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Author Topic: Booth Nightmares Matthew Peters Expert Film Handler Posts: 179 From: Glen Waverley, Melbourne, Australia Registered: Nov 2002 posted 02-11-2004 12:45 AM                     About a year ago (maybe two), Projectionist comes running out the to Concession/Box office area holding one of her fingers covered in blood, she was panicking and feeling faint. Somehow the film had sliced deep into one of her fingers, which meant it kept bleeding. Not sure whether she was building up or breaking down. Thankfully one of the box-office staff was a former nurse, she stopped the bleeding and bandaged it up.  |  IP: Logged Edward Jurich Master Film Handler Posts: 305 From: Las Vegas USA Registered: Jul 2003 posted 02-11-2004 02:15 PM                     ---------------------------- Ed ("Perfect Show") Jurich once had a doofus booth tourist step on the film going back to the platter in the middle of a musical number. ---------------------------- Then there's the time I threaded a cartoon while talking to someone not even noticing there were no countdown numbers. Start the cartoon and find the reel was in fact tails out  |  IP: Logged Scott Norwood Film God Posts: 8146 From: Boston, MA. USA (1774.21 miles northeast of Dallas) Registered: Jun 99 posted 02-11-2004 04:46 PM                        I've had a couple of these experiences: - during my first night working in a particular theatre, I neglected to notice that the "curtain" button was very close to the "changeover" button and very similar in size and shape; guess who hit the wrong one once - old crappy print (acetate) broke on startup (reel to reel booth) and started piling up on the floor; I didn't notice until about thirty seconds after the changeover, but managed to get things sorted out without having to stop the film - when changing out trailers on an AW3, I somehow managed to get things tangled enough to cause a brainwrap (my only brainwrap ever!) to occur about 30 seconds after show start - more recently, during a show at an Air Force theatre, the National Anthem film broke (old acetate print with feed tension set too high); I found out later that the Base Commander was in the audience that night...oops  |  IP: Logged Jack Ondracek Film God Posts: 2348 From: Port Orchard, WA, USA Registered: Oct 2002 posted 02-11-2004 05:47 PM                        No nightmares in my life... none at all! None of your stories has EVER happened to me! You'd never known the place wasn't already Ummmmm, Brad.... how many of those platter rings do you have in stock???  |  IP: Logged Lauren Fisher Film Handler Posts: 12 From: Dallas, TX, USA Registered: Sep 2003 posted 02-25-2004 02:52 AM                     ive seen some of my worst nightmares in the booth come to life. ive actually dreamed of things that come true within weeks if not days. i think one of the most rarest stuff ive encountered is having 2 of our bulbs explode in a year, and moving the ROTK to another platter with a fellow colleague. it just so happens when we got it on the platter...well halfway on, the center ring just dropped and fell on the floor. my friends eyes just stared in surprise while i reacted and shoved it fully onto the platter. turns out the ring broke in two...just on its own. it was very interesting. and this was the nite we had the lotr trilogy. another funny thing that happened to us (me and the other same projectionist noted above) was when we were moving cat in the hat. we were going down the stairs and her foot got caught and she fell...i followed her down as she fell and the print stayed intact perfectly.....very close call. needless to say some of my shifts are full of adventures like this.  |  IP: Logged Gary Crawford Expert Film Handler Posts: 200 From: Neptune NJ USA Registered: Nov 2003 posted 02-25-2004 02:50 PM                     During a storm we suffered a power outage (including a few blocks around us). Of course everything came to a dark silent stop, emergency lights casting their weak candlepower through the building. The very first thing that happened was the owner yelling up the ladder to me how long before I got the show back on the screen. Do you have lights and power down there? No. Think I have any up here? Uh, do you? As a matter of fact, I don't. Think you can get the show started again? Not until I get power back, no. How long will that be? At the same time you get power back downstairs. When will that be? (Actual conversation)  |  IP: Logged Christian Appelt Jedi Master Film Handler Posts: 505 From: Frankfurt, Germany Registered: Dec 2001 posted 02-25-2004 03:58 PM                     Well, it's more of a "booth in mind" nightmare... I