A neat article I ran into yesterday.
A flickering life
For film projectionists, the cinema booth is filled with hours of isolation
BRAD MCKAY
The first thing you notice when you step into Andy Mallouk's office is the sound, an abrasive clatter that drowns out much in the way of conversation or, for that matter, thought.
If you can manage to block out the noise, you'll notice that the place has all the makings of a survivalist's dream home - television, VCR, radio, computer with Internet access, washroom and assorted furniture, all jammed into its 4 metre-by-6 metre confines.
There's even an ad hoc lounge fashioned out of giant sofa cushions, secreted away behind velvet curtains. The makeshift amenities serve to disguise the fact that the space, with its limited ventilation and concrete walls, is more bunker than proper workplace.
But to Mallouk and the rest of the city's remaining movie projectionists, a booth such as this one, at the Fox Theatre in The Beach, is as good as it gets.
To devout filmgoers, the time-honoured romance of "the movies" can be a power unto itself, allowing them to cast a rosy glow on everything from the stalest of popcorn to the most sullen of ushers. Take Cinema Paradiso, the much-loved 1988 film about one man's syrupy stroll down memory lane. Spurred by the death of an elderly projectionist friend, the protagonist spends the rest of the movie reflecting on a youth spent living, laughing and inevitably loving, from within the confines of his hometown's small theatre.
But compared to the workaday reality of life in the projection booth, the Italian film has as much depth as a Hallmark card. To veteran projectionists, the booth means long hours and stultifying isolation, a combination that gives rise to antisocial behaviour, bizarre antics and, occasionally, screen-worthy moments of melodrama.
Add to this a bleak future due to the cost-cutting ways of the major theatre chains, and you can't help but assume a wry outlook on the business. In other words, Fade Out Cinema Paradiso ... Fade In Clerks.
Mallouk, the Fox's resident projectionist, is quick to concur. While he loves his job, he's the first to admit that 27 years of operating cameras in theatres across Toronto has its cynical side effects.
"You're in a room all by yourself, with a projector that's so noisy that you don't hear the soundtrack, you just hear this white noise - this grinding sound from all the gears," the 44-year-old says of a standard day. "After 12 hours of sitting in a room like that, you come out and you have sensory deprivation - it's like solitary confinement. So, I guess you end up living in your own mind."
Romanticized by some, this isolation can lead to clandestine drinking and drug use, with tales of massive benders scattered like war stories through the industry. Anyone who worked at the Cineplex Odeon multiplex at the Eaton Centre during the 1980s can attest to the liquid therapy used by some projectionists to battle the often-punishing conditions.
A trailblazer in multiple screen theatres, the now defunct complex demanded seven-day-a-week, 12-hour shifts from its crew. Luckily, its vicinity to several licensed restaurants allowed camera jockeys to nip out for extended lunch breaks.
And those could consist of a single bottle of bourbon.
The hours and isolation also help contribute to a peculiar love-hate relationship with the job. In the same breath, Mallouk will talk about movie cameras as both "magic lanterns" and "plastic extrusion machines."
"You keep feeding the oil in and it keeps pouring out. And you just keep shoving this 20-minute stretch of plastic in," he says, as the Super Lume-X camera chugs away in the background. "People are out there enjoying the romance of the theatre and they have no idea there's some monkey running around back there feeding plastic strips into this machine."
While he doesn't speak for every projectionist, he and the less than 40 remaining members of Local 173 of The International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees and Moving Picture Technicians (they of the star-shaped IATSE logo seen at the end of movie credits) share similar experiences.
In the 1990s, sweeping lockouts by major North American theatre chains effectively turned old-school projectionists into an endangered species. After a failed 1996 strike, the Toronto union - once the largest local on the continent - began to slowly give way to attrition, its numbers slipping from a high of more than 400 members to its current slim ranks.
Union meetings are now few and far between, with projectionists just as likely to bump into each other at a colleague's funeral as they are at a union hall.
With $10-an-hour teenagers filling the old role of $30-an-hour projectionists, those left have retreated to repertory cinemas such as the Festival chain and Rainbow Cinemas, which are willing to pay them a living wage.
