The Westrex tower is a very fussy beast, I ran them for ten years with Kalee, Westar, Westrex 7000, Phillips, Cinemec, Prevost, Ross, Fedi, Century and Spectra machines, and I am always very unhappy about running full spools with the tower not directly nehind the machine. at ninety degrees to the mech it is safer, but still not something I'd be happy doing, it's not the tower itself that's the problem it's the poor state of most of spools these days, and at the price of those things you don't find too many people willing to replace them for the sake of the odd film that runs to that length.

I'm not saying it's not possible to run the spools full with the tower at the side, as Ben rightly said it's been done with 'extra care', but if you are single manning three or four screens, in different booths with no automation and no turrets etc, that extra care is simply not available. I remember running a sunday matinee of Apocalypse Now some years back, which just fits on a tower spool, in a screen with the tower at ninety degrees to the mech. I drafted in another staff member and has him nurse this show from start to end, he wound up guiding the film onto the take up reel by hand towards the end of the feature. OK that man's time and effort made that show run impecably, but the cost to our wages budget soon made me see that we should have either not run it in that screen, or run it with an interval.

Bernard: What are you going to do with yourself after your theatre closes? Another sad day for real cinemas in the UK.

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