A union projectionist who was approaching retirement, together with one who had just retired,
recommended me to the managers of a new non-union eight-plex.
Those managers, you see, had just switched jobs from the union house at which those two projectionists had worked.
So in about the first week of December 1991, I got a call out of the blue, and I took the job.
I wish I hadn’t.
When I signed my papers, I realized that there was going to be trouble.
The head manager, who had me sign those papers, mentioned that he would have a lot of trouble
when it came to calling people in to work on Christmas, because any scheduling he would do would seem to be unfair favoritism.
I lit up and said, “Oh! That’s easy! I’ll tell you how —”
and he cut me off, not wanting to hear my idea.
We three projectionists were all called in, I think, on Thursday morning, 12 December 1991, a day before the
grand opening.
Why?
So that the circuit’s tech could introduce us to the machines.
One by one throughout that long day, various police offers would come in to patrol the building,
and they frequently walked the entire length of the booth.
Bizarre.
Our trainer mentioned that Super Saver had been growing, and had most recently acquired the Far North in Albuquerque,
and I think I recall him saying that the Far North was the new base of operations.
“The Far North?” I exclaimed in surprise.
He ignored me.
Our trainer seemed to be in his seventies, and he had his ideas.
He told us off for running Screen 8 out of focus.
Actually, every time I had walked by that machine, I adjusted the focus, because it kept drifting.
“I’ve been adjusting it. This print has
focus drift.”
He snapped at me: “Focus does not drift!”
We ran that film (I don’t remember which) for another few weeks,
and I had to adjust the focus every few minutes, because
it constantly drifted.
He asked us what kinds of machines we had worked on in the past.
I could answer.
One of the others could only say, “I don’t know.”
A prompt: “Simplex? Century? Norelco?”
He didn’t know.
“Did they have a big knob on the gate?”
“Yeah.”
“They were Century!”
The consoles were by Cinema Film Systems of Arizona (a so-called
“Right to Work” state)
and the combo picture/sound heads were by
Monee, a company in India.
They were copies of Century/Westrex/Westar, but oh gawd were they cheap!
Breathe on the things and they’d crumble.
Where Century/Westrex/Westar would have thick, heavy, hardened-steel bolts,
these stupid Monee knock-offs had dinky little pot-metal set screws.
One of the heads (Screen #2) had a base that was machined incorrectly, about a tenth of an inch too wide,
which pushed a drive gear apart from the shutter shaft, and so holding the shutter shaft tight was impossible.
It bounced all over the place and got travel ghost on screen.
Impossible to fix.
As for the consoles, the manual override was connected in series with the automation
so that if the automation failed, the manual override would not function.
That’s sort of like making sure that the emergency exit can’t be closed when things are okay,
but that it instantly locks if there’s a fire.
What drunken numbskulls designed this junk?
Our trainer took us to machine #3 and told us the background story of these Monee machines.
He said Monee was a copy of
Century, which, in turn, had been an American copy of the British Westrex.
He told us that Monee was legal, though, because the Century patents had expired, which I think was correct.
The bit about Century being a copy of Westrex didn’t sound right to me.
I checked his claim later on, and he had it backwards.
Westrex was a licensed British copy of Century.
Oh well. That’s not a big deal.
It got to be a bigger deal when he pulled out the igniter (I think) from the lamp.
He said that to get it in and out we needed a special Allen wrench,
that the usual English and metric wrenches would not work.
This required a British Allen wrench, he said, which was not easy to find.
He was wrong.
It was metric.
He told us never to replace that part without doing what, boys and girls?
What do we do first?
He pulled out a screwdriver and touched it to both leads to drain the capacitor, a term he did not tell us.
He said that unless we did that, the machines would fry.
Again, he was wrong.
There was no need to drain the capacitor.
Our trainer asked us which side of the film faced the lamphouse, the base or the emulsion.
I was the only one who knew the answer.
He then told us how to cure hot-spotting.
I couldn’t see how, because there were no knobs or other controls to adjust the reflectors.
He demonstrated.
To adjust a reflector, you needed to open the lamphouse door, defeat the safety switch,
loosen the four bolts holding the reflector in place,
turn on the blinding xenon bulb,
and then, with your hands, move the reflector around until the light on screen was even.
As soon as he opened the lamp door, I stepped back.
Far back.
This was DANGEROUS!
Did he not know how dangerous this was?
Somebody expected me to do that?
Oh, why don’t I just test this electric chair by sitting in it and pulling the switch?
Totally insane.
