The Morals of the Story

Back around 1990, I guess, Dave Friedman sent me a repertory schedule for the Castro in San Francisco, saying that it had the finest programming of any cinema in the US, and he encouraged me to attend if I could ever get out that way. He was probably right in his assessment of the quality of the programming, but he knew little about my experiences at Don Pancho’s. When we had first met, some months earlier, the moment I told him that I had worked in Albuquerque, he asked, “Did you know Pat Baca?” I said I knew him by reputation, but had never met him. He seemed a bit relieved. He was not fond of Pat Baca. Then we spoke about some people we knew in common, but I pretty much skirted the Don Pancho’s story, which is why he learned nothing of my grievances. The Castro, you see, was run by Landmark, and I wanted nothing to do with it. Then, much more recently, a retired friend in the Bay Area wanted to put me in touch with the manager of the Castro. No thanks, I said, that’s Landmark, and I won’t set foot in it. Oh no, he said, it’s no longer Landmark. I mentioned the names of the Owner and the Second Business Partner at Movie, Inc., and that just set him off; he uttered a stream of invectives, saying that they had given him nothing but trouble back in the day, when he ran a different cinema, and they had given everybody in the local cinema business nothing but trouble. He couldn’t wish enough bad things to happen to them. Nonetheless, he assured me, they are long gone from the Castro, and good riddance. The new manager, he insisted, was a decent guy. Okay, I think I got the message. After having heard almost nothing but loving praises for the owner and his second in command for all those decades, I found it personally validating, at long last, to encounter someone else who had had a less-than-sterling experience.

ADVICE FROM QUORA. No idea at all how I ended up on Quora’s mailing list, but I did. Mystery. A question recently posed was, “As someone who is passionate about your dream job, how would you feel if you get surrounded by unenthusiastic and lazy people whom you thought would act professionally, when you start working?” So far, there are three responses. Jane Adams recommends, “Keep your eyes on your own work and ignore your coworkers unless they are interfering with your own work. Be cordial but distant....” Donald Leow’s advice is, “I didn’t waste time judging the people around me. I just went to work and did my job plus more. I ended up doing so well the boss trusted me more than anyone else....” Summr Turn has a different idea: “I would report their actions to my high manager then to the corporation and HR last and from there investigations would be open on all of them and while doing so I’d post their jobs on Craigslist and other locations and always have a volunteer on call.” In my experience, these answers are total rubbish. The unique employee who behaves professionally is the unique employee who will be smeared and tossed out, possibly reported to the authorities with endless false accusations. The best thing to do is leave, immediately. If you’re the only staffer who is behaving professionally, just clock out at the end of your first day and call in your resignation. If you stay, you’ll have a black mark on your record, because everyone on staff and everyone in management will take everything out on you. Actually, if you’re passionate about your job, don’t even apply. That’s my advice. If you want to do something you love, do it in your spare time. Take pride in the quality of the work you perform from eight to five, but for heaven’s sake, make sure it’s not work you’re passionate about, else you’d just go crazy, and you’d drive everybody else crazy, too.

The moral of the story? If you run a cinema, the very first thing you need to do is hire a heating/cooling technician to repair the lamphouse-exhaust system. Rot is intolerable and baffling is essential, else the reflectors and xenon bulbs will shatter every day. The moral of the story? If you are an employer, and if your employees and managers lodge complaints against another employee, do not take anybody’s word for it. Investigate. Start spying. Chances are that the people lodging the complaints are actually saboteurs. Saboteurs are depressingly common in the workplace. They are generally the most attractive, the most likeable, the most magnetic people in the office, the ones who began their employ by repeatedly demonstrating their trustworthiness. There is a difference between an attractive, likeable, trustworthy employee whose heart is in the right place, and an attractive, likeable, trustworthy employee who is plotting and secretly sharpening knives. It takes considerable skill and experience to discern the difference, and even after you learn how to spot the difference, you will still sometimes be fooled and misidentify one type as being the other. You’ve got to be careful, and you need to judge only according to the evidence. The moral of the story? If you are an employee earning minimum wage, leave. The moral of the story? If you run a business but cannot afford to pay your employees well, shut down your business. If your profit margins are that low, give it up and find something better. The moral of the story? If one of your employees is having trouble, don’t just dump that person. For heaven’s sake, get involved and help out. The situation might be completely different from what it appears to be. The moral of the story? Don’t fall in love with your work. If you work at a job that you love, it will kill you. Take a job that does not excite you. The moral of the story? When somebody does you wrong, don’t kiss and make up. The moral of the story? If you have a short fuse, learn how to control your temper. It’s surprisingly easy to do, especially when you finally realize that most of the things that trigger you are of no consequence in the greater scheme of things. Just be happy-go-lucky. Please. The moral of the story? If you run a business and you’re basically a nice person, and if you worry that others might walk all over you, do not partner with an attack dog for protection. Yes, the strategy works, and yes, the attack dog wins lawsuits on your behalf, but the attack dog does much more harm than good. There are better strategies. The moral of the story? Stay out of showbiz.

