by Mark Kermode
At the screen …
At Zac’s head …
And his hair …
Or lack of it …
Any moment now …
Any moment …
Any moment …
Any …
Oh, for fuck’s sake.
I got up out of my seat (easy when it’s on an aisle – see?) and strode purposefully out of the theatre in search of an usher.
There weren’t any.
As we know.
So I strode all the way back down the corridor, right back to the huge queue for the ‘comestibles and tickets’ stand that still snaked all the way out into the foyer, and accosted someone wearing what appeared to be the uniform of the establishment in question.
‘Can you tell the projectionist to check the picture in Screen Seven?’ I said with what I believed to be an air of firm authority. ‘The picture’s spilling over the top of the screen.’
The uniformed monkey gazed at me with an air of blank bewilderment. He appeared to be just hitting puberty. Right there. Right then. Right in the middle of the lobby, by the look of him.
‘Whaaaaaa?’ he drooled.
I took a deep breath – this was going to be annoyingly complicated. Let’s try and make it simple.
‘The projectionist,’ I said slowly and clearly ‘in Screen Seven … needs to adjust the picture. Or to move the masking. By about a foot. Can you tell him? Or her? Please?’
The pubertal monkey stared at me, slack-jawed, his mouth grasping at word-like shapes but his vocal chords too bored to go to the effort of actually making a noise.
‘Please?’ I asked again.
The monkey turned and pulled something chunky and weather-beaten from out of the waistband of his trousers. To my amazement, it appeared to be a walkie-talkie. Could he possibly operate such a hi-tech device? Apparently so. He pushed a button and held the machine to his head, where it let out a high-pitched screeching sound, causing him to jump a little and recoil in terror (so maybe he couldn’t, after all). I imagined that would be the end of it but, no, he was going to have another go. He looked at the machine again, shook it, pressed the same button, waited for the awful howling noise, got nothing, and then gingerly lifted the receiver back toward his face.
‘Roger?’ he whispered, hesitantly, with just a hint of fear.
Nothing.
‘Roger?’ he said again, this time a little louder, a little more assertive. But answer came there none. He decided to give it one last go.
‘Roger!’ he shouted into the machine at a volume which meant Roger would probably have heard were he anywhere in the cinema complex, whether the walkie-talkie was working or not. Presumably most of the audience in Screen Seven – where I was currently missing Charlie St. Cloud in the same way that Zac’s head was missing the screen – heard it too. So much for turning off your mobile phones for the consideration of others.
But apparently Roger had heard nothing, or if he had he was staunchly refusing to answer the call of duty. Clearly Roger had about as much enthusiasm for this cinema as I did. Then, with a flash of inspiration, monkey boy remembered something and took his finger off the button he had been depressing since this strange procedure began. Suddenly the machine in his hand leapt into squawking, shrieking life again, catching a raised voice mid-sentence that one could only assume belonged to the aforesaid Roger.
‘… your finger off the button, you muppet!’
Monkey boy blanched and put his finger straight back on the button to silence any further outburst. Taking control of the situation, he raised his chin, brought the walkie-talkie very close to his lips (while surreptitiously turning down the volume control) and said in a voice which sounded uncannily like those automated train information systems that claim to be robotically sorry when your service is delayed, ‘Please come immediately to the ticketing area where customer assistance is required thank you over and out.’ And with that he clicked the intercom off as swiftly as possible and jammed it back down into his waistband. It was a deft move, made all the more impressive by the fact that I had been rather surprised to discover he could speak, and the combination of language skills and manual dexterity had caught me quite off guard. I wasn’t sure whether to applaud, like you do in the circus when a chimpanzee peels a banana with its feet while riding a tricycle and wearing a bowler hat, or to laugh, like we used to do when those unhappy primates in the PG Tips commercials pretended to push musical instruments up a flight of stairs. (‘Dad, do you know the piano’s on my foot?’ ‘You hum it, son, I’ll play it.’) As it transpired, neither response would have been appropriate as this callow youth clearly had no intention of making eye contact or engaging in small talk. He was not, in industrial terms, ‘customer facing’, although this being the case it was hard to know exactly what he was facing. It seemed to me that, when approached by a ticket-buying customer, his only response had been to send out for reinforcements, presumably to neutralise the threat to his personal space. For all I knew, the phrase ‘customer assistance required’ meant that he (rather than I) needed the assistance, presumably to protect him from the customer, and what was required was for me to be neutralised forthwith. Whatever, having made audio contact with ‘Roger’ he had apparently done his bit for queen and country, and he wasn’t going to do anything else except stand there and hope I wouldn’t notice him.
