@QMS
never wanted it. I even don't remember why and how it happened. oh, well, shit happens, just a bit too often.
Wishing everyone here all the best, health, peace, love and friendship.
I love this place and I think I will love it for good.

Take two

@usefewersyllables

I’m watching Silent Witness which is a British crime/medical drama and the episode I’m watching now is about a theatre fire that started in the film running room. 12 people died and one person cannot be identified. Except that he might have been killed years earlier, but his body was never recovered.

to work my way through college was to get licensed as a motion picture projectionist. This slightly anachronistic practice dates back to the early days of film, when movies were distributed on nitrate film stock- as opposed to the more modern acetate stocks. Nitrate stock is also referred to as "guncotton", of course, and each reel of 35mm film is about a quarter stick of dynamite. Flammable, indeed. Like ya read about.

Having the film break between the aperture and the intermittent drive sprocket downstream would leave a frame of the print in the light path from the arc lamp to the lens, to get hot and catch fire- which in the teens through the 40s and with nitrate stock, generally resulted in the loss of the theater. After the first few of those, the laws changed, and projectors of the era had fire doors, and fire rollers, and the booth had automatic fire shutters over the projector ports- so that when the fire started, hopefully the only person who got incandescently dead was the projectionist.

Fast forward to the late 60s-early 70s, when non-inflammable acetate was the only film stock in use, and the fire hazard had long since completely disappeared. But some states still required that projectionists be trained, licensed, and ready to nobly sacrifice themselves in case a reel of the Movietone News decided to launch itself into orbit.

This was when projection was still a performance art, part of the show; and the reel changes every 10 minutes waited for no man. You'd thread up to the 5 second mark on the leader for the next reel, and then wait for the cue dot from the previous reel (which is supposed to be 7 seconds from the end: 24 frames/sec, so 168 frames). When you saw the first dot, you'd start the second projector, and it would come up to speed- 2 sec. At a count of 4, you'd open the damper shutter to let the light from the arc lamp into the aperture- but no light would make it to the screen, not just yet. And at the last cue dot (10 frames from the end), you'd step on the zipper pedal.

The zipper shutter is why you never saw a reel change, at least if you had a competent projectionist. Stepping on the zipper pedal would close the zipper shutter in the active projector, and simultaneously open the zipper in the projector you had just started- which should have accelerated over 2 seconds, and should have the very first frame of the next reel in the aperture, if you'd counted right.

And nobody in the audience should know that there even *was* a reel change- the sound changes over at the same moment. Done right, it works a treat. Part of the show!

Then on the other projector you close the damper, kill the motor, demount the reel, and put up the next reel, threading to 5 on the leader. Lather, rinse, repeat: done right, there are no gaps or warts from house-to-half until you bring the lights back up and send 'em on their way. And you damned well learned to count to 168 quickly (or cut a string to the right length).

The college I attended was a union shop. And the union guys made serious bank on all of the student-facing A/V stuff, except for projection in some cases: they hated the film classes and the exotic international student clubs, with a passion. And I just happened to have the state P ticket... So I also got to make bank, at 85% of union scale, projecting every flavor of Hindi, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Urdu, Tagalog, yadda yadda films you could imagine. Not French or Spanish- the union guys liked those, because they were nearly porn. Only the completely unintelligible ones, especially the ones film professors tend to show.

It was a very good gig. Saw a lot of film, learned a lot about life, could afford to keep a roof over my head and study. I might have to write down a story or two from that- like the time I got to project 5 Hitchcock movies on absolutely pristine, original release, only-twice-ever-shown Technicolor prints. Or how I still dislike Bollywood (they were right about that). Or the time I did a film class *vintage* vintage festival, and most of the prints (from private libraries) were indeed nitrate... Or the time I involuntarily participated in an international incident involving the Chinese government. But that's for another day.

Film. Yay! They also served, who only stood and wound from the road reels to the house reels, checking for bad splices, checking for cue dots, and counting frames... Any other technical film geeks (or SMPTE members) here?