Like looking into a mirror

I started working in projection booths in 1999, the year Fight Club came out. As FC fans know, Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) has a night job as a projectionist, which he uses as an opportunity to splice frames of p**nography into Disney flicks.

FC is one of my favorite movies of the ‘90s. Its vision of “Planet Starbucks,” of disillusioned manboys venting their frustrations by beating the hell out of each other, strikes me as very relevant to the America of today. But the scene in the projection booth struck me as all wrong from the beginning. I was thinking about that, as well as the 9 years I spent as a part-time projectionist, when I watched The Projectionist, a Danish short film uploaded to Openfilm by Zarije.

First of all, projectionists don’t look like Brad Pitt. We’re a gentle, fugly bunch who speak in film-geek, read (comic) books and have vague, usually unattained goals of writing screenplays. Beyond that, Tyler is working as a projectionist at the turn of the century. What’s he doing running the film reel-to-reel?

Okay, let me back up and explain how the magic of movie projection works. You receive the film in big orange or gray cans. Inside the cans are “reels,” which hold about 20 minutes of film each. So you take the reels over to your work bench, get out your splicing tape and put the reels together (about 5 reels for a 90-minute film, 6 for a 2-hour film, etc.).

After attaching trailers and, depending on how annoying your theater is, maybe some commercials, you feed the reels onto a platter, which looks like this:

That’s it. From there you “thread” the film from one platter, through the projector, and back onto another platter.

So, as I said, what the hell is Tyler doing running the film reel-to-reel? I could understand if he worked in a revival house or something, but a shot of the big auditorium the audience is sitting in suggests he works in a multiplex, and multiplexes have platters. The really far-fetched part is when he splices a frame of p**nography (“nice big cock”) into a family film. Anyone who’s seen Boogie Nights (and if you haven’t, then stop reading this and go watch it) knows that 35mm prints of p**no flicks went out of style sometime in the early 1980s. So unless he has access to some very old prints, it’s highly unlikely that Tyler would be able to pull off this kind of stunt.

The craziest “stunt” I ever pulled as a projectionist was purely by accident. (This story is going to make me look bad, but I’ll tell it anyway.) I was putting together the reels for Peaceful Warrior, the 2006 inspirational drama starring Scott Mechlowicz, and I accidentally left Reel 4 (of 6) in the can. In the film, Mechlowicz plays a gymnast who suffers a devastating injury. In the director’s cut, the film shows the hero’s road to recovery. But in my version – the Shupe Cut, if you will, which ran about 20 minutes shorter – Mechlowicz goes from being in the hospital in one scene to being completed recovered in the next. Amazingly, nobody complained about the missing reel. We discovered the problem the Tuesday after Peaceful Warrior opened, and I had some fun getting chewed out by the management and putting all the reels back together.

But no, I never spliced in frames of p**nography. If anything, I took them out, like when I removed some key frames of Rosario Dawson from the print of Alexander after it finished its theatrical run. Fight Club isn’t the craziest thing I’ve ever seen in a movie involving projection work – that prize would go to Cigarette Burns, the John Carpenter episode of “Masters of Horror” in which Udo Kier threads his guts through a projector – but I wouldn’t call it a realistic depiction, either.

The Projectionist, on the other hand, is another story. The protagonist is suitably fugly, and the cinematography perfectly captures the cavernous feel of a projection booth. I can’t vouch for the film’s sci-fi elements, but I will say that booths have been rumored to be haunted. I never had a supernatural encounter, though I would sometimes get the heebie-jeebies. It’s lonely work, it’s dark and secluded, and it would be easy for your imagination to get the best of you. You could probably go completely bats**t up there, which seems to be what’s happened to the hero of The Projectionist.

About a month after I left, my theater started converting to digital projectors. Sorry to say, but this job is probably going to be a relic of the digital age.