quote:

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I know a kid who tried to stop a spinning 6K reel full of film by grabbing it with his hands and ended up bloody. He had been told that spinning reels like that are pretty much analogous to a big buzz saw but, still, he was stupid enough to grab onto it!

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Think about a Goldberg Platter reel with 8 reels loaded and try stopping the shipping reel. OUCH If the reel doesnt have any knicks to cut your glove open in it then you are goign to get burned, even with a glove on.

[ 02-08-2004, 07:47 PM: Message edited by: Chris Hipp ]
 

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Posted by Jason Thode (Member # 1854) on 02-08-2004, 07:45 PM:
 
My worst nightmare was on a Thursday, I had just gotten finished building up all of the prints when one of my staff comes up and says "I think I broke the projector". It turns out he tried to clean the projector with the motor running and got a like rag jammed in the intermittent sprocket, it seized and broke the back gearing. All this happened right before a special showing for a church group. Needless to say the staff member is no longer a projectionist.
 

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Posted by Robert D. LaValley (Member # 1867) on 02-08-2004, 08:03 PM:
 
Built 14 prints for a theatre opening, broke down 12. 38.5 hour shift.

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a person who was helping me during that had a bad brainwrap while running a print through. He proceeded to take the film off the platter from the outside (like pulling a core) and put it into a cup cardboard box.

We had film everywhere trying to straighten it out.. It was the worst thing I ever saw. knock on wood that is also the closest I have ever came to seeing something like a thrown print.

*shutters in fear*

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I worked at this one plex and you had to run reel to reel 6 thousand foot reels.. So for the change overs you had to rewind the already shown reel. To be funny I decided to play a joke on a staff member. I put a bunch of old trailers on a 6 thousand foot reel. I made them look all wound up and crazy. Then I took my tie off and threaded through the film and reel to make it look like while I was rewinding the film, that my tie got cuaght and pulled in.
so then with the reel of trailers and tie I ran downstairs in a (fake) panic and started with the acting..

The facial reaction was priceless.. After about 10 minutes I let him in on the gag. He was cool about it becuase not to many people could trick him and I did.


 

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Posted by Randy Stankey (Member # 64) on 02-08-2004, 08:57 PM:
 

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Mike Babb: Probably the worst one that came true was a diode going out while I was working alone both upstairs and down, and people asking to see me downstairs while I was troubleshooting and replacing it...

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I have had more than one call to a theater for "Projector Down" because of improper diode changing:

One place caught the projector on fire because they monkey-fucked the diode change so bad. I'm talking actual flames!

Another theater melted down a power supply so bad the capacitors blew their guts all over the inside of the lamphouse. I spent about six hours just rebuilding the inside of the thing. Every wire and every terminal block was melted down. Try calling up electrical supply houses on a Saturday afternoon to scrounge replacement parts! I got the thing almost ready to go and the manager came up to me to ask how long I thought it would take to finish. I told him, "Oh, about 1/2 hour..."

20 minutes later he came up to me asking if he could thread the projector. When I asked why he wanted to do THAT he simply said, "The customers are waiting." It's lucky I had only a few minutes work to do. I didn't pre-test the thing like I always liked to do. I just kicked the tire and lit the fire. It worked! (Sigh of relief!)

Here's where it gets good! The picture is on-screen just fine but the sound is all screwed up. I took a look at the sound head. It was quite obvious that somebody had tinkered with the sound head. I got the manager, pointed at the screwed up sound head and asked, "What the fuck is THIS?!" (My exact words.)
"Oh, I forgot to tell you that we had problems with the sound yesterday..." I just tossed him my car keys and said, "Go get my 'scope! It's the big black case in my trunk." While he was getting my case I was quickly realigning the (Simplex) sound head by eye. That was probably the fastest A-Chain I have ever done!

This is the same theater that totally disassembled a sound head all the way down to a bare chassis because some idiot forgot to check the backup/normal power supply switch on the sound processor. (You know, the USL JS-200 series processors that seem to go dead when you press the backup button without the external supply attached.)

