Vintage Baker

by Nicholson Baker

  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 the 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 KGB official.

  “Toothbrush,” Hulce says. “Very convenient for cleaning. I always carry one with me.”

  The KGB 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 epocha
l “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 machine 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.

  “You know what a Maltese cross is?” an itinerant projector-repairman with questionable toilet habits asks an incompetent projectionist near the end of Wim Wenders’s mammoth film-fleuve, Kings of the Road. The projectionist takes a guess: Some kind of drink? The repairman shakes his head sadly and tries to explain it to him. “Without this little thing, there’d be no film industry!” he says. The projectionist is unimpressed, and (because Kings of the Road is a semi-comprehensible art movie) he casually inhales the flame from a cigarette lighter to close out the scene. But the workings of the true star system, though they may take a moment to grasp (Fig. 2), repay meditation: seldom has a mechanism so simple, so unexpectedly heraldic, persisted without modification at the center of a ruthless business that has otherwise undergone continuous technical, artistic, and financial upheavals.

  Fig. 2. The cams turns (1) until the pin engages the Maltese cross (2), giving it a quarter turn and pulling the film down one frame (3). At (4), the pin releases the cross.

  The Simplex projector, which many hold to be the finest, is built in Omaha by a company called Ballantyne, which also makes theatrical spotlights and high-tech chicken cookers. The Maltese cross within the Simplex projector, however, is manufactured in Glendale Heights, Illinois, the work of a privately held company called La Vezzi Precision Incorporated, run by fifty-one-year-old Al La Vezzi. Al La Vezzi’s grandfather, Edward La Vezzi, got his start, during the First World War, by milling the worn teeth off projector sprockets and sweating new brass ones on. Now, in a sort of benevolent monopoly, La Vezzi’s company makes sprockets and intermittent movements for Simplex, Century, and Ballan-tyne projectors (all three brands are co-owned, and based in Omaha), and also for several companies in Europe and Asia, and for Christie projectors made in Cypress, California. For Christie, La Vezzi developed a sealed, belt-driven intermittent movement, called the Ultramittent, that never needs oiling. La Vezzi Precision is also responsible for the legendary VKF sprocket—the Very Kind to Film sprocket, that is—whose teeth are smoothed in meaningful ways by computer-controlled four-axis machining centers. The manufacture of the VKF sprocket is a “no-brainer,” however, according to Mr. La Vezzi, compared to making the Maltese cross, where serious flaws are measured in millionths of an inch. “The slot of a star has to be perfect,” he says, pronouncing “perfect” with inspiring plosiveness.

  Will there always be intermittent sprockets, and the projectors they serve, at work in the world? Will later generations of movie watchers know how similar a projector sounds to an idling VW Beetle? Will they, when viewing that superb early scene in Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times, realize that, though Chaplin is ostensibly dragged down into the bowels of a huge “Electro Steel Corp.” machine, he is really miming a piece of flexible film and threading himself through the sprockets of a movie projector? I’ve watched quite a few projector-movies recently (including one that I haven’t been able to splice in anywhere here, called The Smallest Show on Earth, in which Peter Sellers plays an old projectionist who disrupts a Western when he gets drunk in the booth), but I watched every one of them on videotape. I paused, rewound, fast-forwarded, played, and paused again so much in studying the last scene of Desperately Seeking Susan, for instance (Aidan Quinn kisses Rosanna Arquette against a Simplex projector playing a sci-fi movie about mutant attackers—Rosanna’s back arrests the winged chariot of the movie reel and the film frame melts on the screen), that the black plastic housing of the rented video gave off an unusually strong and pleasing smell of miniature VCR servomotors and hot printed-circuit boards when I at last, having subjected the lovers’ frame-melting embrace to a level of scrutiny it was never meant to bear, ejected it.

  But that single 35-mm rectangle of color film contains, it is estimated, the equivalent of forty megabytes of digital information: forty megabytes, the contents of an entire small hard disk, in every frame of a movie. Even if one assumes all sorts of clever data compression, it is difficult to imagine digital storage systems matching the Van Eyckian resolution of the chemical grains on a strip of 35– or 70–mm movie film anytime soon. Projectors, and the durably whirling Maltese crosses inside them, may still be around when, in another thirty years, a third, magnificently reimagined Blob oozes into the projection area of the local eight-plex and begins stirring up trouble. And by then, perhaps, horrorfilm makers will be brave enough to show us a few platters.

  (1994)

  LEADING WITH THE GRUMPER

  This1 may be the funniest and best-smelling work
of profound lexicographical slang-scholarship ever published. Some may respect the hint of Elmer’s glue in recent printings of Partridge’s Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English (8th ed.), or the faint traces of burlap and cocoa bean that linger deep in The Oxford Dictionary of Modern Slang, or even the fume of indoor swimming pool that clings to the paper-bound decolletage of Slang!: The Topic-By-Topic Dictionary of Contemporary American Lingoes. But a single deep draught of J. E. Lighter’s magnificent Historical Dictionary of American Slang (Volume I, A-G) is a higher order of experience: it smells like a high-ceilinged bare room freshly painted white—clean and sunlit, full of reverberative promise and proud of its mitered corners, although with a mildly intoxicating or hyper-ventilational “finish.” Since these one thousand and six pages embrace more concentrated filth, vilification, and depravity than any contiguously printed sequence is likely to contain until Lighter’s Volume II (H-R) appears in the spring of 1996, we may momentarily question the appropriateness of so guileless a fragrance. Yet reading onward (and Lighter really must be read, or at least deeply browsed, rather than consulted—the book belongs on every patriotic coffee table) we begin to acknowledge its aptness, for this work makes us see American slang—a dingy, stuffy, cramped apartment that we’ve lived in for so long now that it bores and irritates us—with sudden latex-based clarity and awe. What a spacious, cheery gallery we now have in which to tour our swearwords! How delightfully chronological and typographically tasteful it all is! How firmly principled, how unchaotic, how waltzable-in!

  And mainly, how unexpectedly funny. To judge by his helpful introduction, Mr. Lighter, who has been laboring on this project for twenty-five years, is not himself a wildly comic person, but he is an exact and deliberate and historically minded person, and he has a rare ability for positioning formerly funny words and phrases in settings that allow them to become funny once more. He is slang’s great straight man. I never suspected that I would again laugh aloud at the phrase “broken-dick motherfucker,” having found it inert for some time—but no, reading (on the plane) one of the several citations under “broke-dick adj. worthless.—usu. considered vulgar,” I was suddenly, mystifyingly, pounding the tray-table. So too with the entry for airhole: