Happy Birthday Dad

In honor of the 94th anniversary of my dad's birth, a video short about a projectionist. One of the many different jobs/ventures/adventures my father had during his life.



With the increasing digitalization of films, projection is a fading skill that won't be around much longer.

From Slate...

Rivierzo is an executive board member of Local 306 in New York City, the last uncombined projectionists union in the country. At the height of its power in the '40s and '50s, it had 3,000 members. These days, it's down to 400, and that number's dropping fast.

Nowhere is technology eliminating the need for human labor faster than in motion-picture projection. From the birth of cinema until the 1960s, the system was the same: Every projection booth had two reel-to-reel projectors with carbon arc light sources. The movie would start playing on one machine, and the projectionist's job was to watch for the changeover cues: usually a small circle or an X in the upper right-hand corner of the screen.

"You see those cues all your life," Ramos says. "Some people know what they are, and some people don't. There's two of them: There's the machine cue, and you already have your reel threaded up to seven or eight on the countdown reel, and when you see the first one, you hit the switch and the second machine starts to run, and when you see the second cue, you step on the pedal or flip a switch, and this projector shuts down and that one starts up. If you do it smooth, it's seamless; if you do it wrong, it f---s up."

I remember when Dad told me about those cues and from that point on it was hard to miss them.

Happy Birthday Dad, I'm sure your changeovers were smooth and seamless.