He explained the ATTENTION statement affixed to the lamps, warning of exposure to radiation.
He told us not to worry, because that wasn’t “nucyuler” radiation, but only
“harmless” ultraviolet radiation.
He was content that he had fixed all the hot-spotting, but he hadn’t.
All eight machines hot-spotted, and I had no intention of doing anything about it.
Do you begin to see why I hate “Right to Work”?
I asked him why there was a necessity of running the framing all the way up and down before each show.
After all, with Brenkert and Simplex, we just leave the framing alone unless there’s a problem.
“These aren’t Brenkert and these aren’t Simplex!” he snapped.
“That’s why I’m asking!” I snapped back.
He opened the gear side of the mechanism and showed me why that was necessary.
My heavens! What a lousy design!
All the machines were set only with 1:1.85 and undercut 1:2.35, and so I asked this guy
about where the other lenses were.
“There are no other lenses. This is enough!” he barked.
“But then we’ll be cropping the films.”
He barked again: “We do NOT crop the films!”
“No, I mean, when we get films that are 1.66 or 1.375 or something like that, we need different setups.”
“Oh we don’t care about any of that!” he barked again.
What a grouch.
He left town that night or the next day and I never saw him again.
And I never wanted to see him again.
I just now plugged his name into Newspapers.com but found only a whole bunch of other guys with his name.
Can’t find him.
I guess he just evaporated and nobody ever noticed.
I decided that this place was going to be trouble.
I phoned International Cinema Equipment in Florida and asked about zoom extenders.
Yup, they had ’em, and I could get one for $150, no guarantee.
I bought it.
Perfect condition.
I had a small collection of lenses (where I got them, and why, I do not remember — oh, wait, yes I do!; what a story!),
and so I knew that when we got a film that desperately needed a larger aperture,
I could plop my own lenses onto the machine and rescue the show.
Except that I couldn’t.
Outside equipment was strictly verboten.
The Woody Woodpecker cartoon that preceded one movie just wouldn’t fit.
Action was simultaneously at the top and bottom, and there was nothing I could do to help.
Then we got Fievel Goes West, which was definitely shot for Academy 1:1.375,
but was cropped to 1:1.85 on the printer.
The cropping was horrid, but even with proper equipment, there was nothing I could have done about it.
On the off-chance that anybody in the audience would notice that something was wrong,
at the beginning of the movie I framed up a little bit to show the black bar,
and then I framed down a little bit to show the other black bar.
Then I centered it again.
Oh, those Monee heads had another problem too:
Whenever you turned the framing knob, the shutter went out of time.
Brilliant.
I don’t even know how that physically could happen, but it did.
Framing and shutter are entirely separate controls, unrelated, and how one could influence the other remains a mystery to me.
The worthless platters were, if memory serves, from
Potts.
I could be wrong about that, though.
I detest all platters, but my memory was that we got the worst of all.
Projector #6 was not pointing at the screen, but at the house-left wall.
The guy who had installed the machine did not do the simple thing and point the machine straight.
Oh, no, that would never do.
He simply adjusted the lens holder to shift to the right.
When I saw that, I understood that the corporation that ran this cinema deserved to go out of business.
The picture head in Screen 3 would not hold the image steady unless we turned up the gate tension as high as it would go.
If we did not do that, the image wobbled and jittered all over the place.
I knew this was going to break, and I knew that I could do nothing to prevent it.
I began my tenure there with a mistake.
Management printed out for us a list of all the show times each day,
but in sequence by screen, not in sequence by time.
The lists were something like this:
|
SCREEN 1 Let’s Melt the Simplex! 1:50 5:40 9:20 |
SCREEN 2 The Flaming Duck Exploded 1:20 5:50 9:10 |
|
SCREEN 3 We Don’t Need a Mono Card 12:55 3:15 5:35 7:55 10:10 |
SCREEN 4 Yeah, I Don’t Know What to Do about That 1:00 3:05 5:10 7:15 9:20 |
|
SCREEN 5 Let’s Bomb the Van without a Motive 1:40 4:20 7:30 10:00 |
SCREEN 6 It Looks Fine, Man 1:30 4:40 7:35 10:00 |
|
SCREEN 7 Arson for Fun and Profit 1:05 4:05 7:00 9:50 |
SCREEN 8 A Shortage at the Bingo Parlor 1:10 3:15 5:30 7:35 9:50 |
The other guys looked at that and instantly saw what was coming up next.
No prob. No confusion.
My mind doesn’t work that way.
