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I hope you've had the booth lighting improved since your little mishap with Saving Private Ryan. It must have been pretty dark for you not to realize there was no ring in the print. I'm all for keeping booths dimly lit, but not to the extent where you are putting yourself and the prints at risk.

We also use clamps or straps WHENEVER we move a print,,, for Safety reasons, of course.

By the way, what is a cheeky bugger

The large sleeve is a two person operation but the small sleeves are comfortable with only one person.

Regards,

In the very rare and unfortunate circumstance that I must do breakdown at this point, I can usually get the center ring's pins into the holes. If I cannot, I remove part of the mylar leader, which is just enough to allow the pins to go down and still maintain good tension.

And now it's time for my confession. I do this all the time, and usually alone. But if I'm tired, I always ask for help. Haven't slid or dropped one yet.

(BTW, one of our film festivals had nine 35mm films in three days. Single screen, tiny booth. No place to store the films in it. To get them out of the booth, they had to go thru an ordinary size door. Once I got them on the masonite, with the center ring in, I tipped it up, hugged the print to it, and walked. Had a volunteer walk with me, since I couldn't see well past the print. We stacked up the prints in a room behind the concession. Had to swap some prints between shows. What fun.)

On the other hand: Tower spools also need a bit of brainwork: one night the projection booth pet (st bernard) had luck to flip over a full 4000 meter reel, which was leaning at the wall (never again !). Now this full reel got to lean on to the lower spool of the running tower instead, and "Dances with Wolves" got an additional intermission. Sold out cinema never got the truth - guess they'd never believed it anyway....

/ p.

When I was a brand new assistant manager-operator for a first run twinplex, in 1983, I went to start a show and some part of the equipment wouldn't respond. It's been a long time and I can't remember this clearly, except for the punch line. Anyhow, all that filled my head was what I had been trained on and I ran over it and over it and could not figure out why things weren't working. I did not step back from the situation and ask myself, "What is wrong with this picture?" I got on the phone to our service company. They could not help me. They had three simultaneous emergencies on much larger screens in separate locations. So I broke the bad news to the audience, that I couldn't fix the problem and I've have to give them all passes. Thankfully, it was a small crowd!

Later, after everyone had gone, I walked back up to the booth to have a little look around. Much to my amazement, I noticed a power cord with the plug laying on the floor. I, or someone, obviously knocked it out of the outlet. I plugged it in and indeed that was my problem. I remembered a piece of advice I once heard. It's the sudden, acute problems that are usually easy to fix. The slow ones sometimes take a while to diagnose. It's the intermittent ones that drive one nuts.