If I had a gun I would have shot the bastard!
 

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Posted by William Hooper (Member # 71) on 02-09-2004, 01:03 AM:
 
Ding, ding, ding, end of reel, there's the motor start, start the motor, move the foot over the changeover pedal, shoelace gets caught in the changeover pedal, changeover pedal rises sideways up into the air with the foot, WHAT THE..., changeover cue, stomp, miss it, pick foot up to stomp again, pedal flies up & whips around, frenzy of stomp, stomp, stomp like trying to stomp ants or that stupid put the ball on the string in the cup game with the pedal flying around at the end of the shoelace, bend down to try to grab it & slam it by hand, SON OF A DAMMIT!, off balance & foot goes back dragging the pedal away...

Went for about 6 seconds, but was mighty stupid while it lasted. Fortunately it was between two shorts & the black which ran & slow fade-in missed was no big deal.

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Showtime, top of a show, big house, reach over to strike the arc for the first reel, turn on the power to the lamp, NO ALMIGHTY KLUNK & NO POWER, mind goes into diagnosis overdrive, OH NO THE CONTACTOR IN THE RECTIFIER MUST HAVE BURNED OUT!, tell the house manager on the 2-way there'e a big bad problem which may delay the show a long time, run over to the rectifier, get the cover off, the screw on a terminal on the contactor had fallen out & the wire was about 1/4" away, put the screw back in, only 4 minutes late starting the show. And on the first reel instead of one after, can luck get better? Yay for low-tech light sources!

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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.
 

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Posted by Paul G. Thompson (Member # 655) on 02-09-2004, 02:28 AM:
 
The biggest booth nightmare I have had was back in the carbon arc days. I was running the 11 mil "black stick" in an old RCA lamphouse (built by Ashcan [Ashcraft]) and the water cooling lines plugged. With the aid of a garden hose running from the bathroom to the lamphouse, I was able to save the show. Lots of water on the floor, big clouds of steam on the water discharge, and alot of cussing and praying. At the end of the night, that booth was like a boiler room.

But the show continued.....

Ah, the good old days.
 

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Posted by Aaron Sisemore (Member # 145) on 02-09-2004, 02:52 AM:
 
I have had my share of thrown prints in my career, most of them from Christie AW2, AW3, and MW3 platters...Gotta love when the motors short or the controller card fries and the platter decks spin at light speed (and the flames emanating from the AW2 motor controller that usually accompany it)...

Once at the Phoenix, I was breaking down a print from a tower reel at top speed (Wolk rewinds don't have speed controls), and was almost done with the last reel (which by now was moving a incredible speed) when the reel came off the spindle, landed on the floor, cutting grooves in the floor tiles, then it skidded while spinning back into the spindle...*KLANNNNGGG!!!*...The reel caught the spindle, bending the 1/2" shaft completely 90 degrees upwards, and shearing the rivets that hold the reel together causing one of the flanges to separate and buzzsaw across the booth into the wall. Miraculously, the film never broke during all this action

Another one happened when I was breaking down a show of 'Long Kiss Goodnight' onto 6000' reels in a big hurry for circuiting to another location, the [polyester] film broke under the high tension of fast winding, causing the MUT to scoot about a foot away from the [CFS Super] platter, and on the other end, the ring with about a reel and a half of film still on it came loose, sheared the brain right off the deck, and missed my girlfriend's head by about 4 inches before slamming into the wall leaving a huge dent in the drywall!!!!

I had a couple of wonderful experiences involving sold-out full houses for 'Rocky Horror': The first was in the 80's running changeovers on Simplex E-7s, with a print brought over at the last minute by another theatre that also ran changeover: Well some idiot had a film break and mended it on the fly with DUCT TAPE and failed to tell me about it... So about halfway thru the 'Lips' opening credits, the film jams and breaks. I could hear the millions of objects hitting the booth wall from the angry audience...

