Here’s a short film my good friend Gene Alexander put together way back when I was living on Aotearoa, that other island. Gene and I worked together at the Paramount, a great movie theater downtown Wellington. We filmed this over a few weekends and off-work evenings. Unfortunately I was in Helena before the project was done, that left Gene and his editor without much to work with. “It reads more like a trailer,” Gene wrote in an e-mail to me.
I hope you enjoy the show!
Those Old Machines
Watching this again brought me right back to my last weeks in Wellington. The projectors at the Paramount were so much fun to work with. We we’re the only theater in town that could run reel to reel, so just like the old days you had to watch for the “cigarette burns” to que to for a changeover. (I never heard another projectionist call them cigarette burns, always “que dots” or “changeovers”.) A changeover takes place when you fire up the second projector just as the reel of film on the first runs out. The projectionist’s goal is making as smooth a transition as possible, no gaps, no overlaps.
