The Size of Thoughts

by Nicholson Baker

  Chuck Russell’s remake of The Blob (1988) brings every detail, or almost every detail, of the first film neatly up to date. The movie-within-a-movie is now entitled Garden Tool Massacre. “Isn’t it awfully late to be trimming the hedges?” a camp counselor mutters while making out with his girlfriend, having noticed a masked stranger at work on the shrubbery after dark. “Wait a minute,” he then says, suspicions aroused. “Hockey season ended months ago.” Cut to the booth, where “Hobbs,” the bored projectionist (whose life will indeed prove to be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”), his head again seen past a turning reel of film, reads a magazine and fiddles left-handedly with a yo-yo. The second-generation Blob, far peppier and more enterprising than its forebear, pukes its way briskly up the air-conditioning duct and plasters the unhappy Hobbs to the ceiling. Moments later, the manager, looking up, discovers his colleague, a Ralph Steadman grimace on his face, half consumed in an agony of Handi-Wrap and dyed cornstarch, the yo-yo still rising and falling from his twitching finger.

  Why the addition of the yo-yo? the student of film technology may wonder. Is it merely a gratuitous prop, or does it tell us something? I suspect that the yo-yo is a reference to the classical principle of the movie reel, which repeatedly rewinds and relinquishes its length of film. The reason Mr. Russell had the iconography of the movie reel very much on his mind in shooting this scene, I think, is that, despite all his diligent updating of cultural references, and despite the elaborate verisimilitude of the movie’s gruesomeness, he was not quite able to bring himself to reveal to us the reality of modern theatrical-movie projection. For the terrifying reality is that film is no longer projected from reels.

  Film is projected from platters. The platter system (Fig. 1), first invented by a German projectionist, Willie Burth, and perfected by Norelco, in the Netherlands, about twenty years ago, works this way: The film arrives from the distributor on five or six reels in an octagonal steel suitcase. The projectionist splices the film from these reels together, winding it in one big spiral onto one of (typically) three horizontal circular steel disks, each roughly four feet in diameter. When the projectionist wants to set up a show, he pulls the beginning of the film from the middle of the platter, threads it through the platter’s central “brain” (its lumpily massed rollers look somewhat cerebral), thence around a few guide rollers screwed into the wall or the ceiling, and loads it into the sprockets of the projector. After it passes through the “gate” (where it is actually projected), the film usually travels through the sound head (where a light reads the optical soundtrack), loops around several more guide rollers, and ends up being wound in another huge spiral on one of the other horizontal platters. Because the film leaves from the middle of the platter, instead of the outside, rewinding between shows, reel by reel, is no longer necessary. And each theater needs only one projector per screen, rather than the traditional tag-team alternating two.

  Fig. 1. On the top platter (1) film unfurls from the inside out, and winds up on the middle platter (2). The lowest platter (3) is a spare, used for a second feature. The canted console (4), containing the xenon lamphouse and sound equipment, aims the image from the projector (5) through the glass projector port (6), and onto the screen. In the soundhead (7), a solar cell interprets the soundtrack. The projectionist keeps an eye on image quality through the viewport (8).

  There are a few revival houses in Los Angeles and New York that continue to show films on two projectors from reels, but the vast majority of the country’s theaters—art houses and mall-plexes alike—currently employ the platter system, and have for the past decade. Yet of the projector-movies from this period that I have seen (movies that include a moment or two in a contemporary projection booth, I mean), not one—not Chuck Russell’s Blob or Joe Dante’s Gremlins (1984: gremlins invade theater and play Reel 4 of Snow White), or Night of the Comet (1984: couple spend night in steel-firewalled projection booth and escape being turned into red dust or killer maniacs by comet), not Susan Seidelman’s wonderful Desperately Seeking Susan (1985: we’ll get to this one later) or Gas, Food, Lodging (1992: girl falls for Chicano projectionist)—dares give us a glimpse of a turning platter. I was sure, having read a description (in Carol J. Clover’s thoughtful book Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film) of a despicable Italian zombie movie called Demons (1985), that, because its action—fountains of pus and helicopter-blade disembowelings—is set within a fully automated and (of course) transcendently evil movie theater, with an unmanned projection booth, and because the second-largest manufacturer of movie projectors in the world happens to be Milan’s Cinemeccanica, that at least here, in this admittedly unsavory setting, we would be shown something approaching the technical truth about movie projection. But no: although the demonic equipment blinks with a few more lights than usual, it is fitted with the familiar pairs of reels up front.

