Gallery: An Ode to the Lost World of the Film Projection Booth
Taylor Umphenour01Giclee Print #1
Avon Cinema's two 75-year old projectors, pictured here with their Brenkert Enarc lamp houses, worked continuously every night of the week, 365 days a year, before they were retired in 2013.
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Projectionists refer to film on a reel as either "heads out" or "tails out." The former has the start of the film on the outside, and is ready to be threaded for projection. The latter needs to be rewound before it can be put away, which is what's happening here on the motorized rewind bench.
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The film in this photo is polyester based. Before that, acetate was the standard film stock, which was preceded by nitrate-based film. As *Cinema Paradiso* fans know, nitrate stock was highly flammable, and could even spontaneously combust.
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Looking at a piece of 35mm film, most people focus on the individual frames. But there are plenty of other goodies embedded in the strip. Here, you can see two of them: Waveforms for the left and right channels that together make up this movies's stereo soundtrack.
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No, they're not called cigarette burns. We saw *Fight Club* too. Cue dots typically appear in the same spot on four consecutive film frames. When the frames are played normally, viewers see a single dot for 1/6th of a second.
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Most cue dots you see in movies are inserted in the prints themselves by the film lab during the creation of a movie's release prints. Occasionally prints were made that did not have lab cues, and in those cases, projectionists used a cue marker like this one to create the dots.
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Negative and positive carbon rods in their original National boxes. As a movie plays, the carbon steadily burns and the copper sheath melts and drips into a collection pan at the bottom of the lamp house where it is accumulated and resold. Each rod typically only lasts only a few reels.
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It's carbon rods that produce the light moviegoers see onscreen. A negative and positive rod are electrified and struck together creating an arc of electricity (an arc light). As the movie plays, the projectionist adjusts the burning carbons (called trimming), keeping them at the perfect distance from each other. This is a negative carbon, still burning hot, as it's pulled from the lamp house after a changeover.
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The film is threaded up and ready to go here. If one of these rollers gets skipped or left open, the film will bunch up in the head of the projector, which can be bad for both the moviegoers and the 35mm print.
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When a film is photographed for the widescreen CinemaScope aspect ratio, the image is squeezed with a horizontal compression as it is captured on the camera negative. The result? Objects and people appear much taller and thinner than they should.
Taylor Umphenour11Giclee Print #4
It's one of the most recognizable symbols in cinema, and one of the most misunderstood. The countdown film leader both protects the body of the film from being damaged by dirt and oil and also allows the film to be threaded up in a specific spot so that when the projector is started the images are projected on the screen precisely on cue.
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This is what a take-up reel looks like just before a movie starts. The film leader is wrapped around the center; the entire reel will be full after about 20 minutes. At that point, a projectionist will change over to the next projector, and the take-up reel will be pulled from the machine and rewound.
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Film bins were used to hold reels between performances. Each reel held 2,000 feet of film and could have a running time of up to 20 minutes. Most feature films were about six reels long, plus an additional reel of trailers.
