HOLLYWOOD — The projector is the size of a refrigerator and nearly as heavy, and on Thursday, for the first time since the 1990s, it ran a movie.
The screening room sits on the third floor of a studio building off Melrose, a forty-seat space built in the 1940s for executives to watch the day’s footage in private. It had been dark for decades — the projectors shrouded, the seats sold off and later bought back, the booth used for storage — until a small crew of restorers and retired projectionists spent a year returning it to working order.
The room was built for 35-millimeter film, and film is what its champions wanted back. Restoring it meant more than cleaning lenses. The pair of projectors had to be rebuilt so that a reel running out on one could hand off, mid-scene, to the other without the audience noticing — the changeover, the oldest sleight of hand in the trade.
“Anybody can push play on a hard drive,” said Ellison Barnett, seventy-one, who threaded projectors professionally for four decades and came out of retirement to train the room’s new operators. “This is a craft with its hands on the actual film. You feel the reel getting light. You watch for the cue mark in the corner. You make the switch. Miss it and the whole room knows.”
The cue marks — the small circles that flash in the frame’s upper corner seconds before a reel ends — are Barnett’s favorite artifact of the form. He calls them the projectionist’s secret handshake, visible to everyone and understood by almost no one.
The restoration was privately funded by the studio, which sees the room less as a keepsake than as a working asset. Film restorations increasingly need somewhere to be checked on film, and a growing number of directors, given the option, ask to see their work projected the old way.
Barnett spent the afternoon before the first screening the way he always had: checking the arc, the sound, the tension on the take-up reel, the focus he set by eye on a test frame and would touch again once the room filled.
The lights went down. The beam cut through the dark, catching the dust the way it had in the room’s first decade. A test reel ran, then a short.
The first reel change came at the twenty-minute mark. Barnett caught it clean, the way he was taught in 1979 — one machine dimming as the other took the picture, the seam invisible to everyone in the seats and obvious only to the man in the booth, who nodded once and reached for the next reel.