All I see is a jumble of numbers.
So, on my very first day I completely forgot to start the show on Screen 6.
The assistant manager was not furious, but she was not happy, either.
From that time on, I rewrote all those memos from management and put them into order by time, not by screen:
|
12:55 1:00 1:05 1:10 1:20 1:30 1:40 1:50 3:05 3:15 3:15 4:05 4:20 4:40 5:10 5:30 5:35 5:40 5:50 7:00 7:15 7:30 7:35 7:35 7:55 9:10 9:20 9:20 9:50 9:50 10:00 10:00 10:10 |
3 4 7 8 2 6 5 1 4 3 8 7 5 6 4 8 3 1 2 7 4 5 6 8 3 2 1 4 7 8 5 6 3 |
I posted such lists at the work bench and by every porthole.
Nobody else needed that.
Nobody.
The others saw no need for it.
Other people definitely have abilities that I do not have.
By the way, I had met the head manager at a previous cinema.
He was cordial and laughed easily and got along (or pretended to get along)
with his crew.
I had heard tell of one of the assistant managers, and her reputation was sterling.
The masks fell off at Super Saver.
There was nothing friendly about them at all.
The young projectionist who had said “I don’t know” was a really nice guy.
He told me once about how much he missed his girlfriend, who had left him.
He told me her name, and I was floored.
I knew her!
She was the daughter of a gal I worked with in my day job!
The next time I gave the gal a lift home,
I mentioned, “So tell me about _____ _____.”
She was startled.
“Why are you saying this?”
She really liked him, and she said that her daughter really liked him, too.
That didn’t explain why she dumped him, but I didn’t pry.
I tried to be friendly at that place, but almost nobody else tried.
The time clock was in the middle of the booth, and I would watch the changing of the guards.
As the dozen or so janitors and candy concessionaires and ticket takers marched past me,
I would say, “Hi!” “How ya doin’?” “Nice day today,”
“Good to see you again,” “Whatcha up to these days?”
“Good day at work?”
and they all completely ignored me and pretended I didn’t exist.
One day, the friendly young projectionist witnessed that, and said to me,
“It’s not you.
They treat us all that way.”
That made me sad, especially because some of those folks seemed to be nice.
I suspected that they had been instructed, in no uncertain terms,
never so much as to say Hi to a projectionist.
There was one usher, extremely tall, with an extremely deep, booming voice, who was not afraid to talk to the projectionists.
As a matter of fact, he enjoyed coming up to shout at us and tell us off.
For instance, we were running
Hook on Screen #1.
I was about to start the movie, but I could see that the audience were still streaming in.
It was a good idea to hold off until everybody was seated.
So this giant with the thunderous voice stormed in to bellow at me,
“IT’S TIME TO START THE MOVIE!!! YOU’RE LATE!!!!!”
“They’re still comin’ in,” I replied softly.
There was a gal who also broke that rule, and in contradistinction to the giant,
she was really jovial, but only when the supervisors weren’t looking.
She never dared utter more than two or three sentences before she dashed off.
There was another gal who seemed really nice, who seemed to be the friendliest employee of all, and she had an Arabian name.
I really liked her name and thought it sounded exceptionally beautiful.
I just now looked it up on the Internet.
Her given name means “grapevine.”
Her family name means “one who guides others.”
I assume that those definitions are from Classical Arabic, not Modern.
She was downright terrified of me.
Well, people who have Arabian names and people who have names like mine tend not to mix too well,
but I had no interest in those stupid old feuds.
My guess (only a guess) is that she may have lived through those stupid old feuds.
Come Christmas Day, I was perfectly willing to work, both shifts,
without even asking for holiday pay.
I don’t celebrate Christmas. Ever.
It means nothing to me.
Instead, Super Saver gave me a holiday that day,
and scheduled the young guy to work that day, the whole day, both shifts,
if memory serves, and he did celebrate Christmas and was frustrated
that he would have to miss seeing his extended family that day.
I would gladly have swapped with him, but we had no such opportunity.
Anyway, the young projectionist was having troubles.
The films he mounted kept on breaking.
I taught him how to inspect films.
He began inspecting films, but he was in pain from all the electrical shocks.
I told him about static electricity, and I told him how to ground himself.
He almost always started the films out of frame, and there was not enough motion in the framing mechanism to set them right.
I taught him how to lace the films up in frame.
He was asking questions, he was learning, and so I was impressed.
The next thing I knew, he was gone.
He resigned.
So I suggested that a friend apply to replace him.
