Movies I've Destroyed

I was about to put this in the comments section, but this makes a fairly entertaining post by itself. I became a projectionist back in 1995 at (the now long-closed) Carmike Williamson Square 8 and have continued being one in two different stints at Regal Hollywood 27 and a truncated stint at Carmike's Bell Forge 10.

Easily the most memorable film I destroyed was From Dusk Till Dawn. The movie played in Wsq8's auditorium #1. Williamson Square had its share of problems from time to time, but you could usually run a movie without worrying about anything. People on this board such as Jonathan and Mike came by to watch Screamers at the time, in auditorium #3. Once the movies had been started for the evening, I went into this auditorium to check the movie out, but something was wrong, horribly wrong. I got up, like those guys you hear about in those Time Life series books, and left the auditorium, and lo and behold--someone was coming out of From Dusk Till Dawn informing me of a screwup.

I went up there, not expecting much--maybe a failsafe I needed to check or something. Perhaps if I were a more experienced projectionist at the time, my memory of it wouldn't be of something this ridiculous--but I believe in my heart that it was the most screwed print in the history of film. I was dealing with a brain wrap--it looked like part of it was the "fast" brain wrap (clockwise rotation) and some of it was "slow" (counter-clockwise). There was film, not part of the brain wrap, turned upside down (soundtrack facing down)--not to mention the effects of brain wrapping where you have numerous loops and tangles, and sprocket damage. The final nail was that it appeared one section of the film (probably the tail end of the film) had wrapped around the part of the film that was going from the brain to the first platter roller, looking like a corkscrew. There wasn't a chance in hell it was going to play the rest of the night--I started cutting all the tangles and matching up frames--then Jonathan and Mike came up. I had Mike taking film the length of one side of the projection hall to sort out more tangles, I had piles of film on the floor getting ready for assembly. The task took hours. Running that movie through again, I would wince at how many splices went through every few seconds.

At Hollywood, I've seen more than my share of "thrown" prints, where the platter speed and fluctuations would cause prints to slide slightly, the tails to get loose and start wrapping underneath the platter, and eventually cause a print to fall. The worst I ever saw combined this problem with a brain wrap and was Love Actually, during a sneak. This was on par with the From Dusk Till Dawn calamity, although this time, the brain wrap was one heaping koosh ball of a mess. Even with my experience, it took a great while to fix.

But the amount of man-hours spent to both Love Actually and From Dusk Till Dawn can never approach the amount of time it took me to fix Master and Commander, a movie that was being prepared to be shipped out (broken down). Breaking down one of the reels, the print unceremoniously flew off of the breakdown platter, landing with a messy thud on the ground. To fix that, I had to pull out good sections of the film and run them through open projectors. I had like 7 projectors doing the job, condensing these sections onto rings where I could easily break it down--but the problem after that was finding the matching frames where I had cut, and then figuring out what reel those sections belonged to. The movie was 7 or 8 reels. The exact same thing happened to another movie the next day to someone else, and I had to talk them through what I did. The problem was that the ring wasn't sitting in the platter the way it should, and the ring would slip out of its holes and cause the print to become an unholy diver. That movie took me around 6 hours to fix, just to break down.

Mike referred to Waiting to Exhale. I'll be honest--I don't remember if it was that or if it was How Stella Got Her Groove Back--it was one of those Terry McMillan novels-turned-movies. That wasn't really a mess-up, as much as it was a strangely-acting platter (#1 again! These problems were so inconsistent, and I was such a green projectionist, I never thought that these were fixable problems--they were just anomalies), and when pressed for time, I had Mike spinning the platter to avoid a brain wrap. Yeah, I used civilians to help me out on occasion.

There are, of course, many memorable prints for various reasons. Those stick out the most. For those in the know, Biker Boyz and 28 Days Later are the gold standard for print-tossing, because it happened frequently, and even when you tried your best to make sure they didn't.

As for KW, my most memorable experience involving him involves Fight Club. The movie was playing in Hollywood's #4 at the time. Whenever you have a problem with a platter that doesn't want to move, a failsafe is supposed to detect the film getting slack and stop the projector. But #4 did not do this. The film would slack, and the projector would continue to run, meaning the film would just run into the floor. Well, I was closing, and KW had left, and then I got a call. You remember Cousin Itt? That's what the film looks like when it just falls to the floor. In this case, the pile has to get high enough so that the film has nowhere to go anymore, so finally the projector just stops because the film breaks. To fix that, you have to go get a breakdown table and take the top of the pile and rewind it onto a special reel, then you match the frames and basically build the print again. Then you run the remaining part of the movie through and attach it to the solid print.

Oh believe me, I've probably fixed nearly a hundred thrown prints, prints that fell apart when moving it from one projector to another, brain wraps, and so on. When you take the percentage of successful runs to failures, the percentage is pretty low--but they are always memorable, and KW is right--it can be fun to fix them even though your heart sinks at the customer satisfaction. But on a pure skill basis, figuring out the best way to salvage a print can get your brain working on several diverse levels, and I've discovered more than my share of oddball ways to fix a print, some would even call me a mad genius. I was called during my vacation time after my New York trip to come up and fix a movie that had thrown (The Life Aquatic) and when I got up there, it was so easy I was almost like, "Hey man, don't waste my time." However, there was yet another print that had thrown (White Noise in...#4!) that was being saved to fix for the next day that I was instantly annoyed about (Why did these assholes save this for tomorrow? And then I figured it out--they didn't have the skills I did), and took great pleasure in fixing in minutes. It took me one cut to fix the entire thing, and something that would have required a hundred cuts for anyone else.

In summary, though, I've gotten pretty damn good about not having anything happen to a projector that I am running. It has been since early 2003 that I could point to a print falling off the platter and it was my fault. This is due to better knowledge and some interesting ideas on how to prevent them in the first place, so things have cooled down for the past few months. There's no ultimate explanation for them, but they happen.