Chapter 15
I Irritate Everybody
I Irritate Everybody
If only I had noticed the newspaper article that mentioned that the Encore was set up to run silent films properly,
that is where I would have begun hanging out every possible moment.
I would have haunted that booth.
I would never have even thought of visiting Donald Pancho’s booth.
I would likely have become buddies with Peter Kavel and maybe even gotten a job working for him.
Even though the Encore closed just after it opened, a few weeks or months there could have been life-changing in a good way.
Instead, I went wild over Don Pancho’s Art Theatre, which was life-changing in a bad way.
In the autumn of 1975, I was at Donald Pancho’s to see a Bogart double feature, and so I asked if I could visit the booth.
The usual response: Sure, come on up!
Remember those Bogey days?
In those days, if you had a cinema that was running at a deficit,
all you needed to do was run Bogart or Hitchcock, and you’d be in the black again.
Bogey and Hitch were the magical elixirs.
Donald Pancho’s was running a Bogey double feature each week for three weeks.
The projectionist was a really nice guy and he was happy to have a visitor.
(Because he became my master, I shall call him Mr. Master.
It was not until I did research for this essay that I discovered that Mr. Master was not placed at Don Pancho’s by Movie, Inc.
He was a legacy employee from the Pat Baca days and, I am convinced, even from the Art Theatre Guild of America, Inc., days,
from before the installation of the automation.)
He sat me down at projector #2 and asked me to open the door of the Brenkert picture head.
I did so.
He asked me to look for the little brass aperture inserted into the film gate.
I found it.
He asked me to read what it said.
It was awkward to get a good angle to see the thing, but I was able to make it out and I said,
“One point six six to one.”
“Right!” he said.
“Now, do you know what format this film is in?”
“No.”
“It’s one point three three to one.”
(That was, and remains, a common colloquialism for 1:1.375, derived a trial format from the late 1920’s, .600"×.800", which truly was 1:1.33.)
“Do you know what that means?” he asked me.
I hesitated.
Thoughts came to me.
I had noticed that pretty much any movie I had ever attended anywhere had been noticeably cropped and I had never understood why.
I hazarded, “That means you’re cropping the film?”
“Yes!” he screamed out in frustration.
“And I hate doing that, but that’s all they give us!!!!!”
I was more intrigued than ever before.
I had known that there were problems with running silent films at proper speeds on modern equipment,
and that always got my blood boiling.
Ah, but this new wrinkle completely intrigued me.
I was determined to fix this problem if it took me my entire life.
That is why I asked if I could apprentice on the machines on Saturday nights for a few months.
Saturday night was the best night, since I would have most of my high-school homework done by then,
and since I did not need to wake up early on Sunday.
Sure, no prob, so long as I could get the owner’s okay.
He introduced me to the owner, who was there, and the owner granted my wish with a smile on his face.
He seemed really nice and I liked him instantly.
By the way, nobody on staff could figure out why the Bogey films were sticking in the film gate and making such a filthy mess and such a loud racket.
After each reel, the guys had to pull the gate from the machine and laboriously scrape off all the gunk — with a flat screwdriver!!!!!
That’s a huge no-no , as I would learn shortly afterwards.
They did not know about chemical solutions that would have dissolved the gunk.
One of the projectionists, Ernie, made a joke that
“Casablanca is a dirty movie.”
Only a few weeks later, I would learn, from my own research, that those were “green” prints
that simply needed
a bit of lubrication, a problem solved quite easily.
Nobody at Donald Pancho’s or The Guild knew that trick.
As an aside, Mr. Master was a railroad enthusiast and the recently hired Ernie, the relief guy, was another railroad enthusiast.
Further, a projectionist at The Guild was also a railroad enthusiast and I shall call him Mr. RRE.
Mr. RRE was a high-school geography teacher by day and he seemed to me to be somewhat older than the other two.
My educated guess is that they had all met at railroad events and that Mr. RRE helped the other two get their jobs.
Since early childhood, I have been intrigued by trains, especially by steam locomotives,
but I never pursued the hobby and I never became expert in any aspect of the topic.
Had I only engaged those three guys in conversations about trains, maybe my life would have turned out differently.
The apprenticeship was minimal: splicing, rewinding, lacing, change-overs,
recuing miscued or damaged reels, and, once, striking a carbon arc at The Guild.
On my first try I broke the positive rod, which got Ernie seething.
(In all my years of running carbon arc afterwards, I never broke another rod.)
