Comment by ilamont | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ilamont | Hacker News Reader

Former 35mm projectionist here. This statement is flat-out wrong:

A 35mm film projector was a machine with a handful of parts. If one broke, theaters could be back up within a matter of hours.

Are you kidding me? A 35mm projector has hundreds of precision engineered moving parts. If one of them breaks, you're not swapping it out with a replacement from Radio Shack. You might not even trust the pimply teenager running the projector (me) to touch any of the interior parts or gears.

You're going to the pros: Authorized service techs, or a specialized AV supplier who may have it in stock, but is definitely not open on the weekend when these things tend to break. And, the supplier may have have to order the replacement part from Japan or Europe.

If you're part of a chain that uses standard equipment (not a given, considering consolidation) you might be able to borrow parts or spares from your pal running the show at the multiplex across town.

Worst case: Because most theaters operate two sister machines for each film (a reel can only hold ~75 minutes of film max, so you have to switch over to the second machine halfway) you can technically swap reels on a single machine with a 5 minute intermission.

The 35mm projectors were professional-grade machines designed to last for years. Our theater used 25-year-old Italian projectors made by Cinemacannica which is still around today (https://www.cinemeccanica.eu/cinema-products/), and looks like it has moved into digital exhibition.

Some of the old 35mm machines are still around, usually at indie theaters. I spotted one a few years ago in Somerville Mass as described here: https://leanmedia.org/memories-movie-theater-film-projection...

Hi! Fellow 35mm projectionist here. Your experience must have predated mine, things changed. By the time I worked on them (2007) the dual projector system was long obsolete. At that time (and afaik this remained the state of the art until digital came along) you had a single projector attached to a "platter tree", consisting of three circular rotating tables, holding the entire film (all 4 or 5 reels) spliced together into one mega reel held sideways. One table for input, another for output,and a third for extra (eg running two features on the same screen at different showing times)

This innovation eliminated the need for a projectionist to sit there and swap every 20min -- now a projectionist only had to touch the machinery once per showing rather than once per reel. It did add some labor Thursday nights as new films had to be spliced together and old ones broken up to be fed back into the can.

Thanks to this system a 12 screener could easily be operated by one teenager (me), and a twin theater didn't even need a dedicated projectionist-- just the manager popping up to lace up the film once per showing.

(Films still had the corner black dot cute though, I guess since some older theatres still had the then antique two projector system)

Thanks to startup timers, you didn't even need to be there exactly when it started, just sometime between the last showing and the next one -- but you did this at your peril, as jams and other glitches were most common at startup time, especially in the "brain" the clever device that allowed feeding the film from the inside of the input platter megareel to the outside of the output platter, this avoiding the need for rewinding you would have if you fed from outside to outside as with casette tapes.

All in all, my era's projectors were more even complex in the pursuit of saving labor costs.

I miss them. They were really cool machines.

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I was a projectionist in the late 80s and the dual projector setup was standard. No one was talking digital … the storage and delivery tech wasn’t even close and most people didn’t understand the looming impact of Moores Law.

I do recall seeing the platter system many years later and had a sense of how they worked but not the details. Regardless I’m sure we could swap some great stories of epic “jams” … thanks for sharing!

Yeah it sounds like the writer of the article is spreading hogwash.

Amazing insight, thanks for sharing. I had a micron of an idea how it worked, but of course when you look into a specific process, it's clear it's never as simple as it appears

Thanks. Besides the reels, just about the only part I could swap out was the light bulb, and even that had a process around it - for instance, I had to wear lint-free gloves because if I touched the bare bulb with my fingers, the oil from my skin could cause the bulb to explode when 1000+ watts start coursing through it.

Fire safety was a real concern. I had to be tested and licensed by the state, and most of the questions were about what to do if there was a fire. Part of the projection machinery included venting to get all of that hot air away from the projectors and out of the room (not unlike a server room).

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