I used to work as a projectionist at Famous Players and Cineplex when they still had cheap tuesdays. It got to the point I hated working Tuesdays, things always went wrong on Tuesday night. The weird thing is from a projection point of view it doesn't really matter if there are 2 or 300 people in the theatre. In most theatres the projection booth is high up and you can't even see all the seats.
It always seemed odd to me that things would go wrong on Tuesdays when there are the maximum number of customers to piss off, Murphy must have had a special subset for movie theatres. I should point out what most of you are probably thinking, it was usually equipment failure or film jams that were not caused by the projectionist.
Occasionally the problems were caused by the projectionist. I have one really memorable screw-up. I was working at the Wellington 8 and I had to thread up what we call a yo-yo. Bascially there is one print of the film, it plays in one theatre, runs along the wall on some rollers then plays in another theatre. One time I somehow flipped the film over and put the soundtrack on the wrong side on one of the projectors. Stopping one projector after it has started is enough fun but when you need to stop two about 50 feet apart it gets to be a lot of fun. Naturally it was Tuesday night and both shows were packed. I managed to stop the projectors without anything breaking, flipped over the film, rethreaded, and restarted the show.
I think the subset was directly poking me that night, one of the first things a projectionist learns is which side the soundtrack is on and to make sure it's threaded up properly.
We almost never have problems at Western Film but I still get this nagging feeling when I work Tuesdays.
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