  These lapses of realism probably have more to do with iconographic inertia than with any sort of conspiracy or coverup on the part of movie people. It isn’t that “they” don’t want us to know that the friendly century-old reel of celluloid, the reel that has fueled a million puns and that more than any other image means movies to us, has been superseded by a separate triple-tiered mechanism that, while full of visual interest, and quite beautiful in its indolent, wedding-cake-on-display sort of way, is less intuitively comprehensible than its predecessor. Hollywood producers don’t care whether we are aware that the platter system reduced the participatory role of the projectionist and helped make the multiplex theater financially attractive. (The eighteen-screen Cineplex Odeon in Los Angeles, for example, requires only two projectionists at any one time, and the twenty-six-screen complex in Brussels is comfortably tended by eight.) Nor do they care whether or not we know that platter hardware is, according to some critics, rougher on a movie print than reel-to-reel projection was.

  “The platter is death to film,” Dr. Jan-Christopher Horak, the senior curator of films at the George Eastman House, in Rochester, told me. A print now must twist a hundred and eighty degrees on its axis as it completes the large open-air loop that leads from the feed platter through the projector to the takeup platter; this subjects it, Horak says, to a kind of helical stress that film stock has not previously had to withstand. He has been finding “strange stretch marks that aren’t vertical, as you might expect, but horizontal” on platter-fed films. And the platter system, he says, allows for unattended operation: if a hardy chunk of filth gets caught in the gate of the projector, it can scratch the film for hundreds of feet unremedied. Horak also mentions the lost-frame problem: every time a projectionist “builds” a feature on a platter, he must cut the leaders off each component reel and splice the ends in place; then, when the film is “broken down” at the end of its run, those splices are cut and the leaders reattached for shipping. In the process, each reel loses at least a frame of film. The more theaters a film visits, the shorter it gets.

  Dick Twichell—a wise and careful projectionist at a twelve-screen Loew’s Theatre complex in greater Rochester, not far from Horak’s archival collection—admits that ambient dirt can cause serious trouble now. “Static electricity becomes more of a problem, because the film is out in the open air and attracts dust,” he says. The guide rollers, often made of plastic rather than metal, contribute to, rather than dissipate, static. And when a plex theater does something called “interlocking”—the simultaneous running of a single print through two or even three separate projectors, aimed at different screens—the film can travel hundreds of feet over guide rollers, paying out along the ceiling and returning low, inches from the floor, drawing dust along the way.

  On the other hand, Twichell disagrees that the round trip to and from a platter physically overstresses a print. “If that were true, the splices would come apart, and they almost never do,” he says. In fact, Twichell, like many in the film industry, is of the opinion that platter hardware is far gentler on prints than reels were. A takeup reel had
a primitive clutch: it pulled the film forcibly off the teeth of the projector’s lower sprocket, wearing out its perforations: a print would last perhaps three hundred runs, certainly no more than seven hundred, before becoming flimsy and easily torn. Now, on platters, a print can run almost indefinitely without sustaining that sort of mechanical damage. (There is a platter disaster known as a “brain-wrap,” but it is relatively rare.) Disney routinely gets ten or twenty thousand showings from a single print in its theme parks; often the dyes in the emulsion fade before the film succumbs.

  Constant rewinding, which platters eliminate, was itself a major source of harm. “Fully nine-tenths of the damage to film comes from the process known as ‘pulling down’ in rewinding,” says the 1912 Motion Picture Handbook. The rainmarks, as they are called, that distance us from an old Buster Keaton picture, say, were probably made while it was being rewound, not while it was being cranked through the projector. Projectionists were traditionally tinkerers, techies, taciturn isolates with dirty fingernails; of necessity they worked (and still do work, some of them) surrounded by grease pots, oilcans, dirty rags, swapped-out components, and (before xenon bulbs came in, in the sixties) by the stubs of spent carbons from the carbon-arc lamps, each of which lasted no more than half an hour. Chuck McCann, who plausibly plays the hefty, chain-smoking hero of a 1970 film called The Projectionist (which is a sort of remake of the 1924 Buster Keaton movie Sherlock, Junior: the one about a projectionist who, dozing off on a stool by one of his machines, dreams that he has entered the film that he is showing), gets angry at Rodney Dangerfield (the manager) and slams a reel of film onto the rewinder, cranking hard and maintaining tension by resting his palm on the reel. The more brute film handling—rewinding, threading, splicing—that the typical projectionist was forced to do, the more beat-up the film became.

