The Projectionist's Apprentice

The first thing I think when I see Ty Wilton for the first time is that her appearance does not match the voice I spoke with over the phone. Friendly, laid back and self-possessed, that voice had conjured images of a lithe, dainty young woman with naturally brown or sandy blond hair worn up in a loose bun, or maybe a pixie cut, dressed in airy and colorful bohemian attire and not a lot of makeup.

The real Ty Wilton has thick, black rings of eyeliner around her eyes, hair the color of drugstore Valentine's Day decorations and is trying to pass off her short-and-stocky body type as voluptuous by strangling her extra body fat with too-tight black clothing and accentuating her smallish breasts by means of a partially visible push up bra.

She reminds me of awkward girls I knew in high school.

When she says she is glad to meet me, however, her voice is as friendly, laid back and self-possessed as ever, and I decide that, however questionable her fashion sense, it is unfair of me to lump her in with those girls from high school, and I am a prejudgmental asshole for doing so.

Repentantly, I extend my hand.

It’s nice to finally meet you, too, I say, putting extra emphasis on the “finally” (originally the plan was for me to come by The Mini, the independent movie theater where she works as head projectionist in Rochester, NY, last weekend, but I had to cancel on her twice, both times at the last minute, when I could not secure a ride. I am not just a prejudgmental asshole, I am an unreliable asshole).

“So tell me,” she says, “what is it exactly you wanted to do here?”

Well basically, I was hoping to follow you around, maybe see the inside of the projection booth, how all the equipment works, etc.

“We can do that. Come this way.”

She leads me past the ticket-taker’s booth and through an Employee's Only door between the entrances to Theater 1 and Theater 2. Behind this door is a steep and very narrow metal staircase that turns twice at a right angle like a fire-escape before we reach the top. As we climb she makes small talk of the “So how do you like school?” variety. On the landing is a cardboard box full of empty film spools. There is also another door, this one open, with a large poster hung on the inside. The poster is a landscape done all in shades of yellow: naked soldiers wade through a body of water at night as a city burns to the ground behind them. One of the soldiers stares out at the viewer mournfully. At least he would if somebody hadn't taped a pair of 3-D glasses over his eyes.

Waltz with Bashir. I wanted to see that. Was it any good?

“I didn’t see it either. I don’t know who put that up. The posters on the walls in here change all the time.”

“In here” is the projection booth, and it’s not at all how I imagined: a long, low-ceilinged room with shiny silver walls and a concrete floor. Actually it’s two rooms, but the door between them has also been left open and is nearly as wide as the room itself. To my right is a desk cluttered with loose papers, a desktop computer and a paperback copy of Twilight: Eclipse by Stephanie Meyer. On the wall above the desk are posters for Che, Steven Soderbergh’s biopic of Che Guevara, and Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, a crime drama starring Ethan Hawke and Philip Seymour Hoffman (not that you'd know that from looking at the poster: it boasts no photos of its leading men, only the title with a drawn-on tail and horns to make it resemble its mythical namesake). There is also an autographed black and white photo of Steve Martin, which makes up slightly for the copy of Twilight: Eclipse.

To my left are what look like three giant inverted Extra Extra Large pizza trays stacked one on top of the other and spaced a few inches apart. I am suddenly struck with the sensation of having been shrunk down and imprisoned inside a 1950s jukebox.

What are these?

“Those are called platters. They started using those in the '60s, I think. No more reel-to-reel changeover.”

What's reel-to-reel changeover?

“That’s when the projectionist would put a new reel of film inside the projector as the last one ended. A film comes in several reels.”

Like in Fight Club. Those little cigarette burns in the top right corner of the screen.

“Exactly. Little markings on the film to let the projectionist know when a reel was about to end. Only by the time they switched over to platters they didn’t look like cigarette burns anymore. They were little white circles. Nowadays what we do is build the film beforehand.”

She takes me into the adjoining room, where there is a work bench exactly like you'd find in a suburban garage, complete with pairs of pliers and scissors, a screwdriver, a tube of glue and a vice—only instead of a disemboweled lawnmower, this one's got three spools of film on it. On the floor next to it are three bulky, octagonal, construction-site-orange canisters that look more like something a James Bond villain would use to transport plutonium than anything that belongs in the projection booth of a movie theater. Looking closer, however, I can just make out the words written on their sides: Duplicity, Gomorrah, Sunshine Cleaning.

“We take the reels,” continues Ty, “cut off the ends which are blank, then attach them beginning to end, basically turning them into one long reel. Once it’s been built, we wrap it around the brain. We call the center of the platter the brain.”

Sure enough, there is a black doughnut of film around the center of the platter about four feet in circumference: the giant record to the platter’s giant turntable. The sensation of being inside a 1950s jukebox returns.

“Then you thread the end through the projector.”

