Last Projection Job

Chapter 44
My Very Last Projection Job

By now, I was tired of working in cinemas and theatres. Most of the people were sour mean-spirited nasty bullies with perennial temper tantrums, and they were fiercely proud of their ignorance. Should I apply at the Frauenthal? That would be a really nice job. I would enjoy it there. I had every intention of applying, but then I learned that Tom Harryman had just retired. Blast it all! I should have applied anyway, but I wanted to apply directly to Tom, not to somebody else. I decided that, if by some miracle I could ever get rich, I would purchase my own theatre just as a hobby, not as a business. Other than that, no, I didn’t want to work in theatre or cinema anymore. Then something unexpected happened.

I was working at the office and the phone rang, as it tiresomely did all day long and into the night. I picked it up and I immediately recognized the voice. I had been in the audience some years earlier as she introduced a number of Louise Brooks movies at the museum, and again when she hosted a series of silent-movie sirens. For the most part, I hold film historians in low regard. Kevin Brownlow is the towering exception, of course, and there are a few others who are knowledgeable and thoughtful. This gal was one of them. I was quite impressed by her. She knew her topic inside-out, she was well-spoken and intelligent, she was gracious, and she seemed entirely likeable. She introduced herself, but I told her that she didn’t need to, because I knew exactly who she was. She told me what she did, and I told her that I knew perfectly well what she did. Then she told me that she was involved in a film series at a downtown eight-plex, that she needed help with getting professional 16mm equipment, and that someone (who???) had recommended me. I had to confess that 16mm is not my specialty, but I could surely find someone for her, and asked what sorts of movies she was running. She mentioned a few intriguing titles, and said that the first two films had shown already. “All the films are 16mm?” No, she said, most are in 35mm. I cried out, “But they have only American widescreen!” Her response was immediate and despairing: “Tell me about it! They’ve been cropping the films.” “You want me to fix that for you?” “Oh, could you?”

My life changed again. I had no desire to work in cinema or theatre again. I was sick and tired of the whole profession and of all the dangerous crooks in it. Had it been anybody else who had called, I would most likely have referred that person to someone else. But for this gal, and probably only for this gal, I felt compelled to say Yes.

The eight-plex was a non-union house. Had it been a union house, I would never have been allowed even to suggest a change. I refused to be put on payroll, because I could no longer trust any cinema. I wanted the freedom to leave without anybody having any hold over me, without needing to list the job on a résumé, without needing to use the employer as a reference. Why should I have gotten paid, anyway? All I would do was supply lenses and apertures, plop them into the machines a few minutes before showtime, and then enjoy a nice movie for free in return. So everything would be hunky-dory. Then, not too long afterwards, I saw the projectionists receive a print from the exchange (I think it was Touch of Evil) and immediately wind it onto the Screen 1 platter. “Hey, wait! What are you doing? Don’t you inspect the film first?” They looked at me blankly. They had no clue what I was talking about. “Take that back off the platter. I’ll inspect it.” So I started doing inspections, whenever I could, and brought along my own 6,000' hand rewinder and Ciro deluxe 8-perf splicer together with rolls of my own splicing tape. After my regular job, I would drive over to spend an evening shift hammering those battered prints into projectable condition. Then I discovered that nobody was minding the machines even during the specialty shows. So I started minding the machines during the specialty shows. Before I knew it, this was almost a full-time job. I had been doing research on local history for several years, for a planned pair of books, but that project now came to a crashing halt. A year later, I was totally worn down. I had completely forgotten that I had insisted on not getting paid, and so now I begged for some sort of compensation. Dumb. Dumb. Dumb. Sometimes I’m just so darned dumb. Dumb and senile. Without meaning to, I managed to insult and anger everybody with that request. Nonetheless, they paid me a few hundred in honoraria, which was nice, but off the books, which is how I wanted it. I wanted plausible deniability.