Out of politeness, I didn’t.
So we both stood there, saying nothing, waiting for Roger, like characters in a Beckett play. Only unlike a Beckett play, Roger did actually arrive. Quite quickly, in fact. Or at least, more quickly than I had expected, considering how long everything else had taken in this bloody hellhole. For all I knew, by the time I had explained the problem to Roger, the projectionist would have woken from their slumber, looked out of their box, noticed the absence of Zac’s usually fabulous hair, and adjusted the picture all by themselves, thus making my laborious intervention utterly unnecessary and making me look like a bit of a fool. Maybe I was missing out on some perfectly projected Zac right now, hanging around moaning in the lobby when I should have been relaxing in the luxurious comfort of premium seating. I was starting to wish I’d stayed put.
But here was Roger, smiling, ambulant, comparatively grown up, and apparently unaware that I had overheard his recent untempered radiophonic outburst.
‘Hi, I’m Roger,’ he said somewhat extraneously, but with the air of a man who was well on his way to becoming assistant manager in the very near future. Clearly Roger was the guy to be dealing with, and all my trials, Lord, would soon be over. Perhaps they were over already?
Who knew? But Roger was keen to help.
‘What seems to be the trouble?’ he asked, like the go-getting, problem-solving sort of chap he so clearly was.
‘Well,’ I began, relieved to be dealing with someone with the power to make things happen. ‘It’s nothing terrible. It’s just that the projectionist in Screen Seven needs to adjust the picture a little because it’s spilling over the top of the screen.’
‘I see,’ said Roger, giving every impression that he did, although with noticeably less bonhomie than he appeared to be exuding about ten seconds ago – before I started telling him about the ‘problem’ in Screen Seven. There was a bit of an awkward silence. I wasn’t quite sure why. But I decided to fill it anyway.
‘So if you could just tell the projectionist in Screen Seven to …’
‘He’s not in Screen Seven,’ said Roger, a little tersely I thought, and with an edge of irritation which suggested he did not quite appreciate the fact that I knew perfectly well the projectionist was not literally in Screen Seven. He was up in the projection booth.
‘He’s in the projection booth,’ explained Roger.
I pursed my lips a little and tried to gauge the tone of this comment. Was he having me on? Or did he actually think that I needed to be told that the projectionist was in the projection booth, rather than in Screen Seven? I decided to give him the benefit of the doubt.
‘I know he’s in the projection booth,’ I replied, taking care to keep my tone measured and encouragingly interactive, with no trace of hostility. ‘He’s in the projection booth for Screen Seven and …’
‘No,’ Roger cut in assertively. ‘He’s in the projection booth. There’s only one. It’s very modern. All the screens are controlled from there.’
This was undoubtedly true. As we noted earlier, it has long been common practice for a single overworked projectionist to operate any number of screens in a modern multiplex, leaving them unable to attend to the deficiencies of an individual performance. The solution to this problem, according to those who run such establishments, is not to employ more projectionists but rather to install equipment that has no need of the projectionist’s art. Equipment like those aforementioned digital projectors which need only to be switched on, allowing the whole movie to be perfectly projected from beginning to end without clunky reel changes or old-fashioned analogue snarl-ups, just like it does when you put a DVD on at home and simply sit back and enjoy the picture.
Have you ever done that? Slapped a DVD on and then just sat back and enjoyed the picture?
I haven’t.
Why not?
Because the opportunity for error with digital information is just too great.
