The Good, The Bad and The Multiplex Read online

  CONTENTS

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Prologue: ‘Would the Last Projectionist Please Turn Off the Lights …’

  1. Let’s Go to the Pictures

  2. Why Blockbusters Should Be Better

  3. The Inevitable Decline of 3-D

  4. What Are Film Critics For?

  5. ‘The British Aren’t Coming … Or Going’

  6. American Without Tears

  Epilogue: The End of Celluloid

  Acknowledgements

  Index

  Copyright

  About the Book

  In It’s Only a Movie, the incomparable Mark Kermode took us into the weird world of a film critic’s life lived in widescreen. Now, The Good, The Bad and the Multiplex takes us into the belly of the beast to ask: ‘What’s wrong with the modern movie business – and how can we make it right?’

  If blockbusters make money no matter how bad they are, then why not make a good one for a change? How can 3-D be the future of cinema when it’s been giving audiences a headache for over a hundred years? Why pay to watch films in cinemas which don’t have a projectionist but do have a fast-food stand? And, in a world in which Sex and the City 2 was a hit, what the hell are film critics for? Outspoken, opinionated and hilariously funny, The Good, the Bad and the Multiplex will appeal to all Mark Kermode’s existing legion of fans, and should win a few new followers, too.

  About the Author

  Outspoken, opinionated, and never lost for words, Mark Kermode has carved out a career in print, radio and television based entirely on the belief that The Exorcist is the greatest movie ever made and that the Pirates of the Caribbean films should be buried in a very deep hole where they can never bother anyone ever again.

  ‘Everyone gets armbands and 3-D glasses’

  Elvis Costello, ‘Night Rally’

  Prologue

  ‘WOULD THE LAST PROJECTIONIST PLEASE TURN OFF THE LIGHTS …’

  A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, the most important person in a cinema was the projectionist …

  Back then, it was the projectionist who conjured the magic of cinema, producing dazzling lights and wondrous apparitions from reels of celluloid and complex machines built from dizzying, spinning wheels and whirring cogs. It was a job that required skill and precision, and it involved no small degree of expertise, not only because to many the cinema was a sacred place, as hallowed as a church, but also because in its earliest days film was dangerous, incendiary, explosive.

  Literally.

  Listen …

  When moving pictures were first exhibited in the 1890s – initially through the end-of-the-pier peep-show Kinetoscopes and later via the miracle of public projection – the greatest risk they presented was as a fire hazard. Early film was made by dissolving cotton waste in nitric acid (and a bit of sulphuric acid) to which was added a plasticiser like alcohol or camphor. This created a thin strip of highly combustible material which would then be placed dangerously close to an extremely hot lamp, usually in a confined dark space that was stuffed to bursting with men, women and children. An infernal cocktail indeed.

  Today when people talk about movies being ‘dangerous’, they’re usually referring to the medium’s alleged power to deprave and corrupt viewers – most commonly young viewers. But when the Cinematograph Act was first introduced in 1909, giving local councils more power to regulate cinema than any other art form, it was public safety rather than censorious control that was the prevailing issue, with the Home Secretary acting to control firetraps rather than moral mazes. And in those heady days when film needed to be handled with extreme care, the art of projection was seen as a craft, a bona fide trade carried out by skilled operatives whose talents were as essential to the smooth running of a movie show as those of stage managers were to the proficient production of a play.

