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July 4, 2010

A Long Summer Job

The only real job I've ever held was as a projectionist, and here is why. As a burgeoning filmmaker growing up in Dallas, I attended with great interest to the press received by local heroes Wes Anderson and Owen Wilson upon the release of Bottle Rocket in 1996. I clipped articles about them from the paper, and in one of them noted that Owen Wilson had worked as a projectionist at a local theater during high school. The delineation here seemed instantly clear: from projectionist to Sundance to Hollywood career. I made immediate plans to follow suit, plans which were curtailed for about a year on account of my being fifteen. But the instant I was legally employable, my mother drove me to the AMC Grand - the first megaplex in the country, which had opened its doors the previous summer - and filled out an application. I also snuck into Albert Brooks' Mother and Alan Parker's Evita while I was at it, hopping from one theater to the next and fomenting a habit which would, some ways down the line, lead to my downfall.

I worked over the following spring and summer as a concessionist and in the box office, suffering through the indignities of popcorn butter and customer service with the single-minded goal of making it into the projection booth. By September, I'd risen through the ranks on a campaign of incessant politeness, and was trained as a projectionist, both by a kindly manager and a charming girl named Emma, who possessed a pierced tongue. I learned fast. By October, I'd left the floor behind, and for the larger part of the next seven years, I made those dark, cavernous corridors of the booth my home.

This was where I wanted to be. It was, to me, the perfect job (and perhaps it says too much about me that my idea of ideal employment never paid me more than 6.25 an hour). I didn't have to deal with customers. I rarely had to talk to anyone at all, in fact. And I took great pride in the fact that I was the final arbitrator between the filmmaker and the big screen. I handled the film - the physical film, the 35mm celluloid, which I spliced together reel by reel, building up calluses on my fingers where it would run through them. I loved it. My memories of that time are bound to that place. Watching films in piecemeal from the little port windows. Wandering lonelyhearted up to the roof. Sneaking a crush in through the back doors. The history of my adolescence was threaded through those projectors and wound up on the new film reels that came in each week, which I'd build up on Thursday nights and screen for the employees, and myself, and my friends. I remember one night when an invitation I'd passed on to two or three folks to see a private midnight show of Dark City spread like wildfire, resulting in a theater full of about 30 people I didn't know. This was my version of a high school party.

There was also the matter of free time. At night, working the closing shift and waiting for the last movies of the night to end, I would labor over screenplays. I wrote my very first feature length script up there, in fact, an epic saga of displaced youth entitled - naturally - The Projectionist. This script no longer exists, and thankfully so, but I recall that in it was expressed a certain discontent with the way the small cinemas I'd grown up with were being replaced by giant theaters too corporate to be called palaces.

And indeed, the AMC Grand itself was soon supplanted as biggest theater in the country by another megaplex fifteen miles West. Sometime after that I quit, moved to yet another theater, worked there throughout that glory year of 1999, and then made an attempt to move up in the world. I retired on the eve of the millennium, made my first movie, met my best friends, got a job on the periphery of the film industry (driving film and video equipment to locations), gave college an initial try, had my first kiss, got my first apartment - and then, six months later, I was back at my parents' house, and back in the projection booth at the AMC Grand. I guess I'd been taking things a little too fast.

That was the summer of 2001. I would go on to work at that theater for another three years. I was part of the old guard. I knew the place like the back of my hand, and I could see that it was falling apart. And just the company wasn't putting any care into it, my own sense of ownership over my duties gradually diminished. There were too many times when I was the only projectionist running all 24 projectors - a feat I was both proud of and, conversely,recognized an excuse to do inferior work. If they didn't care, why should I? I still wrote on the job a lot. I also slept. I looked for any excuse to undermine managerial authority. I was a good projectionist but a lousy employee, and so when one of the managers saw me sneaking my brother in through the back door to see The Triplets Of Bellville on a snowy Valentine's Day in 2004, he called me to the office and fired me.

All of this comes to mind now, upon the recent news that the AMC Grand is finally closing its doors for good. I don't remember what the last movie I saw there was - Wall-E, perhaps? I'm not going to miss it. I got what I needed out of it, although not what I initially expected. I can still thread a projector with my eyes closed, and I'll take that skill and set it aside alongside hundreds of memories: fire extinguisher fights, sledding down auditorium steps, babysitting a print of Titanic, splicing naughty frames into romantic comedies, staying up all night running movies for myself, summer evenings on the roof and making out in the back row with the girl I'm going to marry.

Posted by David Lowery at July 4, 2010 11:20 PM

Comments

Posted by: Joseph B. at July 4, 2010 6:29 PM

Posted by: David Lowery at July 4, 2010 11:35 PM