As for running a show solo, or doing maintenance, or making repairs, that was verboten.
One thing these guys taught me that almost no other projectionist knew about or cared about:
How never to let the film touch the floor.
That was an invaluable lesson and there’s a remarkably simple trick to it:
Just keep folding loops of the leader in your hand.
That’s it.
I never saw a projectionist at any other cinema do that.
(Here’s a photo of a projectionist doing that.)
Another solution: Immediately wind the film onto the take-up and, before you lock the reel on,
roll the take-up down to the frame you need, and then, and only then, lace the machine.
Example? Here:
Why should film never touch the floor?
The dirt on the floor loves to attach itself to the film and then it migrates throughout the entire reel, courtesy of static cling.
So never let the film touch the floor!
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By the way, I just discovered that carbons are still being made!!!!!
Hallelujah!!!!!
CinemaCarbons.
Oh, the world is a happier place!
Now if only we could find someone who still makes the dichroic reflectors!
That’s the huge gap in the supply chain.
On Friday, the seventeenth of December 2010, I announced to everybody I knew that the world had just ended.
That was the day that the LaVezzi factory shut down.
LaVezzi made the replacement parts for projectors.
Once that factory shut down, film was doomed.
Not long afterwards, Entertainment Equipment of Buffalo had a sale:
All 35mm equipment was on offer — for free.
My heart sank.
We need to band together and start making replacement parts.
Who’s up for it?
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On my first night of apprenticing,
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre was on the double bill.
There was a problem with the print, though.
Half of a reel was missing and in its place was half a reel of A Raisin in the Sun.
Mr. Master chopped out that half-reel, which left a gap in the movie, as the story darted ahead about eight minutes,
and suddenly on the screen there was a fourth gold prospector whom the audience had not known about before.
I listened to the audience reaction at that gap and there was a house-wide gasp of “Huh?”
The owner was in the booth for a little while and this was a topic of discussion.
I ventured that, “It would have been funny had you left that half-reel in.”
The owner paused a beat and then said, slowly, and in all seriousness, “No, it would not have been funny.”
Though nobody would allow me to get too hands-on, I watched what everybody was doing, more carefully than they realized.
They were teaching me a little bit, but after a few hours altogether, I caught on to things they had never noticed,
and I picked up on the mistakes they were in the habit of making without even realizing what they were doing.
For instance, as I said already, using flat screwdrivers to clean off the film rails.
For instance, during a change-over, while the old reel was still on screen,
the first few seconds of the new reel were already running through the next projector.
For instance, they used the numbers on the leaders to choose a starting point,
even though almost every leader was battered and shortened and should have been re-marked.
For instance, they off-set the tape splices, which got the tape edges on screen,
even though the whole point of an 8-perf splice is to ensure that the tape edges align with the frame lines, to make them invisible on screen.
I mentioned the bit about skipping film at the change-overs,
pointing out, before the completion of the change-over,
“See? Look! The beginning of the next reel is already running through.”
That got on everybody’s nerves.
After that, I kept my mouth shut and just observed and made mental notes to myself.
NOTE ADDED ON 20 OCTOBER 2020:
Oh, yes, how could I have neglected to plop in this utterly useless bit of information?
Saturday, the 25th of October 1975, was a monumentally important day in my life.
Donald Pancho’s was running The Groove Tube.
Mr. Master told me and the others that this was a censored copy of The Groove Tube,
with a chunk of the Geritan commercial “physically cut” out of the movie,
to change the X rating to an R.
Nope. The chunk that was missing (a few seconds) had just been removed due to damage.
Second on the bill was Flesh Gordon.
Now, I was 15.
I had never seen any such images before in my life.
I had not even imagined any such images. Ever.
What an eye-opener!
I had no idea what the prélude to The Groove Tube was about,
with the apes discovering a TV set.
I had not yet seen 2001, you see.
The next sketch, with Buzzy Linhart as the hitchhiker, knocked all my senses away.
The gal driving the car had an incredibly gorgeous smile and I was simply agog at what proceeded thereupon.
Ernie was in the booth at that moment and he wistfully sighed, “I wish that would happen to me.”
I only just now discovered that the gal who drove the VW convertible had a boy’s name: Richmond Baier.
It was her only time in front of a movie camera.
Whatever became of her, nobody knows.
I learned a great deal about female anatomy that evening and I wanted to learn more.
Mr. Master told me that there was a predictable audience reaction during the Safety Sam sketch.
