Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: Catharsis via Film-Tech 'confessional'?

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Posted by Michael Barry (Member # 237) on 08-08-2002, 11:20 AM:

I'm willing to see if it's possible, because I feel so darned silly. Actually, I just feel plain bad.

I did something really stupid at work tonight, and the worst part about it is that I can't understand how I possibly could have made this mistake.

Why is it that you can make it through some fairly rigorous, complex stuff just fine, then you have the simplest and most straightforward of tasks which you then proceed to somehow foul up?

What did I do? I threaded the incorrect movie. Yes, it was corrected prior to hitting the feature (the final trailer had just ended!) However, with clearly marked schedules and my (usually) extremely vigilant triple-checking procedure, I cannot for the life of me understand how this one could have slipped by. Worse, this comes less than 24 hours after a satirical posting about the importance of checking things! What egg on my face?

I pride myself on the accuracy and consistency of my work, and errors are few and far between...but this is what makes this one especially annoying: it was so obvious and avoidable.

OK, so I can accept that mistakes will crop up from time to time. But the question is: what about the idea of stupid, inane mistakes cropping up? Shouldn't they be completely absent? What an embarrassment.

Posted by Brad Haven (Member # 954) on 08-08-2002, 11:34 AM:

Just make sure you have a good laugh about it, as it IS quite funny for an obviously proud and professional projectionist to make this mistake!...and i'm sure you wont make the same mistake again!!

------------------
currently (relief)chief projectionist
at Luna Leederville cinemas
also cheerleader for john wilson (gooOO JOHN!)

Posted by Mike Blakesley (Member # 26) on 08-08-2002, 11:38 AM:

Everybody makes mistakes. Just two months ago, I accidentally included the "Sum of all Fears" trailer in the trailer pack for that movie!

Come on everyone, chime in with your own goofy mistakes (as opposed to that previous "booth disasters" thread).

Posted by Jeff Taylor (Member # 443) on 08-08-2002, 11:56 AM:

Not exactly a "booth disaster"...more of a "studio disaster". Under the category of mea culpa, when I was working as a DJ years ago I was half asleep and probably hung over doing an early morning drive time show. This was back in the days of vinyl, and I announced the next number with a fairly detailed introduction only to find out that the prior record was still on the table. Ouch! Well, at least I cued it up right as if that mattered!

Posted by Gracia L. Babbidge (Member # 582) on 08-08-2002, 12:51 PM:

Once, and only once, did I manage build up a print with one reel spliced in backwards. >_< (I was still a bit of a novice at that point in time.)

Once, and only once, did I manage to build up a print with reels in something other than the correct order. I somehow put on reel 7 where reel 4 should have been, and reel 4 was where reel 7 should have been! (And this print played like this for three days without anyone noticing!) >_<

Lessons learned = mistakes going unrepeated!

Posted by Jon Miller (Member # 163) on 08-08-2002, 02:42 PM:

Four years ago I ran projection for a film festival in a local multiplex equipped with Christie packages in all auditoriums except for the largest one, which was blessed with an AA-II (DP-70). Most of the festival, which was held in a smaller auditorium, went fine, except for that P35 sounding like a bucket of bolts in operation. The festival operators moved one feature to the large house due to heavy advance ticket sales. Of course, after running those unspectacular Christies I was eager to get a chance on a legendary projector and was flush with anticipation.

Well, I got the hang of the machine in no time and threaded up the projector without a hitch...or so I thought. When the picture hit the screen, something was amiss. Mirrored picture, no sound. D'OH! In my eagerness, I accidentally threaded the print soundtrack in and failed to catch that error . I had to stop the projector and, with the assistance of the theatre's "booth ushers," re-feed the paid-out film back into the center of the platter pack to get it going again. Five minutes and one red face later, we restarted the show, this time threaded as God and Norelco intended.

Sooner or later, a goof catches up with up. As long as no film was damaged, I guess we can live down to our human-ness, pick up the pieces, and get back to doing film right.

Posted by Josh Jones (Member # 447) on 08-08-2002, 03:19 PM:

We were running a new print of "The Man Who Wasn't There." This is all fine and dandy, but there was an out of frame splice in reel 3 to 4 or somewhere in there. So what do I do? I DID NOT wind onto a 6000 like I should have, but instead split the roll in two with my fingers, pulled out the offending splice, fixed it, and started the show. Halfway through the movie, that dangling piece of film caught on the film going into the brain. Wholla, instant brain wrap.

I was expecting something catastrophic like that so I stayed in the booth until it went through. All hell would have broke loose had I not have been there. Five minutes later we were back on screen, and I learned an important lesson.