  For most of the 20th century, cinema screenings were referred to as ‘performances’, a word that acknowledged the medium’s oft-forgotten roots in the theatrical tradition. Although we may foolishly imagine that the visual thrills of films like Titanic are somehow unique to cinema, they were in fact prefigured by live productions that allowed audiences to witness spectacular shipwrecks and historical disasters from the comparative comfort of the 19th-century theatre stall. In 1899, a full 60 years before Charlton Heston’s widescreen Technicolor outing, audiences for the first Broadway production of Ben-Hur watched in jaw-dropped amazement as eight specially trained horses pulling two full-sized chariots galloped at full pelt on floor-mounted treadmills, while a cyclorama allowed the background to fly past at an equivalent whack, creating a thunderous edge-of-your-seat illusion of death-defying motion. Just imagine that! Think of the noise. Think of the smell! Sensurround, Odorama and Dolby Digital 3-D combined would be hard-pressed to match the immersive thrill of that 19th-century play, as 32 pounding hooves kicked splinters into the air while the actors’ cracking whips arced out into the auditorium above the terrified audience’s heads. The stagehands working the production were run off their feet and were required to be vigilant at all times. The same was true of the projectionists who followed in their wake; they had umpteen tasks to perform and would never dream of leaving their posts. In its early incarnation, cinema – like theatre – was very much a ‘live’ production.

  Owing to the volatile nature of plasticised nitrocellulose (or ‘nitrate stock’, as it was commonly known) early projection rooms had to be sealed and their walls lined with thick asbestos. If a fire broke out in such a room, containment was the only option; an early instruction film made by the Admiralty for budding projectionists entitled This Film Is Dangerous, showed reels of nitrate film continuing to burn even when fully immersed in water, with no need of air to continue their spectacular conflagration. In 1926, a converted barn in Dromcolliher went up in flames after a reel of nitrate film somehow came into contact with the unguarded flame of a candle, killing 48 people – for decades the worst fire disaster in Irish history. On 31st December 1929 at the Glen Cinema in Paisley, Scotland, a can of nitrate film that had just been projected as part of a children’s matinee was placed into a metal box, which began to issue bilious clouds of black smoke. As the smoke seeped into the auditorium, the young audience panicked and ran to an escape door, which was padlocked and opened inwards, and in the ensuing crush 69 children were killed. An enquiry later concluded that the fire had been started when the metal box was accidentally placed on the unguarded terminals of a battery in the projection booth which then short-circuited, causing the nitrate film inside to burst into flames.

  The Cinematograph Act was subsequently amended to beef up fire-prevention measures and to ensure that cinema doors were fitted with push-bars and opened outwards. As for projectionists, the sense that their trade was potentially lethal and needed to be carried out by highly skilled operatives was heightened as never before. Indeed, nitrate film was generally regarded with such alarm that it was not allowed to be transported on the London Underground (although smoking cigarettes on the Tube was fine!) or sent through Her Majesty’s post without appropriate anti-fire precautions. And, as film archivists subsequently discovered to their cost, if you leave nitrate film in an unopened canister for a period of years it will decompose, releasing noxious gas and turning first to a honey-like goo and then to dust which has the capacity to spontaneously combust.

  Eventually, nitrate gave way to ‘safety film’ and ‘triacetate’, which may not have been as explosive as nitrate stock but was still flammable (it would burn as merrily as paper under the right circumstances) and, if left unattended, would produce the distinctive vinegar whiff that signalled a des
cent into brittle instability. Long after the age of nitrate had passed, projectionists still had to use their noses like police sniffer dogs when opening a canister of film, a precaution which ensured that the image of a highly combustible element cloaked in a sulphurous cloud remained hard-wired into the popular imagination.

  As well as being a dangerous procedure, projecting a movie was a very physical, hands-on enterprise, thanks to the need for regular reel changes, which occurred roughly once every 20 minutes. Generally, cinema screens would have two projectors, enabling the first reel of a film to be projected from one machine whilst the second reel was laced in readiness to take over from its partner. As the first reel was drawing to a close, a series of cue marks (usually dots or circles) would appear in the upper right corner of the picture. If you’ve been going to the pictures as long as I have, you will probably have noticed these symbols, the first of which would appear eight seconds before the end of the reel, telling the projectionist to start the second machine rolling and wait for the ‘changeover cue’. Once this appeared, the projectionist had around one-and-a-half feet of film – that’s about one second – to make the smooth transition from one reel to the next. In older movie theatres, this may have involved sliding manually operated covers back and forth to open or close projection booth windows. More modern systems used interconnected ‘dowsers’, the metal or asbestos plates which come between the lamp and the film to stop the image from projecting, or the film from burning. Either way, the projectionist needed to be on the ball or everyone would wind up watching a load of scratchy ‘tail leader’ being beamed onto the screen where an exciting motion picture should be.