It’s funny to look through those film schedules now. I don’t remember half of those movies being in that series. I’m surprised to see them on the schedule. I must have been there. I must have watched them. Total blank. Amnesia. I certainly don’t remember inspecting more than a few of those titles. There are only a few I remember running through my hands on the inspection bench, and I remember them only because of one or two peculiarities in each. The first was Touch of Evil, of course, a pretty good movie, especially considering that it was based on a slapdash script. I remember that it had bromide drag, or, at least, some developer fault that resembled bromide drag. That is so painfully common when new prints are made of old black-and-white movies. Gold Diggers of 1933 (with the great Ned Sparks) still had some of the Part Titles, which I showed on screen. Once upon a Time in the West (magnificent, despite its deplorably sexist attitude problems) was missing an entire scene, obviously damaged and deleted by a previous projectionist. It included Harmonica picking himself up after being shot and improvising a sling, even though director Sergio Leone had deleted that brief sequence just prior to release, to make the narrative a little more elliptical. The way Leone re-edited it at the very last moment, the sounds of the gun battle cut directly to the sound of McBain’s rifle. What had happened at the gun battle would become clear in the tavern scene, when we see Harmonica’s bullet wound. As ever over these past 30+ years, the opening and closing credits were misprinted, stretched, which was not true of the original US prints of 1969 (though the releases in Germany and other countries really were stretched in the original releases). Obviously, the credits were shot with spherical lenses, but the modern restoration crew, without access to the original instructions, assumed that the credits were meant to be transferred with anamorphics. That drives me totally nuts. When the title wheels away at the end, it wrongly describes an oval rather than a circle. The end music was changed. The crescendoing “Jill’s Theme” suddenly disappears and is replaced by a tinny-sounding dub of “Cheyenne’s Theme,” and I have no idea why. That wrecked the point: What had started as a gunfighter story had slowly evolved to become Jill’s story, a story of nurturing; Cheyenne, Harmonica, and Frank all understood that their time was over, and they were now nothing more than memories receding into the past. So, who bloody changed the music, and why? why? why? I enjoyed looking at the film as it was running through my hands, because there were no frame lines at all. The bottom of every frame touched the top of the next. That was the first and only time I had run a film derived from a Techniscope master, and Dennis Carey of Cheektowaga (a technician who happened to be in the audience that night) explained to me that, yes, anamorphic prints of Techniscope originals have no frame lines at all. He had seen the film on its original US release at the Center (carved out of Shea’s Hippodrome) and was overwhelmed. He decided to see it again after it moved over to another house, and he was appalled that it had been mutilated. He visited the projection booth to run through the reels, and saw that the leaders had been scribbled through at the lab and that new reel numbers had been written on the negative by hand. It was Dennis who assured me that, yes, my memory was correct, in the original, the credits were not stretched, and the wheeling end title described a circle, not an oval. I was looking for evidence of negative resplicing in The General (captivatingly beautiful, hilarious, and adrenalin-inducing), but saw nothing, other than a few optical illusions that vanished once I enlarged the images. For Pandora’s Box (utterly hypnotic), which was full-frame Silent, I used my car’s jackscrew to lift the projector and point it to the right, and I was irritated that I could not slow the motor down to 75' or 80'/minute. I was also irritated that some of the titles in the restoration were missing or entirely mistranslated. We were stuck at 90'/minute, which was just way too fast, and we were stuck with incorrect titles. I gave everybody in the audience a list of the incorrect and missing titles side by side with the correct ones. We sold out that night and had to turn people away. Il conformista surprised me by being 1:1.66. (Did not care for that movie at all, as it was all too obvious. Maybe I just missed the point. I’ll try it again someday.) In Don’t Look Now (richly beautiful), I examined the censored section quite carefully, seeing how each shot of the scene was reframed differently, which was plainly evident on the print, but invisible on screen. I ran it open matte, 1:1.375, to get as much of the deleted image on screen as possible. That resulted, of course, in four of five shots with black bars at the top and bottom. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (worse than a kindergarten production) I remember only because my friend Ed Summer wanted to see what 1:1.66 in the camera looked like. I walked him up to the booth and showed him a sample. Dr. Strangelove (cream of the crop) I remember because the reel ends were all shattered, and, rather than cause further damage and risk further breaks, I included a few frames of black leader and tail between reels. Also, even from the booth, I could see something on screen that I could never see on video. One of the manuals on the table in front of General Buck Turgidson had a cover or maybe a spine that read something like, “Nuclear Destruction in Megadeaths.” Per Kubrick’s wishes, we ran it at Academy 1:1.375 and showed the disappearing and reappearing black bars at the top and bottom. The Blue Angel (surprisingly effective and affecting) I remember because it had four frame lines all the way through, demonstrating that this was not from the original camera negative (OCN) or internegative (IN). A normal release print is four generations removed from the original camera negative, having gone through two intermediate stages: interpositive and internegative. Since there were four frame lines, this was from a duplicate negative at least eight generations from the original. It still looked quite good on screen, surprisingly, and the duplicated framelines, fortunately, were so close to the proper frame lines that they did not show on screen. The print also came with an extra 2,000' reel that held only maybe 100' of film, which was a brief screen test by Marlene Dietrich. I decided to put that the beginning of the show. if.... (mysteriously lovely) I remember because I was thrilled to discover that, unlike the print I saw on an inspection bench in 1975, it had not been masked in the printer, and retained the Academy aperture. I asked the series coördinators if they wanted it correctly cropped to 1:1.75, or if they wanted me to run it open matte. They chose open matte, and it looked GREAT that way. I actually preferred it that way. Mean Streets (interesting, but it made me suspicious) I remember only because the print was rather new and had dazzling colors and hardly any damage. Day for Night (hideous) and Black Orpheus (rich) I remember only because they had the identical lab error: The subtitles were right at the bottom of the frame, making the correct 1:1.66 crop untenable. Monty Python and the Holy Grail (nearly perfect and devastatingly funny), unlike the print I ran in 1975, was not masked in the lab, and just looking at the frames as they ran through my fingers was a hilarious experience. Of course, I projected it at 1:1.75 for the public screening, but I asked the assistant to the assistant manager if I could come in late one night and run it just for myself, without any aperture at all. Not only did he say Yes, he said he and his brother would like to see the screening, too. So we chose a late night, and we saw typographer’s crop marks in all but one of the opening credit titles, we saw microphones at the top of the image, we saw a crew van at the bottom, we saw wires and threads wound around spindles and Terry Gilliam’s hands moving the cartoon cut-outs around. We could see that one of the shots of the army at the end was flopped. The movie was actually funnier that way. My heavens! I so wish that the Pythons would release it that way on Blu-ray as a supplement. My wish was eventually conveyed to Terry Jones, who did not express interest in the idea, but who did compliment me on having “the presence of mind” to crop it correctly at 1:1.75 for the public screening rather than run it with a larger aperture. As for Il gattopardo, we’ll get to that story below.

The Rohauer print of The General inspired me to do something new. That print had a one-sided splice at the beginning and ending of each reel, and that piece of splicing tape held a small paper message: “Please peel off and reattach. Please do not remove frames.” Brilliant idea! I ran off numerous such messages on a laser printer, “laminated” them with clear packing tape, and taped them onto the beginnings and endings of all prints I ran from that day on.

I know for certain that I did not inspect the first several films. I’m pretty sure I did not inspect Queen Christina. I didn’t project it either. Another guy ran that one, and he agreed to stand by the machines the whole time. I think that’s the one that had a misframed splice that the projectionist ignored, and I think that’s the one that was shriveled from deacetylation and broke half-way through, and that was one of the rare times in my life that I ever lost my temper, because I was a total nervous wreck from a run-in with three maniacal policemen.