Take Dave Callaghan, for example. By all accounts, he should be working in a laboratory, not a suburban theatre. The 50-year-old head projectionist at the Rainbow chain, which just re-opened the Market Square cinema on Front St. E., holds a degree in physical chemistry and can discuss everything from microprocessors to the current tally of known organic compounds. If it wasn't for a projectionist father and a well-paying summer job, he'd likely be in a lab coat. But Callaghan, a card-carrying projectionist since 1971, quickly grew accustomed to the unique benefits offered by the booth.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
`Now all it's good for is gas money or beer money.'
projectionist Bill Roulston on his wages
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"With some jobs, you're like a cog in a machine - your job is like a function of a larger machine," he says. "But at least when I start work, I run the whole show."
Callaghan has heard the stories of woe before (he mockingly refers to his position as `the showman that knows no applause') but says he relishes the problem-solving possibilities that come with his job. "Some people like going camping or going to a sunny place and lying on a beach - that's not my idea of a fun time. I've always felt that this was a place where somehow I belonged," he explains of the darkened booth.
From within his sterile booth at the Cumberland Theatre - management cracked down on any superfluous decorations years ago - Bill Roulston can recall a string of anecdotes from older days.
The most memorable involves a baby alligator he inexplicably decided to raise in the projection booth of the old Promenade Theatre. Thanks to a steady diet of goldfish and mice, Rocky (named after Roulston's favourite film) grew to be a metre long. With the co-operation of his fellow workers, the reptile thrived in the dank booth, becoming something of a mascot.
That is, of course, until a visiting Cineplex executive spotted him during a routine tour. Days later, Rocky and his $1,000 tank were gone.
Not long after, the industry changed and, like many others, Roulston found himself bouncing from job to job, until he finally ended up collecting employment insurance. "It's just gone so downhill," he says of his $10-an-hour wage. "Now all it's good for is gas money or beer money."
By contrast, Mallouk should count himself lucky. Logging his requisite one-year unpaid apprenticeship while in his teens, he entered the union and inherited his dubitable future.
"When I apprenticed in Orangeville, the guy said: `This is one of the loneliest jobs in the world. You work nights, you'll never see your family or kids, you'll be in the theatre every night, seven nights a week, holidays everything,'" he recalls.
"Then he told me that the guy I was replacing had turned 70 and they told him he had to retire, that he couldn't work any longer ... so he hung himself between the projectors in the Orangeville projection booth. He loved his job that much."
Mallouk's passion for film and all things technological would gladly whisk him out of his hometown to Toronto, New York City and beyond. Along the way he would cross paths with Elizabeth Taylor, David Bowie and the occasional supermodel. Which, depending on the day you bump into him, might be Mallouk himself.
Unwitting Beach residents and patrons of The Fox have likely encountered one of his many personalities before.
There's Mallouk on his customized moped, complete with a 1920s car headlight on the front and a Godzilla toy on the rear, who peels up to the theatre before a show. And once inside the building, there's Ann D. Liscious - one of his drag incarnations - who works as their ticket taker.
To Mallouk, these are the fringe benefits of a life that allows him to air his eccentricities without fear of retribution. If this means donning makeup and his Trans-Sister Radio, an electronic piece of wearable art that blares music from its wire-mesh bra, so be it. It is a theatre, after all.
"When you're up there for 27 years, you have a few different spirits in the projection booth that talk to each other," he explains, butting out a cigarette in an old film canister.
Perhaps sensing a conflicting spirit, he switches gears, wandering into the sentimental.
"The love of film for the worker is the ultimate," he waxes. "I was always told that you were the last person to have to show it to the public after all these people have invested their time, money and blood into this movie.
``So if you screw up, you're letting down everybody behind you."
Not long after, though, the sarcasm that is a result of his nearly 30 years in the booth resurfaces.
"In the end, all we do is feed plastic into this extrusion machine, it gets pushed out the other end and in between something happens," he concludes. "It's like we squirt light through the aperture plate, it gets shot on to the screen and people enjoy."
Take that, Cinema Paradiso.
A flickering life
For film projectionists, the cinema booth is filled with hours of isolation
BRAD MCKAY
The first thing you notice when you step into Andy Mallouk's office is the sound, an abrasive clatter that drowns out much in the way of conversation or, for that matter, thought.
If you can manage to block out the noise, you'll notice that the place has all the makings of a survivalist's dream home - television, VCR, radio, computer with Internet access, washroom and assorted furniture, all jammed into its 4 metre-by-6 metre confines.
There's even an ad hoc lounge fashioned out of giant sofa cushions, secreted away behind velvet curtains. The makeshift amenities serve to disguise the fact that the space, with its limited ventilation and concrete walls, is more bunker than proper workplace.
But to Mallouk and the rest of the city's remaining movie projectionists, a booth such as this one, at the Fox Theatre in The Beach, is as good as it gets.
To devout filmgoers, the time-honoured romance of "the movies" can be a power unto itself, allowing them to cast a rosy glow on everything from the stalest of popcorn to the most sullen of ushers. Take Cinema Paradiso, the much-loved 1988 film about one man's syrupy stroll down memory lane. Spurred by the death of an elderly projectionist friend, the protagonist spends the rest of the movie reflecting on a youth spent living, laughing and inevitably loving, from within the confines of his hometown's small theatre.
But compared to the workaday reality of life in the projection booth, the Italian film has as much depth as a Hallmark card. To veteran projectionists, the booth means long hours and stultifying isolation, a combination that gives rise to antisocial behaviour, bizarre antics and, occasionally, screen-worthy moments of melodrama.
Add to this a bleak future due to the cost-cutting ways of the major theatre chains, and you can't help but assume a wry outlook on the business. In other words, Fade Out Cinema Paradiso ... Fade In Clerks.
Mallouk, the Fox's resident projectionist, is quick to concur. While he loves his job, he's the first to admit that 27 years of operating cameras in theatres across Toronto has its cynical side effects.
"You're in a room all by yourself, with a projector that's so noisy that you don't hear the soundtrack, you just hear this white noise - this grinding sound from all the gears," the 44-year-old says of a standard day. "After 12 hours of sitting in a room like that, you come out and you have sensory deprivation - it's like solitary confinement. So, I guess you end up living in your own mind."
Romanticized by some, this isolation can lead to clandestine drinking and drug use, with tales of massive benders scattered like war stories through the industry. Anyone who worked at the Cineplex Odeon multiplex at the Eaton Centre during the 1980s can attest to the liquid therapy used by some projectionists to battle the often-punishing conditions.
A trailblazer in multiple screen theatres, the now defunct complex demanded seven-day-a-week, 12-hour shifts from its crew. Luckily, its vicinity to several licensed restaurants allowed camera jockeys to nip out for extended lunch breaks.
And those could consist of a single bottle of bourbon.
The hours and isolation also help contribute to a peculiar love-hate relationship with the job. In the same breath, Mallouk will talk about movie cameras as both "magic lanterns" and "plastic extrusion machines."
"You keep feeding the oil in and it keeps pouring out. And you just keep shoving this 20-minute stretch of plastic in," he says, as the Super Lume-X camera chugs away in the background. "People are out there enjoying the romance of the theatre and they have no idea there's some monkey running around back there feeding plastic strips into this machine."
While he doesn't speak for every projectionist, he and the less than 40 remaining members of Local 173 of The International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees and Moving Picture Technicians (they of the star-shaped IATSE logo seen at the end of movie credits) share similar experiences.
In the 1990s, sweeping lockouts by major North American theatre chains effectively turned old-school projectionists into an endangered species. After a failed 1996 strike, the Toronto union - once the largest local on the continent - began to slowly give way to attrition, its numbers slipping from a high of more than 400 members to its current slim ranks.
Union meetings are now few and far between, with projectionists just as likely to bump into each other at a colleague's funeral as they are at a union hall.
With $10-an-hour teenagers filling the old role of $30-an-hour projectionists, those left have retreated to repertory cinemas such as the Festival chain and Rainbow Cinemas, which are willing to pay them a living wage.