Bad thing was, the splice I replaced wasnt the bad one.

Josh

Posted by Randy Loy (Member # 112) on 08-08-2002, 03:22 PM:

A few years ago I was embarrassed while running "The Matrix" at a performing arts center where we still use arc lamps and do 2,000 foot changeovers. The chief projectionist at the theatre is 88 years old and he started at the same theatre in 1932 when the theatre was a commercial movie palace and he was a union apprentice. Anyhow, we couldn't get access to the film print until just before showtime (long story) so I started inspecting the print reels and as soon as I would finish inspecting a reel on the bench, George would thread it up on a machine in preparation for the next changeover.

The Ashcraft lamps in our booth can be a little tricky to run these days and I suspect they need a good going over by a tech. If you don't keep a close eye on them, they have been known to lose their arcs when the arc gap gets a little too large. This little problem jumped up and bit us with one machine during this particular show while I was distracted with inspecting film and George was tinkering with the other machine.

As I was on about reel four, with my back to machine one, I suddenly got this funny feeling and thought to myself, "Uh oh, It's been too long since either of us have checked the arc on number one!" I then spun around and discovered that the lamp was indeed dark. I dove for the lamp and re-struck the arc, hoping that we'd been off-screen for only a second or so. Not so, however. Later, floor staff told us the screen was dark for about five minutes. And they never even radioed the booth to tell us!

Posted by Randy Stankey (Member # 64) on 08-08-2002, 03:24 PM:

So, how do you expect to have any war stories to tell the guys if you have never had any "accidents"?

Everybody makes bone-head mistakes once in a while. It's not so much about whether mistakes are made or not. (Obviously NO mistake is "OK".) What separates the "men from the boys", metaphorically speaking, is the way one conducts him/herself in the face of a problem.

Do you stand there, denying the mistake, making excuses or do you hop on your feet and fix the damned problem?

In my experience, it's an unwritten rule that the audience will give you a Mulligan if the mistake is relatively minor and it happens before the feature actually starts.

Don't worry about it so much... But don't let it happen again!

Posted by Joseph D. Olson (Member # 1340) on 08-08-2002, 07:37 PM:

I had been training for quite a while before it was time for me to actually build my first print and it was a press screening for Big Fat Liar. The last reel was spliced on backwards. Luckilly, it was only flipped around and not heads\tails flipped so because it was the last reel, I could just stop the show, put a twist in the film and thread it backwards. Film offscreen for less than five minutes. Oh, well. Sneak preview. I guess you get what you don't pay for.

------------------
So if old projectionists don't die, what happens when new projectionists get old?

Posted by Manny Knowles (Member # 1171) on 08-08-2002, 10:12 PM:

I was training a GROUP of new projectionists and I threaded backwards (soundtrack flip-flopped).

"And that's what happens when you try to do two things at once, class!"

~Manny (now in three delicious flavors!)

Posted by Joe Redifer (Member # 3) on 08-08-2002, 10:30 PM:

I spliced on a Dolby Digital Aurora trailer ass-backwards (tail first) at the Telluride Film Festival on the front of "Straight Story". It hit the screen immediately after director David Lynch and actor Richard Farnsworth gave their speech to the audience. Very embarrasing. I just closed the douser and muted the sound until the trailer ran through, but boy oh boy did I feel like a dumbass! But if you're gonna screw up, you might as well screw up BIG!

Posted by Brad Miller (Member # 2) on 08-09-2002, 01:16 AM:

I don't know if this "tops" yours Joe, but I've got a similar one.

Back in 1989 I had just been hired at a Cinemark. This particular location was their flagship at the time. My first shift and the first round of movies, the manager comes running up to the booth 5 minutes before #6 was supposed to start. (I have no idea what the movie was, but I remember it was #6.) He says that all of their policy trailers are in terrible condition and that the owners Lee Roy and Tandy Mitchell just walked in the door and were about to watch that movie. He was freaking VERY badly over it and demanded that I unthread it and get a clean copy on there.

To make a long story short, I grabbed a few policies out of the cabinet (all were in bad condition) and found one on a spot check that wasn't too horrible. It was labeled "FRJ head". (FRJ=Front Row Joe) I raced over to #6 with the splicer, got the thing dropped in and the machine rethreaded and hit START right on time. I guess I don't even need to tell you that whoever broke that trailer down should have written "FRJ tail"! If it hadn't been for the numnuts who mislabeled it and wound it emulsion in (and also the fact that I was rushed and had no idea what the beginning and ending of the policy looked like), I would not have screwed that up.

