Hi! Fellow 35mm projectionist here. Your experience must have predated mine, things changed. By the time I worked on them (2007) the dual projector system was long obsolete. At that time (and afaik this remained the state of the art until digital came along) you had a single projector attached to a "platter tree", consisting of three circular rotating tables, holding the entire film (all 4 or 5 reels) spliced together into one mega reel held sideways. One table for input, another for output,and a third for extra (eg running two features on the same screen at different showing times)
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 was a projectionist in the late 80s and the dual projector setup was standard. No one was talking digital … the storage and delivery tech wasn’t even close and most people didn’t understand the looming impact of Moores Law.
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!
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.
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