I was one of those people who screened Ready to Wear for you and I swear that it looked fine to me. Of course I was just looking at the models.

My most painful booth mistake was when I stood up under a 70mm penthouse door and gashed my head. We were very close to showtime in all 12 of our theatres so I had to thread them all up. So for an hour I was wandering around the booth, treading projectors and starting films with blood poring down my head onto my cloths. Finaly after I had started everything, I went to the bathroom to clean up. I looked worse than some of the dead guys in the slasher ficks.

Bet you are all still seeing "spots" in front of your eyes. Seriously, if you or your guests are still seeing an afterimage of the arc, it would be a very good idea to go to an eye doctor. The strong UV from an unshielded carbon or xenon arc can damage the retina within a matter of seconds.

Reminds me of a Kodachrome Super-8 film I made in a film class in college called "The Unseen Showman", showing a day-in-the-life of a projectionist. I aimed a Super-8 camera with automatic exposure control at an open Ashcraft Core-Lite lamphouse and struck the arc (not looking at it directly myself, of course). The camera's auto exposure control worked perfectly, so I got a scene with the carbons coming together, and then the plasma "flame", all well exposed. If I was a modern "film" student and using a video or DV camera, I'm sure I would have "fried" the CCD with this trick.

Wonder if video was ever used to "film" nuclear explosions?

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John P. Pytlak, Senior Technical Specialist
Worldwide Technical Services, Entertainment Imaging
Eastman Kodak Company
Research Labs, Building 69, Room 7419
Rochester, New York, 14650-1922 USA
Tel: 716-477-5325 Fax: 716-722-7243
E-Mail: john.pytlak@kodak.com

On my second shift for Hoyt's in 1989, I threaded "Parenthood" with the soundtrack turned inside the projector. I start it up and...wala! The logo is horizontally flipped with no sound. What's worse is how I corrected this abberation. Instead of taking one minute to unthread the Century and simply "turning the film around", I have it in my head that I have to rewind the entire film and rethread from scratch. Yeah, that took a good hour producing some irate patrons. I thought it would cost my job for sure. You can rest assured I haven't made that mistake again though!

Most painful:

I briefly worked for an old (still existing) single-screen house with the traditional 2000' reels and carbon arcs (Magnarc lamphouses). While changing carbons during a show, I failed to secure the hood properly and it came crashing down on my head. I also have some bruises on my hand from splicers.

Another persons makeup "disaster":

We got "Beauty & the Beast" for the second time and the makeup projectionist forgot to visually verify the third reel was heads up. Sure enough, everything's going fine until the splice and the characters appear upside down. At least we got a good laugh from the kids in the auditorium.

Another persons exhibiting "disaster":

anybody got any info on how i can get my hands on that seminar tape. sounds funny.

anyways i used to work in a cinemark 2-plex which has many walls and many stairs there was a week that went by that i triiped on those narrow stairs but that is beside the point.

i used to have a problem with running into the corners of walls(really freakin' hurts especially with glassess so they get oushed farther into your face) and interlock rollers as well. One time it was the last start of the last round and i was tired. I was double checking the bottom roller when all of the weight in my head went flying into the manual douser lever(CFS7000)
it knocked me back and i was looking at stars.

As anybody everheard a 7000watt bulb explode? It is extremely loud:0 Scared everyone. I have heard it twice. You can hear it from one side of the building to completely the other.

how about false fire alarms?

I will never forget the time there was a 30 min. blackout in the whole theater. it was packed and all of the patrons who came to the huge 20-plex got a raincheck. how much do you think this one cost?

weirdest thing i have seen while closing.

it was about 2:00am and i waws shutting down booth when in the last theater i see a couple who have fallen asleep. work lights were on and non-sync was going. police had to come and revive the two from the dream that was better than the movie.

weirdest thing i have heard that has happened
well in my theater at least. all stadium seating. two people having sex in the middle walkway of the auditorium. and another performing oral faltio in prince of egypt. called police to that teater but they were done before they arrived.

some body once threw a pair os purple panties on the porthole for dr doolittle

weirdest thing found
cocaine and beer bottles.
condoms in front of theater

I have even seen a couple of people been escorted out of the theater and was arrested. i believe at least one of those had a warrant out forhis arrest and he arrrived to the theater drunk off his ass. really smart there buddy. Ironically I have heard of one fight manager tried to stop but was pushed. they ran away befpore cops got to them. Oh yeah 2 bomb threats. one false. the other ws just some customers tools in which were found in the parking lot. it was in a army issued ammo box. employees and customers could not get to their car within that vicinity until the scene has been chaecked out. But yes it was a nice rich neighborhood. its plano. conglomerate international

any body else find weird stuuf in a theater?

THAT sucked!

I used to work in a porno drive-in. You can only *imagine* what i have found out there while either servicing the field or cleaning the place up during the day. You can usually find some strange items in a theatre right after any screening of 'Rocky Horror Picture Show' as well.

Odd Things I have found in regualar theatres (non-porno, and not after a showing of RHPS):

-Dirty Diapers (someone had the BALLS to change a baby in the auditorium?!?)

-a pair of pantyhose

-a pair of pants, belt and all , nothing in the pockets tho...