So just like Joe did, the second it hit the screen I saw what had happened. I turned the fader to "0", closed the douser and kept the lights at half and waited there, and waited there, and waited there, and waited there (these policies were in excess of 2 minutes), and then waited there some more until it finally played through. The manager was standing there freaking out even moreso over it (he was acting like he was a mob target) and demanded that I stop the projector and turn it around, but I had to keep explaining to him that such a thing would take a LOT more time. (By the way, he didn't last long.)

Nowadays if the head / tail is not obvious to me, I look at the emulsion in the reflection of the light to determine if it is heads or tails out. I haven't screwed up a trailer change in any fashion since that day (and I've probably done about ten thousand others in the last 13 years).

We're all allowed one mistake, right?

Right...but just that one.

Posted by John Pytlak (Member # 331) on 08-09-2002, 09:24 AM:

A tutorial on print orientation for the "newbies":

The analog soundtrack is always on the outboard (towards you) side of the projector as you thread.

The emulsion side of a 35mm release print always faces the lamphouse. The base side of the print is always towards the lens.

The image in the gate is always upside down.

The image will always "read" correctly from the emulsion side of the print.

To summarize: As you look at the film coming into the projector head, the analog soundtrack should be outboard, the image on the print should be upside down, and the image (title lettering) should read correctly if you view the print from the lamphouse side.

------------------
John P. Pytlak, Senior Technical Specialist
Worldwide Technical Services, Entertainment Imaging
Research Labs, Building 69, Room 7525A
Rochester, New York, 14650-1922 USA
Tel: +1 585 477 5325 Cell: +1 585 781 4036 Fax: +1 585 722 7243
e-mail: john.pytlak@kodak.com
Web site: http://www.kodak.com/go/motion

Posted by Frank Angel (Member # 248) on 08-09-2002, 01:27 PM:

John, those excellent rules-of-thumb should be posted in every booth. Especially in rep houses like mine that occasionally have to run silent films. With those, obviously that nice landmark soundtrack isn't there, making orientation even more of a challenge. And for some reason, on older prints, the tell-tale emulsion/base contrast (dull vs. shinny) seems to become less obvious and you really have to eyeball it.

Anyone who has worked in a booth for any length of time has gotten bitten by the flipped soundtrack, the wrong lens/aperture, change-over only to find the arc not struck, etc. What is REALLY embarrassing is when you've been in the booth for years and should know better, but because of some small distraction, it comes up and bites you on the butt again. But I've got one better than the soundtrack flip-a-roo. This is very much in line with Manny's, only with a lot more dire consequences.

I was called in for a screening at the museum it so happened at a time that they had just hired a new AV Manager, a young guy just out of college. He was in charge of everything technical in the theatre -- sound mixing for live shows, slide lectures, everything except 35mm projection -- for that he needed to schedule in a licensed operator. So on this his first film screening on his new job, as I am preping this short film, we carry on an animated discussion about the 35mm system, the integration into the house sound system, then moved to museum politics. I start the show; our conversation continues. I make the first two change-overs showing him how it works. He is impressed. But now as we are talking, out of the corner of my eye, I begin to check the third reel playing out thinking I have to bring the lights to "Credit" level soon. Now I begin to shut out his discussion and my mind starts to focus on the film on the screen I and realize something is very wrong. What's wrong is that the there's about 7 minutes on the last reel and nothing on the screen seems to be coming to a conclusion; in fact, what sounds like a new plot twist is beginning.

It would probably be really cool if someone was there with a camera to snap your face at that moment of revelation when it "dawns on you." I stop him in mid-sentence and ask, "Er, do you remember if there are any other film cans downstairs?" "Why?" he asks innocently. "Well, because unless they can get to town, find a lawyer and get some evidence to go to trial in the next 4 minutes, we are missing three, maybe four more reels of this movie." This kid goes white. I mean, he's very white to begin with, but now he looks like he is going to faint right there in front of me. I tell him to sit down and drink some water. He kept repeating over and over, "Oh my God, what are we going to do? "Well, in a situation like this, since we don't have the rest of the film, its simple. We just have to go out and tell the audience that we can't finish the show." I thought a little levity would help, so I add, "And by the way, who's this WE you speak of?" It didn't.

Knowing it was my fault for not realizing that the unfortunate fade-out at the end of R3 was NOT the end of the movie, I said, "Look you just sit here, I'll go out and tell the audience." I went out to the theatre and told the 200 people sitting there in CREDITS lighting that the distributor hadn't send the full feature and we are very sorry but we cannot finish the screening and they could see it next week, pickup passes at the door, blah, blah, blah.

