A Thousand Cuts
In 2011 director Michael Bay sent a well-publicized letter to the nation’s theater projectionists, imploring them to run his then-current Transformers: Dark of the Moon in digital 3-D at “the brightness levels specified for the best results.” He went on to add, in a spirit of camaraderie, “We are all in this together…. Projectionists are of ultimate importance because your expertise defines the audience’s experience.” In reality, Bay was pleading with a nearly empty projection booth. Part of the collateral damage of the transition to the digital age is that it’s essentially wiped out the job of projectionist. As Time Out London observed in a recent article, “Projectionists as we imagine them are on the verge of extinction. This is down to big changes in the world of exhibition: hulking hard drives—to which films are sent digitally—are being installed in cinemas, while tactile, scratchy, buzzing celluloid film prints are being tossed on the scrapheap.”56 Theaters equipped for modern digital projection don’t even require a professional projectionist: theater managers can easily “ingest” a Digital Cinema Package onto the server and push “play.” No experience required.
“The mantra here, as far as I can tell, is that we’ll continue to show film as long as the studios make it available to us,” says Paul Rayton, film collector and head projectionist for the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood, originally built by impresario Sid Grauman in 1922 and reopened by the nonprofit American Cinematheque as their permanent home in 1998. Paul has gray-white hair, glasses, and the spry, excitable temperament of a wizard out of a J.R.R. Tolkien novel. When Jeff and I arrive, he’s in his usual semiflustered state, dealing with plugs for a Powerbook presentation for something called “Social Media Week.” He’s wearing, ironically, a gray T-shirt that says, “Never Forget,” with icons of a film reel, unspooled film, and a Goldberg can, although the message may be lost on most of the Social Media Week attendees.
With him is his friend, fellow projectionist, and film collector Michael Schleiger, who has the rangy good looks and deeply lined face of an older Richard Widmark. Together, the two men have projected at nearly every surviving movie palace in the L.A. area (and a good number that are gone), including the famed Chinese Theatre down the block, where Mike was projecting for Star Wars in 1977. “When they would go into hyperspace the first time—whoosh!!—I’d turn the sound all the way up,” he recalls. “When the Death Star exploded, same thing. During the ending credits, on the original ’77 run, I’d change the side lights, very subtly, a little green, a little blue, a little purple. Purple was my favorite.” Although most audience members wouldn’t consciously notice the changes, these are beautiful examples of how a good projectionist could influence the movie experience. It’s an art that is now sadly lost with the change to digital. Both men are past retirement age—“I hit seventy last month. It’s a miracle I’m still here,” Paul sighs—but continue to practice their craft at the Egyptian because, well, there is almost no one around qualified to replace them. “In 1969 when I came into the Projectionists’ Union, there were 650 members of Local 150,” observes Mike. “And now there’s maybe forty. And of those forty, I’d say only ten, and I’d be really exaggerating if I pushed it up to fifteen, that could come in here and run film.”
Lest anyone think that Paul and Mike are film-only Luddites, both men accept that digital is here to stay, and that it may be a good thing in some ways. “This is what did it for Michael: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. You’ve got to see it on DCP,” Paul says enthusiastically. “That’s one of the things that made me a convert. It never looked as good on film as it did on digital,” Mike nods in agreement. In many ways it’s reassuring to hear these two expert projectionists—who’ve seen enough to know—embracing the new technology. Paul is the older of the two by five years. He was born in 1942 in Hanover, New Hampshire, the son of a physics professor and an elementary school teacher, and raised in the shadow of Ivy League school Dartmouth College. His father was an amateur ham-radio buff, who passed along his love of gears and gadgets to his son but who died when Paul was still in his teens. He came out to Los Angeles to attend the University of Southern California (USC) Film School, where he did second unit photography in 1966 on classmate George Lucas’s seminal short 1:42:08, which later formed the basis for the feature THX 1138. “I had a girlfriend back East who I wanted to see over Easter, and I had no idea George was going to the desert to shoot the race car stuff for 1:42:08. Had I gone with George to the desert and spent time more actively working with him, my career path might have been significantly different,” Paul says with a wry grin.