  The Projectionist is filled with fun snippets from old movies, as is Cinema Paradiso (1989), a horribly sentimental Italian creation that is nonetheless accurate in portraying the local projectionist, rather than any director or studio head, as the person with the final cut. Cinema Paradiso’s previewing priest rings a bell anytime people kiss onscreen, and the projectionist dutifully marks the moment in the reel with a strip of paper so that he can remove the kiss later. In truth, though, projectionists, at least in the United States, were more likely to be furtive editors and clip-collectors on their own (as the creators of The Projectionist seemingly were) than on behalf of local censors: they would simply cut out a few feet, or a frame or two, of an image or a sequence they liked. Commonly, they collected “favorite movie stars, and especially scenes or shots that had pieces of female anatomy in them,” Horak told me; the Eastman House now owns some of these collections. One projectionist told me that if you cut two frames from a scene where a camera is dollied sidewise, and you then view these frames through a stereoscope, you can simulate 3-D. After years in the projection business, this man has lost all interest in watching movies, and he has canceled HBO and Cinemax, but he continues to accumulate 3-D frames. He cuts them out, he hastened to say, only if they appear in a trailer, or at the front or back of a reel, where frames are meant to be lost anyway. Other projectionists may be less ethical. It could well be that hands-off platter automation helps projectionists resist the powerful temptation to keep souvenirs from the films that pass through their theaters.

  Even with automation, though, there is a fair amount of under-the-hood maintenance connected with tending a projector. Early in The Inner Circle (1991), Tom Hulce, who plays Stalin’s projectionist, plucks something from his shirt pocket.

  “What’s that you’re poking in the projector?” asks the alarmed K.G.B. official.

  “Toothbrush,” Hulce says. “Very convenient for cleaning. I always carry one with me.” The K.G.B. man studies it, sniffs it. “The old projectionist never had anything like that,” he says, impressed.

  Recently, after the last show of the night of The Remains of the Day, I watched Stephan Shelley, senior projectionist at the Grand Lake Theatre, in Oakland, California, clean the vitals of one of his eight projectors with a pale-blue Colgate toothbrush. (“A clean, used toothbrush is ideal,” advises the user’s manual for the current Century MSC-TA 35-mm. projector with self-turning lens turret.) Shelley greases the rods and gears of his Century projectors every morning; he uses rubbing alcohol and Q-Tips on the equipment daily as well; and he keeps a vigilant eye on the level of the oil bath in the all-important intermittent movement. (Seventy-millimeter film, he says, which has a magnetic rather than an optical soundtrack, leaves a projector especially dirty, because ferrous particles from the magnetic strip come off in the machine.) Fully cross-trained, he also fixes popcorn poppers when they break. There are occasional reports of projectionists less knowledgeable than Shelley who, having run out of projector oil, resort in desperation to pouring popcorn butter in the machines to keep them from freezing up. This practice voids the warranty, however.

  Besides platters, the other notable recent development in projectorware is the aforementioned xenon bulb, a two-thousand-watt, foot-long, thousand-dollar item that illuminates a film by sending eighty amperes of direct current through a quartz envelope containing ten atmospheres of excitable xenon. It makes a B-movie sort of zap when it comes on. Through a tiny green portal in the lamphouse, you can peer in on it and watch it radiating away, cooled by indefatigable fans. It, too, caused a flutter of dissent when first introduced: charged xenon was said to produce a noticeably harsher, bluer light than the glowing carbon tips of the arc lamp did. Also, bulbs occasionally “fail violently” (i.e., explode), damaging the focusing mirror in the lamphouse. But the arc lamp gave off toxic fumes, and it was moody: movies were especially luminous on windy days, when the exhaust chimneys drew better and the carbons consequently burned brighter. Objections to xenon have pretty much died down; the only legitimate gripe the moviegoer can make now is that when a bulb fails, even nonviolently (this usually happens after about two thousand hours of service), it takes a while to alert someone in the theater and get the projector stopped, and, since platters can’t be reversed, the audience will miss the stretch of the movie that ran with sound and no picture.