Take Dave Callaghan, for example. By all accounts, he should be working in a laboratory, not a suburban theatre. The 50-year-old head projectionist at the Rainbow chain, which just re-opened the Market Square cinema on Front St. E., holds a degree in physical chemistry and can discuss everything from microprocessors to the current tally of known organic compounds. If it wasn't for a projectionist father and a well-paying summer job, he'd likely be in a lab coat. But Callaghan, a card-carrying projectionist since 1971, quickly grew accustomed to the unique benefits offered by the booth.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
`Now all it's good for is gas money or beer money.'
projectionist Bill Roulston on his wages
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"With some jobs, you're like a cog in a machine - your job is like a function of a larger machine," he says. "But at least when I start work, I run the whole show."
Callaghan has heard the stories of woe before (he mockingly refers to his position as `the showman that knows no applause') but says he relishes the problem-solving possibilities that come with his job. "Some people like going camping or going to a sunny place and lying on a beach - that's not my idea of a fun time. I've always felt that this was a place where somehow I belonged," he explains of the darkened booth.
From within his sterile booth at the Cumberland Theatre - management cracked down on any superfluous decorations years ago - Bill Roulston can recall a string of anecdotes from older days.
The most memorable involves a baby alligator he inexplicably decided to raise in the projection booth of the old Promenade Theatre. Thanks to a steady diet of goldfish and mice, Rocky (named after Roulston's favourite film) grew to be a metre long. With the co-operation of his fellow workers, the reptile thrived in the dank booth, becoming something of a mascot.
That is, of course, until a visiting Cineplex executive spotted him during a routine tour. Days later, Rocky and his $1,000 tank were gone.
Not long after, the industry changed and, like many others, Roulston found himself bouncing from job to job, until he finally ended up collecting employment insurance. "It's just gone so downhill," he says of his $10-an-hour wage. "Now all it's good for is gas money or beer money."
By contrast, Mallouk should count himself lucky. Logging his requisite one-year unpaid apprenticeship while in his teens, he entered the union and inherited his dubitable future.
"When I apprenticed in Orangeville, the guy said: `This is one of the loneliest jobs in the world. You work nights, you'll never see your family or kids, you'll be in the theatre every night, seven nights a week, holidays everything,'" he recalls.
"Then he told me that the guy I was replacing had turned 70 and they told him he had to retire, that he couldn't work any longer ... so he hung himself between the projectors in the Orangeville projection booth. He loved his job that much."
Mallouk's passion for film and all things technological would gladly whisk him out of his hometown to Toronto, New York City and beyond. Along the way he would cross paths with Elizabeth Taylor, David Bowie and the occasional supermodel. Which, depending on the day you bump into him, might be Mallouk himself.
Unwitting Beach residents and patrons of The Fox have likely encountered one of his many personalities before.
There's Mallouk on his customized moped, complete with a 1920s car headlight on the front and a Godzilla toy on the rear, who peels up to the theatre before a show. And once inside the building, there's Ann D. Liscious - one of his drag incarnations - who works as their ticket taker.
To Mallouk, these are the fringe benefits of a life that allows him to air his eccentricities without fear of retribution. If this means donning makeup and his Trans-Sister Radio, an electronic piece of wearable art that blares music from its wire-mesh bra, so be it. It is a theatre, after all.
"When you're up there for 27 years, you have a few different spirits in the projection booth that talk to each other," he explains, butting out a cigarette in an old film canister.
Perhaps sensing a conflicting spirit, he switches gears, wandering into the sentimental.
"The love of film for the worker is the ultimate," he waxes. "I was always told that you were the last person to have to show it to the public after all these people have invested their time, money and blood into this movie.
``So if you screw up, you're letting down everybody behind you."
Not long after, though, the sarcasm that is a result of his nearly 30 years in the booth resurfaces.
"In the end, all we do is feed plastic into this extrusion machine, it gets pushed out the other end and in between something happens," he concludes. "It's like we squirt light through the aperture plate, it gets shot on to the screen and people enjoy."
Take that, Cinema Paradiso.
i liked it.
And here's my job taken to the "logical" extreme: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZKFFK4x4Fc