While studying at USC, Paul discovered that hundreds of vintage prints were being dumped in the trash at the nearby Gilboy film depot. “I went there and there’s all this film in barrels and barrels and barrels,” he remembers. “And I thought, ‘That’s interesting.’ So I started going back. They left the gates open on a Saturday, and I just went in and helped myself.” Among the treasures he rescued from the garbage heap were 35mm four-track mag prints of Oklahoma! and The Sound of Music, An American in Paris, and a rare print of Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura. According to Paul, it’s also most likely where he salvaged a 35mm mag print of James Dean’s Rebel Without a Cause, which he loaned to Warner Bros. years later when it turned out the studio had lost all of the original stereo elements on the film. “Every single stereo element that is in existence now on Rebel Without a Cause came from Paul’s print,” Mike points out proudly, to which Paul gives a self-conscious little shrug. When I ask if he still owns this invaluable print, Paul turns to his friend: “Do I still have it?” he asks. Mike nods yes, confirming it’s still in Paul’s collection at UCLA Archive.
Mike was born in Omaha, Nebraska, the son of a movie theater manager and a cashier, who met at the theater where she worked. His mother died when he was four years old, and his father moved the family out to L.A., where he took a job with Fox West Coast Theaters. At one of the cinemas his father managed, the long-gone Picfair at Pico and Fairfax, he met the saxophone-playing projectionist, George Roth, who took a paternal liking to the young Mike. “So I gradually learned to be a projectionist. He’d teach me how to splice film: he’d take the splices after I’d made them and pop them—he’d go bam bam bam!! like that, to see if they held. And he’d charge me fifty cents for every splice that came apart, and twenty-five cents for every misframe.” As Mike became more experienced, he discovered he could steal his father’s keys and ride his bike to the theater after it closed, where it became his own private screening room. “I wouldn’t run the whole movie. I’d just run a couple reels and then ride back home. I just loved the opening of West Side Story,” he remembers. To make sure Roth didn’t catch on to his midnight movie forays, he was careful enough to remove the used carbon stubs from the projectors and slip them in his pocket.57 I ask Mike when he last saw his mentor Roth, and he rubs his face sadly. “At the Four Star Theatre in Los Angeles sometime in the 1970s,” he replies. “He was the projectionist when the Mitchell Brothers were running Behind the Green Door when the Four Star was a porno house for a while.”
As a collector, Mike has a fondness for 35mm four-track mag stereo prints and has rare copies of Prince Valiant, The Brave One, Mr. Roberts, and Picnic in his collection, featuring the now-obsolete sound format. “One of the rarest things I had, though, were the outtakes from Spartacus in 70mm, which I eventually gave to Robert Harris when he did the restoration,” he says. These included the burying-of-the-baby sequence and a more explicit scene of Jean Simmons bathing in the pool. I ask where he found these, and he says from “an old sound guy from Universal that a friend of mine knew. He had a bunch of stuff in his garage and wanted to get rid of it.” Like most collectors, he and Paul still mourn the ones that got away or, worse, went vinegar. His most painful loss to vinegar syndrome? “That would be my two-hundred-minute four-track mag version of Lawrence of Arabia,” he says, wincing. “One night I got very drunk and took all fourteen reels out to the dumpster behind the Chinese.” Paul nods in agreement—one of the rare Oklahoma! IB Tech prints he salvaged from Gilboy in the mid-1960s finally went vinegar a few years ago. Although he threw the print out, he couldn’t bear to part with the film cans. After the interview he takes me out to his car and shows me where they sit, empty, nestled right behind the driver’s seat.
The two men are philosophical about the changes that have swept the industry and made projectionists an endangered species. “Most of the people who come to see these movies are not coming necessarily to see something that’s on a piece of a celluloid that’s rattling through a projector,” observes Paul. “They’re coming to see the content: Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, Gone With the Wind, Clark Gable and Olivia de Havilland, the glorious cinematography.” Mike agrees but worries that a younger audience is growing accustomed to seeing a pristine viewing experience. “In the 1950s and the 1960s when we were watching movies on television, we were watching scratchy and beat-up prints that were run off 16mm. That’s what our generation was used to seeing,” he says. “But now, this generation won’t accept imperfections.” One thing they agree on is that the movies have changed, permanently, with what they both call the “seismic shift” from film to digital. “This is as big as the one from silent to sound. Probably bigger,” Paul says thoughtfully. Mike draws in a deep breath: “At least with silent to sound, you were using the same physical element to project shadows on the screen. But now …” His voice trails off for a moment. “Is it still shadows now, Paul?”