He said that every time he ran it at The Guild the previous year, he would step into the auditorium to listen to the laughter.
The first row would laugh first, as the people there recognized what the puppet really was.
Then the second row would laugh, then the third, and finally the back row would get the gag.
So, he told me when to go to the auditorium to observe this phenomenon myself.
Unfortunately, it didn’t happen. Oh well.
What was important about this day was that
the Hiland had also booked The Groove Tube for its midnight show, but did not receive a print.
So, Donald Pancho’s agreed to loan the Hiland the print.
As soon as The Groove Tube ended at eleven o’clock,
a young guy from the Hiland dashed up to the booth to pick up the two gigantic 6,000' reels and drive them to the Hiland, two miles up Central Avenue.
Now, Mr. Master had already told me that the same had occurred on the previous night,
and he was appalled that the Hiland was not set up for 6,000' reels, but was still running on 2,000' reels only.
Could Mr. Master please “break down” (disassemble) the movie back onto 2,000' reels, pretty please with sugar and honey on it?
“Oh no. No. No. No. No. No way. You guys break it down.
Then build it up again before you give it back.”
I thought that might be a bit unfair, since if the Hiland did not have 6,000' capacity, how on earth would the crew mount the reels onto the inspection bench
for break down or build-up?” Oh well, they managed somehow.
Why do I bring this up?
Basically, to record for posterity that, as of the 25th of October 1975, the Hiland was still running on 2,000' reels,
but that it somehow was able to plop 6,000' reels onto an inspection bench.
If I do not record that information, nobody would ever record that information and it would be lost to history.
It is not something that is significant — except to someone who is trying to write a book on the history of cinema in Albuquerque.
So there ya go!
Another reason to bring this up is, well,
for all my acquaintances who for some reason thought that “foreign” movies were just a bunch of porn, uh, no, no, no, no, they weren’t.
In the 1950’s and 1960’s, many foreign movies had age restrictions, but not because they were porn.
They were not, not at all.
I guess that Americans think that age restriction = porn, for whatever reason.
Those two American movies were a million times hotter than anything I had ever seen emanating from another country.
Now, the midnight show at Donald Pancho’s that Saturday was Donald Cammell’s
Performance,
one of the staples at The Guild and Donald Pancho’s.
Since it was revived every few months, I was quite curious about it.
So I stayed until maybe 12:15 in the morning and I caught the first three or four minutes of the movie.
As soon as it started, the opening music disappeared and the film went silent.
I blurted to Mr. Master, “The sound went out.”
“No,” he replied, “it’s supposed to like that.”
The opening two minutes gave me a strong headache, but not because it was bad.
It did not look bad at all.
It looked fascinating, but it was shot and edited like nothing I had ever seen before,
and it was processed like nothing I had ever seen before — or since.
It was the visual quality that was such a shock to my system that I instantly got a headache.
I saw it again a year or so later, as a paying customer, and I am quite sure it was a different print,
with normal processing.
I have in more recent years seen various home-video copies of the movie.
There are several variant versions floating about; I must have seen three or four by now:
there’s an X from 1970 (much later appealed to R);
there’s a shortened R from 1981;
there’s one with much redubbing and someone else dubbing Johnny Shannon (currently on Blu-ray);
there’s one with the original British dialogue;
there’s another with slightly Americanized dialogue;
there’s a DVD that’s nice except that it’s missing a line of dialogue;
there was in 1997 a British VHS that contained material not seen in any other edition;
there was also an earlier, longer, stronger version that seems to have vanished from the face of the earth.
More recently, I saw a newer 35mm print at a museum.
Those videos and that new 35mm print looked NOTHING like what I saw for those few minutes at Donald Pancho’s that midnight.
The colors in that print in October 1975 were extremely saturated, almost ludicrously oversaturated.
The videos and the newer print were almost monochrome in comparison.
I liked that oversaturated look.
I wish I could see it that way again, all the way through.
ANOTHER NOTE ADDED ON 20 OCTOBER 2020:
The next Saturday, the first of November,
was the Albuquerque première of Vittorio De Sica’s A Brief Vacation.
I wanted to see it.
I had never seen a De Sica movie and wanted to try one out.
Alas, no time. I hardly saw more than twenty seconds of it.
I remember that before the show, the young projectionist from The Guild visited and asked me what the show was that night.
I said, A Brief Vacation.
He looked at the projector, which had only a preview reel loaded, and responded,
“That’s only five minutes. It can’t be that brief.”
