By Kelly Schweitzer
- Projectionist Andy Erne at Toronto’s Royal Theatre – Photo by Kelly Schweitzer
That smell is unmistakable. The second you heave open the movie theatre door, you’re guaranteed to be greeted by the scent of hot, buttery popcorn wafting over you. Movie posters are sure to be lining the walls and smiling faces will be standing behind booths, ready to dole out tickets.
Whether you attend a show at an independently owned theatre or a corporate chain, the experience is largely the same and has been for decades. But the one thing that has truly evolved, and inconspicuously, is the role of the projectionist – the person whose job is to ensure you see the movie you paid for.
“A real projectionist is like the Wizard of Oz,” says Andy Erne, projectionist for The Royal Cinema in Toronto. “If you do it well, no one ever draws the curtain. I am paid to be invisible. The only way people know I’m here is if something screws up.”
Early film projectionists were required by provincial governments to be licensed and the profession mandated a set of specific skills and training. Now, more than a hundred years later, the role of the projectionist requires little training and can be performed by regular theatre staff. While there are fundamental elements of the position that still remain, a lot has changed over the past century.
John Tutt, projectionist, film programmer and owner of the Princess Cinema and the Princess Twin in Waterloo, Ont. says the licensing system was introduced when 35mm film was made of nitrate and was volatile.
“Theatres burned down and projectionists got injured with this film that would sometimes ignite in the projection booth with all the hot lamps and carbon arcs,” says Tutt.
The licensing system was established both for safety reasons and for quality control. “It was a way to make sure that films were presented in a standard way and weren’t presented in a shoddy manner,” he says.
Peter Henderson, a projectionist at The Bookshelf Cinema in Guelph, Ont. says becoming a licensed projectionist required 700 hours of an apprenticeship followed by an almost three-hour written exam and a practical exam with a projector in which you had to thread up and demonstrate operating knowledge for the equipment.
You also had to be at least 18 years old, adds Erne, since projectionists would be running restricted movies. Plus, you had to be physically fit and have good eyesight.
In 1995, the government abolished the provincial licensing system for projectionists, deeming it unnecessary, Tutt says.
Erne says he thinks that getting rid of the licensing system diminished the quality of projectionists. “Some people just love this, and those are the guys who make good projectionists. At multiplexes you don’t have people who care about what they do. At every multiplex you’ll usually find one person who cares and he will have been there longer. And with him, he’ll have what we call “threaders” working – people who just thread the movie but also work downstairs. And they don’t know much about it; they just know how to put the film in and how to thread up and then if something goes wrong, a lot of them don’t know what to do.”
Henderson says there were two things that had to happen for the advent of the multiplex to occur: the xenon bulb replacing the carbon arcs and the platter system.
Before the 1980s, when xenon became the standard, carbon arc was used to project the images from the lamp house to the screen.
Two carbon rods sat facing each other in the lamp house and an electrical current would jump across to form a light which a mirror would catch and throw through the projector onto the screen. The problem was that the carbon rods only lasted roughly 20 minutes before they burned down and would have to be replaced.
The length of time it took for the rods to burn down was in sync with the length of time it took for one reel to end, as each reel of film equals about 20 minutes.
“That’s why there were two projectors in every movie theatre,” says Henderson, “because you’d go back and forth alternating with your 20 minute reels.” With the reel-to-reel system, or changeover system, one reel is played on one projector while a second is being set up.
“In the audience you didn’t notice a thing, you’d just think you were watching a 90 minute feature,” Tutt says. “But in the booth it was quite a busy place because the projectionist was adjusting his carbon arc lamps, he was changing projectors, he was reloading reels every 20 minutes. And I believe way back when, there would even be two projectionists in a busy theatre.”
When xenon replaced carbon arc it alleviated the necessity to continually change the carbon rods as a bulb runs for about 2,000 hours.
Xenon brought its own problems however. Tutt says the colouring a xenon bulb reflects on-screen isn’t as good as the carbon arc’s, and it is sometimes argued as tending to the purple spectrum. Carbon arc, on the other hand, was the closest thing to pure sunlight, and so produced perfectly balanced light.
With the longevity of xenon, projectionists can splice reels together and eliminate the necessity for multiple changeovers. And with the platter system, before patrons even enter the theatre the projectionist will have spliced the reels together into one continuous reel so the film plays from beginning to end.
- 35mm film still feeds through this projector at The Royal Cinema in Toronto – Photo by Kelly Schweitzer
This is done by using a device called a splicer and a special kind of tape specifically intended for film. The two ends of each reel of film are first placed on the splicer and the splicing tape is stretched across to connect the ends. A perforator is then pushed down over the film to puncture the tape through the sprocket holes which are necessary for the film to run smoothly through the projector.
While the reels are mounted on the projector in the changeover system, the platter system consists of three large round discs, or platforms, that are stacked horizontally and separate from the projector. The movie reel is placed on one platter and the film threads out of the centre of the reel and along a set of rollers to the projector. It then feeds through the projector and comes back on another series of rollers and onto an empty platter, making one big loop. It is this system that allows one projectionist to operate several different screens.
While the platter system makes things a little easier during film projection, some independent theatres, such as The Royal, continue to use the changeover system. One reason for this is that most booths don’t have room for a platter, says Erne.
And though a platter system can run a film continuously without having to do a changeover, it could take up to an hour and a half to splice together each reel – time that in Erne’s opinion is often a waste. Many independent theatres will only run a film for two or three days, so projectionists would have to break it down again after limited use.
And of course, technology is always progressing. Theatres are gradually making the change from film to digital projection, but not even all mainstream theatres have adopted the new technology. While Cineplex Entertainment’s Scotiabank Theatre in Toronto has installed the digital cinema projection system, Cineplex’s IMAX continues to use film prints.
“I think it was automation over the years that’s changed the job a lot,” Tutt says. Cue spots started being put on the film in order to cue the theatre lights to turn on, the screen curtains to open, and music to come on after the film.
He says the projectionist’s job became more of a technical role in making sure everything worked properly.
“You want all this technology to work properly and that’s where the expertise changed and I think projectionists had to become knowledgeable in a different area. And now today it’s just a cornucopia of changes,” says Tutt.
Tutt says that with technology moving forward and digital projection becoming more popular, any consumer has the skills needed. It’s akin to knowing how to properly load a Blu-ray and adjust it so that it looks proportioned on the screen.
“It’s that level of skill that a projectionist has now-a-days, except they do it in a bigger, more public
environment.”