First up, you have to make sure that the picture is playing in the right screen ratio. Oh, I know this infuriates people, and I’m constantly being told just how annoying it is that I cannot be in the same room as anyone watching TV in the wrong ratio without reaching for the remote and correcting the grievous error forthwith. But why the hell shouldn’t I, when those errors are so easy to fix? It’s not like the picture doesn’t look wrong, for crying out loud. And every modern television handset has a ratio-adjustment button that will happily snap between screen sizes until you arrive at the right one … which you will know you have reached because it’s the one that looks right. It really doesn’t matter what you’re watching, whether it’s a handsomely remastered copy of John Ford’s The Searchers or the early evening broadcast of Look North West. It makes no difference; if the people on the screen look dumpy and squat, or squished and thin, then change the flipping ratio until they look right (unless you’re watching Sex and the City, in which case that’s how they’re meant to look).
And it’s not over once you’ve got the ratio sorted. As anyone who has ever watched a DVD will know, getting the disc to start playing is just the beginning of the fun. Since digital technology is a binary yes/no (or on/off) affair, it is entirely possible for a machine attempting to convert a string of noughts and ones into moving pictures to give up the ghost unannounced at any time, causing the picture to freeze and the player to helpfully inform you that it has encountered a ‘disc error’ or, less helpfully, to attempt to assure you that there simply is ‘no disc’ on which errors might occur. So you trudge over to the machine, take out the allegedly non-existent disc, wipe it on your T-shirt (having perhaps breathed on it first), and then put it back into the player to see if it likes it any better this time. Sometimes it does, and it will start playing from where you left off (hooray!). Other times, it will insist on going back to the start menu and make you endure those infuriatingly patronising anti-piracy messages through which it is impossible to fast forward. Most often, it will simply repeat its evidence-defying claim that there is ‘no disc’, leaving you to: a) start the whole process all over again; or b) shout, swear, kick the DVD player, try again, fail again, and finally end up watching Look North West instead. In the wrong ratio.
Do you have a picture of this ‘home is where the hate is’ horror in your mind? OK, now transfer that to a cinema auditorium, where the problem is magnified by the fact that everyone there has just paid ten quid for the thrill of being there, and now the bloody film’s either in the wrong ratio (due to being projected through the wrong lens) or misaligned or stuck or whatever, and you can’t get anywhere near the projector to kick it. I once interviewed a projectionist from a major West End cinema who told me that he refused to run a digital print of a movie unless he had a secondary 35mm back-up projector running simultaneously, but 30 seconds behind. That way, if the digital brick blipped (which they are wont to do) he could simply open up the second projector and show the rest of the film from reliable old celluloid. The great advantage of film is that it is splendidly mechanical, and if anything goes wrong it can usually be fixed with razor blades and sticking plaster in a matter of moments. The same is true of gramophone records; if the record gets stuck, you can always just move the needle on to the next groove and away you go. Not so with CDs, which when they fail run the risk of simply not playing at all. I know this to be true having worked at Radio 1 during the great advent of CDs and D-carts (digital cartridges) and experiencing first-hand the horror of TDF (Total Digital Failure), which you simply never had to face with old-fashioned analogue. Hell, if worse came to the worst, you could actually haul a segment of tape through a reel-to-reel machine manually and it would continue to play. OK, so the sound would wobble and warp all over the place, but at least it didn’t just stop and leave you with nothing but silence.
Or darkness.
Or a frozen picture, which is what you get when a digitally projected film fails.
And when that happens, not only is there nothing the projectionist can do about it (unless they’ve got a 35mm print laced and ready to go), but most of the time there’s no projectionist there not to be able to do anything about it in the first place. They’re too busy being unable to do anything about a whole other bunch of screens.
Which brings us back to Screen Seven and Zac Efron’s hair. Or (as I mentioned previously) the lack of it. Having ascertained from Roger that the picture was (as I suspected) not being closely monitored by a keen-eyed projectionist after all, the next step seemed simple enough – get Roger to get the projectionist to move their arse up the projection corridor and correctly adjust the image in Screen Seven forthwith, a process which would take approximately 30 seconds tops. How hard could it be?