I think it was that day that the guy started calling Mahetma Yenta, mispronounced Mahetma Yetma, after a character in The Groove Tube.
I think that was the evening when I descended the tiny spiral staircase, but was blocked by this young guy,
who was sitting on a bottom rung with the concessionaire whom he was forever trying and failing to date.
As I tried to get by him, he grabbed me by the waist and rather violently shook me,
“Don’t fall! Don’t fall! Don’t fall!” he said, as I burst out laughing
and as the concessionaire smiled in mild amusement.
This projectionist shall appear again a few paragraphs down and I shall bestow upon him an apt sobriquet.
That midnight was something called
Pink Flamingos,
which I had never heard of.
The box office was giving away tiny little pink paper bags, “Barf Bags,”
for those who would not be able to stomach the proceedings.
I souvenired one and I still have it in storage somewhere, I think.
There is no way such a tiny, porous paper bag could possibly serve such a function.
The box office was also giving out miniature posters for the movie and I still have mine somewhere in storage, I think.
Mr. Master answered my question about Pink Flamingos and he said that yes, absolutely,
it was sickening, disgusting, revolting, so putridly awful that it was rated X even though there was no sex in it.
I took his word for it. Sort of.
A little while later, Mr. Master also summarized the movie for a concessionaire (mother of The Guild’s projectionist;
who would soon become Mr. Master’s mother-in-law),
loudly telling her how sickening, offensive, stomach-churning, disgusting it was,
“and the sex in it! You’ve never seen such disgusting sex!”
Okay. Whatever.
I saw the first twelve minutes and then I had to leave for the night.
It was 16mm enlarged to 35mm and it looked bizarre, certainly.
Edith Massey had an unforgettable face, that’s for sure.
For the sake of completeness, I should point out that in 1975 there was another machine in the Donald Pancho’s booth as well:
a Bell & Howell Filmoarc,
converted to xenon, with the lamphouse repainted wrinkle grey.
I presume that was the contraption that had shown hardcore during the brief Pat Baca reign.
It had once been at The Guild to show The Mouse That Roared and it worked well at that time.
Now it was back at Donald Pancho’s and it was worthless.
Horrible machine.
It overspeeded, drastically, more than double speed, perhaps 60 frames per second — or was it more?
Nobody could figure out what was wrong and nobody thought to take it to an electrician for service.
Instead of getting it repaired,
the projectionists tried to slow it down a bit by wrapping a cloth around the motor’s spindle as tightly as they could.
The machine was not happy about such interference.
It wanted to spin so fast that it would fly to the moon.
Decades later, I discovered the exact same problem with the Bell & Howell Filmoarc at the Frauenthal Theatre in Muskegon, Michigan.
I guess that was a design flaw.
The first few times I visited Mr. Riot Act in the booth of The Guild, he was quite personable.
Then I came to annoy him (in those days, before learning basic social skills, I tended to annoy everybody),
and that is when he decided to freak me out, just for kicks.
So he freaked me out.
He lit up a joint and inhaled deeply, with a look of diabolical bliss.
I had never seen anyone do that before and so I was in a state of infantile panic.
He was laughing uproariously over my reaction, which just prodded him on.
He loved his joints, and, one day, when dropping by Donald Pancho’s for a moment,
Mr. Master invited him to come over to the Bell & Howell Filmoarc.
“Hey, ____, why don’t you take a whiff of that ozone?”
Mr. Riot Act walked right on over, leaned over the open xenon exhaust funnel, took a deep breath, and pretended:
“Ahhhhhhhhhhhhh!” he exclaimed, in ecstasy.
Another memory comes back, now, May 2021.
That rotten 16mm Bell & Howell abomination ran the tedious series of WWII Batman serials for several months,
as a prélude to each midnight show.
One the Friday/Saturday midnights, 8/9 November 1975,
that machine also ran a bunch of cartoons that I wanted to see and stayed to see.
After that Saturday night/Sunday morning, Mr. Master drove me back home.
He told me that he enjoyed driving late at night because he could “run the yellows.”
I had no idea what that meant.
Zo, as he drove me home, he ran all the yellows.
I couldn’t figure out how he timed it that way.
It got me a bit worried, admittedly.
I did not feel nervous, but I also did not feel too comfortable in that passenger seat.
Anyway, a few months later, that B&H machine was gone. Hooray!
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NOTE ADDED ON 16 MAY 2021.
During this season, which was the fall semester of tenth grade,
a fellow student by the name of Tim Steinberg decided to do me a favor.
