How the Show Goes On

First thing each workday, without fail, Ken Gaskill synchronizes his watch with the digital time on his office PC.

He then checks his wrist every three to four minutes for the next eight hours.

In this age of we’ve-got-more-screens-than-you’ve-got cinemas where projectionists fire up eight films an hour, systematic clock-watching has become as pervasive as the paparazzi at premieres.

How’s that for Hollywood glamour?

“It makes the day go by pretty quick,” Gaskill says.

He works at Century Stadium 25 in Orange, which opened this winter as the county’s multiplex with the mostest, bigger by four screens than Irvine’s Edwards 21 Megaplex. With similar movie houses planned in Orange County and around the world, Gaskill needn’t fret about job security.

Having worked his way up from the snack bar, he presides over 12 screens, while a co-worker oversees 11 others. The two share the operation of the theater’s two remaining projectors, housed in a much smaller third booth.

Cancel that. A booth is what they have at the Bay Theatre. That 52-year-old, single-screen anomaly in Seal Beach has a booth--more like a nook--that projectionist Dennis Addy can traverse in 10 big steps.

Each of Century Stadium’s two main projection rooms swallows 1,500 square feet. Projection booth manager Jim Campbell supervises all three and spends his shift shuttling from one to the next and back again.

“I’ve gotten in so much better shape since working here,” he says.

While the Bay’s nook has all the homey touches of a den--with Addy’s easy chair, fridge and TV--each of the Stadium’s command centers evokes the dimly lit interior of a nuclear submarine.

The shadowy, narrow chambers are crowded with imposing metal cabinets housing more than $1-million worth of projectors, 4,500-watt projector bulbs and digital sound equipment.

Myriad control panels, steel “platters”--the horizontal pizza pan-like discs 5 feet across, on which an entire film rests--and the constant squeak-squeak-squeak of rotating projector parts add to the eeriness.

“It’s so quiet except for the squeaking that it helps keep our sanity,” Campbell says.

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Indeed, projectionists rely not on bells or alarms but on visual cues to thread each film for its next show; a page of white paper says it all:

Feature: “Titanic.”

Previous End Time: 3:37 p.m.

Intermission: 53 mins.

Start Time: 4:30 p.m.

Screen Number: 1.

Gaskill unpockets this tip sheet, listing every show time of every film on his screens, as often as he consults his watch.

“Five minutes till my next one,” he says, heading off to prepare “The Wedding Singer.” “I think I’ll thread it up.”

Gaskill spends most of his day threading, a process that technically begins when a film arrives (usually on Thursdays) in a beat-up octagonal canister containing six or seven reels. “Building the film” at a makeup table, he splices the reels with transparent tape (a lot like household Scotch tape) into one big reel, about 3 1/2 feet across, which lays atop one of three platters, stacked a foot apart on a pole-like “tree.”

Then, from five to 30 minutes before show time, Gaskill tugs on the 35-millimeter celluloid jutting from a “payout head” in the center of the platter, snakes it through pulley-like “rollers” and attaches it to the “takeup reel” in the middle of a second platter.

He can thread a movie in about a minute: “I’ve done this for, like, three years,” after having received a week, maybe two at the most, of training.

It all looks pretty complicated. Projector and platter-tree stand 2 feet apart, and threading involves two dozen rollers--some tiny, some fat, some sprocketed, some not. Over at the Bay, the two 50-year-old projectors have a handful of rollers.

Albeit more intricate, the single-projector platter system, developed and refined over the past 30 years, averts a risk endemic to the dual-projector system Addy and others still use. Without the huge platters, Addy must thread two reels per film; if he doesn’t flick on his second projector, loaded with the film’s last half, the screen will go blank and the audience will go ballistic.

“Oh, yeah, I have got to be watching to make the changeover,” Addy says.

Once Gaskill switches on one projector, he peers through a glass portal to make sure the film is properly framed, double-checks the volume and then moves on to another screen.

Things do go wrong, though, especially when the same film screens in two or more auditoriums on different schedules--all day long. Gaskill recently pulled the trigger 45 minutes too soon on the “Replacement Killers.” He stopped the movie the moment he caught the mistake and radioed his manager, who apologized to early birds in the audience.

“I couldn’t believe it,” Gaskill says. “I thought, ‘I hope I don’t get in trouble.’ ”

He didn’t, but trouble can result from scratching a film while splicing or threading it. Campbell keeps a tiny flashlight handy to avoid such mistakes. One replacement reel can cost $3,000, says David Stowers, Century 25 general manager.

Focus problems are rare, Stowers says, because of the automatic-focus projectors, but have you ever gotten your ears blasted? That usually happens, he explains, during matinees when there aren’t enough bodies in an auditorium to soak up the pre-programmed sound.

Projectionists must watch for such mishaps. So while they do get breaks, and high-tech equipment mitigates errors, they can’t leave the booth for lunch, Gaskill says. Overtime can build up. During the Christmas holidays, Hollywood’s high season, Campbell worked 16-hour days making up or “breaking down” films to ship to the next theater.

And though Gaskill can have all the free soda and popcorn he wants, he’s too health-conscious to care. The pay’s so-so, and he never has time to watch a film as he works. Yet the job does have its moments, when that Hollywood glamour thing doesn’t seem so remote.

“In the summer, when we get the blockbusters and it’s opening night,” Gaskill says, “it’s crowded and everyone’s cheering. Yeah, you can hear ‘em up here. It’s like a good feeling.”

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From Can to Screen

The projection room at Century Stadium 25 houses the very latest in film-projection equipment. But it may come as a surprise that even the most modern equipment is more complicated than popping the now ubiquitous cassette into a VCR or slipping a videodisc into a player. Here’s what goes on inside the booth:

1. Film reels arrive in metal cans; a long movie, such as “Titanic” or “Amistad,” may have 10 reels.

2. Projectionist splices together coming attractions, known as “trailers,” which are added to the beginning of the movie.

3. All reels are spliced together in one large reel on the makeup platter of the “tree,” or platter system.

4. Before movie begins, slide projector may show advertisements, announcements and trivia questions.

5. Once movie is assembled, it is fed from a payout platter to the projector.

6. As movie plays, projectionist can monitor screen through portal in the booth wall.

7. Film returns to a takeup reel, which becomes the payout reel for next showing.

Source: Century Stadium 25 theaters; Researched by PAUL DUGINSKI/Los Angeles Times