I love museum audiences -- they are so polite. They took it quite well....seemed quite understanding of my explanation. I was actually a little pleased with myself thinking, "Gee, that was easy." And just as I was making my get-away, happy that no one asked the obvious, one feisty old guy down in front was a bit more vocal, a bit more Brooklyn. He yells out in typical Brooklynese, "Hey, the distributor didn't send you all the reels, so how come you didn't figure this out till just now?" "Damn," thinks I, "caught." My voice mumbled, "Yes, that was our error, sorry." while my brain thought, in perfect Brooklynese, "Yah, screw you, pal."

There is a good reason the union has a rule that no one other than the projectionist is allowed in the booth while the film is running. Beware distractions, my brothers!

Frank

Posted by John Wilson (Member # 269) on 08-10-2002, 03:29 AM:

Michael

Don't feel too bad about it. Just remember you ARE allowed one mistake.

Having said that, I should point out that if you make one more mistake I'm gonna fire your ass!

Posted by Michael Brown (Member # 890) on 08-10-2002, 08:56 AM:

Changing a 'Coming Soon' trailer, I spliced the new version in "ass-backwards".

Posted by Mike Babb (Member # 1379) on 08-11-2002, 01:33 AM:

Here's one: about 15 years ago I was running a Century JJ and had something wrong with the film in the top sprocket in the penthouse. In order to avoid stopping the film to fix it, I was trying to "adjust" it while going and ended up running my finger through, had to stop the projector with my other hand and extract my finger. Yeah I felt like a dumba$$...

Mike

Posted by John Daily (Member # 1362) on 08-11-2002, 10:18 AM:

Mike, I JUST did something like that a couple of weeks ago!!!

Definitely one of the more stupid things I've done. It was a print I hadn't made up and I heard a crunchy splice go through, so I ran my finger along the takeup platter (which happened be on top) to feel the thickness of the splice and got caught in the next layer of film coming on. Luckily, the show wasn't affected, but I was a little ticked at myself for a while.

Posted by Brad Haven (Member # 954) on 08-11-2002, 11:37 AM:

My biggest mistake was in my first week of training, we had a sci-fi festival on , all star trek films 1-6?, dusk till dawn! (lumiere cinemas).
Things were quite rushed that week so they took a chance and asked me to make up the films (first try with basic instructions , verbal), well...when they came up on screen it appeared that alot of the spools were in the wrong order, on each film i think atleast two spools were mixed up!. The management panicked ,but we couldn't do much about it so we just told the audience to enjoy the experience!, they all loved it and had a great laugh (all trekers). I still occasionally bump into someone that was there that day or knew someone that was there and they all said they still remember the occasion fondly.
We worked out that some of the spools were incorrectly marked and mixed up between films. The person who was training me got the sack/quit over the matter, due to it was her responsibility, i still feel guilty though!!.

Posted by David Stambaugh (Member # 1102) on 08-11-2002, 07:07 PM:

Kind of long, sorry. The 2nd story is actually sort of related to film...

I was in the Air Force, stationed in Bangkok. Our unit operated super-secret (at the time) electronics for monitoring nuclear weapons testing by other countries (mainly China, but France was still testing at the time too). Our station was next to Bangkok's main airport. Commercial power there was very unreliable, so we had 3 big diesel emergency generators: 1 for utility, 1 for tech equipment, and 1 spare. I think they were 50KW generators. In case of a commercial power failure, one of us would stay inside & shut off all the equipment, while the other would sprint out to the generator shack, fire up 2 of the 3 generators, and get tech power running first, followed by utility power. The person inside would bring all the equipment back online.

We had been on emergency generators for several days, and finally commercial power came back on and seemed stable. Now getting the place switched back to commercial power, without any interruption or downtime, was very tricky. There was a crude monitoring system in the generator shack that displayed if the commercial power & the generator were in sync with each other. The idea was to get commercial & generator power perfectly in phase (by raising or lowering the generator's AC frequency slightly), cut in the commercial breaker, and cut off the generator. So for a couple seconds, our generator would be running in parallel with commercial power.

Did I mention that I was new there?

My shift partner, who was none too swift but still had seniority over me, takes me out to the generator and shows me exactly what to do. "Watch this light. Start adjusting the generator's frequency, and when the light is ON bright & steady, power is synchronized & in phase. That's when you cut in the commercial power, and quickly cut off the generator."

No problemo. He goes back inside to watch over the equipment. I start adjusting the gen. freq. to match commercial. I get the phase light so it's on steady and bright, and cut in the commercial breaker.