“I love film, I love touching it,” says retired projectionist and collector Matt Spero as he leads us through his dark, curtained house in Hollywood. “You can’t touch a digital file, you can’t physically manipulate it and hold it in your hands. There’s a tactile experience to running film, to being with film.” In person Matt is a big, bearlike man with a handlebar mustache and an infectious, raspy voice. His house sits in a dodgy neighborhood near Melrose and Normandie with the concrete walls of the 101 freeway looming overhead. Inside, the place is either a fascinating paradise of movie memorabilia or something of a cluttered nightmare, depending on your point of view. The most remarkable feature is a jewel-box-like screening room immediately to the left as you enter, with its own theater marquee over the entry and a poster case sporting a one-sheet for Brian De Palma’s Phantom of the Paradise, a personal favorite of Matt’s. The screening room itself is like a grand old movie palace, just in miniature. He’s decorated it with faded but still beautiful architectural elements salvaged from various old theaters that were being demolished. Overhead, the ceiling is decorated with a glorious abstract sunburst pattern, with a carved wooden emblem from the Whittier Theatre hanging above the red velvet curtains. He points to an ornate bronze-and-frosted-glass wall sconce next to an assemblage of gilded mythological sea-horses riding foaming waves: “These came from the Imperial Theater in Long Beach. At one time there were eighty different theaters in Long Beach. Now there’s one, the Art Theatre, which has been restored,” he says. Standing here I realize this is something like a theater graveyard, with the ghosts of bygone movie palaces still gathered here waiting for the show to begin.
“You found my booth!” he exclaims, as I poke my head into the cramped, dusty space at the back of the theater, reached by a narrow set of steps. “I can screen 35mm, including four-track mag, 16mm, and now video,” he notes proudly. Although I don’t say it out loud, my heart sinks looking at the state of the booth. It’s filled with haphazard piles of loose film leader, plastic cores, and trailer reels. Can he even still show film in here? At one point he certainly did, and it must have been magnificent to sit in this tiny movie palace with its crystal chandelier overhead and its glass ticket booth by the door. “We had a sneak preview of The Hand, with Michael Caine. It hadn’t even been released yet. I knew somebody who worked on the film, and they got me a print. The Great Race in IB Tech, my own personal print. We ran a four-track mag Tech print of The Guns of Navarone,” he gushes. One night he had to hold the start of the show thirty minutes so that members of disco group the Village People could arrive to watch the sci-fi flick Saturn 3, starring Kirk Douglas and Farrah Fawcett.
Born in Berkeley, California, in 1945, Matt moved with his parents to Santa Rosa (the setting for Hitchcock’s classic Shadow of a Doubt) when they opened a truck stop and café there. He caught the projecting bug running 16mm films in junior high school and began work professionally as a projectionist in 1970 in the L.A. area. Among the well-known theaters he worked at were the Vagabond and the Tiffany rep houses, and the downtown Orpheum, where he fondly remembers running a double bill in floor-rattling Sensurround of Earthquake and Midway. He is, of course, most proud of his own little cinema. I ask if he has a single favorite experience as a projectionist. He thinks for a moment, then recalls screening a print of Mary Poppins at home one day. “I’m sitting here watching this movie all by myself, and I said, ‘You are the luckiest fucker in the world.’ I’m watching this beautiful Tech print with stereo sound in my own home … I actually got tears in my eyes. I was so happy. How many people could say this?”
For him, the writing was on the wall for projectionists’ jobs as early as the 1980s, when giant mechanical platter systems were quickly replacing the old dual-projector set-ups. “At the time I was getting paid about eight or nine dollars an hour. It was all going downhill by that point,” he says in frustration. “By then I knew that being a projectionist was dead. They were beginning to make us teach the candy-counter people how to thread.” He still maintains a small film vault at his home just off his back bedroom. It’s barely big enough to squeeze into sideways and is stuffed to the ceiling with reels of 35mm trailers and odds-and-ends, like test footage of Mae West in her final film, Sextette (1978), that he plucked from a dumpster.
When I ask if he still runs his prints at home for friends like he used to do, he shakes his head and gestures to a digital projector perched in the back row of the theater. Even here, in this jewel-box-like theater literally made of movie memories, film is dead. Nowadays he runs prints only if he needs to check the condition to sell them on eBay. “Here’s the absolute reality of digital versus film. I absolutely love film,” says the man who talks passionately about the tactile feeling of holding film, almost breathing it in. “However—there comes the big one—show me a print directly out of a lab of a movie. Then show me the digital version that’s been cleaned up, with all the scratches removed and the jiggle removed, and the digital version looks pretty damn good.”