No! No no no no no. No! That’s not what happened.
My memory was playing a trick on me.
Right after grand opening, the managers said they wanted a fourth projectionist,
and so I referred them to my buddy,
who quickly became friends with the young projectionist.
They kept in touch after the young guy left.
Sheesh.
Why does memory fail?
Why does memory invent?
Why does memory mix things up?
Why does memory later correct itself and flood back?
Whenever I came in for an evening shift,
I would wait until the matinée projectionist left,
and then waited a minute or so more to make sure he didn’t come back up the staircase.
Then I dashed from one screen to the other.
Every one of them was misframed and travel ghosting, always, every time, and a few were usually out of focus, too.
The worst example was The People under the Stairs.
The actors’ scalps were at the bottom of the screen.
Above them was just wall and ceiling.
I framed that immediately, and wondered if anyone was in the auditorium.
Yes, about 30 or 35 people.
Not one of them had complained.
I wondered if the movie had just started, and so I looked at the platter.
We were on the last reel.
What could I say?
 Unidentified film, shot |
 Correctly cropped to 1:1.85. |
 As misframed at too many cinemas. |
 As misframed at too many cinemas. |
 A nice glass-lantern slide from the 1910’s. On the |
The head manager decided that we projectionists were not busy enough, and so he gave us a new assignment:
Unfold popcorn boxes, thousands and thousands and thousands of popcorn boxes, every moment when we were not tending to the machines.
Great! So I get my oily hands on popcorn boxes. Lovely.
One day a platter disc failed, and so I had to move the film down to the next platter disc.
I had to start the show maybe five minutes late.
The head manager was furious: “Because of you, we’re going to have to pay everyone overtime tonight.”
Total lie. Other shows ended well after that particular movie.
I never cost the company one second of overtime.
Another perpetual problem was the disappearing tool box.
The floor crew kept walking off with it, and so when I needed to make adjustments
or pull parts out for cleaning, I couldn’t.
The head manager gave me an earful for not adjusting a machine,
and so I told him that the tool box was missing again, as usual.
He denied that completely: “No one ever takes the tool box!” he adamantly insisted.
Not too helpful, was he?
One of the cue readers was malfunctioning, and so I asked the head manager when he normally arrived, and he said noon.
I said, good, if I can get here at noon, I’ll see if I can clean that cue reader.
As it turned out, I had too many other obligations, and could not arrive as early as noon.
When I did arrive, there was the head manager, glaring at me.
“I was waiting for you since eleven o’clock ’cuz you said you’d be here early.”
I was a bit startled. “Oh, I’m sorry.”
Before I could say more, he growled, “So am I.”
Oh, how could I forget? The best anecdote of all!
During one week, the only film that was doing good business was
The Fisher King.
It sold out most showings, and nearly sold out the rest.
It was doing more business than all the other seven screens put together.
That surprised me, because it was a really good movie.
Movies that are really good generally do not do much business at a mainstream commercial house.
But hey, it did, and I was thrilled.
Management had stuck it into our smallest auditorium, Screen 8.
That’s why it kept on selling out.
There were not enough seats in Auditorium 8 to hold all the people who wanted to buy tickets.
An assistant manager phoned corporate HQ to request permission to move The Fisher King to Screen 1, our largest auditorium,
so that the box office would not have to turn people away anymore.
The assistant manager quoted for me HQ’s eloquent response:
“We don’t want that high-class crap in our theatre!!!!
Get rid of it!!!!!!!!”
So, after a mere week, we shipped it out, and did lousy business not merely on seven screens, but on all eight.
Brilliant. Brilliant. Brilliant.
That single quotation, which I am certain was verbatim, encapsulated for me show business in its entirety.
After maybe three months, maybe a little less, I submitted my resignation, with a one-month notice.
The perpetually grouchy head manager said he would accept my resignation immediately and that I was not to return.
And what did this dream job pay?
Just a few pennies above minimum wage.
I felt that I had embarrassed the two union guys who had recommended me.
The head manager respected those two guys, and they got along with him.
That was entirely contrary to the head manager’s behavior at the eight-plex,
where he respected no inferiors and whose every word was hostile.
He was simply an insecure little bully, nothing more, nothing less.
My path never again crossed with those two union guys. Too bad.
Oh, I should mention that one of the projectionists loaned me
a 16mm film on the making of The Poseidon Adventure,
and I never returned it because the manager didn’t want me back.
I don’t even know how to reach the guy.