Well, before I had a chance to do anything else, this huge generator started bucking and struggling, and smoke started pouring out of the alternator. I was like "Holy crap, what the hell's going on!!??" I at least had the sense to quickly shut the thing down. Smoke was billowing out of the shed now. This was day shift, full office staff there, so of course everyone comes running out of the office building to see what's going on. Our unit commander had an IQ no higher than room temperature on a cool day, and he was in a panic because of all the paperwork he would have to fill out. "I'm personally responsible for this!!!" Then someone reminded him that regulations required the local fire dept. be called in case of ANY fire-related emergency. So they call the airport's Thai fire crew, explaining that this is an electrical fire, and requesting that the fire crew respond accordingly. The fire truck arrives about 10 mins. later with nothing but water.

So we start sorting it out, and find out that my shift partner had a brain fart about that phase light. Commercial & generator power were in phase when the light was completely OFF, not ON. When the light was on, the 2 power sources were 180 degrees out of phase with each other. And believe me, you don't want to parallel your generator with commercial power when they're 180 degrees out of phase with each other.

================

Another story of working in Bangkok, and it's actually film-related. We worked 2-man 12-hour shifts. The graveyard shift would not always have a lot of work to do, so sometimes one of us would grab a few hours of sleep while the other kept an eye on all the equipment. We had a darkroom for developing 500 foot rolls of 35mm b/w film (equipped with a Labmaster automated 35mm film developer). Well, since it was a darkroom and there was a large countertop work surface, we would sleep in there on top of the counter.

Did I mention that power was very unreliable? We were all hyper-sensitive to variations in line frequency, voltage sags, etc. in commercial power and we tended to be paranoid about it, because we were never supposed to have more than 2 minutes of equipment downtime if the power failed. Any more than 2 minutes down and we had a lot of 'splaining to do.

Well, it's my turn to sleep, so I'm in the darkroom, sleeping, shoes off. I'm sound asleep, lulled by the hum of the equipment. All of a sudden commercial power drops. I immediately wake up thinking "Oh shit, I'm the designated generator operator!!" Instinctively, I know I need to get up NOW. Forgetting where I am and being in total darkness, not to mention foggy-headed, my right leg flies up as hard as it will go, and I jam my big toe into the bottom of a cupboard above the counter I'm sleeping on. This pain shoots up my leg, but I manage to drag myself out to the generators and get them going.

When the dust settled, I found out I had jammed my foot into the bottom of the cupboard so hard I broke my big toe. The toe was smashed over sideways, about 45 degrees off from where it should have been pointing. When I went to the doctor, he couldn't really do anything for it. It was about 3 years before I had full flexibility of that toe again, and it's still crooked.

How many people can claim they've broken a limb while sleeping on the job?

Posted by Brad Miller (Member # 2) on 08-11-2002, 08:44 PM:

Ouch! So silly question here, given the choice of a countertop or the floor, where do you sleep now?

Posted by David Stambaugh (Member # 1102) on 08-11-2002, 09:12 PM:

Heh. Anyplace, as long as there's no immovable object directly above me.

I can almost relate that Air Force job to being a projectionist...

The equipment we were running was ancient. It recorded data on successive frames of 35mm b/w film. Most of the electronics were tube, but some of it was solid state and even digital. Back then, a flip-flop circuit was made of discrete components (transistors etc.) on a plug-in circuit board. One board = One flip-flop! No ICs. There were 8 6-foot tall standard 19" racks, filled to capacity with power supplies and other junk.

When a nuclear device is exploded in the atmosphere, it emits a very unique and strong pulse of energy at 10KHz (this is the infamous electromagnetic pulse that's supposed to cause most solid-state devices to be disabled when a big nuke goes off -- Same type of pulse they were creating in Oceans 11 to knock out all the power in Vegas). The signal was picked up on an array of loop antennas, which allowed triangulation of the source. It was amplified, and split into analog and digital components. The analog 10KHz waveform was displayed on an oscillosope-type CRT. The digital data (the signal's amplitude, direction, precise time, etc.) was displayed on a matrix of high-intensity LEDs (actually I think they were some kind of neon tubes), as binary coded decimal data, BCD. These two images were reflected through a series of mirrors and recorded side-by-side on a frame of film.

Unfortunately, there is a LOT of natural atmospheric electrical noise at 10KHz, so we chewed through those 500' rolls of film pretty quickly sometimes. Since they didn't want any gaps in the recorded data, and the rolls of film were limited to 500', we had 2 complete, identical arrays of film recorders. While one was recording, the operator would load up the other one with film. We had to load the magazines in the darkroom, thread the film, record a series of calibration signals on the leader, and ensure that the system clocks were sync'd to UTC. We had an atomic reference clock there for that.

