A Visit to an Early Film Projector Booth

I've always been a movie buff, even today, at age 85, I always find compelling films, despite family disapproval statements and friends. Movies today are much more sophisticated and high-tech and shiny; but sometimes I miss movies of my childhood and teenage years later, even when they made the film in black and white. Although no classification of films, most of the images could have a label with a PG.

Color film was in its infancy; in fact, the first image I saw in my hometown of Marianna, Florida, and the first film, I think, to use color, was the Wizard of Oz at the end of the thirties: Launched in Black Dorothy and white on the right then switched fantastic farmhouse bright colors when he woke up in the Land of Oz!

The first animated feature to run in theaters was Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, a magical place, recreation in motion by beloved fairy tale of the incomparable Walt Disney on a beautiful princess and small inhabitants of forest fun befriended her and tried to protect her from her evil stepmother the Queen. And scores and individual tracks for these films - so memorable and melodic! They can be adapted in future films, but never surpassed in its originality and its ability to win the heart of moviegoers.

And the same size of the epic, the following films offered more exciting history of the Civil War and its effects in a southern lifestyle and passions exalted in the wind! Perhaps the benefits of special effects and sound effects through the science of high technology, including computers, has a most impressive contemporary films cunning; but that's all. In the imagination, the heart and creative, these early films still shine as beacons for all future movie creations.

As a sensitive imaginative children during the decade of the thirties, often resorted to showing the home team in Marianna, where the "giants of the film" hoods, gallop, stolen, or jump as gods by the larger screen natural waistline. I was captured by the alchemy of the process. The reality is suspended, was divine heroes before me shadows of the actors; but the length of the film, they were flesh. Like the old masks used in rituals, images became gods themselves. The Lone Ranger is mounted Saturday after Saturday afternoon with Avenging Wrath through a metamorphosis of the landscape; He was hiding behind the mask, became the god himself.

Fascinated by the alchemy, one day, I asked the director of the theater permission to visit the projection room where all the magic came. The projectionist, modern Merlin, projectors and showed me how it worked. How wonderful stills becomes larger than the actual size of the screen in a kaleidoscope of monochrome movement. He showed how the film on each reel through each projector and how, by alchemical mixture of chemicals and light, the film was produced which is now bolted through the "magic lanterns." Then Merlin the projection booth showed me how the audio was synchronized to the edges of the film, when the film moves past the eye of the projector, the sound seemed to come as well as photos, Widescreen itself. Magical things in a child!

Even more intrigued me how this place still images, shot in black and white film in realistic actions on the fantastic life magic of the screen. As explained patiently cinema was the film running through the projector so many meters per second to create the illusion of continuous movement. We need someone had counted the number of feet of film at some point to recreate the natural movement of the action originally captured by film cameras! Enchantment? Ah! Yes.

Before leaving the projection room, Merlin film screening presented me with a film bag - some images of movies - maybe Westerners do not remember now - I have treasured for years before so many memorable sights, has disappeared. With home cable channels on the video such as American Movie Classics TCM and I can enjoy many of these early films again (no commercials, too!), But the old classic stones still to relieve my enthusiasm for their worthy successors. So lets have a look and get information.