The most important moral? I learned this only in 2012. You don’t need three-wing shutters to run silent films. Oh the trouble I could have saved had I only known that! Sheesh! Back in the late 1980’s or early 1990’s, a bunch of us at the Defamatory Cinema were working to modify 1930’s equipment to behave as though it were 1920’s equipment. One problem was adjusting the speed of the drive motors. We switched to DC motors with rheostats, but because drive motors on sound heads have nonstandard frames, we needed to jury-rig the spacing. If I were to try it now, I would probably try variable-frequency drives so that we could keep the original drive motors. Would that work? I don’t know, but if it did, I suspect it would be much neater and much cheaper. Since the machines did not have lens shifters or base shifters, I found some lens shifters from the original 1929 run of Super Simplex and purchased them myself. I was afraid they wouldn’t fit in a Simplex E-7, but they did! Well, I had to saw off the end of a bolt to get them to fit, but they fit! When we first installed the speed controls, I played around, and, of course, at speeds lower than about 85'/min the strobe would induce seizures. Nonetheless, I continued to adjust the speed, running some random reel (I think it was a reel filled with some previews that I took from the Sunset), and the lower I turned the knob, down to less than 60'/min when the fire shutter dopped, the worse the strobe got, but the film never melted! Phew! I purchased four three-wing shutters, but they evolved into the major problem. They lost half the light (of course), and so, to gain some light back, I tried front shutters in addition to the regular rear shutters, all trimmed to considerably less than 90°, to no avail. Then I was mortified to discover that, at speeds lower than 90'/min, the shutters hit a harmonic with the 60Hz supply and the picture violently faded in and out several times a second. I could hardly believe that the rectifiers had never been filtered to prevent this. That’s when I learned that single-phase rectifiers for projection booths simply were not filtered, ever. Talk about poor design! Idiotic design. Stupid design. Retarded design. How did this pass quality control? I wanted to fix this, but I am not an electrician. I would have electrocuted myself and blown the building up. So we switched from single-phase rectifiers to a generator with ballast rheostat. That resulted in a nice picture, but the whole project with the shutters was a pointless exercise. None of it was necessary. If your shutters are conical, they’ll do just fine down to speeds as low as 65'/min and the strobe will not be annoying, or even noticeable. If your shutters are discs or cylinders, then just place a filter in front of the lens to darken the image by 50%. That’s it. The result onscreen is indistinguishable from the result you would obtain with a three-wing shutter. There. That’s free information that nobody else would ever sell you for a million dollars. We all thought that higher frequency alone reduced strobe. That is part of the equation, but it is only the smallest part of the equation. I suppose 3-phase or 12-phase rectifiers would be superior to single-phase rectifiers or even generators, and would help silent films even more, but I’ve never had the pleasure of using them.

Another little tidbit: The few times I ran silent films at slower speeds, I could smell the metal of the lamphouse and the metal of the picture head cooking. At slower speeds, the shutter was slower, and it is the shutter that has fan blades that cool the mechanism. At slower speeds, the shutters do not cool the mechanism as vigorously. The booth got noticeably hotter during those shows. When you read in old accounts about the peculiar smell of electricity, that was the reference. People could smell the metal wires, the metal cables, the metal conductors, and the metal machines heating up. Nowadays, that smell is rare, because electrical conductors have better insulation. Who else would ever explain this to you? Who?

DREAMS AND LEGACY. Did you know that a later projectionist wrote an essay about the closing of Donald Pancho’s? Take a look: Rudolfo Carrillo, “A Reminder and the Remainder: Don Pancho’s Art Theater,” Report on American City, 119n, 5 August 2011. The accompanying photograph is most definitely not Donald Pancho’s, though. It is actually a photo of the projection booth at the Byrd Theatre in Richmond, Virginia. I have never seen a photo of any part of the bland interior of Donald Pancho’s, except for that single photo of Ernie loading projector # 2 (see Chapter 30). The only exterior photos I have ever seen are of the façade, and I reproduced them in earlier chapters. I would like to chat with this Rudolfo Carrillo. I submitted a comment, but it was never posted. Predictable.

