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.

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.”