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.
>
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!
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).
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...