-a pile of *human feces* in the elevator of our 9-plex (gak)

-on several occasions in my career I have found small quantities of 'illegal' drugs (marijuana, crack, crank, powder cocaine) that have 'fallen out' of someone's pockets... their loss (the items in question were *not* consumed or resold by me they were flushed down the toilet)

*Then there are the strange food items that have been found in the auditoria:

-three *large* Domino's Pizza boxes (how *these* managed to get by the ushers is one for the X-Files)

-a large box of Cheerios

-an empty Mason jar that had some kind of home-canned friut or vegetable in it

*Then the pleasant surprises found while cleaning:

-a $100 bill under a seat

-several [still]cameras, Walkmen, CDs, cassettes, and calculators, most go unclaimed...

* Living things other than people, insects or common housepets/vermin making their way in a theatre:

-we had a skunk come visit the lobby in Tiburon

-a bat somehow made it into the 3rd floor lobby of Sebastopol

-Errant birds, mostly smaller ones, but I have seen pigeons and crows in theatre lobbies and auditoria...

I could go on....

Aaron

All our projector work light switches are posistioned correctly except one. One annoying switch that is upside down. For some reason it just annoys the hell out of me. Well one day I had a bright idea, "I've got nothing better to do. Its only two screws, turn it around, put them back in." Problem is our breaker box is poorly labled and all the shows were running then so I didn't want to experiment. Anyway, I got the screw out and was turning the switch around when I somehow manageing to touch the positive and negative screws with my finger. OUCH!! That hurt. Now I'm panicking, I obviously kicked out that breaker, so a couple of emergency lights come on and there is a black patch on the side of the switch. Panic time. So what do I do? Put it back together exactly the way it was and act like nothing ever happened. It still works to this day, still upside down though.

jasoN

Well one evening, things got screwed up, and I had to thread a film quickly to avoid "dead air"...of course in my frantic hurry to get things ready, I forgot to throw the switch. Well, the boys upstairs got nervous and rolled the machine along with my right index finger through the feed sprocked above the gate.

one time i was watching my manager change out the payout control card on a speco lp271 well he forgot to turn off the power to the power to the platters and all of the suddenZZZZAAAAAPPP!!!! i turn to see my manager thrown to the floor in pain.

We stopped doing it when I was receiving a shock. Actually, it felt more like a surge of static electrical current running through my arms. And I want to say it pasted my chest, but I really can't remember. This was more than three years ago. Anyway, I asked the other guy if he'd been receiving the same kind of discharge and he said he had. I didn't have the problem when I spun one or the other of the platters by itself. So I asked him if he had any problems spinning the platters individually and he said, "Nope. It's only when I spin both platters." I told him we needed to stop doing it since I had no idea what was causing it and had just assumed we lose the extra time to spin one more platter then have a stopped heart. I still don't know exactly what that was. Anybody out there have any idea?

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The man with the magic hands.

I had just built up Dogma (8 reels) and I went to take it off of the platter. There were no clamps on it and when I went to swing it off of thte platter, it just came apart in my hands. It took 3 hours to put back together again and needless to say, I always check the tightness of the print before I move it myself.

Another idiot mistake someone else had but I had to fix:

I was off the previous day when I get in the next day to find a big pile of film all tangled up on the build-up table with a note scribbled on one of those papers you get with the prints that said something to the effect of, "this is angela's ashes, I didn't know how to fix it, so fix it. Thanks." Enough said. On a side note, this happened at 11:30 that morning and the manager came up and saw what happened and asked, "will this be up for the 1:05 show??"

One of my other projectionists were building up a print of Black & White for a press screening. The first 2 reels ran fine when all of a sudden the third reel was running upside down. I didn't monitor the sound but I realised what had happened. Naturally the critics were pissed and we had to cancel the screening because we weren't able to finish it in time for the first show we ran in that house.

Most painful mistake:
transferring film from one 6k reel to another and trying to stop the pay-out reel spinning at top speed. I thought I was placing my hand in the direction that the reel was spinning when it was in the opposite direction. I got my middle and index finger caught in one of the holes. It just plain hurt for the first 2 minutes. I was shaking my hand kind of like when you hit your finger with a hammer when I looked at the floor and realised that there was blood. I looked at my fingers and saw that my fingertips got sliced. We didn't have any first aid kit, so i just took some paper towels, wrapped it around my fingers and taped them with maksing tape.

Ethan: I have heard a 7k bulb explode. It was while it was lit and during a show of Mission To Mars. I never heard it because i wasn't around but I asked the projectionist running that side when it happened and he said it sounded like a great big explosion. He was right next to it when it happened and he said he almost crapped his pants!!!

Acting on a suspicion, I placed my finger on the film over the sound-drum on the Cat 700, and felt, as I had suspected, a "bump" with every revolution of the sound drum. Using a flashlight, I could see a gob of splicing tape stuck to the drum. I tried to unstick it with my fingernail with the projector running. THIS IS NOT A GOOD IDEA!

Sprocket-marked fingers hurt!

The tape that everyone seems to want is only 3 minutes long. I am toying with the idea of having anyone who wants it just send me a blank tape. If the interest is enough, I may go back in and add sound effects (there is alreadu narration and music).