“I have a habit of going to movies every night. They’re doing an Ernst Lubitsch series at the Aero, and I went to see Trouble in Paradise, the best film of its kind,” says projectionist, union officer, and film collector Lee Sanders when he arrives at my house. A thoughtful, soft-spoken guy, Lee is tall and slim, with a gray-black nub of a mustache and an Ichabod Crane–like quality. In keeping with his personality, he’s kept a low profile among L.A. area film collectors, but over the years he’s quietly assembled a superb collection of 35mm and 16mm prints, including rare titles like Anthony Mann’s bleak antiwar masterpiece Men in War (1957), which he freely loaned for a Mann retrospective at the American Cinematheque I organized in the mid-1990s. “I personally would be happy to see a terrible IB Technicolor print over almost anything else,” he says about his love for film on film. “I think IB prints are like oil paintings.” This story of Lee’s sums up his passion for film best, and how he’s shared it with others over the years: “One of my favorite memories was [journalist] Todd McCarthy borrowed one of my films to show to Jean Renoir. It was John Ford’s The Rising of the Moon. Todd reported that Renoir said afterwards, ‘Magnifique!’”
Born in Evanston, Illinois, in 1943 and raised in Pasadena, Lee was a self-described “film freak” in the 1960s. Eventually he abandoned a career as an aerospace engineer at Jet Propulsion Laboratory to work as a projectionist. He started projecting in 1972 at theaters like the Vagabond and the downtown Arcade, where he recalls undercover cops would hang out with him in the projection booth because they were too afraid to sit with the audience. “I want to explain why I became a projectionist. It’s not because I wanted a job—it’s because I wanted to preserve film. I was a collector first,” he notes with emphasis. Of all the projectionist-collectors Jeff and I spoke with, the soft-spoken Lee has been arguably the most vocal in fighting for the jobs of his brother workers: for twenty-five years he was an officer at Projectionists’ Union Local 150 as well as a delegate to the county Federation of Labor.
There’s a bitter irony to the fact that Lee’s own job as a projectionist has been wiped out by the transition to digital. For a number of years he’s worked on the private Bel Air circuit. It’s one of the most exclusive perks in a town that prides itself on perks: millionaire producers, financiers, and studio executives would set up plush screening rooms in their Bel Air and Beverly Hills mansions and screen the latest films, often loaned by rival studios. “What I remember most is how incredibly clean and beautiful the houses are,” marvels Lee, who makes three hundred dollars a night for his projecting services. “They’re really beautiful places, and they’re so pristine that you don’t have to clean the projectors. There’s no dust in the entire house.” You might assume that Lee would eventually become resentful, surrounded by so much conspicuous wealth, but it’s just the opposite. “Although politically a socialist, I still have great love for a lot of capitalists—I’m not prejudiced,” he says. “It’s not their fault that they have a capitalist system and know what to do with it. I might do the same things they do, although I might be happy to pay more for the projectionists,” he adds with a wink.
When the end came for him on the Bel Air circuit, it came quickly and without a word. “That ended in December 2012. No more prints,” he says quietly. “In December I did a lot of screenings, but nothing since then. I worked at three different places, but they’re all finished. These were private homes, and they spent twenty-five thousand dollars per projector for beautiful Kinoton machines, which are the best and the most expensive.” With the transition to digital, there is simply no need for a projectionist like Lee any longer.
“I can agree with everything in the digital transition. Everything is okay with me, including losing my career, although of course I don’t think it was actually necessary,” he says toward the end of our talk. “But the one thing that is of greatest importance is losing the archival quality of film. Film is cheap to store. You can just ‘store it and ignore it,’ as they say. Set it aside for several hundred years, if it’s stored properly by a good archive, and then you can come back and still use it.”
Among collectors we interviewed, former New York City projectionist Michael McKay may have been the youngest to own a 35mm projector, at the tender age of fifteen. “I was just dicking around with it,” he says now with a laugh. “Any trailers I got in 35mm, I’d just cut the trailer up and make slides out of them. I was a kid, you didn’t know. I realized later when I started seriously collecting that I’d cut up some really great trailers: Horror of Dracula, Forbidden Planet, The Time Machine.” The son of a New York City policeman, Michael was born in 1951 in Queens. His life changed overnight at the age of twelve when his mother committed suicide. “Because my mother died when I was very young, and the circumstances of her death, my father became very overindulgent and never said no to me,” he recalls now about the first feature he ever got, a print of Godzilla vs. Mothra (1964) that his dad purchased for him at a local camera store.