Students have the “finals dream.” I still have that dream, regularly. I enter the classroom for the final exam, and then it occurs to me that I had completely forgotten to attend class all semester. Waitresses have the “waitress dream” She waits on a table, but then goes into a panic when she realizes that she has forgotten to wait on eight other tables. She rushes to wait on them, and then panics even more when she remembers that there were 25 other tables that have been waiting for hours. As for me, I also have the “student dream.” I am back in junior high school, because I have been flunked out every year for the past half-century. I also have the “Super Saver dream.” I start Screen 4, but oh no, I completely forgot about Screen 8, which is three hours behind. I rush to it, only to remember that Screen 1 and Screen 7 are four hours behind. I run and run from one machine to another, hurriedly trying to lace up the film because I had forgotten to do so when the movies ended. I am huffing and puffing, entirely out of breath. Then I wake up more exhausted than I was when I went to sleep.

Whenever I visit Albuquerque these days, I inevitably pass by the building that was once Don Pancho’s, and I inevitably pass by The Guild. A few years ago, the former Don Pancho’s building was a tattoo parlor. I definitely did not want to enter. The next time I passed by, it was a CBD shop, and the look of it gave me the creeps. Currently it is the Iron Café — Lan Zhou Hand-Pulled Noodle Japanese Food & Asian Cuisine restaurant. Should I enter and say Hi? Wellllllllllllllllllllllllllllll.... I still have the occasional dream that I am back in the auditorium to see a movie, but that I do not know how I got in there, and I am a bit afraid that I will be caught. In my dream, though, Don Pancho’s has been greatly expanded into neighboring buildings and lots, and the auditorium is huge, with a steep rake and a balcony, perfectly well-designed for showing movies. I’m impressed, but then the dream dissolves away into something else. As for The Guild, I debate with myself: Should I enter, or should I stay away? So far, I have always chosen to stay away. After all my experiences, The Guild seems like a bad dream remembered from childhood, not a reality. It’s almost as though it never existed. I don’t know what I would feel if I were to enter again, nor do I know what that would do to my dreams at night. The new owners seem to be nice guys, not the expected malignant narcissists and psychopaths and gangsters that usually populate the executive positions of cinema, but still, hey, the memories are more powerful than the current reality.

Oh heck. I worked up the courage. Tuesday evening, 19 October 2021. I no longer care for pizza, but I was hungry and ordered a build-it-yourself pizza from Il Vicino next door. It was divine! Okay. I’m sick and tired of pizza, but if it’s from Il Vicino, I’m hooked. Mouth-watering. Then, a few minutes before eight o’clock, I walked up to The Guild’s ticket window and purchased an $8 ticket just so that I could step inside. There have been changes. The curtained partition in the lobby is gone, and replacing it is a second set of double doors. In the lobby, Harold Lloyd dangles from the clock and flanking him are two 8×10 b&w images of glass-lantern slides: “No spitting on the floor. Remember the Johnstown Flood.” I already forgot the other one; might have been “Please wait a moment while the operator changes reels.” Heck. Not even three hours later and I already forgot. The owners were not there that evening, unfortunately. I really wanted to meet them. I would still like to meet them. Two other guys were there. “This is a historic moment. For decades, I have considered coming through that door, but I always decided not to.” “Did you used to work here?” “I used to work at Don Pancho’s, which had the same owners, but I used to hang out here a lot, in the booth. I still don’t feel comfortable being in here,” I confessed. I told them that I had written a history of The Guild on my website. They had no interest. They promised to pass my contact info to Jeff Berg. We shall see. I stepped into the auditorium and saw some more changes. The screen has been pushed back several feet, which opens up space that can be used as a microscopic stage. So I assume that the sink that was back there was finally taken out. The curtains were removed to make way for a wider screen. The audio is considerably better than it was before, clear without being loud. Unfortunately, the sound isn’t as warm as it used to be, or, at least, it wasn’t during those few minutes of previews. There is some soundproofing on the rear wall. I didn’t ask to see the booth, but there is a digital projector, a 16mm, and a single 35mm/xenon with a platter. They managed to squeeze a platter into that thimble-sized booth? Despite the passage of four decades, the place still gave me really bad vibes. I left after about ten or maybe fifteen minutes. Bad vibes. Bad vibes. Really bad vibes. The associations are still too strong. On my way out, I did sign up for the email list, though. Now my dreams are gonna be all messed up. The moral of the story? Don’t do anything that messes up your dreams. How? Stay out of showbiz.