attended a showing of ICE STATION ZEBRA in 70mm (in a small theatre where I used to work sometimes). At the end of reel #3, something dropped. Something heavy. Then the sound went out. Sitting in the audience was pure terror to me, because I knew that exactly one second later the image would go blank. It did. A less than attentive projectionist had forgot to lock the spindle on the feed reel (this was a changeover show, I should add), and during the reel the spool kept sliding outward. Then it dropped six feet down, ripping the film out of the sound head (Kinoton mag penthouse on Bauer U4 machine) before it split apart. One second of film to go - blank screen. In some way it was worse than if I had caused this accident myself, it's harder to know that somebody simply does not care about damaging a vintage 70mm because he could not wait 10 more minutes to get another cup of coffee.  |  IP: Logged Bill Enos Film God Posts: 2081 From: Richmond, Virginia, USA Registered: Apr 2000 posted 02-25-2004 05:35 PM                     Worst one I've seen ocurred in a dinner cinema where the owner had been thumping the igniter circuit boaard with his finger to cause the lamp to strike. I'd pointed out to him tha one day he might get jolted, but he declined fixing it. One night he got full igniter voltage in his right arm and out his left. The staff heard the crash of the tower going over and came running. Roy was found with no pulse by one of the waitresses who was also an EMT, she gave CPR. Though more than a little shaken, he finished the night.  |  IP: Logged Bill Enos Film God Posts: 2081 From: Richmond, Virginia, USA Registered: Apr 2000 posted 02-25-2004 05:35 PM                     [ 02-25-2004, 11:55 PM: Message edited by: Bill Enos ]  |  IP: Logged Carl Martin Phenomenal Film Handler Posts: 1424 From: Oakland, CA, USA Registered: Feb 2002 posted 02-25-2004 11:17 PM                        aw, that was no worse than the last one. this was literally a nightmare, in that it didn't really happen, obviously. last night i dreamt i was running a projector that fed accordian-folded film up from the bottom, chopped the frames off one by one, projected them, then tape-spliced them back together and spit them out. not a very practical set-up, to say the least, and kinda hard on the film. i didn't sleep too well. carl  |  IP: Logged Bill Enos Film God Posts: 2081 From: Richmond, Virginia, USA Registered: Apr 2000 posted 02-26-2004 12:04 AM                     It would be damned facinating to watch, the tape bill would be a killer though.  |  IP: Logged Leo Enticknap Film God Posts: 7474 From: Loma Linda, CA Registered: Jul 2000 posted 02-26-2004 01:38 AM                        quote: it just so happens when we got it on the platter...well halfway on, the center ring just dropped and fell on the floor. I've never had one totally disintegrate, but I did once take over from a colleague mid-shift who had forgotten to put the tensioning pin in an old-style Kinoton collar. At the end of the show, therefore, the collar was totally locked tight and could not be lifted out for love nor money. As the film was Titanic (i.e. around 15,000 feet), there was a lot of pressure. In the end what I had to do was get a couple of people to put their arms under the print to raise it 2-3 inches, while I knocked the collar out with a hammer. We just got away with it - the alternative would have been spooling the whole film off onto 6,000 feet spools to free the collar, which would have meant losing a sold-out, Friday evening show. Apart from that my worst almost-nightmare was a Sunday afternoon rep show of Gone With the Wind. The print we got had clearly been cobbled together from several old ones - it was a commercial distribution print, not from an archive. A colleague had made the whole thing up onto two platter rolls. After the usual cleaning and power-up routine I was about to lace it up, when I noticed the tell-tale 'mothball' smell coming from the platter. A close-up sniff confirmed what I suspected. Of the seven reels in part 1, three were nitrate. We later found 2 in part 2, as well. My colleague, who had very little booth experience, had simply never heard of nitrate. I hadn't bothered telling her about the H & S issues, because I thought that the chances of any nitrate being delivered to a provincial arthouse as late as 1995(ish) were absolutely zero. When we told the distributor about it, their response was 'nitrate - what's that?'