So a good operator would be able to do "changeovers" by himself (while his partner slept - ). The trick was to accurately predict when the operational system would run out of film, based on the rate of film being used, which varied up and down all the time. When you decided the recording system was about to run out of film, you would run the calibration recording sequence on the other system, and start recording data exactly at the top of the minute. The 2 systems would overlap for exactly 1 minute, then you would cut off the one coming down and record another series of calibration images on the tail of the film. Run out the tail, take the magazine into the darkroom, unload and box the exposed film, and load the magazine with a fresh 500' roll.

This one time, I accidentally ruined a roll of freshly-recorded film by exposing it to light. This was very bad. My partner & I talked it over, and decided to load up the spare recorder with fresh film, set the system clock back to the exact start time of the original, ruined run of film, and record a new [bogus] roll as if nothing had happened. We had to make sure the other system didn't run out of film itself during this time, so we tweaked the sensitivity settings on it to minimum, slowing the recording rate to almost nothing (and conceivably filtering out a genuine signal). Yes folks, the security of your country was in our capable hands.

Posted by Frank Angel (Member # 248) on 08-12-2002, 01:18 PM:

Brad H. Funny it happened to you on a STAR TREK film because the same thing happened here in NY at the famous Zeigfeld Theatre on one of the first STAR TREK films. Paramount had booked in a preview screening for their New York execs at 11am and the operator who made up the platter the night before reversed reels 4 & 5. Unfortunately the Paramount suits aren't as forgiving as Trekies, and sadly the guy lost his job. I always thought that was way too harsh and the union should have fought for him, but they didn't (don't want to loose all those invites to the Paramount preview reel parties).

My take on it is, "Hey Paramount, you want a perfect show? Pay for a test run, you cheap &%^$#&s."

Frank

PS -- Dave S., thanks for the great stories.

Posted by Lewis Bohannon (Member # 1387) on 08-14-2002, 01:52 AM:

Here's a good one, but (luckily) not one of mine...

I had been working as a projectionist in my theater for only a few weeks, when I came into the booth for my shift hearing my GM (at that time) yelling and screaming at the other projectionist. Trying to mind my own buisness, I try to slip by on my way to my desk, noticing a BIG pile of film on the floor. Suddenly, the GM swings around grabbes my by my shirt sleve and drags my to another projector, and orders me to lace it up.
With shaking hands and my life [carrer] flashing before my eyes, I manage to lace it up perfectly. My GM walks over, wearing a smirk only Satin could produce, goes to the take-up platter and reverses the sound-track. He runs about 3-4 of the trailers through, stoppes the projector, tears it at the splice. He then pulls the collar out of this mini-movie and says to me:
"Lew, what would you do if you saw this as you go to thread a projector?"
I told him I'd just twist it the other direction as I thread the first roller on the colum.He smiled, said thank you, and patted me on the back. And as he walked back over to the huge pile of film on the floor he announced that the other guy saw the reversed soundtrack just like the one my GM showed me, and believed the solution was to flip the WHOLE print around... All eight reels, by himself! heance the large pile on the floor. I think it took him ultill 2am to fix that print.
Needless to say the other guy didn't last too much longer. I think what made my GM more upset was the other guy had almost a years more experance than I did. Just goes to show, some people make mistakes, others F***-up!

Posted by Bruce McGee (Member # 131) on 08-14-2002, 11:51 AM:

Having rarely used platters, I'll offer this one:

Running Love Story (1970) in about 1978 in a drive-in. My boss was off the lot for 15-20 minutes. Reel 2 was ending. I loaded up reel 4 and started it. About 2 minutes went by... then the car horns started. I figured out what had happened, stopped the reel 4. The horns stopped, too. Got on the intercom and told the audience what happened, and please give me a couple of minutes. Then turned on the music. I got a round of horn toots, then silence. I quickly loaded reel 3 and resumed the show.
Funny thing though, my boss was the one that set the next reel in front of the projector! When he came back, I told him what happened, and what I did. He was mortified at what he had done, and offered his apologies.
Happily, we had zero complaints that night. Fairly full house, too. I like to think that most of the patrons were actually watching the movie.

Posted by Thomas Procyk (Member # 1170) on 08-14-2002, 12:07 PM:

Here's two I remember vividly...

