Outre And Ordinary Cinema Experiences

In my last installment, after being laid off from my job showing the college film series, I visited the projectionist union and was invited by member Don Hansen to visit his booth at Alameda’s Southshore Cinemas…

Built in the late-1960s,Alameda’s Southshore Cinemas (closed in 1998, demolished in 2002) was one of the first multiscreen theaters in theUS. This twin-screen facility had two identical theaters and was built by Robert Lippert, who produced some 180 low-budget “B” movies (many of which were westerns) and at one time owned a chain of some 118 theaters, includingAlameda’s Island Drive In, and the Alameda Theater.

Arriving for my “backstage” tour of Southshore Cinemas, I walked up the narrow fl ight of stairs leading to the booth and was amazed by what I saw. I had been in numerous theater projection booths before, but nothing like this. Most had been dark, grimy, industrial affairs. This was a long, rectangular room that was clean, fairly well-lit, modern appearing and dominated by two huge projectors—one for each screen. Don explained that these were Italian-made Cinemeccanica V18s.

These state of the art devices also ran an automation system that with a touch of a single start button would handle all operations, including fading the house lights and intermission music, starting the projector, opening the curtains, and reverse the procedure at the end of the film, reverse the procedure. Pretty cool, but what impressed me even more was the ability to load an entire feature film on a huge 13,000-foot 35mm reel (nearly three feet in diameter) and play the entire film without the need for changeovers. This allowed a single projectionist to run two screens. And each projector lamp was a high output Xenon bulb with thousands of hours of life—no stinky old-tech carbon rod lighting here! What was equally cool was that fact that Don—an electronics wiz in his own right—also created a large desktop center in the booth with remote switching that allowed him to control and monitor the operations of both screens (via closed-circuit cameras) from that spot. It looked more like something out of NASA mission control than a suburban mall cinema.

The 13,000-foot film reels had a capacity of nearly two and a half hours—great for uninterrupted viewing and could be rewound directly on the projector. However, they also weighed about 70 pounds and lifting one of these and sliding it onto the top spindle (about six feet up) required a feat of agility and strength. This presented no challenge to Don, who devised a system using the motor and worm gear drive from an electric garage door opener to create an automatic lift for the heavy reels. Problem solved.

The Cinemeccanicas were amazing, but had one drawback. The huge film reels took about 20 minutes to rewind, which was an issue with theaters that wanted to run the movie with short (like 10-minute) times between showings. Also, before any show, the film that arrived on 20-minute shipping reels that had to be spliced into one long continuous roll, and once the film run ended, the projectionist would take the film off the big reels, splice the leaders back on and pack the film for its trip back to the distributor or next theater. The process provided plenty of margin for error, such as inserting reel four before reel two, or mismarking the reels before they left for their next engagement—leaving the disaster for the next guy.

These days, the once-common 13,000-foot film reels have all but disappeared, replaced by platter systems. Using platters, on arrival at the theater, the film’s 2,000-foot (20-minute) shipping reels are assembled onto the equivalent of giant, stacked rotating horizontal pizza trays, which eliminate the need to rewind after each showing.