The other RHPS incident was a little more in control: Once again at the Phoenix, about halfway thru the show, the rectifier shorts a diode, taking out the cartridge fuse in the process. Having neither spare diodes nor fuses on hand in the middle of the night, I simply ran the show with sound, as the live cast took over for the missing image... Soon after we had a circuit breaker installed in place of the fuse box, and another rectifier was brought in to replace the one with the fried diodes.

Another wonderful one occurred at the long-closed, now-a-church Cinema II in Ignacio CA: I came in to take over for the evening shift, and the end credits of 'Witches Of Eastwick' was rolling up the screen, so I went up into the booth to find that the first few minutes of the film had actually taken up to the platter before the film broke (no failsafe here) and now I was standing in a knee-deep pile of film... Took us about 2 hours to get it all collected upo and rebuilt to the platter.

there are many more....

-Aaron
 

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Posted by Aaron Garman (Member # 1653) on 02-09-2004, 08:20 AM:
 
The old story around our place is when one projectionist threaded Along Came a Spider all wrong. She managed to thread the ring so that the film was not flush with the platter it was going to sit on. As the film ran, it created a tornado shaped platter of film that rose to the ceiling. At the end of the day, the entire print would have to be replaced.

EDIT: I actually found out it was only a couple reels that were replaced...they still reside at the theater.

AJG

[ 02-09-2004, 02:00 PM: Message edited by: Aaron Garman ]
 

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Posted by Aldo Baez (Member # 790) on 02-09-2004, 02:40 PM:
 
I was tearing down me, myself, and irene and the ring wasn't in very well and I did not notice it and was tearing down. About 4 reels left I was going at full speed and the ring came out of the holes in the platter, the film then proceeded to hit the tree, tilt the tree so far and it hit the projector and bounced back and the film then flew off the platter to the ground. This all happened while a movie was running too! Amazingly nothing happened with the running movie but I stood there for about 5 minutes not believing what had just happened.
 

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Posted by Adam Budweg (Member # 1901) on 02-10-2004, 11:22 AM:
 
ive got one thats funny scarry and stupid all in one.

i got called in one day to fix a brain wrap. cause teh manager on call didnt want to deal with it ( go figure ). so when i finially arrive the platter is still spinning. id imagine that 20 sec id take to cut the power to the tree cut into some very pressibng matter on a tues afternoon, but common it was still spinning when i got there. that easilly turned a 2 min job into a big pain in teh ass.
 

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Posted by Chris Hipp (Member # 1788) on 02-10-2004, 01:25 PM:
 
Ive had rookies that will just stand there and watch the platter spin until I get there. Unfortunately common sense is not a requirement at my theater.
 

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Posted by Matthew Peters (Member # 1495) on 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.
 

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Posted by Edward Jurich (Member # 1787) on 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.
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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
 

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Posted by Scott Norwood (Member # 30) on 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
 

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Posted by Jack Ondracek (Member # 1466) on 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???
 

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Posted by Lauren Fisher (Member # 1905) on 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.
 

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Posted by Gary Crawford (Member # 2038) on 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)
 

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Posted by Christian Appelt (Member # 1067) on 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.
 

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Posted by Bill Enos (Member # 440) on 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.
 

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Posted by Bill Enos (Member # 440) on 02-25-2004, 05:35 PM:
 


[ 02-25-2004, 11:55 PM: Message edited by: Bill Enos ]
 

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Posted by Carl Martin (Member # 1146) on 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
 

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Posted by Bill Enos (Member # 440) on 02-26-2004, 12:04 AM:
 
It would be damned facinating to watch, the tape bill would be a killer though.
 

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Posted by Leo Enticknap (Member # 534) on 02-26-2004, 01:38 AM:
 

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it just so happens when we got it on the platter...well halfway on, the center ring just dropped and fell on the floor.

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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!
 

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Posted by Steve Kraus (Member # 476) on 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.
 

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Posted by William Hooper (Member # 71) on 02-27-2004, 12:06 AM:
 

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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

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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.

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I don't have that excuse for the shine on top of my head!
 