Tim and I were both in Latin class — you know, the language class in which no instructor so much as speaks a word of the language,
and instructs the students never to speak a word of the language either, and then wonders why we’re not learning anything.
You know, right?
Since I liked projection booths, Tim thought it would be a good idea to drive me over to meet his friend,
Bob Shaffer, at Los Altos Twin.
So, one evening after school, he picked me up from my house (I think) and whizzed us off to the twin screens.
Bob was a good guy. I really liked him.
The building was entirely impersonal.
The booth was entirely impersonal.
Everything was new, antiseptic.
The machines were Imperials from Japan and I think they were the first ones ever imported to the US.
They were partly copies of the Cinemeccanica Victoria 8,
but there were no interchangeable components.
They were all-in-one.
There was absolutely no way to alter the size of the intermittent loop,
to adjust the amount of film between the aperture and the exciter bulb.
That’s why the sound was always out of synchronization, at least three frames out of synchronization.
Always.
Unpreventable.
The four-banded hard-rubber pinch roller left an imprint on every film that ran.
So, if you ever looked at a print and saw four stripes of wear and tear
running the entire length of the film, you knew it had been run on an Imperial.
Running 2,000' reels was not convenient.
The machines were designed to run 8,000' reels only.
The feed reel was almost at floor level.
The film fed upwards, across, and then down again.
Bizarre.
On Screen #1 was
Rooster Cogburn,
and Screen #2 was playing
Mahogany.
I did not watch them, though I could hear the Mahogany soundtrack faintly —
“Do you know where you’re goin’ to, do you like the things that life is showin’ you?” —
oh god that drove me nuts, but it instantly lodged in my head and it too often replays without my asking it to.
I wish it would go away.
What little I saw of those two films looked lifeless compared to the silent comedies I so enjoyed,
lifeless compared with the vibrant films regularly on display at Donald Pancho’s and The Guild.
Newspaper researches reveal that our visit could have been no earlier than
Friday, 7 November 1975, and no later than Thursday, 25 December 1975.
As I think about it and check it against other memories, it had to have been in the first part of November,
probably right around the 7th.
I remember returning to visit at least two more times and still hearing
“Do you know where you’re goin’ to, do you like the things that life is showin’ you?”
coming over the monitor.
Bob, forever puffing away on his pipe, left the entire booth and the films with an unmistakable odor that was,
surprisingly, far from unpleasant.
I kept trying to pick his brain.
He knew a lot of stuff, but there was also a lot of stuff he didn’t know.
He loaned me his ever-expanding collection of Wesley Trout’s Sound and Projection Manual
(if I’m remembering the name and title correctly),
a dittoed periodical that was overflowing with fascinating information.
How much I would love to see that again!
He also got me hooked on Kodak’s upcoming freebie newsletter for projectionists,
which proved to be terribly superficial and which was
Our opinions about movies were diametrically opposed.
He liked simple action flicks.
At that time, I preferred
2001 and
A Clockwork Orange.
He was stunned by my appalling lack of taste,
as he reckoned that those were two of the worst movies he had ever seen.
We couldn’t chat about the films I loved from the 1940’s and earlier, because he had never seen them and had no interest.
We couldn’t chat about the action films he liked, because I had never seen them and had no interest.
Ironically, I no longer like 2001 and A Clockwork Orange and a bunch of the other films that so mesmerized me in those days.
He told me stories of running, I think, the
right-screen projector for
This Is Cinerama
at the Fox Winrock,
which to me was a thousand years before, circa 1962 or 1963, when I was still a toddler.
Of course, for him, it was just yesterday.
So strange how I felt perfectly at home in the 1940’s, in the 1930’s, in the 1920’s in the 1910’s,
in the 1830’s, in the 1760’s, in the Classical world,
but yet the 1950’s and early 1960’s were infinitely far away in the past.
Bob said that his projector was often slightly out of frame, because he was more interested in watching the audience’s physical reactions
than in watching the screen.
Bob never understood what on earth I meant by other apertures, no matter how much I explained it to him.
I also repeatedly mentioned how much I wanted to learn about the projection of silent films.
He looked confused.
He didn’t know what silent films were.
I tried to explain that they were formatted differently, run at different speeds, had a different optical center,
that they had no soundtracks and that the musical accompaniment was by live musicians.
He still looked confused.
So I said, yet again, that I wanted to learn how they were properly projected.
“Are they 35?” he asked me.
“Yes,” I responded.