If you happen to read this, give me a holler
and I’ll get it back to you.
So, the nice young guy was gone.
Then I got the boot.
That left only two projectionists.
After I got the boot, my buddy had an experience.
A few minutes before a show, he opened the porthole window and stuck his head out.
Some young girls, probably eight or ten years old, giggled.
“Hey, look! There’s a guy up there! Hi!”
My buddy said “Hi,” and the girls asked if they could visit with him.
“No, I’m busy,” and he shut the window and got back to work.
A little while later, a manager called for him to go down to the lobby.
(A manager should NEVER ask a projectionist to leave the booth during a show.)
Down in the lobby was a daddy, trembling and red with rage,
“WHAT ARE YOU DOING TO MY GIRL? WHAT ARE YOU DOING TO MY GIRL?”
Daddy was under the ludicrous impression that my buddy had agreed to meet the girls in a back lot after the show.
My buddy was fired on the spot.
There was only one projectionist left, the one who had loaned me his 16mm print on the making of The Poseidon Adventure.
That is when Super Saver suddenly signed a union contract.
My buddy’s replacement?
A union projectionist whom I had known from the
Boulevard Mall Cinema I-II-III-IV .
Well, he was a good guy, I thought, and since the managers respected him,
maybe they would believe him when he told them the same things I had told them.
They never believed me.
Would they now change their tune?
Not at all long after my buddy got the boot, he phoned me.
That must have been on Saturday, 6 June 1992.
He asked if I had read the day’s Buffalo News.
No, I said, I had not.
So he read me an article about the projectionist who had replaced him.
Turns out that, back in August 1991, he had raped an 11-year-old girl in the projection booth of the
Boulevard Mall Cinema I-II-III-IV .
After the first few sentences, I blurted out something like,
“Oh baloney!
I’m so sick and tired of that accusation.
You know as well as I do that it’s almost never true.
Everybody is accusing everybody of that these days!
Sheesh, granddaddies getting arrested for playing Patty Cake Patty Cake Baker’s Man with their grandkids.
I don’t even want to hear anymore.
Enough already!”
My buddy said something like,
“Hold on a minute. Let me read you the whole thing.”
He continued reading the article, straight through to the end, and my heart sank.
This was not one of those phony claims.
The account was definitive.
The guy confessed, pleaded guilty, was jailed, and was apologetic.
See
“Projectionist Pleads Guilty in Sex Assault,”
The Buffalo News, 30 April 1992;
“Man Admits Guilt in Abuse of 2 Children,”
The Buffalo News, 5 May 1992;
“Sex Offender Jailed for Weekends, Theater Employee Sentenced in Molesting of Girl, 11,”
The Buffalo News, 6 June 1992
(the online version is abridged, by the way; the print version had much more information).
The sentence was laughably lenient: five months of weekends in jail, followed by a five-year probation.
If his complexion had been darker, he’d still be locked up.
He had a light complexion and an Anglo name, and so he had special dispensation.
He did not lose his job.
He was still employed and still in the MPMO.
The cinema in which the crime took place did not give him the heave-ho.
The cinema in which the crime took place, by the way,
had been managed at that time (August 1991) by the manager and two assistant managers who so indignantly fired my buddy from Super Saver.
So much for any claims of propriety.
The MPMO allowed him to remain a member in good standing.
Appalling.
When the management of Super Saver so indignantly fired my buddy for a crime that never happened, whom did they hire to replace him?
The criminal they had kept on payroll at a previous cinema.
He was my buddy’s replacement.
There are no words for this.
I was just glad that I was out of Super Saver.
I was sorry that I had accepted that job in the first place.
I was now glad that I had never been admitted to the MPMO.
I truly hope that the 11-year-old emerged relatively unscathed and is now doing well.
Lenient.
Let me ponder something.
Murder charges against John Servizio were dropped, with barely an investigation.
Other charges against him were not even made, despite all the evidence repeatedly pointing directly to him.
Why?
Complexion.
The sentence for the projectionist who sexually assaulted a child at his workplace?
Almost nothing.
He didn’t even lose his job over it.
Why?
Complexion.
If those two had been of Méxican descent, or African descent, or Middle Eastern descent,
they would never have gotten out alive.
So, why was my buddy, with a light complexion and a somewhat standard name, fired for absolutely nothing?
The bosses just didn’t like him.
That’s all.
They were searching for a pretext, and they found one.
So they replaced him with a known criminal, because they liked that known criminal.
And that tells me everything I need to know about that entire corporation.
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.