That was Close...

I was working as projectionist tonight. The movie playing was The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo which is a long, intense thriller. The movie was in the credits and only one guy was left in the theatre watching the credits. Suddenly the power went out for no apparent reason. Initially he gave me a bit of a dirty look thinking I had turned the film off on him but the entire building was dark. I was so glad the power didn't go off even 5 minutes earlier, imagine sitting there for 2 1/2 hours and suddenly the screen goes blank right at the climax of the film?! The power was only off for a few minutes so I could have finished showing the film but sometimes it's off for hours.

It was kind of odd, the power usually only goes off during thunderstorms and it wasn't even raining.

It reminded me of a time that did suck. I was working at the Galleria Cineplex back in 1998 for a matinee of Saving Private Ryan. That movie is almost 3 hours long. It was about 10 minutes from the end and suddenly the bulb went dark, so the screen went dark, but the sound would have continued. The manager wanted me to change the bulb but it's dangerous to change a bulb when it's hot so I said I had to wait 20 minutes. The people got passes or whatever but I wasn't able to finish running the show for them because it would have screwed up later showings. When I started running the film through I noticed it had gone dark right when a major character was having his big death scene. Ouch.

A Projectionist's Nightmare.

I got this picture off a projectionist's forum. This isn't at Western Film, it's a print of Angels and Demons somewhere in Australia. That's the film all over the floor, where it's not supposed to be.

The piece of equipment in the middle is called a platter. It consists of three revolving discs about 4 ft wide. On the bottom one you'll see a film as it's supposed to look, nicely wound in a big spool with the beginning of the film in the center and the end on the outside.

When a film plays off a platter it pays out from the center, goes over some rollers, through the projector and back onto one of the other discs. It wraps around a ring placed in the center and ends up looking the same as it started, just on a different disc.

What happened here is somehow the film was not going back onto the platter but was just spilling onto the floor. There's several things that can cause this, mostly projectionist error but sometimes it can be a equipment problem. Even something like a momentary power drop out can cause this. That's why you'll always see the projectionist at Western Film go into the booth after the power blinks, even if the film seems to be running normally.

The scary thing is the average film is 12,000 ft long, that's a lot of film to try to wrap back up manually.

Almost had a major problem with Juno.

I book films on Monday and they usually come in by courier on either Wednesday or Thursday. Occasionally I pick them up at other theatres in town if there aren't a lot of prints around.

A film comes in metal cans in small reels that are about 20 minutes each, I've included a pic. Most movies are 6 reels. We then splice the movie together and play it as one continuous film.

Juno came in on Thursday as usual. The projectionist took it into the booth and opened it. I was just about to leave for my class (my last.one. ever!) when he said he had bad news. Reel 3 was missing!

Obviously this could have been a major catastrophe as we can't really play a film with 20 minutes missing from the middle.

In previous cases I would call our Booker who would have a print shipped out on the bus on Friday. Juno didn't have a lot of prints so I didn't know if there would be an extra.

Luckily I thought to check with the theatres that had just finished playing it and Rainbow still had their print. I went and picked it up Friday afternoon, took reel 3 out of it and finally had a complete print of Juno.

Fox's asked me if the Fox seals were still on the metal cans, they still were so the missing reel didn't get stolen in transit as one would suspect. Fox isn't too happy with Deluxe in Toronto, the warehouse that ships their prints. The print was supposed to be checked before it left and obviously wasn't.