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This topic comprises 5 pages: 1 2 3 4 5
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Topic: How old were you when you wanted to become a projectionist?
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Frank Angel
Film God
Posts: 5305
From: Brooklyn NY USA
Registered: Dec 1999
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posted 10-30-2008 05:49 AM
And additionally there was Sterling Motion Pictures. Between them and MTPS, you could get enough really decent titles to make up full programs as I did for a small theatre in my college dorm common room. Every Friday nights were movie night in our rec room (Notre Dame was not coed when I attended, so movies were very popular on Friday nights. The common room or rec room as we called it had a small stage and curtain at one end -- that's all I needed to see and I spent much of my freshman year building a dorm theatre.
I built two 6 foot high stands with blimped soundproof boxes on top of each to house the two old B&H 300 series projectors. I attached the arms to the outside of the blimp boxes while the boxes themselves were walled with acoustic cieling tile I got from the university maintenance shop. The blimps worked very well -- you could hardly hear the projectors.
For dimmers for the curtain & house lights I actually had found a few of those huge resistive rheostats -- big round black things with the wire coils imbeded in cement and probably asbestos and with big handles. They were awkward and bulby, but they worked....and got hellishly hot if you didn't turn them off when once you dimmed the lights completely out. When we ran features, I would get another B&H from the next res hall & put it in my second blimp. I loved those Bell & Howell.
For change-overs I worked diligently trying all manner of solenoids & levers outside the projectors to flip in front of the lenses, but when I finally got one to work, the two of them made so much noise together that I finally gave up and opted for a two-way switch to flip the projector bulbs power on one switch. It worked well enough and it was a hellofa lot less noisy than those big solenoids slamming shutters on a fulcum up and down.
There was also a great source for sports news reels from the USArmy. They would send one every week (I called it our Sports Reel Spectacular) and it was a big crowd pleaser; the rec hall filled up every week. And the sports reels were totally free -- the Army even paid for the postage both ways. Evidently they had a huge film and processing facility and this was a bye-product. Our tax dollars at work.
Whenever I could save enough money from the popcorn sales, I would rent a feature from Films, Inc. The first one I ever played in that dorm theatre was MR. ROBERTS. The B&L anamorphics werent matched -- one was a integrated, the other was an attachement. The biggest hitch was getting a curtain/mask puller (no motors in that system). And even though I had indicator lights run to the back stage, they never could quite get it right. Mostly because lots of beer was consumed at these movie nights and although they got it pretty much at the start of the show, they weren't nearly as reliable by the end of the show. ![[beer]](graemlins/beer.gif)
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Scott Norwood
Film God
Posts: 8146
From: Boston, MA. USA (1774.21 miles northeast of Dallas)
Registered: Jun 99
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posted 10-30-2008 08:31 AM
How does one thread a filmstrip projector in frame? The ones that we had in school had a slot in the top of the machine where the leader of the filmstrip would go and, when pushed far enough, the leader would engage the advance sprocket under the gate. There was no way to insert or remove a filmstrip mid-strip. The entire thing would need to be advanced through the machine. The actual advance knob had detents every quarter-turn, so that the strip could be advanced four perfs at a time. There was also a framing adjustment knob that either surrounded or protruded from the center of the advance knob. The only way that I could see that the filmstrips could be reliably threaded in frame would be to cut the leader "in frame," although that position probably varied between projectors.
The usual problem with filmstrips (other than the fact that almost all were sleep-inducingly boring) was that whoever was assigned to advance them would either miss a beep on the record or would advance two frames instead of one, thus getting the picture out of sync with the soundtrack.
By the time I was in fifth grade (1987), my school got an automated filmstrip projector, which worked only with filmstrips with sound on cassette tape. These tapes were recorded with a stereo head with the beeps only on one track. The player in the projector would reproduce the other track (without beeps) and use the cue tones to advance the filmstrip. This worked fine if the operator put the proper start frame in the gate before starting the tape. The tapes would play normally (with audible beeps) in a mono player for schools without automatic projectors.
Another oddball format that we had in elementary school was the "film loop." These came in either standard-8mm or super-8mm (using different projectors for each format) and the film came in an endless-loop cartridge (which was keyed to prevent the use of a standard-8mm cartridge in a super-8mm projector and vice-versa). The projectors were made by Technicolor (!); they accepted the cartridges in a slot in the back and had only four controls: on/off, focus, frame, and lamp bright/dim. Even on "bright," the lamp was very dim and not suitable for a picture more than a couple of feet wide.
We had B&H 500-series auto-shred 16mm projectors in elementary and middle school and Elmo 16CLs in high school, though relatively few teachers showed actual film in class after 1990 or so.