The projector is the one thing that looks almost exactly like I imagined: a big metal box stuck on to a pole with a lens like the headlight of a car jutting out through a square shaped hole in the wall. The only things missing are the Mickey Mouse-ear film reels you always see attached to the back of them in old movies. Instead, the film simply stretches across the empty space between the projector and the platter about a foot above the floor like an impossibly flimsy conveyor belt. I am concerned that there is nothing to protect this conveyor belt while it makes its perilous journey: no screen, no plastic tubing, not even a railing to keep you from tripping over it if you’re not paying attention.

In fact I almost do trip over it when I step forward to peer through the square shaped hole in the wall down at the blissfully ignorant audience below. Luckily, I catch myself at the last second and opt for the other way around.

The seats are occupied almost exclusively by, shall we say, the elderly. I ask Ty what movie is playing:

“Duplicity.”

That explains it. Or maybe it's just that the time, about 6:30, is a bit early in the evening for college students and hip, urban twenty-somethings to be out and about.

Ty opens a panel on the side of the projector and starts to thread the film through a series of pulleys inside. I’m surprised at how rough she is with it, how speedily she goes about the process. Once again, I am concerned about the film. I tell her so, and she laughs and informs me that what she’s threading now isn’t film, it’s something much more durable that you attach to the beginning of the film to get it started. It’s called leader. I ask if that’s leader as in “follow the leader” or liter as in a liter of Coke, although I'm pretty sure that is a stupid question.

“Leader as in follow the leader,” she says nonjudgmentally because she is a much better person than I am. “Now you crank the flywheel.”

Platters, brains, “crank the flywheel”: I'm loving this projectionist lingo! She grabs hold of a crank on the side of the projector (which I astutely take to be the aforementioned flywheel) and starts cranking. It is evidently difficult to turn; she puts some muscle into it. The leader snakes around the pulleys and out through a hole in the top of the projector. Once enough has made it through she lets go of the flywheel and drags the leader back to the platter.

“First we remove the brain,” she says, and proceeds to do so. I am tempted to reply with an enthusiastic and slightly sputtery “Yes, Master!” but I am afraid she will not get the reference and so instead I say nothing.

The brain is a hand-sized cluster of black plastic pulleys. The innards of the projector are pulleys. Everything is pulleys. (Or to phrase that observation in the form of a movie reference because movie references are an appropriate leitmotif for an article about the inside of a projection booth: My God! It's full of pulleys!)

“Then you wrap the film that’s been through the projector around the brain of the second platter so that when the movie plays the film goes through the projector, where the images are projected onto the screen, then threads back out again and winds around the second platter, so that by the end of the movie all that film that started off on the first platter will be wound around the second platter.”

And it does all that by itself?

“Yep. All I have to do is press play.”

I quickly compose a haiku in my head: A projectionist: / the elf who turns the light on / and off in the fridge.

I ask Ty what she does while the movie's playing.

“Oh, sometimes I go downstairs and hang out with the concession workers, sometimes I just sit in here and play solitaire or read.”

What do you read? I ask, although I already know the answer.

“Well lately I've been working my way through the Twilight series. I know, I know, they're terrible, but my sister-in-law is making me read them. And besides, when there's a movie playing I have to keep one eye on the projector in case there are any problems, so it's good to have a book I don't really need to pay attention to.”

Once again I feel like an asshole, and I tell her I've heard how addictive they can be.

“Ha ha, yeah,” she says. Then she asks if I have anything else I'd like to ask her. I tell her I can't think of anything and she says, “Alright, well unfortunately there are some other things I need to go do, but you're welcome to stay and watch a movie on the house.”

I'd love to, but my friend is picking me up in half an hour, so I'll probably just walk around the corner to the coffee shop.

“Fair enough. Well, it was nice meeting you." She smiles. I melt a little inside.

Yeah, you too! And thanks again for letting me, you know, observe you.

“No problem! It was fun. Just make sure to send me a copy of the article when it's done!

I promise her I will and make a mental note to cut out the bit about her “questionable fashion sense” before I do. Then she leads me back downstairs and gives me a final little wave as we part ways. When I exit The Mini I do indeed walk around the corner to the coffee shop, where I order a mocha latte and sit down to look over my notes. I think about the little square shaped hole in the wall that separates the projection booth from the theater, about the blissfully ignorant audience members in their folding seats below. I think how every day people all over the world go to the movies in search of a little magic, forgetting that the magic doesn't happen by itself, that like all magic it is merely an illusion, one for which we owe our thanks to a lonely illusionist who by the very definition of their job must necessarily go unnoticed and unpraised.

An idea for another poem occurs to me. I am taking a class on Shakespeare, and so I decide to write this one in Shakespearean sonnet form:

Once all the lines have been declaimed with heart,

and the director shouted “That’s a wrap!”;

once all the sets have been taken apart,

and all the costumes folded, gown and cap;

once justice to the villain has been brought,

and all his victims’ mourners been appeased;

once by the test a lesson has been taught,

and from the plot all drops of drama squeezed;

once trusty brains have triumphed over brawn,

and all the worthy highly are esteemed;

once to the victor all the spoils have gone,

and those of disrepute have been redeemed,

and hero and his ingénue have kissed,

it's in the hands of the projectionist.