. I dread to think what could have happened if she'd been working that Sunday and 6,000 feet of it had gone up in an unprotected booth. As for the show, the manager was somewhat off-pissed at my not wanting to project the film. So I snipped a couple of feet of spacing from the tail of an offending reel, took her out to the back yard, handed her a box of matches and invited her to do the honours. She didn't need much convincing after that! An usher was dispatched to Blockbusters to get a VHS which we then projected... and several customers commented on how good the picture looked!  |  IP: Logged Steve Kraus Film God Posts: 4094 From: Chicago, IL, USA Registered: May 2000 posted 02-26-2004 09:08 PM                    Roy was found with no pulse... Though more than a little shaken, he finished the night. Holy moly! I thought about this the other day. I run changeovers (screening room) and I inspect/repair heads and tails to make sure there are no surprises. Nevertheless since most of my screenings are first time runs and unfamiliar to me it still gives me a bit of a jolt when there is a surprise blackout shot near a reel end when I'm awaiting the change. I'm sure in the old days there was more than one elderly operator who dropped dead on the job and no one knew until a reel ran out and the screen stayed white indefinitely. But I wonder if anyone ever correlated someone with a weak heart going into cardiac arrest because of some surprise like unexpected black.  |  IP: Logged William Hooper Phenomenal Film Handler Posts: 1879 From: Mobile, AL USA Registered: Jun 99 posted 02-27-2004 12:06 AM                        quote: I'm sure in the old days there was more than one elderly operator who dropped dead on the job and no one knew until a reel ran out and the screen stayed white indefinitely Elderly? In October I started a movie that began with silence at the top, WHAT? Check the exciter lamp & threading, crank the monitor, nothing, launch like a rocket to run to the spotlight port & stick my head out to listen, ducked either too little or too late & BA-WHAMMM slammed into the steel fire shutter over the spotlight port. Classic concussion, seeing stars, on the floor & feeling every one of its molecules, thinking..."MUST MAKE CHANGEOVER, BELL WILL RING, MUST MAKE CHANGEOVER..." I musta looked like Banquo's ghost coming down after the auditorium emptied to use the restroom mirror to patch up the mess. I still have a big old scab on my head from it.  |  IP: Logged Frank Angel Film God Posts: 5305 From: Brooklyn NY USA Registered: Dec 1999 posted 03-02-2004 01:14 PM                        I may have told this story before on this forum, but it's a good one. Talk about the hazards of the booth..... The projector was a Super Simplex with the shutter in the normal position behind the aperture but with the shaft still protruding from the front of the head next to the lens from when the shutter was once located in earlier designs. I was 18 and had a head of hair consistent with the styles of times like the those worn in the movie HAIR, where we let our hair grow until it stopped by itself. The reel was finished and I had made the change-over to the other machine. A few change-overs prior, I had become fascinated with my discovery that if you put a piece of paper into the aperture on the machine that was not running, you would see a miniature image of the movie that was being projected on the screen by the other projector, the movie running as it were, right there in the aperture. I had just discovered this and as soon as I made the change-over, I wanted to see this phenomenon again. With the out-going machine still running, I leaned over the front of the head thinking if I could get an angle so that I could see into the lens without blocking the image from the screen, I would see the little 35mm mini image in that projector's aperture even better. As luck would have it (or rather anti-luck in this case), as I bent over the front of the projector, the spinning shaft caught the hair on the side of my head and in an instant had twirled up a big chunk of it and literally tore out a swatch of it from the middle of my head to my temple. A bloodcurdling scream could be heard throughout the theatre. Luckily it just pulled the hair out by the roots and did no real damage to the scalp itself -- no blood that is, but plenty of pain -- which was the only thing that made my boss reluctantly allow me to finish the show. The damage to my ego was another story. For a few days I walked around with half a head of hair and got so tired of explaining what had happened and then having to listen to the snickers, that I shaved it all off. It all grew back fine, only to fall out later in life. My boss said that in all the years he had worked in the movie business, he had never seen anything quite like it. To this day, me neither.  |  IP: Logged

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