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Is this the same manager who had to have a splicer by EVERY projector "for when the film breaks"??? I'll bet it is.

If it's that same guy, he literally couldn't make it through more than one 70mm presentation per week without the film breaking at a minimum of once! I know all the assistant managers always cheered when "it didn't break". They went through thousands of passes just because he was such a firm believer in "the 2 finger loop". (Of course, the man had HUGE fingers and his loops slapped all over the inside of the projector.)

I always felt for the poor AW3s at that theater. When he spliced he would punch the splicer with all of his weight to the point I'd swear his feet would jump off of the floor...because he ALWAYS spliced with the splicer on the edge of a platter deck. To this day, those axles are all bent to crap.

He also thought the only way to remove a trailer was to pull it by hand through the brain onto the floor. At that point he would carry the glob of film to the rewind bench and start untangling it onto a core.

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"Why are you opening all those beers?" I asked her as she moved on to the 20th. "Are there some customers coming out?"

"No!" she said. (duh) "It's supposed to be busy at the matinee tomorrow so I'm saving time for then".

It ended up there was a small party at the end of the show after all that.

(Well, you can't go wasting good beer now, can you?) (hic)

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When I worked in TV, we had the OLD RCA TP-6 telecine projectors with one reel at the top and one just above the floor. We were running a 2000' reel loaded with "The Towering Inferno" In those days, we would transfer the film to tape so we wouldn't have to physically cut the print. Anyway, it was late at night, and the projectors were in another room. I loaded the reel and cued it up. Then I went back into the control room to start the 2" VTR and start the recording. I started the tape, then started the projector. I heard it start from the other room, and I saw the film running on the monitor. I checked the sound, and sat down to continue doing all the other stuff I had to do.

Anyway, at the end of the reel, I stopped the tape, stopped the projector, and walked into the projection room. I found 2000' of "Inferno" in a heap on the filthy floor. The take-up reel had split and I didn't hear it. The bad thing is that my "helper" tried to pick-up the lump of film--to keep it from getting dirtier.... He thoroughly tangled it up.

We ended up paying for a replacement R3-4 of the movie. That is R2 on 16mm. Twentieth Century TV actually inspected the print and saw what our station had done to their only new print (at the time) and billed us.

From then on, I instructed our guys to keep an eye on the projectors while we were dubbing at night. There were always people around during the day.

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When I arrived at the theatre about an hour before last Sunday's screening, thinking that an hour would be more than enough to prepare a couple of archive reels and a short, I was told by the manager of these special screenings that this particular "short" was actually a short sequence, a monologue by the director of the old classic, that was part of a seven-reel feature. The Swedish Film Institute had helpfully sent us the whole film, not just the right reel.

My first question to the manager was, obviously, what reel the sequence belonged to. He didn't know. What does the scene look like? He didn't know. Does anyone know? Well, yes, one of the other managers might, but she was at a restaurant somewhere, eating lunch with the guest director who was to speak to the audience before the show. They'd be back in time for the show, not before. Can we phone the Swedish Film Institute and ask? No, not on a Sunday, they're closed.

The manager, looking rather worried by now, thought for a moment, and then asked if I could "simply fast-forward the film and look the scene up"...

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