“New York was a very small group of people who all knew each other,” he says referring to the late-1960s East Coast subculture, then rattles off a list of names, including Spartacus restorationist Robert Harris, collector Wes Shank, producer Jon Davison, and director Joe Dante. As a teenager he fell in with Castle of Frankenstein magazine editor Calvin Beck, who was hosting screenings of classic horror and sci-fi films like Metropolis at the McBurney YMCA in New York City. He began tagging along with Beck and his mother, who took him to other film-buff screenings, like the legendary Theodore Huff Memorial Film Society events hosted by William K. Everson and attended by a young Leonard Maltin and Susan Sontag, among others. He mentions the famed connection between Beck and Hitchcock’s Psycho: “They say that the character for Norman Bates was based partially on the relationship between Calvin Beck and his mother. Calvin was no murderer, but it was a weird, sick relationship that he had with his mother,” he recalls. “He couldn’t go anywhere without her. Very rare that they would ever be separated.” He still has real admiration and affection for Beck: “Calvin was a great guy, deep love of movies. It showed in his magazine, which was not like Famous Monsters. I mean, I love Forry Ackerman and everything, but his magazine treated movies like a joke. Calvin was much more respectful of the genre: science fiction, horror, fantasy.” I ask him for his impression of this underground group of New York cinephiles, and he pauses for a moment. “There was a group of older collectors, and I look back now and think a lot of them might have been either perverts or dysfunctional socially and sexually,” he replies. “If they weren’t just mama’s boys in general, they probably had a lot of issues with their sexuality. They were either closeted or out-and-out gay people. It’s probably part of why they had you hanging out with them, why they allowed young boys to hang out with the group. But nobody ever made any advances to me or my friends,” he notes.
Michael was pretty much indulged by his father until the age of twenty-eight: “I had done nothing with my life,” he admits. “I never developed like most people, get a job. I was locked in this drug and movie and sex thing.” One day his father sat him down for a heart-to-heart talk. “He asked me, ‘What is it you like to do, what do you enjoy doing?’ I said, ‘I like to get high and watch movies,’ and I laughed. My father very seriously said, ‘OK, let’s start with that. You have a lot of knowledge; there’s gotta be some way to turn your hobby into a job.” Michael found it difficult to break into the Motion Picture Projectionists Local 306, but after befriending a projectionist at the local Haven Theatre named Angelo, he was finally able to get his union card. He says the union was rife with corruption at the time, tightly controlling who worked where and even stealing hundreds of prints of films like The Graduate from a company called In Flight that provided screenings on airplanes. Catching on to how things worked, he freely admits that he began routinely stealing prints himself: “As a projectionist, every time I’d go to a different theater, if I wanted a print I’d just take it. If the manager would say, ‘Where’s the print?’ I’d say, ‘They picked that up last week.’”
He also picked up a particularly notorious habit of projectionists: cutting his favorite scenes out of a movie, then shipping it on to the next theater.58 “I had the European print of Vault of Horror with the scene where the vampire puts a spigot in the guy’s neck and turns it on to fill a glass full of blood,” he remembers, then adds: “I cut that out.” There is a long silence. “You didn’t ask the reason: why would I do this? I felt the movie business had treated me so poorly, the theater chains. I felt at that point I owed them nothing and had free hand to do whatever I wanted to them.” According to Michael, the theater owners were constantly trying to bust the unions and refused to pay him and the other projectionists the agreed overtime rate. “So the next Bond film that would come in, I’d grab a couple prints and sell them and put a couple thousand bucks in my pocket.”
“Most collectors are nuts. An awful lot of them are really disturbed,” he says about his fellow film buffs. “I hate to say someone’s a crook—here I am stealing films. I like to think I have some kind of integrity, but a lot of people did not. Is there such a thing as being an honest thief? Is that hypocritical?” he asks to no one in particular. He shares a bizarre and unsettling story about a collector who was, as he puts it, “famous for fucking with prints.” After buying a copy of It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World from Michael for three hundred dollars that he planned to resell to someone else, the collector “starts going through the print taking out scenes for himself. Then he starts rewinding it and holding a razor blade to scratch up the whole print on the emulsion side.” When I ask, slightly appalled, why he’d mutilate a perfectly good print, Michael just shrugs. “He was crazy. He was nuts.”
When the end came for Michael as theaters transitioned to digital, it was a slow, painful process of erosion. “First I went from working 60 hours a week to 50 hours a week to 40 to 30, to 25, to 20,” he says with barely disguised bitterness. The last film he projected was Rudolph Valentino’s 1925 silent drama The Eagle in 2011 at the Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center, before he was able to get an early pension at age sixty. “That was horrible, going digital. Very bad scene. It’s death by a thousand cuts.”