Captain Pike's Ship Log II

There used to be a block of stores that made up the beginning of one end of the downtown of Calais. It was kind of the “bad part of town”. If you went down Calais Avenue, to the bottom, where it met Main street and turned you’d be in front of Warrens Store, the first establishment on this now gone block. Warrens store had big, high plate glass windows in the front and south sides, and granite steps in the center leading up to a great, black, wooden multi-paneled door with beveled glass windows. It was mostly a beer and cigarette store, and any time you might round that corner on to the Main street side walk, there’d be kids hanging around out in front of Warrens. Inside, there were a couple of scant, dingy aisles where you could buy a loaf of white bread, some Crisco or maybe a box of pancake mix. Some of the more durable dry goods had been on the shelves quite a while. There was a dark red cooler there for soda which had two opening doors on the top and cold water in the bottom of it’s galvanized interior which kept the bottles cold. Your coke was not only cool, but wet when you set it on the counter. There was a great, time-stained oak and glass counter, containing viewable candy and cigarettes and other more valuable and stealable items. The old mechanical cash register, proclaimed your sum with magnificent, painted, metal tags, which moved into place during the totaling behind a glassed in display. The great, old type-writer style keys had to be carefully selected and drawn down in parallel, by the agile operator. You could hear the math being performed by invisible clockwork somewhere inside and a bell announced the “damage” when your total was ready, or maybe when the drawer was opened.
I think there was one other, day-time business next up from Warrens, but I can’t remember what it was. Past that, up the street was the Calais Cinema, a narrow knocked-together one aisle movie house. This was back in the days when carbon arcs lamps were used to illuminate the silver screen and the noxious fumes from their combustion were vented out over head of the customers waiting to come in to the theatre.
The Calais Cinema was a carnival-style type attraction. An alternately gold and red lightbulbed marquis hung precariously perpendicular to the building and proclaimed the current attraction. The smell of popcorn intentionally vented to the street indicated they were open for business. True to its form the proprietor was a grand showman and entrepreneur. He had great plans for movie production, but for the moment was gathering strength in Calais. Often, when the show was selling tickets and it was summer, the front door would be blocked open. Rich hues of reddish-orange and deep green poured out into the sidewalk from the nighttime painted walls inside. A faint lullaby of come-in-sit-down music emanated from the auditorium somewhere inside. It was nearly impossible for me to pass by the opened door without some glance in to see what was happening. I had met the Grand Showman during the construction of the cinema. The two immense black and chrome projectors seemed like archaic but formidable weapons with their ample discus-like film magazines. These fierce guns would shell our small town with the propagandized dreams of Hollywood. They were the locomotives which would bring us endless fashion and excitement in slick, fast moving 35-mm cars.
I began to hang around the cinema, talking to the ticket girl and occasionally tipping hat to the Grand Showman as he dashed in and out from the projection booth to attend to the projectors. You had to actually climb up a small folded up aluminum ladder to get up into the level that the projectors sat on in this small room. I was gradually indoctrinated into the world of movie film projection. Rewinding the 20-minute reels was the most mundane task of the projectionist but this seemed fascinating. To see individual frames of an actual motion picture seemed impossible to me at first. There they were: Robert De Nero and Al Pacino, caught miniaturized, thousands of them, frozen in character forever: it seemed a magic trick revealed. Twenty-four frames per second rolling past the eye was all it took to lull the mind into imagining an impossible and fantastic point of view.
In those days, a movie house would have one screen but two projectors. The movie film itself came special delivery on a truck in stop-sign shaped, galvanized metal cases. These boxes have metal handles allowing them to be lugged like suitcases. The cases might contain 2 to 4 reels each, so they have varying thickness. A full reel runs about 20 minutes, so a typical feature film would be 5 or 6 or sometimes more reels. “Threading her up” takes some careful consideration. The idle, empty projector is opened up into a prostrate position where the film can be set into its sprockets and aperture. The apparent fluidity of a motion picture is greatly a result of the brain’s persistence of vision. The mechanism of the projector moves a frame in front of a source of bright light, holds it there a moment, exposes it briefly in the focal point of this light, then moves to the next frame. This holding of the film still a moment then flashing the light through it is what makes the flicking sound and requires that there are two slack loops of film, one before this aperture, one after. If the film is going to break, this is most likely where it is going to happen. If you’ve ever seen a movie where suddenly the image freezes then begins to melt and bubble on the screen you know that somewhere there is (or should be) a frantic projectionist.
