By Phillip Maciel

White sand between toes. The sun beaming down on a warmed, glowing face. A cool, gentle breeze blowing off the nearby ocean. The inevitability of retirement prompts images of the most relaxing of possibilities, where freedom is finally complete.

Serial Number One: The First IMAX Projector - Courtesy Shirley Hughes

They probably don’t imagine being locked away in a dark, musty warehouse, wrapped up and sitting on a pallet.

Serial Number One, the very first IMAX projector in history, has such a fate. It’s probably for the best – beach sand would likely disagree with its machinery. But there’s good news. “We took the projector out in a way to preserve the machine, so it took us a little longer, and cost us a little more, but we didn’t chop it up into little bits and carry it out the door,” says Mike Hazelton, the manager of attractions at Ontario Place.

The theme park, one of Toronto’s most popular attractions, is home to the Cinesphere, which has housed Number One since 1971. At that time, Ontario Place could brag about being the only location in the world with a permanent installation of an IMAX projector. If you wanted to see an IMAX movie, you had to go to Toronto; there was no other option.

The projector had impressed audiences a year earlier in Osaka, Japan, where IMAX was introduced to the world by a group of Canadian filmmakers.

The basic idea started with projecting regular 35mm film on a 360-degree screen for an unparalleled sense of depth. Instead of using various slide projectors for all the screens necessary to get that 360-degree effect, IMAX movies use 70mm film, much larger than the normal 35mm, in order to put all of those images onto one filmstrip.

Tiger Child, the very first IMAX film, played for six months at Expo ‘70 in Japan. After that, Number One was moved to Toronto’s Cinesphere, which offers the biggest cinema screen in North America.

Hazelton, who has been with Ontario Place since 2004, explains, “because it was a one of a kind technology, everything about IMAX happened here.” Everything, from making the movies to editing and right down to mixing the soundtrack, was done using Number One in Toronto – there was no number two.

No one knows this better than the Cinesphere’s current projectionist, Dave Callaghan Jr. He projected Number One’s final film, North of Superior, in December 2010. It was a sentimental note for Number One to go out on, given that Callaghan’s father, the late David Sr., ran the same film using the same machine almost 40 years earlier on opening night.

Around that same time, Callaghan Jr. was already learning the trade, having spent so much time in theatres. “When everyone else is going out for entertainment, that’s when a projectionist goes to work,” he says. “I’d be home from school and my father was always working. So in a sense, in order to see my father, I would go to work to see him.”

Callaghan Jr., now 58 years of age, is still projecting. It’s delicate work – once a projector starts up, the film goes at an incredibly high rate of speed. One wrong move and the damage could be disastrous.

[pullquote]“To continue to be relevant 40 years after we started, we need to have access to the latest film products that are coming out there.”
-Mike Hazleton, manager of attractions[/pullquote]

But it seems Number One was an extremely trustworthy and gentle machine. “There are instances where prints can literally be damaged before they get through their first weekend. With the IMAX projector, you were hard-pressed to tell exactly how long a print had been run,” Callaghan says.

Still, Number One isn’t the same machine it once was. The image quality was still impeccable, but Number One was constantly being modified in order for it to keep up with the times. The lamp house was changed to improve efficiency and brightness. A new rotor allowed for faster reel speeds that could play double the frames per second – a modification that was only ever made to a select few projectors in order to play high definition. “Because it was a work in progress, especially in the first ten years, that thing changed dramatically,” Hazelton says. “It’s probably 50 per cent the same as what the machine sort of ran like when it was originally put in.”

Perhaps most important to contemporary audiences, Number One went from being able to only play films around 20 minutes long to feature-length films. After learning to raise reels above the other and overlap them, “they found a way to run films up to two and a half hours long, so we could run Avatar or even the Harry Potters,” Callaghan says.

The old adage ‘out with the old, in with the new’ seems fitting for Number One’s 40-year tale. There are bigger and better things for the Cinesphere, and Hazelton admits, “to continue to be relevant 40 years after we started, we need to have access to the latest film products that are coming out there. IMAX 3-D and 3-D film in general is obviously at the forefront right now, so for us to have access to that inventory and catalogue of films, we need to go in that direction.”

In early February, Jennifer Kerr, media relations manager at the Cinesphere, told Fine Cut they have a 1.8 million dollar budget for renovations this year and plan to purchase a new IMAX film projector with 3-D capabilities. They also want to clean the outside of the Cinesphere, something that hasn’t been done since Number One was first installed. “Then we’re doing all new seating, a new lobby, and a new screen,” added Kerr, all in hopes of being ready to open for the May 2011 long weekend.

With a new projector taking its place, Hazelton says there are options for Number One’s future, but nothing’s been determined. Callaghan wants the projector in some sort of museum, perhaps even on display at Ontario Place itself. Number One will simply have to wait to find out what kind of retirement plan it’s been given.

While the Cinesphere remains under renovation, Callaghan has been projecting films at the TIFF Bell Lightbox. The equipment he’s using is newer, the setting much jazzier, but praise for Number One seems to flow naturally for him. “There’s very little that you can say on an engineering level – and just in practice as a projectionist – that was not just absolutely first rate about the IMAX projector, even going back to the first day.”

It seems as though Callaghan and Number One’s histories are intertwined. Now Callaghan is looking on as his partner exits stage left, but the Cinesphere will always be the world’s first permanent IMAX theatre, and Number One will always be the world’s first IMAX projector. “I feel extremely fortunate that I can work at an IMAX booth, and it’s a presentation second to none,” says Callaghan sentimentally of his time spent with Number One. This is the end of a legacy, both for the Callaghans and the IMAX technology. Let’s just hope Number One can finally find its own version of that warm and sunny beach.