My first job in a booth at the brand-new Regal Royal Palm, the only megaplex and stadium seating theater for 50 miles at the time, which would get guests such as Donald Trump and Tommy Lee Jones in the coming years, sell the most tickets in north america for Lethal Weapon 4, the most in Florida for Star Wars Episode 1, yadda yadda yadda.... Anyway, grand opening, me building my first print: "City Of Angels". I wasn't there to witness it run for the first time as I was in school. I come in later that day and see the manager with a disappointed look. He explains that I reversed the soundtrack on one of the reels, so that it was on the screen. They stopped the show, fixed it, and on the very next reel it happened again. First show at a brand new flagship theater.... PASSED HOUSE! Next print I built: "Deep Impact"... flawless

The other was a year or so later, with "A Night At The Roxbury". It had just been moved to a bigger house because it kept selling out. I just came in for the evening shift on Friday after this new guy, who built the print. He told me that there were bad splices at every trailer, and to stand there and frame it until the feature. This was absurd, so I built a new trailer head, dropped it in, and stood there to watch them play through. Changeover opens, and the words "THIS FALL" are upside down and backwards on the screen! I shut the douser and hit the sound to Non-Sync. As Brad said, I wait and wait and wait... the trailer was the 5-minute "Pleasantville" crap! But since it was the first trailer, my quick thinking made it look like just an upside-down slide. Rest of the trailers were fine, THEN it brainwraps at the feature. Sometimes you just can't win...

=TMP=

Posted by Frank Angel (Member # 248) on 08-15-2002, 06:25 AM:

Well, yah, you can....you just have to work a change-over house. You never heard of a "reel wrap," did you?

Frank

Posted by Paul Cassidy (Member # 951) on 08-15-2002, 06:50 AM:

I,ve done some pretty strange things , like leave the Anamorphic up on a Scope film , you certainly see the difference at change over ,Leaving the flat Lens in with scope set up WOW it's bigger that Cinerama with image down both sides of the walls , but the biggest was not really my fault , as I got a print of "Once Were Warriors" which came with no heads or tails and just a piece of tape holding each reel with a number on each , well after adding heads and tails as I was Reel to Reel , I numbered the Reels as they came ..... well for a week a played the film out of sequence ( I wandered why Tattoo's disappeared half way thru the movie) well only one couple complained that the movie was wrong , as they had seen before , others said it was better the way I had it ( I thought it made more sense that way to ) accept for the disappearing Tattoo's )

------------------
A KIWI eats,roots & Leaves.

Posted by Leo Enticknap (Member # 534) on 08-15-2002, 07:16 AM:

Related to John's 'Film Orientation for Newbies' tutorial - the real fun starts if you're showing full-gate silents. Because the topography of the film is symmetrical (i.e. the frame occupies the entire width between the perforations), the only well you can tell if it's the right way round is by looking at the frame orientation and, as Brad points out, noting which side is the base and which is the emulsion. You can't tell by noting the position of the soundtrack, 'cos there ain't one.

I found this out the hard way showing an archive print of The Wedding March. Big show, 20-piece orchestra. The print didn't arrive until 20 minutes before showtime, so no time to check it properly. The head leaders were Academy ones with a soundtrack, so I assumed that if I laced the track the right way round then the picture would be, too. That was not a safe assumption to make. The reel change came in the middle of a climactic scene: the incoming reel opened with an intertitle, which appeared in mirror-writing. There was nothing for it but to stop and relace.

So, by trial and error, I found out that the way you check is as follows: if the top of the frame points outwards (i.e. away from the rest of the reel) the reel is head out. If it points inwards (i.e. towards the rest of the reel) the reel is tail out. When lacing up the top of the frame should face downwards (i.e. toward the take-up spool): IF the print has been made according to SMPTE specs, the emulsion should face the lamphouse, but don't rely on this, especially with prints produced by Eastern European archives. Look for some writing, e.g. on an intertitle, and ensure that it's the right way round facing the lamphouse, i.e. mirror-writing facing the lens.

Posted by Randy Stankey (Member # 64) on 08-15-2002, 09:50 AM:

I made a chart to help the kids figure out which was which:

All you have to do is hold your piece of film up to the picture and compare.

Obviously it wouldn't work with film that doesn't have a sound track but for those booths that used this (and other posters I made) their "F-Up ratio" went way down.

Posted by John Pytlak (Member # 331) on 08-15-2002, 10:47 AM:

But what if my print doesn't have

on it?

Posted by Joe Redifer (Member # 3) on 08-15-2002, 01:32 PM:

Well John I guess you'd be outta luck!

Posted by Brad Miller (Member # 2) on 08-15-2002, 02:34 PM:

Randy, I'm seeing conflicting information on your picture regarding which edge is the soundtrack. Did anyone actually notice the word "SOUNDTRACK"? It took me a minute to notice it. I was looking at the SRD blocks. Also, all 4 examples are of emulsion out winding. What about those wacky people who wind emulsion in?