Two projectors are needed to sequence through the movie, one reel at a time. At the end of each reel, there are two sets of change marks visible in the upper right corner of the frame. The first set of little round dots up there signal the projectionist to start film moving in the next projector. The second set of marks cues the actual cutting over to the new projector by means of the opening and closing of physical dowsers on the front of the projectors. Today, I still notice the brief appearance of the little circular markings when sitting in my living room watching a movie on TV or video tape. An ancient and subdued pang of panic still tugs at my conscience – “you missed the change!”.
One evening, I was hanging around the cinema talking with Elissa, the young ticket girl from Pembroke. Leaning on the counter I could smell her faint shampooy innocence and see a narrow rectangle of the movie through the closed doors of the auditorium. A customer came out into the concession area allowing me to hear briefly the dialogue of the show until the two swinging doors to the auditorium closed quietly, ushered shut by their small pneumatic hinge dampeners. I stepped politely back making monetary eye contact with him then looking down, crossing my hands reverently like a funeral director. A little while after the customer returned to the movie, I noticed the screen went completely white.
This isn’t an odd thing to see in a movie, often a “white out”, or fade to white is used as an effect. After a short time, we both stopped talking and looked through the windows at the white screen. There are at least a couple of problems that can cause the screen to remain lit brightly, but always the first thing the projectionist does is dowse the errant projector. Leaving the screen full white for more than a second is just bad manners – eyes are offended, and often people become irritated and begin to move around. A blank screen is much more acceptable. After several minutes with no sound and a blank screen, folks begin to cat-call or stamp their feet, but even then they quiet right down once the show starts. If the blackout has to last a long time, perhaps a little light music and an assuring announcement are in order. But a white screen is death. Thirty seconds may have gone by before the first disgruntled customer emerged looking as if awakened at 2pm but a sudden drawing back of the curtains. Several people were standing and speculating aloud in the auditorium. I could hear the projector humming away in the booth – no sound seemed changed from there. As people began to collect in the concession area, Elissa gave me a worried look. She was only about 15 and looked very small behind the counter with all those unhappy, paying customers.
I opened the door that said EMPLOYEES ONLY to the projection booth. I had one foot on the ladder when I noticed the Grand Showman lying on the floor between the two projectors. I pulled shut the booth door. I didn’t think the worst because of the odd grin on his face and his one raised arm. He was lying on his back, with is head raised up off the floor and the one hand sort of waving me off as if to say “yeah yeah, I’ll get to it”. I climbed quickly to the level where the projectors sat and the grand showman blinked his eyes very slowly and mumbled something then shook his head. I straddled him and dowsed the empty but running projector. This made the screen go black. Next I struck the arc in the other projector and got the light going, then turned the switch to start the film rolling. After only a second or two, I opened this new projector’s dowser, and noticed the sound was on and saw that the image on the screen appeared normal.
As it turned out, our Grand Showman had been experimenting with liquid methadrine, a powerful stimulant, and had suffered a temporary outage of consciousness. He had taken one spoonful orally and it seemed to have no effect. Soon after the second dosage was administered, the first one kicked in. He recovered from his chemically induced hiatus with out medical assistance. He assured me he didn’t need to see a doctor. He was, impressed, however that I had gotten the movie going again with discretion and averted quite a disaster on a Friday night with a nearly full house.
Later that night I accepted a job as projectionist, much to my mothers chagrin – she knew what kind of a place it was. But what a great job for a high school kid in a small town! There were many benefits. And some even greater adventures. One of which is the time I left the fight scene out of the Rocky movie on opening night – I wasn’t exactly the hero that night, but that is a story for another time.