Very hard, apparently.
Firstly, Roger refused to believe that there was anything wrong with the image in Screen Seven.
‘No one’s complained,’ he stated firmly.
‘Um, I’m complaining,’ I replied, still unsure whether he was taking the piss.
‘Well, no one else is complaining,’ clarified Roger, theatrically casting his eye around the lobby as if searching for an angry mob with flaming torches demanding to see more of the top of Zac Efron’s head. There were indeed none – I was alone in my complaint. But I failed to see how the fact that everyone else was prepared to put up with shoddy projection meant that I had to do the same myself. I was beginning to feel worryingly militant about this issue.
‘Look,’ I said, still struggling to maintain a veneer of politeness. ‘The image is spilling over the top of the screen. It’s as clear as day. Come and see for yourself.’
Roger thought about this for a moment, and then looked intently at his watch, clearly attempting to give the impression of a man who was far too busy doing his job to worry about keeping the customers happy. Then he apparently remembered that keeping the customers happy was his job, slapped on a plastic smile, looked me in the eye and said,
‘OK, I’ll check it out.’
‘Great. Thanks. Thanks for that. Thanks very much.’ I was pathetically relieved to have achieved such an assurance of cooperation, particularly since things had looked like they were about to turn uncomfortable. With a spring in my stride, I almost skipped my way back to Screen Seven, happy despite having now missed nearly 15 minutes of the movie. No matter, I’d seen it before, and I knew what happened. It was a shame I’d missed the car crash, because that sequence was actually done really well. But it was worth it to know that Roger was going to come and take a look at the picture, notice the fact that the top of the frame was doing battle distractingly with the top of the screen, realise I had been right all along, and then go get the pro
jectionist to fix the problem with the merest tweak of a knob or changing of a lens. OK, so right now the image was all wrong and kept messing with the top of Zac’s hair. But any moment now it would all be sorted out.
Any moment now.
Any moment.
Really soon.
Just another few moments, to give Roger the time to get up to the projection booth, track down the projectionist, drag them away from whichever other screen was currently occupying them, point out the problem, and get them to fix it …
Any moment now.
Coming soon.
To this theatre.
A correctly projected image.
Any moment now.
Any moment.
Any …
OH, FOR FUCK’S SAKE!
I sprang out of my chair, down the aisle and out into the corridor, almost breaking into a run as I headed toward the lobby. As I rounded the corner I saw Roger, idly chatting away with a gaggle of his similarly underemployed cohorts, none of whom seemed particularly interested in cinema in general, and the running of this cinema in particular. As I thundered toward him, Roger turned with the merest hint of a smirk on his face, apparently unflustered by my evident sense of outrage.
‘What the hell’s going on?’ I demanded. ‘I thought you were going to come and check the picture in Screen Seven.’
‘Yeah,’ replied Roger, unfazed and more than a little uninterested. ‘I did. It’s fine.’
He smiled at me, as if to suggest that I should stop worrying my silly little head about such things and get back to my seat. I was doing no such thing.
‘It’s not fine,’ I said firmly. ‘It’s cutting off the top of Zac Efron’s hair. He’s missing a whole foot from his head.’
‘He’s what?’
‘The top foot of the picture is missing.’
‘The top few inches of the picture is missing,’ Roger corrected, patronisingly. ‘It’s fine.’
This statement floored me. Roger was conceding that a part of the picture – the exact amount of which was admittedly a matter for debate – was indeed ‘missing’, as I had been saying for the past 20 minutes. But apparently in his mind this was ‘fine’. Never mind that I had paid to see the whole picture, rather than some diminished proportion of the same. I wondered whether Roger would have found it equally ‘fine’ if an equivalent proportion of the cost of my ticket was similarly missing; if, for example, I had handed over £13.00 rather than £14.60 for one-and-a-half seats, on the grounds that all but the top few inches of the purchase price were present and correct, and so that was ‘fine’.