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Posted by Mike Blakesley (Member # 26) on 03-02-2004, 09:35 PM:
 
In the late 70s when I was running changeovers, we were running late on an early show and decided to changeover early into reel 1 of the movie, leaving off the last two trailers. I thought it would be cool to drop the fire door on the first machine and focus the image on the fire door. I slid the lens out to focus, and enjoyed watching the last two trailers with a 4" wide picture.

Then of course, I forgot to slip the lens back in when I rethreaded.....

Not exactly a booth nightmare on the next changeover, but it was embarassing.
 

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Posted by Gary Crawford (Member # 2038) on 03-03-2004, 02:56 PM:
 
OUCH! @ Frank

I learned back in the 70s that my long hair had to be tied back while working around all those moving parts. My hair is still long (my excuse, I'm 49 and I still can grow it, plus when I do cut it this will be donation #4 to Locks Of Love) and I have Supers with those whirling front shutter shafts and other assorted hazards.

This didn't happen to me but one of our guys had a projector port metal shutter come down when a link broke, and took out the Scope lens like a guillotine, which stuck out into the opening.

One old place I worked had "temporary" rectifiers installed after the generator in the cellar flooded out. These put out 90 amps and we ran 105 amps to the lamps. It took about a week or so but the six rectifiers bulbs would hum and glow brightly, and then all six would burn out. We all got pretty good at changing out bulbs in less than a minute. We tried turning the lamps back a bit but then the image was brown. Frustrating.
 

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Posted by Stephen Brown (Member # 292) on 03-04-2004, 05:23 AM:
 
Two different Booths, both with 20 Min reel changeover and Carbons....

-Started the trailer reel after intermission and hit the curtain open button, and the curtains parted about 3 ft then stopped. Closed them and hit open again, same result. Played the one trailer then stopped the projector. Since I was the only one on I had to run from the box down to the screen to the curtain motor. Found that the end stop on the Belt had moved past the trip switch, and was catching when trying to open. Had to hand wind the curtains open about 5 ft to get it past the stop, then run upstaris again and restart the show....Who says being a Projectionist doesnt make you fit....

-Arrived at the theatre to find that one of the projectors had dropped an intermitant. By the time we arrived at this conclusion the house was full of screaming Kids for the Matinee. Ended up doing the show on one projector. Really sharpens up the threading and carbon changing skills doing it this way. Luckily we got the other Projector repaired for the Night sessions.....

Steve Brown
 

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Posted by Steve Guttag (Member # 268) on 03-04-2004, 06:41 AM:
 
In a similar curtain related story....

Last Saturday...went to start the first show at the Uptown in DC....the Curtains parted for about 2/3rds of the picture then stopped.

Now this is a sickning feeling if you know the theatre. The curtains, since they follow the curve of the screen are about 80 feet long and are over 30 feet tall and are made of a heavy material. You HAVE to use the motor to open them...they weigh so much that one can't pull them more than about 1/2 way open without exceeding ones weight capacity (I'm a little over 200 lbs) and at that point could merely climb the chain without budging the curtains. And this is a pretty good chain...motorcycle type with a 3-phase motor to drive it (by Tru-Roll).

So, it was decided not to stop the show and I had to work on the system, in the dark while keeping up with the changeovers.

Fortunately, the system tries to protect itself...the circuit breaker at the motor controller had tripped...I reset that and got the curtain to move a little further (enough no one in the audience minded so much) before I saw the problem that caused it.

Made a changeover and then proceeded to unrig the chain, clear the jam and re-rig and have the curtain open the rest of the way. Between shows, I reset the stops.

Steve
 

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Posted by Steve Kraus (Member # 476) on 03-04-2004, 07:50 AM:
 
"Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!"
 

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Posted by Phil Blake (Member # 2012) on 03-05-2004, 03:57 AM:
 
Talking of reels coming off spindles, I remember in my drive in we lost a 2000' reel off the rewind bench , It hit the floor spinning , then drove it's self out the open door , off the stairs and out in to the grounds. The speed limit in the cinema was 6mph , let me say that the reel was exceeding the speed limit!
 

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