Stephen
On more recent inspection, there is a slot on the top of the lamphouse just forward of the exhaust port that is covered with masking tape, which looks very like it could be for edge illuminating a sign. I was wondering what that slot thing was about, and I'm guessing thats the answer.
Well spotted.
BTW - I used to live in Croydon, Oval Road, by East Croydon station...
Posted by Tim Reed (Member # 137) on 09-12-2004, 03:54 PM:
It's definitely a Magnarc housing, but the meter looks like it was ripped off an Ashcraft.
Posted by System Notices (Member # 2357) on 03-01-2016, 11:31 PM:
It has been 4188 days since the last post.
Posted by Paul Mayer (Member # 355) on 03-01-2016, 11:31 PM:
Using this thread to ask for help identifying some UK kit - a pair of 35mm portables as installed aboard the RMS Queen Mary after a 1947 cinema remodel:
Posted by Leo Enticknap (Member # 534) on 03-02-2016, 04:29 PM:
So did you manage to get in to one of the booths on the Queen Mary, or is this a pic you found somewhere?
When I did the Queen Mary tour last summer, I noticed projection portholes at the back of both the grand stateroom and, if memory serves me correctly, the second class dining room. I did ask the guide if any projection equipment was still in them and if it would be possible to have a look, but he didn't know and didn't have a key.
If these projectors date from the 1947 refit (which, the tour guide explained, was done to convert it back from a troopship to civilian use fully, including some major upgrades, e.g. the addition of stabilizers), I'd guess Gaumont-Kalee or BTH, but don't recognize them.
Posted by Paul Mayer (Member # 355) on 03-03-2016, 02:01 PM:
This isn't one of my pix - it was posted on a LA Theaters FB site. Given the time frame, they were assuming these machines were of UK origin.
I've only been in the Queen Mary's Grand Stateroom projection box once, for the Long Beach Film Festival back in 2001. The original kit had been long since removed, and we installed a Vic 8 or Vic 10 (can't remember now) for that festival.
Posted by Phillip Grace (Member # 2262) on 03-03-2016, 10:43 PM:
I am reasonably sure that these are Gaumont British model N portable 35mm projectors. The projection plant in the larger cinema was also GB so perhaps the same company contracted for both installations.
Posted by Leo Enticknap (Member # 534) on 03-04-2016, 12:46 PM:
It would make sense. To my knowledge, G-K and British Thomson-Houston were the two major manufacturers of 35mm projector mechanisms in the UK at that time.
In the decade following the end of WWII, Britain was effectively broke from the costs of fighting it (indeed, the UK didn't finish paying off its lend-lease until 2006). The government, therefore, imposed Donald Trump-style import duties on all imports considered to be non-essential, plus tax breaks to encourage exports. So no British purchaser would have imported projectors in 1947 unless they absolutely had to. If you look at the British trade press from the late '40s, it's full of complaints from theater managers about how they can't afford to import spares needed to keep their neon marquees going and that sort of stuff.
At that time, Gaumont-Kalee was the manufacturing arm of the Rank Organisation, the News International of its day, which had bought out the Kershaw optical company in the early 1940s to acquire the capacity to make its own audio-visual equipment.
Incidentally, the import-tax regime persisted until Britain joined (what was then called) the European Economic Community in 1975. In the late 1960s, the Odeon chain installed Cinemecannica Vic 8s, with full 70mm kits. The reason was that the tax penalty didn't apply if the equipment you were buying was not manufactured in the UK. At that time, G-K offered the 35mm only GK-37, which Odeon didn't want, because it had acquired a reputation for being unreliable and difficult to operate, repair and maintain. Because no British manufacturer offered a 70mm projector (G-K bet the farm on VistaVision, and lost), Odeon dodged the tax by importing fully 70mm-capable Italian projectors, even though most of them never ran a single foot of 70mm print.
Posted by Gordon McLeod (Member # 33) on 03-04-2016, 03:04 PM:
The 70mm import loophole ended with the introduction of the Westrex5000 35/70mm machine made in the UK