“Then just put ’em on; they should run.”
“NOOOOOOO!!!!!!!”
Then, one evening, I brought along a few frames from a silent film.
He held the strip.
He looked at it.
He held it up to the light.
He took off his glasses and looked at it again,
and then remarked, “That’s big!!!”
One day, coming in to relieve Bob and take over the evening shift, was Steve Davis, whom I instantly liked.
Like me, he was totally obsessed over movie technology, except he was far more obsessed than I was.
I remember only a few words of their brief conversation and I’m trying to reconstruct it.
What I think prompted it was that he had just spoken with some Hollywood cinematographers,
who said that they absolutely hated composing for a 1:1.85 crop and so they came up with a cheat:
They filled the frame, but instead of choosing tops of heads as a crop line, they chose the eyebrows.
That way the films could still be shown at 1:1.375 and be comfortably filled with faces.
Steve laughed and Bob laughed with him, but I could tell that Bob had no idea what Steve was talking about.
I spoke at length with Steve, too, in the summer of 1978, I think.
I went to Los Altos and bounded up to the booth, without first having thought to ask who was working.
I was sure I would see Bob, but, nope, it was Steve.
I was worried that he would kick me out, but no, not at all, he was thrilled to have a visitor,
and he spent probably four hours answering all manner of my questions,
and also volunteering massive amounts of information about how films are made,
how matte shots and front projections and rear projections are made.
He said he was hoping to purchase his own cinema and, instead of starting by purchasing a plot of land or a building,
he began by purchasing projectors and he insisted on carbon arc, the largest and most powerful carbon arc on the market.
His equipment remained in his garage.
To the best of my knowledge, he never opened his dream cinema.
Too bad.
I would love to have attended.
More than that, I would love to have worked there.
Oh, how could I forget?
One evening, I saw a pair of lens supplements on the inspection bench, and they had slider adjustments.
Were they zoom attachments?
I asked Bob, “What are these?”
“Oh those things! That junk. I couldn’t get any focus out of them at all!”
He told me the story.
He had recently run a film, and I can’t remember the title or not even a memory jog would help.
Anyway, the distributor stipulated in the contract that new apertures must be filed, .351" × .825",
and that the masking must be opened to the anamorphic setting, which at Los Altos was 1:2.35.
The film must be cropped with that smaller aperture, and the zooms must be attached to the prime lenses to enlarge the image.
The result, Bob assured me, was atrocious.
There was no focus at all.
He said that he would hit the Start button and then immediately walk away, because he didn’t want anyone in the auditorium
to turn around and see that he was responsible for the show.
I asked, “Was it the lenses that were bad, or was the print bad?”
He didn’t know, but assumed the problem must have been with the lenses.
“Did you ever run the film with your regular lenses?”
“I threatened to,” he said, but no, he never did.
“Did you ever try the lenses with a different print?”
No, he hadn’t.
“Did the focus change from shot to shot, or reel to reel, or was it consistent?”
His response intrigued me, “There were some moments when it was crystal clear, but most of it was just a blur.”
A ha! There’s the answer! The problem was with the print!
He showed me the literature that came along with the lenses.
The lens attachments were from a new outfit called SuperVision, operated by a Barney Sackett.
Barney’s idea was to save on film stock by printing two reels on one reel, with the frames only two sprockets high, and with a soundtrack on either side.
For instance, the operator would run Reel 1, and instead of rewinding, would simply load it again and run it backwards to present Reel 3.
Well, that might have been a viable idea ten years earlier, before the age of large reels,
but once cinemas had switched to 6,000' and 8,000' reels, the idea was simply unworkable.
Barney, in his promo material, said that he would boggle people’s minds.
He would run a 16mm film on a large screen, and the industry folks in the auditorium would just
There was a telling difference between audiences at Los Altos and audiences at Donald Pancho’s and The Guild, namely,
the auditoriums at Donald Pancho’s and The Guild were usually fairly full,
whereas the auditoriums at Los Altos were always nearly empty.
Each auditorium had maybe 300 seats, but I don’t think I ever saw even 20 of them occupied.
I remember one evening when Bob looked out at the three or four people in the auditorium and remarked,
“That’s not enough people even to pay my salary.”
I was especially amused at the end of
Empire of the Ants.
I took a look at the screen as the flick was drawing to its grand finale.
The rampaging gigantic ants are finally subdued when tanker trucks pull up and spray the creatures with petrol.
The oversized insects are then lit aflame to burst into massive fireballs.
