Worked at a movie theater in high school and college as well that used film. It was amazing.

Everything you say about it being a thrill. Building the movies and keeping some frames after splicing the movie reels/trailers together was great [1]. It did feel in some weird way like part of Hollywood though really it was just the very end of the line. So right on those Xenon bulbs, you had to wear a special suit that looked like the cover of The Thing or like you were in radiation experiments, it was freaky to change. There were stories of them exploding or bad things happening, never did but everyone was always like "a bulb went out" and kind of looked at each other with dread deciding who would change it.

A cool aspect was seeing the info on the upcoming movies prior to IMDB. This info was hard to come across unless you worked with movies and it was exciting to see what was coming up, felt like insider info.

Every Thursday night I had to build the movies and then watch them then or Friday to make sure for any scratches. There was nothing to rent for years after working there in high school and most of college. Though I loved seeing everything come out a day early.

Fun fact: Movies back in the day were built backwards that is why the previews are called trailers in old school film, they go at the end as the film feeds in forward, but the build machines reeled it from end to start. In the projectors we had the trailers and reels go in order then you'd feed the film from the platter into the center part that would ebb and flow through the shock absorbers/gates as needed [2][3][4][5]. It was fun to watch the projector feed in until the last few wraps. The reels would be delivered Thursday night in 2-3 containers, then you'd have to build late into Thursday night / Friday morning. Sometimes a movie distributor would mess up and it would have to be done Friday morning. I worked Thurs night and Friday morning all the time.

I remember building Pulp Fiction three times as it returned to the theater. The first time I built it I glanced in while it was playing and thought maybe the reels were out of order as films that were from other theaters or re-released sometimes would be out of order. The movie was just that way, Vincent was dead then alive at the end.

We used to all hang out at the theater on the roof for various things like Thursday night or Friday night late night movies, when we built them we'd bring in drink and smoke and it was a blast. I let all my friends and family in for free. My Mom and Aunt watched just about everything as well as many of my friends.

There were lots of people that worked there and cycled through so lots of parties and different characters. The pay sucked but it was a fun job. Not to work concession but being on floor wasn't too bad, though later in high school and college I got to be supervisor then manager and it was just a chill job. I could do homework in between movies and after the last showing. The theater had 10 projectors and usually there was 30-50 minutes in between all the rushes, lots of time to chat and get to know people. I met my wife there!

The projectors we had were good. We didn't have a Hell's Angel to maintain them but there was a dude that was from India that fixed all the projectors in the company, it was a United Artist chain theater. He worked his magic when one of them would go down.

The worst thing to happen is a platter on the projector might have a problem and then you have a mess to clean up when it unravels [6]. We had a few trouble ones that the slack was off and it would spin off too fast at part of the movie. Larger movies that sometimes happened. You'd get a complaint about a movie and go up in the booth and see it on the floor. Then you'd have to pass out free passes. Projectors usually had three platters, it would play from one to the other, larger movies would fill up two of the three platters and you'd have to switch them at the midpoint. Got pretty good at making that almost seamless.

The projector booth was just rad. It was dark and all the projectors just felt like movie magic [7]. The sound of projectors is really peaceful and calming almost like waves or wind through trees. It was college so working and school, one could craftily sneak in a 10 minute power nap and it was damn wonderful. The booth you could spy on the entire theater as well, each theater and the lobby, concession and managers office. It was like being Sauron or the all seeing eye. The booth also had access to the roof so it was fun to go up there. We sometimes would watch fireworks on 4th of July up there or just hang out and chill.

Working there was a bit like Waiting... the movie, but was a great group of people. I sometimes think I should write about all the characters there or make a show of it, maybe a movie.

[1] https://www.roxytheatre.net/images/booth%26basement/1003-spl...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Movie_projector#/media/File:No...

[3] https://www.sprocketschool.org/wiki/Platter_Systems

[4] https://www.roxytheatre.net/pages/Projectionbooth/booth3.htm...

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Movie_projector#/media/File:Mo...

[6] https://davidecrowley.com/wp-content/uploads/Minor-platter-m...

[7] http://www.film-tech.com/warehouse/pics/smgc/smgc57.JPG