There's a scene in the movie “Fight Club” where Brad Pitt's anarchist character Tyler Durden is working as a projectionist in a movie theater, splicing individual frames of pornography into children's animated features. Not quite cogniscent of what just happened, children cry and an audience shifts uncomfortably.
Though it's to be hoped this act of quiet cultural disobediance hasn't actually happened (or been replicated in the years since that movie's release), it underscores a point about the anonymity and invisiblitiy of the occupation.
Unless the projectionist attracts attention (as in “Fight Club,” or more realistically with an out-of-focus presentation or scratched print of a movie), his or her role is not considered in the movie-going experience.
“The audience does not see us run, sweat, hustle, etc. because we are in the booth and not on the floor in their view,” says Manuel Valencia, an area projectionist with five years experience working for Silver Cinemas and Cinemark. “They do not know that we get burned or electrocuted to keep their movie running. Second, and the worst, is we can never impress the audience. An audience expects a scratch-free, in focus, in frame picture and quality sound. At most that is all we can give them. They expect a perfect presentation. How can you excel beyond perfection?”
The benefits of such work are entirely internal, according to one projectionist working for a corporate chain south of the metroplex that prohibits its employees from talking to the media.
“The reward is in liking your job, what you do and not looking for any special recognition,” he says. “Patrons hardly ever compliment the operation, but they usually complain when something goes wrong. Coming back is the ultimate compliment.”
Kyle Thiessen, former projectionist, creator of Brainwrap Comics and the artist behind this week's illustrations says that while presenting a movie properly on principle is rewarding, there's another side to the job's appeal for him.
“One of the more rewarding parts of the job is that it can be fun if you have a general interest in how things work,” Thiessen says. “A projector is one of those rare pieces of machinery that still exists today in which you can see all of the moving parts and know exactly what their function is. Almost everything else nowadays is built like a computer, which is fine, but microchips and programming are far less... ‘romantic,' if you will.”
It's not all romantic, however.
“Also, depending on how many projectors you've got to worry about, you can sit and watch a movie and get paid.”
Despite their virtual anonymity in most cases, just about any projectionist will tell you that once things go wrong, the general public is only too aware of them.
Our anonymous projectionist indicates how a lack of public understanding of his job can cause problems.
“By the time the projector stops and then once you get it back up to speed after the power is back on, you might miss several seconds of a scene (10 to 30) depending on the equipment,” he says. “A customer was not too happy during a show of Jurassic Park. He had seen the movie before and wanted his friends to see where the T-Rex got the guy on the toilet seat. ‘Can't you rewind it to that scene?' he pleaded. Sorry, it doesn't work that way ... it's not instant pause and start like VHS or DVD.”
Brian Hearn, film curator for the Oklahoma City Museum of Art, talks about his first time running a movie for the museum as if retelling a combat episode.
“‘Tom Jones,' July 7, 1995. One of the worst days of my life,” Hearn says.
His first week on the job, he was given 16mm prints for the next weekend's films and left to scrounge up a projector with which to show them. He got his hands on a projector he described as “ragtag,” and it probably didn't help matters that the films he had to work with hadn't been preserved very well.
“The print ended up being trashed. It had sprocket damage, the soundtrack was garbled. It could not have been any worse for the first film,” Hearn says. “There were probably 20 or 30 people there and they were coming back behind trying to help me and they're like ‘What's wrong with the projector? Can you fix the sound?' It was just hell. Everything went wrong, people start leaving. It was a very conspicuous beginning.”
That wasn't the only rough spot in Hearn's first year with the museum.
“I used to show those films on Friday nights, and then I realized that the short track dirt auto racing is also on Friday nights on the Fair Grounds so I'm showing my Russian art film and there's this ‘Rawwwwrrrr! Rawwwwrrrr! Rawrrrrr!' and I thought, ‘Oh my God, I cannot compete with this.'”
And no matter what the company motto says, the customer is not always right.
Valencia describes one of his most memorable customer service interactions.
“A gentleman, with his family, came out of ‘Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring' and was upset at the fact that there was no ending to the movie,” Valencia says. “As projection manager, my first thought was the projector had a malfunction of some sort and tripped a failsafe that stopped the movie. But when I asked him what he meant, his reply was ‘They went to the top of the mountain and then the credits came on.' I then explained to him that ‘Lord of the Rings' was a trilogy.”
Sarah Werning, a former projectionist currently attending graduate school at OU, can rattle off problematic customer stories one after the other, like the one about the man who came out of a sold out show of “Star Wars” to complain that the film was too loud for his wife (who had just had ear surgery) and had to be turned down, or the woman who complained that the sound wasn't synched properly for a showing of the early computer-graphics feature “Antz” because the words didn't perfectly match the lip movements of the animated characters on screen.
“I ran Matrix 3 and a guy kept coming out to complain that the tops of the heads were being cut off in the picture,” Werning says. “I thought maybe the print had jumped out of frame, or the screen's masking had fallen a little, but when I checked I realized it was just the way (the film's directors) the Wachowski brothers had framed the shot — they zoomed in on faces and the topmost part of the actors' skulls weren't in the picture. I tried explaining to the guy that there was nothing anyone could do — it was how the movie was filmed. He was screaming in the lobby, yelling something along the lines of ‘Directors ALWAYS show 100 percent of the head! They always show all of the head!'”
Not every trouble-causing customer is so direct, however.
Some just don't stop to consider that there has to be a person up there behind that tiny window who runs all the shows.
“I have seen masturbation, fellatio, cunnilingus, all-out intercourse, breast feeding, urinating, destruction of property and just about any other moral violation written in the Scriptures,” Valencia says of his time in the projection booth.
Such behavior is the exception, says our anonymous projectionist.
“When you look out from the port glass, you see most people well behaved ...” he says. “I love to see young kids down there ... They get all excited and wave so I wave back. It makes their day. Being a parent, I know, as my son always looks up to give me the thumbs up sign!”
And then there are the many dangers inherent to working with the equipment.
“Projector bulbs are the worst,” Thiessen says. “They are 5,000-watt ticking timebombs of fury. You even look at one wrong, it'll explode. There's so much pressure in there, and they become so unstable once it's time for replacement. IMAX bulbs, which are 15,000 watts, are the same kind of bulb that was used for the World Trade Center memorial. Remember, those lights that could touch the moon? Yeah. Veritable grenades, they are.”
Whatever the anecdotes, tiny triumphs or little horrors associated with the job, Thiessen says it's the clandestine nature of the job, the virtual invisibility as far as the public is concerned, that makes the work of a projectionist so unique.
“We're the secret Wizards of Oz who make things ‘go.' We're an enigma as far as the audience is concerned. The mysterious force behind the theatre's bread and butter. Nobody sees us, we're like ninjas — but we're responsible for the most important stuff in the building. And, it's a skilled position: you have to learn and know how to operate the machinery, which has an elitist stigma to it. We're better than anybody else in the building, and they know it,” Thiessen says. “Doesn't get us laid, though.”