  We now know more of the projector’s earliest history, thanks to Christopher Rawlence’s recent book The Missing Reel: The Untold Story of the Lost Inventor of Moving Pictures. It was the movie projector, not the movie camera, that gave early visionaries trouble, since the projector must hold each frame still longer, and must snap to the next frame faster, than a camera does when it exposes film. The original invention, defined as an affair of toothed sprockets that engage with a flexible perforated band carrying sequential images, probably ought to be attributed to Louis Aimé Augustin Le Prince (1841–1890?), a ceramicist and enameler who worked in Leeds. Le Prince filed the relevant patent in 1886 but disappeared several years later, days before he was to leave for the United States with a crated demo model of his epochal “deliverer.” That Thomas Edison’s lawyers had him killed, Rawlence suggests, is unclear.

  Edison, tireless and shrewd in his appropriation of other people’s work, unsurprisingly claimed sole authorship of the “Vitascope,” but he and his projector-development team had done little more than slap the Wizard’s name on a machine actually built by Thomas Armat, a Washington inventor, which incorporated principles conceived by Le Prince. Armat’s historic hand was working the crank when, on April 23, 1896, the screen at Koster & Bial’s Music Hall, on West Thirty-fourth Street, wowed journalists with the “Perfect Reproduction of Noted Feminine Figures and Their Every Movement.”

  Early projectionists in the wake of Armat were inventors and repairmen, but they were also performers, interpreting the emotional tone of a film by varying the film speed. “The really high-class operator, who produces high-class work on the screen, must and will vary his speed to suit the subject being projected,” F. H. Richardson’s 1912 textbook advised. For example:

  [A]s a rule solemn scenes will be improved if the machin
e turns slowly. Take, for instance … the Pathé Passion Play; probably the Bible patriarchs in real life actually moved as fast as anyone else. They may have, upon occasion, even run. Nevertheless rapid action does not suit our preconceived notions of such things. I have often seen the Pathé Passion Play run at such enormous speed that the characters were jumping around the screen like a lot of school boys. Such an exhibition was disgusting to the audience and offensive to those of deeply religious inclination and who revere those characters.

  Even after the electric motor eased the physical labor of the projectionist, silent film studios often furnished cue sheets along with their prints, which itemized the changes in speed that, like tempo markings on a piano score, were an important part of the experience of films such as The Birth of a Nation. One of the reasons silent movies can seem so ridiculous now (in addition to the fact that some of them are ridiculous, of course) is that they are frequently presented at the fixed, twenty-four-frames-per-second rate adopted for equipment in the late 1920s, in conjunction with the optical soundtrack (the ear can’t tolerate changes in speed the way the eye can), rather than at variable rates more in the vicinity of sixteen frames a second, as was conventional until then.

  But despite these momentous changes—the stabilization of film speed; sound; Technicolor; the replacement of nitrate-based film with fire-retardant acetate; xenon bulbs; platterization—the really remarkable thing about the evolution of the projector over the past century is how similar in motive essentials a 1994 Simplex machine is to the original Armat/Le Prince design. Film still moves on sprockets with sixteen teeth, and the crucial “intermittent” sprocket—the one that actually stops and starts the film—is still powered, as it was at Koster & Bial’s Music Hall, by a lovely piece of precision machinery called the Geneva movement, which was first developed by Swiss watchmakers to prevent springs from being overwound. The Geneva movement has two main pieces: a Maltese cross (or star, or starwheel) and a more pedestrian cam, both of which splash around half submerged in oil. The pin on the steadily turning cam slips into the slot in the Maltese cross and forces it to rotate a quarter of a turn and then stop dead, immobilized by the cam’s circular edge. When the star is stopped, a single immobile image floods the theater screen for a few hundredths of a second; when it turns, the film advances under cover of shuttered darkness. The moviegoer’s brain, hoodwinked by this succession of still lives, obligingly infers motion.