. He's screwed on both accounts, no sign of a second projector anywhere near by. But yeah re-threading would be quite hot I imagine. I take it the projector head is generationally mismatched with that arc house, hence the melting concerns.

I also gather their prodigious use of film shipping cans is to create a little moat to contain the film that hits the floor on whatever platform they are on. Yeesh.

[Ryan Gallagher]

Believe it. When I worked for an art circuit chain in L.A. we once did a screening of a sneak preview where we filled our two neighboring locations (about 6 blocks from each other) to capacity. We scheduled one show after the first to allow time for the first reel to arrive, then it was a mad dash to rewind and send the next reel down the road. Both were changeover houses. It was myself and the only other projectionist in the chain who knew how to do fast accurate threading. IIRC the delay to the second start was like 10 minutes AFTER the reel got to the second location to allow for rewind and threading. But any delay in transit would have resulted in the second screen going dark.

In many other less developed countries shuttling reels between theatres is (was) very common and the audiences there were understanding of, and patient with, delays between reels.

Again, I thought things had the potential to be exciting on a single screen in a single booth. Where do you put the slow guy, on the front end or the back end? ;-) I guess whatever delay you introduce (intentionally or accidentally) with reel 1 has to be the maximum for the rest of the changeovers between venues.

[Tony Bandiera Jr]

Ryan, we put the slow guy on the front end most of the time, as long as he made his changeovers on time the show stayed on. If the guy on the back end was slow, and if the reel was delayed in transit there is a higher risk of going dark. I was usually the back end as I got my threads down to about 45 seconds on our machines. (At risk of a misframe of course, but I was lucky and never did a misframe or bad loop size.)

If memory serves, I only did two of those shows in that situation.

However, more that once I had a print arrive VERY late in my platter only booth (Strong platters) and more than once had to load two reels on the platter before starting the show (with the third reel paying off of the MUT) and as the third reel neared the end, I pulled the end off as here (feeding into a large box with a fresh large trashbag liner) to make a quick splice as the platter continued to pull the film on. (if you think about the physics carefully, you'll realize the film pack on the deck always stayed at roughly two reels of film, otherwise this would have pulled the whole pack sideways and you'd have a pileup.) The last reel fed off of the table and as it's tail cleared I'd quickly stall the deck long enough to tuck the tail under the pack.

During my screening days at UC Irvine I had a print show up late and had to quickly inspect and thread reel one, start it while I inspected reel two, barely getting reel two threaded in time to make the changeover, and continued that way until the last reel (eight). That was a workout (OF course all reels arrived heads out which meant a double wind. If they had been tails out it would have been super easy and no stress to inspect "on the fly") It would have been a show stopper if there was any major damage or worse, wrong reels sent.

As for wrong reels, three times at that same location I had prints that were missing reels or had duplicate reels. Twice I was able to save it as I inspected them the day before, but we lost one show as I didn't get the print until day of the show.

[Josh Jones]

In many other less developed countries shuttling reels between theatres is (was) very common and the audiences there were understanding of, and patient with, delays between reels.

There is a scene in Cinema Paradiso where they shuttled 6K's of film back and forth between neighboring towns on a bicycle.

JJ

[Tony Bandiera Jr]

There is a scene in Cinema Paradiso where they shuttled 6K's of film back and forth between neighboring towns on a bicycle.

JJ

That's right, I forgot about that scene. I need to dig the dvd out of storage and watch it again, it is one of the best films showing (our now lost) art.

[Nantawat Kittiwarakul]

Ah, that's definitely happened on my homeland country - namely THAILAND. And I'm surely NOT so proud of this practice.

Seriously this is how we handle films in this country - using Tokiwa portable projector (aka film grinder) with this daredevil reel change as a standard practice. You sure can figure out how clean/pristine the projected image on the screen would look like.?

[Leo Enticknap]

Then there is this comment:
"He hands over the reel for the moto bike messenger to send to the next cinema. That is how 1 print ends up serving many screens."

Not sure about here, but in Britain in the '30s and '40s this was a common practice, especially after wartime rationing severely limited the amount of film stock that was available for release printing entertainment movies. The trade press at the time reported that 30-40 prints of a mega-blockbuster to cover the entire country was not uncommon, and a small army of runners shuttled reels between theaters within a large town or city.

The practice is shown in Hitchcock's Sabotage (1936), in a scene in which a cinema employee takes some reels with him onto a bus, despite a strict ban that was introduced (and again, per trade press reports, was aggressively enforced) on carrying nitrate on buses and the tube.

[Ryan Gallagher]

Maybe the projectionists actually had it better then! If the couriers had venue access the reels would make it to the booth door. Would save me the 6 flights of stairs. ;-)

[Jim Cassedy]

I've done something like that at a private event. Nerve wracking, but once you get
the hang of it, it's not too bad. And there were a couple of times back in the 70's
that I had to deal with 'bicycling' reels of a print between my venue and another
one because there was some sort of lab problem with the first print we got, and
so for the first day-and-a-half, we shared a print with another venue. They had
staggered the starting times, between us & the other place, and I think we stuck
an extra cartoon or short into the trailer reel just to give us a bit of a time buffer.
One of "the kids" did the reel-running between venues in his car. The other
theater was about 10-15min away and there were several alternate roads
that could be taken in case one was backed up for some reason. There were
no cell phones back then so you just had to hope the kid showed up with the
next reel on time. Only once did one of the reels I was waiting for arrive just a
s my '2 minute warning' reel alarm bell rang, which was a little close for comfort.
I was glad when we got our own print.

I'm wondering what size & length of carbons those guys in the video were using.
I can't think of any that were large enough to last a whole feature. I don't know
of any way to hot-swap carbons without burning yourself and/or going blind in
the process.