Working on the 35mm chain gang.

One more “good” story before the fun ones. My dad worked for a while as a deckhand on a riverboat. It wasn’t 1920, just the midwest. That was the cool job in his life. Mine was in the projection booth.

AMC has always been a massive thing, with resources to support entire subcommunities of operations under the same roof. Projection meanwhile was different enough from popcorn sales to require its own community, so the one that developed under AMC’s roof was involved and deeply capable. AMC Burbank meanwhile was a top-10 building in the nation, frequently top 5, every single week.

I din’t know it at the time, but it turns out I had the good fortune of learning from AMC’s best, in front of AMC’s biggest audiences. Kristie, Brian, Miller, these folks were the mountaintop. After a few years in, when my own projection staff started talking up to me the way I talked up to those two, it never felt quite right. (felt pretty good though)

We had three kinds of projectors at Burbank, Christies, Strongs, and Centurys. The Christies were the beginners, the Strongs were the next level, and the 70mm-capable Centurys were the challenge. You learned the Christies your first day, the Strongs on the second day, and Centurys last. The building had 8 easy, 4 medium, and 2 hard projectors, each running four or five shows a day, so there was plenty of acclimation time to get used to the tasks. I was training with Anne, and I remember we each had the Christies down after a single set, and were on to the Strongs that same first day.

I loved it.

And circumstances were in my favor for a change. Shortly after I trained, our GM decided we needed a booth-only crew, and Miller didn’t want to do booth only. I learned in January, the staff launched in March, and by August I was the crew’s supervisor and the building’s go-to booth guy. Which makes me sound like a total badass, but really all it meant was that I was just better at finding and fixing my own mistakes before other people found them.

Early on we had a visit from a corporate rep (Mary) who wanted to shadow me around my booth shift for a while. She walked a few starts with me, then cautioned that she wanted to be sure she wasn’t distracting me or slowing me down. “Don’t worry,” I said, “I wouldn’t let you.” What I didn’t know is that she was the corporate booth god, and a source of some intimidation to our own local gods. Lucky for me she took my attitude in the spirit it was intended, and liked it. A year or so later the Promenade was opening in Woodland Hills, and a few of us scored shifts over there helping get their booth running. They had an opening festival and were screening some vintage (1950s, 1960s) films for those first audiences. Mary was coordinating the work and there was an incoming studio archive print of “The Harvey Girls”, a Judy Garland film. This wasn’t the usual copy of a copy of a copy, this was the studio’s copy. Their backup, who even knows if they still have the negatives. And Mary turned to me among the group and said, “and I want YOU to build it up.”

Yeah, that felt pretty good.

That first projection summer was a gift. Jason, Russ, Chris, Paul, we had a real rhythm going. First time anyone ever called me ‘boss’ was when Chris introduced me to his visiting gf. I think that was before I even officially made supervisor, but we never really needed the managers to tell us the score. I programmed trailers onto the films, I built up 95% of the film that passed thru the building, I wrote the operators’ schedules (writing your own work schedule is pretty sweet, too), and I was 20 at the time.

It couldn’t last, of course. Jason got fired (I tried, but they wouldn’t fire me), we had to bring in some weak links, and eventually a new GM decided he wanted us doing more than just booth. Eh.

There’s a vintage coolness about dad’s riverboat gig that’s hard to beat. I figure the booth is as close as I could’ve come in the big city. No customers, just projectors. No complaints, just film. Stuff breaks, you fix it. Two years hands-on and fifteen more from management, never scratched a single print. You have no idea how hard that is. Literally thousands of shows run.

There were probably a million little wins along the way, I remember some of them as I’m writing. Projection skill in management was a precious commodity so I was able to stay connected to that work for the rest of my time in theatres, both AMC and Pacific/ArcLight. Trained dozens of managers in classroom instruction, and entire teams of staff. My own staff run was my sentimental highlight, but the biggest actual achievements came years later, fixing the colossal incompetence at Pacific/ArcLight. (It was just Klevin, really.)

Even today, if I could make enough money to live off of by doing film projection, I’d do it in a heartbeat. Saving the world has a nice ring to it, but that’s work. If you’re doing something you love…