Who on earth would pay to see this excrement?
I looked out at the auditorium and there was one lone woman.
That was it.
Maybe there were one or two others outside my field of vision, but I doubt it.
I asked Bob how on earth the cinema managed to stay in business,
and I think it was he who explained to me about tax
 There was always a downside to this career. |
“Then just put ’em on; they should run.”
That, in a nutshell, exemplifies what is wrong with cinema.
The people in charge of the technical side have no understanding of historical context, no understanding of the artistic side.
Those in charge of the booking, teaching of, writing about film, in charge of managing cinemas, have zero knowledge of the technical side.
But the two sides are the same side!!!!!
There is no difference, unless we artifically split movies down the middle.
The artistic side IS the technical side, and the technical side IS the artistic side.
Kevin Brownlow is one of the rare exceptions who knows both and who sees no difference.
I am the same, and that is why when I attempt to talk about movies with scholars and projectionists and managers,
I end up just talking to a wall.
My words are meaningless to my auditors.
My nerves are much calmer now that I am no longer involved in any way with any cinema,
and now that I no longer attend movies.
The manager of Donald Pancho’s and The Guild was Mark Brown, who was always good to me.
He was relaxed, intelligent, thoughtful, funny, and just a good decent guy, a genuinely good guy.
On Thursday night, 20 November 1975, he recorded a phone greeting,
and I do not know why I called on Friday or on Saturday morning, but I did, and I heard his phone greeting,
which threw me off balance for a moment.
Instead of the usual, “Thank you for calling Don Pancho’s Art Theatre. Our presentation tonight is....”
Oh no, that’s not what he did for this show.
He put on a nervous, panic-stricken voice:
“Hello? Hello???!!! This is Donald Pancho’s Art Theatre.
I’m sorry, but this week we’re presenting
Monty Python and the Holy Grail....”
I laughed so hard when I heard that and that’s when I started calling the place Donald rather than Don.
I called numerous times so that I could transcribe his greeting.
I might still have that transcription somewhere in storage.
Hope I do.
When I arrived on the afternoon of Saturday, 22 November, I suggested that Mrs. A listen.
She did, and she laughed, not raucously, but gently, and when Mark’s recording called the place “Donald,”
she chuckled: “Donald!”
NOTE ADDED ON SATURDAY, 27 MARCH 2021:
Oh yes! I had a surprise.
On Saturday, 6 December 1975, I was surprised to hear Mr. Master raving loudly about the midnight flick that Friday/Saturday.
It was
Superfly and he could not contain himself.
Unlike the other movies that Donald Pancho’s normally booked,
this one actually had a story!
It was actually entertaining!
He was beside himself with ecstasy and enthusiasm.
I was the perfect irritation.
The managers and projectionists wanted to be LEFT ALONE FOR GOODNESS’ SAKE! but I was always back to get on their nerves.
They complained to the owner and even one of the ticket gals (the mother of one of the projectionists) complained to the owner.
So, the owner came by on a Saturday night to have a word with me.
He was pleasant, gracious, friendly, and understanding, but he did want an assurance that I would soon be gone, because his guys wanted to work in peace.
I asked if I could show up just three more times.
Yes, he said, three, but no more.
I dragged out those three more Saturdays by skipping a week.
My third Saturday was four Saturdays later.
I promised, when I entered, that it would be my very last Saturday and that they could have their privacy again.
It was a nearly full house.
The show was the 1931 Frankenstein double featured with
Young Frankenstein.
I bungled a Young Frankenstein change-over , getting about a half-second of black leader on screen.
An instant later, the owner bounded up the spiral stairs in extreme anxiety.
We had not known he was in the audience.
He immediately grabbed a screwdriver and adjusted the exciter, which was out of alignment and reading sprocket holes, resulting in a very slight hum.
That problem was undetectable from the booth.
He was horrified — and furious — to see that I was back.
He asked the projectionist what had gone wrong with the change-over.
I confessed, happily (childishly, stupidly) explaining that I had merely overcompensated for the usual poor timing of change-overs.
He blew his stack.
“You’re never supposed to experiment on a Saturday night!”
That was the final straw.
Okay. I couldn’t blame them.
I was actually worried that I might have gotten the projectionist into trouble and maybe the ticket/concession staff too.
The irony is that I found Young Frankenstein to be a dreadfully unfunny movie.
Yes, yes, yes, I know, everybody else on the planet thinks it divine, but it was awful.