Posted by Steve Kraus (Member # 476) on 08-15-2002, 06:00 PM:

But the normal tails-out wind is emulsion in.

Posted by Frank Angel (Member # 248) on 08-16-2002, 12:03 PM:

Somewhere deep in my memory circuits I seem to recall someone telling me that there is a test to find whether or not you have the emulsion side or base side -- lick your finger and then touch the film. The film will either stick to your finger or not, depending on which side you are touching. Only trouble is, the part about which side sticks and which doesn't unfortunately seems to have been deleted from those memory circuits.

Anyone ever hear of this? I don;t have a piece of film handy to test it.

Posted by John Pytlak (Member # 331) on 08-16-2002, 12:13 PM:

Generally, the gelatin emulsion will stick to a slightly wet surface, since it absorbs water and swells.

Film curl can also be a guide, as in drier conditions, film normally has "positive" curl:
http://www.kodak.com/country/US/en/motion/support/h1/baseP.shtml#other

Posted by Brad Miller (Member # 2) on 08-16-2002, 12:31 PM:

Twist the belt or change the pulleys Steve. That's a way outdated practice that was recommended for acetate film back in the 60s or 70s or whenever that was published. Your "brother" can come in here and whine about it, but I've got plenty of witnesses who can vouch that film stored exclusively emulsion out and ran emulsion out on feed and takeup has a flawless focus from beginning to end of a large hour long reel, even with a very short throw situation. (35mm lenses for 1.85)

Is it really that hard for people to just look at the reflected light off of the film to determine which side is the emulsion and which is the base? I've been to booths where the operators made it a habit to slobber all over the film before and after every splice to make sure it was spliced together properly. What a nasty mess!

Posted by John Pytlak (Member # 331) on 08-16-2002, 12:35 PM:

I agree, looking at the film carefully should be enough to tell which side is the emulsion.

The trick is doing it in a darkroom without light.

Posted by Scott Norwood (Member # 30) on 03-27-2003, 11:56 PM:

Argh.

Another FT member visited me at a multiplex tonight. I gave a quick booth tour to her and a friend and then they went into an auditorium to watch a movie. Since I had a print to make up in the other booth, I set the timer for that show and went to the other booth to work on the new print. A few minutes later, that show started without sound. The Maxi-10/CP500 combination had to have picked that particular show to not switch out of non-sync at show start. I noticed and fixed the problem within a few minutes, fortunately. Not exactly my fault, but it really made me look and feel stupid.

(This is a known problem in that house, but it almost always happens for the first show of the day, and even then it's quite rare.)

Posted by Daryl C. W. O'Shea (Member # 1303) on 03-28-2003, 12:22 AM:

Don't worry Scott, she's moving out of the country soon. [Wink]

Posted by Michael Schaffer (Member # 1204) on 03-28-2003, 04:01 AM:

Simply blame it on Rachel. Say she pushed buttons she didn`t understand.

Posted by Steve Kraus (Member # 476) on 03-28-2003, 11:08 AM:

I think in the old soap operas the Rachel characters were always the instigators! [Big Grin]

I'll fess up to a couple of rough changeovers a few weeks back. In one case I had an uncued print and during inspection and prep I somehow forgot to add a motor cue. In another case I was running 1.33-within-1.85. Print had normal halo dot cues which fall entirely on the black masking. It's not necessary to mar the image area; what I normally do is to Clint Phare the existing dots which makes them more visible projecting on the black but not distracting. I didn't that time and I paid the price at the first change. It was too late for R2 so I made sure all the booth lights were out and looked really hard to make that change and meanwhile I rescribed the rest including going back and taking care of the first couple.

Posted by Gunnar Johansson (Member # 1661) on 03-28-2003, 11:40 AM:

Confessions? Not too many too bad yet, but at the start of each season we show a suprise film for invited guests, with everybody getting liquered up and having a good time. This january we were opening our new theatre, and all of my predecessors were invited. Not having shown too many films before, nervous, stressed out (got the reels way too late) and the auditorium getting restless, I hurried and, me too, showed the soundtrack on the screen. Everybody knew what had happened (me not being the only one to do this over the years) and cheered out loud. Maybe the best beginning ever, but I just turned it around, took the bow and continued. Now neither me nor my colleagues does that mistake again...
I´ll get back if I screw up again

(Edit) BTW, how does this relate to the thread in Ground Level; Hoyts out of US? Management reading this, and people not posting everything for fear of reprisals? Maybe this thread should be kept hidden? I´m my own boss, but some of you? Nah, as everyone else said, as long as you learn... [Smile]

(/Edit)
//Gunnar