Michael Donahue, Co-Manager

There’s an industrial shop in Glendale, California where skilled craftsmen practice the arcane art of film projector repair.

In one corner, a giant stack of JBL speakers sits silent. Two large blue refrigerator sized electronic assemblies dominate the floor of the shop. These projectors came out of a drive-in movie theater, and are being retrofitted for air cooled gates, new shutter assemblies, and soundheads. The shop manager is on the phone, ordering new studio quality projection lenses.

Eventually they’ll be sold to a new multiplex movie theater. Before then, they’ll make a little detour to Baltimore.

On a table rest two 2,500 watt xenon bulbs—thick glass envelopes, each holding eight atmospheres of pressurized xenon gas. I’m being trained to install these bulbs in the projectors when we arrive in Baltimore. They’re far too fragile to make the trip outside of padded shipping cases, and so delicate that a fingerprint will cause the glass to expand unevenly, and shatter the bulb with the force of a small grenade. Thus the large metal projector cases, the thick gloves, leather apron, and face shields you wear when changing bulbs.

The technician and I discuss every aspect of the film operation, from projector noise, to interchangeability, to plug and play setup, ease of training, and what I need to get elsewhere. I’m arriving two days early to assemble the equipment in a staging area because we have to build the theaters overnight, with an 18 hour turnaround.

Across the shop rests a rack with a Dolby stereo decoder, DTS add-on decoder, and six amplifiers for the speaker systems. Two huge rolled screens, each fifteen feet long—rolled the short length—lean up in the corner. I also have to build the rigging to hold these screens rigid for projection, as they currently have no frames. One of them will have to be cut, edged and grommeted when we arrive in Baltimore. And I’ll have to unroll them and inspect them in the parking lot next week, to make sure they’re in good shape.