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Stephen Furley
Film God
Posts: 3059
From: Coulsdon, Croydon, England
Registered: May 2002
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posted 11-06-2008 03:40 PM
Scott,
Motorised filmstrip projectors such as the Bell and Howell ones were not very common in my day. On the older ones, such as the Aldis Tutor 500 and 1000 wound the strip onto the top spool, pushed the two sprung glass plates apart, slipped the film between them, pushed the end of the film under the clip on the take-up spool, and then wound down to the first frame. You then attached the strip holder, or the slide holder, to the two bars on the front of the projector on which was also mounted the lens holder. The front of the projector could be rotated to position these bars horizontally or vertically. The slide holder was mounted horizontally, and the strip holder normally vertically for single frame (4 perf) strips, but could also be used horizontally for double frame (8 perf) strips, though these were much less common. A small metal mask was pulled out to use these. With the original holder there was no detent, you simply stopped turning when the next frame was correctly positioned on the screen. With a later holder, which I think was introduced with the tutor 2 halogen projector, though it could also be used with the older ones, a sprocket was introduced in the position where the take-up spool used to be, which the film wrapped around about 90 degrees, and then passed to the take-up spool just in front of it. You wound the film through until the first frame was correctly positioned, and then turned the knob on the sprocket until it clicked to set the detent. After this you just turned the knob on the take up spool until the detent clicked, once for single frame, and twice for double frame strips. The Tutor 2 with its 24V 250W halogen lamp gave better illumination than the older machines with their 500W or 1000W straight tungsten lamps, which put a lot of heat on the film.
A rather similar machine was made by Kershaws of Leeds, the same people that made the Kalee cinema projectors, and the same dark red plastic was used for the knobs on them. These were still in use at my primary school in the '60s, but were thought to be getting rather old then. I've got an Aldis Tutor 2 somewhere, but with only slide, not strip holder.
These machines were seldom maintained in good condition, and were notorious for scratching film, it is rare to find a used strip which is not scratched. I have just one strip, from 1951, which is in good condition. Somebody I know was interested in it, as he had not seen a copy, and he arranged to be able to put it on his web site; I did the scanning of both the film, and the lecture notes. For the younger people who have not seen a filmstrip, or to bring back memories for the older ones who sat through lots of these things when they were at school, there's a scan of the label from the top of the small metal film can, and the rather nicely letterpress printed cover of the lecture notes here:
quote:
http://nicwhe8.freehostia.com/btf/productions/filmstrips/BT0017/BT17.html
Clicking on the title frame will take you the whole of the strip, along with the text of the lecture notes for each frame. A typical 1950s filmstrip; the lecture notes, and some if the images, really do seem very dated today. I've actually been on the ship seen in frame 41, in its later days.
The black and white strips were normally made by photographing paper photographic prints, and the colour ones by copying slides, in both cases onto 35mm negative film. The negative was spliced into a loop, and run through a continuous contact printer to produce a large number of prints on a long roll of film, which were then cut off, and packed into cans, the older metal ones were about 50mm in diameter, the later plastic ones rather smaller.
The quality of the images from the small frames could actually be pretty good if the strip was in good condition. The later strips were generally printed on Eastmancolor, and have faded to almost total pink decades ago; they were generally too early to be on low-fade stock.
Interestingly, the strip shown above was printed from a nitrate negative, it must have been one of he last ones to have been. The strip itself is triacetate of course.
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Bob Koch
Expert Film Handler
Posts: 183
From: williams ca
Registered: Nov 2001
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posted 11-10-2008 10:47 PM
Maybe I should`nt even start this.Anyway in early 1937 I went to a hi school in Oakland Ca that had a very active stage crew that interested me and had a tin lined booth in this very large auditorium with a couple of Powers 6B`s on their original stands with the original Powers lamps, vertical trim, solid carbon arc lamps. The hi school was closely connected with UC Berkeley and they were experimenting with student government in our school and as a result several of us were allowed leeway to equip this booth to run 35mm sound. Away we went to film row in San Francisco[Golden Gate Ave] and attempted to obtain this from legitimate dealers,i.e. National Theatre Supply, B. F. Shearer and others who would`nt talk to us and ended up with a pipe organ dealer/manufacturer Geo. H. Leatherby. He sold us junk I can remember to this day[and I`m 86]called Weber Syncrofilm manufactured by Weber Machine Works in Rochester NY. Had an amplifier with a pair of 2A3`s with fixed bias in the output and it was pretty good but fought a losing battle with it,s in put and output sources. The speakers were a pair of Jensens with 110 volt fields and some tweeter I forget. We rigged this to fly as the auditorium had full fly galleries. This is what started me; but the IATSE operators locals were so strong at the time that we had to employ a union operator to run the booth for our paid audience. I started visiting the operator where he worked and really got hooked. A lot of members of Local 169 were kind to me but you did`nt get to touch the equipment. The original operator later was business agent for Local 169 and remained friends with me until his death and I was working for RCA Photophone.
After working in the country in St. Helena Ca for room and board I finally got an opportunty to work as an IATSE permit man. [Mark G. will love this]This is at a time when the International President was George E. Browne, late of Chicago stage hans Local 2, and he answered directly to Frank Nitti and more importantly, Paul Ricca of the Chiago "outfit". I paid quite a percentage of my wages to a fund directly controlled by Geo Browne. Later he and Willie Bioff were convicted of extorting money from the Hollywood studios. They "ratted"about their mob connections and Willie Bioff, some years later in Phoenix,pressed the accelerator of his car and was blown to bits. Readers Digest had an article about Browne entitled, "A Bullet is Waiting" but I never knew what happened.After that I worked until I went in the army and overseas but never got a membership card. When I returned after two years in the Marianas, the good brothers of Local 241 Vallejo Ca put me right back on the job I left and inducted me into full membership. That was 61ears ago. I spent the next 45 years in the projection room, either as a projectionist or RCA/Altec service engineer. Never done anything else.
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