Sunshine

Artist’s rendering of the Sunshine Theatre. It had a Hillgreen-Lane pipe organ. So where are the house-left and house-right organ grills? There aren’t any! There was a single grill above the proscenium, very small and barely detectable in this poorly reproduced image. The murals and the triple arches leading to the exits were all removed in 1950, darn it! The organ was removed as well, which is a terrible tragedy. This image seems to indicate that the two arches that climbed the house walls and ceiling were quite ornate. They were as plain as could be by the time I first saw this theatre on 28 October 1972. The Sunshine’s balcony, which was almost always closed, was magnificent. When you sat at the top, you felt like a god. See below for a more recent view. The remodeling and repainting are heartbreaking. Well, at least you can see that singular organ grill in the middle:

Bob Manke, Senior, a projectionist at the Sunshine Theatre, filed out a pair of 1:1.75 apertures to something vaguely about 1:1.50, smile-shaped, so that he could run older films on that deeply bowl-shaped screen without as much cropping, but still, sheesh, after Bob retired, the other projectionists at the Sunshine didn’t even notice those lenses and apertures, and so they ran everything severely undersized, smaller than 1:2.00. I visited the booth one day and the projectionist was complaining that he was cropping all the Méxican films and couldn’t do anything about it. I told him that there were more lenses and apertures there. He said, No, impossible; if there had been others here, the former managers took them away. Wrongly thinking that the building had been sold, I replied, “They would have been part of the sale of the building. I’m sure they’re still here.” He stopped, looked confused for maybe half a minute, looked up at a shelf above a porthole, stood up on a stool, and retrieved two lenses. There they were, marked, with the marked aperture plates. He said that the apertures looked “a lot better” but would overfill the screen. I told him that those apertures would fit with the lenses that he was holding in his hands and that he would then need to bring the side maskings in. He just got confused and had no idea at all what I was talking about. When he got confused, I got confused, too, because I literally did not comprehend that he had no idea that different lenses gave different results on screen. That’s why I did not know how to respond or how to explain.