Altogether, I apprenticed on thirteen Saturday nights at Donald Pancho’s,
and at The Guild only that once, just for ten minutes on a Saturday afternoon.
The regular projectionist at The Guild, who initially found me amusing and who urged me “Don’t fall!”
(the one who had repaired the opening of
The Mouse That Roared and who had also laced up a movie even though he didn’t know the start time),
now wanted to tear me limb from limb and his mother at the concession stand felt the same.
They made no secret of their feelings.
“Mr. Master said I should take a lesson from you.”
“Oh, he did, did he?” growled the young guy through clenched teeth.
He said that in a playful way and so I took it as a joke and chuckled.
He was not being playful.
He pulled out a signed-and-countersigned directive from HQ stating that there were to be no visitors to the booth under any circumstances.
So much for that lesson.
It was in the autumn of 1975 that I learned that thirteen nights was twelve and a half too many.
I hereby call this young projectionist Mr. Riot Act.
Oh, I just remembered something else.
A friend attended a weekend matinée at Donald Pancho’s, circa 1976, and told me what happened that day.
As he was purchasing a ticket at the box-office window, a small car drove on the sidewalk right in front of the cinema,
honking its horn madly, as someone in the passenger seat mooned the folks inside the cinema through an open window.
The car immediately turned to park in the lot to the house left of the cinema.
From what my friend described of the car and of the two or three people who emerged from the little parking lot,
I could easily determine that the driver was Mr. Riot Act and that the car was his.
I laughed out loud at the story, but I had to remember that this was yet another example of the employees there
who argued that I was the irritating and immature little kid.
Movie, Inc., also opened the downtown Screening Room Twin underground in the First Plaza Galería on Friday, 13 February 1976.
Now, for the Screening Room, Movie, Inc., and the IATSE-MPMO Local 480 worked out a contract.
(IATSE = International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees; MPMO = Motion Picture Machine Operators.)
I know no details and I do not know who organized the place or why or how.
Oh, wait a minute.
It comes back to me.
I do know who organized it:
Mr. Master and Mr. Riot Act themselves!
I remember, circa October 1975, when Mr. Master was in the Donald Pancho’s booth,
and my vague impression after all these years of not having thought about it all,
was that he was munching on a hamburger as he was saying this.
He told me that he had just visited the new
Louisiana Mall Cinema I II III to chat with the union rep.
The Louisiana Mall (on Tuesday, 21 December 1976,
its name was changed to Louisiana Blvd. Cinema I II III)
was Albuquerque’s first triplex.
Mr. Master mused about how the guy there would surely lose a lot
of weight running laps from one machine to the next all day long.
Yeah, so they were the two. Ahhhhh.
What I do know is that the IATSE-MPMO was closed-shop , more like the mob than a labor union.
You wanted a job as a projectionist?
You had to apply to the union, not to the cinema.
Cinemas did not hire projectionists and then have them join the union.
Oh no.
Cinemas had no say in hiring.
The MPMO supplied the employees and there was to be no argument.
As for how qualified those employees were, I can leave it to you, based upon what you have read thus far, to make that determination yourselves.
To get into the IATSE and/or MPMO generally required that your uncle or your daddy sponsor you in.
If you didn’t have an uncle or a daddy who was a union member, you were probably out of luck.
No jobs for you. Get lost.
I admit, most of the union guys were nice to me and treated me with courtesy,
and I had nothing but respect for the business agent, Rudy Napoleone.
I applied, but it did no good.
The market was shrinking and so I stood no chance.
Many or most projectionists and stage-hands had full-time jobs elsewhere, I think.
The projection and stage work was just extra pocket change.
Bob Shaffer’s day job, for instance, was in law enforcement,
but I can’t remember who all had what day jobs.
Surprisingly, when the Screening Room was organized, the MPMO acquired two new dues-paying members!
Further, these two new dues-paying members had no uncles or daddies to sponsor them in!
Mr. Master and Mr. Riot Act were now proud union members.
Amazing.
Even more amazing was that, a year later, Mr. RRE also got a union job.
Then, in early 1978, yet
another Donald Pancho’s projectionist,
minus any connections of which I am aware, also somehow got into the MPMO.
Unheard of, but it happened!
And when that happened, my life changed.
Text: Copyright © 2019–2021, Ranjit Sandhu.
Images: Various copyrights, but reproduction here should qualify as fair use.
If you own any of these images, please contact me.
Images: Various copyrights, but reproduction here should qualify as fair use.
If you own any of these images, please contact me.