Los Gatos Weekly-Times

Photograph by George Sakkestad

Dennis Skaggs loads film from the massive reels onto the projector.

Reel Change

Old meets new in a downtown projection room

By Bob Aldrich

One interesting thing about motion pictures is that they don't move on the screen at all. When Humphrey Bogart lights a cigarette, or Donald Duck hits his thumb with a hammer, you are watching a series of still photographs, with a shutter darkening the screen between each picture. Projected at 24 frames a second, the motion you "see" is pure illusion.

Inventors in the 19th century produced all sorts of gadgets to make pictures move. There was no single inventor of the movies. Thomas Edison in America, Louis and August Lumiéré in France, William Friese-Green in England and others took advantage of the fact that an image lingers in the human eye for a split-second.

At the farm of Governor Leland Stanford in 1872, a British-American named Edweard Muybridge, set up a multi-camera apparatus to photograph a running horse. The photos, viewed in sequence, gave an illusion of motion. Edison's Kinescope was a peepshow, viewed by one person at a time. Prototype of the modern film projector was the Vitascope of 1896 by Charles Francis Jenkins. It threw the images on a screen.

Today, movie projectors are very different from Edison's time--or, for that matter, from mine.

I was once a movie theater manager. Well sort of. The "theater" in our tiny Nebraska village was a converted furniture store with a slanted floor and seats installed. The Simplex projectors were third-hand, and the sound system a mite scratchy. I was in high school, and I took the job for the fun of it. I put up posters, swept out, sold tickets and emceed Bank Night.

Bank Night? That was a Depression-era gimmick to lure people into the show. If nobody won a $50 pot, it rose to $100 next week, and so on. Bank Night sold more tickets than Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers.

The farmers who came to town to shop and see the show liked Fred and Ginger all right, or Irene Dunne and Fred MacMurray, but they really favored Gene Autry and Roy Rogers. Our theater's owner, Jack McCarty, took the same rented film around to different farm towns.

Jack wasn't too fussy about fire laws, and one night some nitrate film flamed up, burned our projectionist's hand and set the building's front afire. (This can't happen with modern safety film.) Scared half to death, I ushered my customers out before the volunteer fire brigade arrived.

My association with film goes back even further. When I was a youngster, they showed "silents" in the community hall. Our neighbor, who operated the projectors, took me along. I was allowed to rewind the reels. I still remember the smell of banana-oil glue used to patch film strips. I also recall being fascinated by film clicking through the projector's film gate, bringing Charlie Chaplin or Gloria Swanson to life on the screen.

I was given scraps of film to take home and run in a hand-cranked toy projector I got for Christmas. (I should have become a Spielberg or a Lucas, but as they used to say in those old silent screen titles: "Fate intervened.")

To catch up on what modern film projection has become since I was in the show business, I consulted with Dennis Skaggs, director of operations and partner with Jack Nybloom and Jim Zuur in the Camera Cinemas, which operates the Los Gatos Cinema along with three San Jose film houses--Camera One, Camera 3 and Towne 3. A working projectionist for 23 years, Skaggs started with San Jose's now-closed Studio, running 16-millimeter film.

"One day I told them they were using the wrong lens, so they made me a projectionist," he said.

Climbing the stairs to the projection booth of Theater No. 2 in the Los Gatos Cinema, Skaggs demonstrated his equipment, which is very different, indeed, from the old upright projectors, in which a 2,000-foot, 20-minute reel was placed in an upper holder and threaded through the intermittent movement-and-sound box to a take-up reel beneath.

The older-type projectors are still used in some theaters--in the Stanford in Palo Alto, for instance, which shows classic films of the 1930s and '40s. But most, including the multiplex houses with many screens under one roof, use the type the Los Gatos Cinema has.

Now, one huge reel containing the entire program is threaded in, and the projector is started with the push of a button. There is not even need for an operator in the booth. A control panel starts the film, adjusts a stereo sound system and even turns the house lights on and off.

Nor is it necessary to rewind the film for the next showing. This apparatus does that chore automatically as the film is being run.

Skaggs places the big reel lying horizontally on the top tier of a three-tiered circular metal stand. Film emerges from the center of the reel, rather than from its rim. He winds part of the film over spools and rollers on a vertical "tree" joined to the stand and through the Century projector's intermittent movement and Simplex sound box. Emerging from the lower part of the projector, the film is inserted in the big take-up reel on the middle of the three tiers.

In the old days, an operator had to be on hand to see that the film was properly projected and also to switch to a second projector when one reel ran out. A small hammer dropped to ring a bell, letting the operator know one reel was nearly run through.

You may have noticed a black (or white) dot appearing in the upper right-hand corner of the screen as you watch a movie. That was a signal to start the second projector. When another dot appeared a few seconds later, the operator closed the shutter behind the lens of one projector and opened the shutter on the second machine. Two projectors are no longer needed because the whole program is on one large reel.

Skaggs ran a looped test film that showed a pattern, like one you may see on a TV screen before the day's programming begins. The test film enables him to adjust the lens and lamp. He also showed an anamorphic lens which, he explained, "squeezes down" the image on film for greater resolution on screen.

"Film quality has been so refined that they no longer make 70-millimeter," Skaggs said.

A rectifier converts alternating current (AC) to direct. The xenon-gas lamp produces a very bright light. There is none of the heat smell or sizzling sound of the old carbon-arc projector lamps.

Skaggs, 42, was Los Gatos Theater projectionist from 1976 to 1983. The theater was formerly operated by Carmel Cormack, before that by Irwin and Carmelita Schwartz, and earlier by Sam Yablonsky. The building dates to 1917 and has undergone at least three remodelings. Under Cormack, it was a 600-seat house. In 1993, Camera Cinemas took over and did extensive remodeling. Now there are two theaters, each of about 200 seats. The fact that each theater is wider than it is long makes for intimate viewing.

It is only 37 feet from the projector lens to the approximately 12-by-36-foot screen.

Film skitters through the projector at the rate of 24 frames per second, 90 feet a minute.

You would hardly think of Omaha as a Hollywood satellite, but a firm called Ballantyne of Omaha is the nation's largest producer of film projection equipment.

According to an article in Forbes (May 6, 1996), Ballantyne makes 65 percent of the movie projectors sold in the United States. "Its $17,000 projection system," says the magazine, "is an industry standard. This year, the company did $46 million in sales."

A one-time Nebraska farm boy and Ballantyne employee, Ronald Echtenkamp, bought out the Omaha company and merged it with other firms at a time when drive-ins were closing and it was predicted everybody would stay home and watch TV instead of going to the movies. In the past decade, the number of movie screens in the United States has increased by a third to 27,800. Each screen requires a projector. Multiplexes and other theaters added 1,200 screens last year.

Two theater-owning firms, Century Theaters and AMC, are in competition to build more multi-screen theaters in the South Bay. Theater chains with large attendance are able to command the most attractive first-run films. Theaters get a percentage of the box office take, with the rest going to distributors and producers.

In the early days of "talkies," the sound was on a large disc, similar to a phonograph record. The sound could get "out of synch," a fact that was neatly satirized in the Gene Kelly film Singin' in the Rain. Then a device for recording sound-waves on a film strip assured that actors' speech would match lip movements.

The Simplex sound box on the Century projector picks up those tiny waves with a photo-electric cell; the sound is sent through a stereo system located in the booth and transmitted to speakers behind the screen.

Things have improved a lot since the days when I ran the Elmwood, Neb., movie palace and some of my high-school friends called me "Roxy" after a New York theater magnate.

One thing I do miss, though. That's the sign at movie box offices that used to say: Adults, 35 cents; children 15 cents.