  The fact that few audiences were even aware of reel changes tells you something about how dexterously this operation could be performed. And the work was not over once a reel of film had been projected: having been duly unwound, each reel would then need to be reverse-spooled before being projected again, otherwise the film would play upside down and back to front. Sometimes an overworked projectionist might forget to reverse-spool a reel, meaning that the next projectionist would diligently have to check the print and carry out any necessary corrections, to avoid screwing up the Wednesday matinee of The Poseidon Adventure by having the ship mysteriously roll upright in the middle of reel five (and leaving the audience demanding their money back). The fact that such major screw-ups were not only possible but probable ensured that projectionists kept watch on the print at all times, and whilst doing so they would regularly check the framing and focus of the image in the auditorium, taking great pride in ensuring that they had used the right aperture, affixed the correct lens, properly checked the tension, and that the performance of the movie was of the highest possible standard.

  This huge amount of responsibility – the fire hazard, the need for constant focus, the reel changes – was all part of the traditional projectionist’s lot, and it encouraged many in the profession to see their craft as a creative and collaborative part of the cinema-going experience. In front of me, I have a copy of a letter from that great auteur Stanley Kubrick which reads: ‘Dear Projectionist, An infinite amount of care was given to the look of “Barry Lyndon”; the photography, the sets, the costumes; and in the careful colour grading and overall lab quality of the prints, and the soundtrack – all of this work is now in your hands, and your attention to sharp focus, good sound, and the careful handling of the film will make this effort worthwhile.’ Similarly, in 1969 writer/producer Larry Kramer gave an interview to Today’s Cinema magazine in which he talked passionately about the projectionist’s key role in the release of his controversial new movie Women in Love, directed by Ken Russell and adapted from D.H. Lawrence’s classic novel. The film was playing at the Prince Charles Theatre in Leicester Square and, according to Kramer, the cinema had been so keen to do it justice that they had installed a new projector and ‘softened some clocks’ in the auditorium that the producer had felt ‘were ticking too loudly’. As for the projectionist, he insisted on reading Lawrence’s novel before handling the print, to ensure that he understood both the nature and the history of the work prior to running the celluloid through his magic lantern.

  Such attention to detail is almost inconceivable today, for even as I write the great profession of projection (in the traditional sense of the craft) is in the process of becoming obsolete. The rot started to set in with the introduction of ‘towers’ and ‘platters’ (or ‘cake-stands’), which effectively did away with the need for multiple reel changes, thereby fundamentally changing the nature of projection as a profession. With towers, the 20-minute reels are all spliced together by the projectionist on to one giant vertical reel, which then runs uninterrupted through the projector on to an equally giant take-up reel (which is then reverse-spooled at the end of the performance). With platters, in which the horizontally laid film is spooled from the centre of the reel, the movie passes through the projector and then back on to another horizontal take-up platter the right way round – thereby eliminating the need even for reverse spooling. There are even systems that allow the same film to run through two projectors at the same time, enabling one print to be shown in two (or more?) different screens simultaneously.

  As David Norris (the West End’s longest serving projectionist) told me, these operations still required great skill, with a ‘good’ projectionist taking care to splice the 20-minute reels correctly in the first place, and to ensure that when ‘broken down’ after the film’s run, those reels were left in good order so that ‘the next poor sod didn’t end up with a six or seven-piece jigsaw puzzle to work out … it’s happened to me, and trust me it’s not funny!’ Once the reels were assembled, however, these technical advancements should have freed up more time for the projectionist to spend checking the framing and focus of the picture, and correcting any imperfections through tiny tweaks of the lenses and the rack. But, in fact, in the emergent world of the multiplex it just gave them more time to go and start up other projectors in other screens, doing the job of six people for half the money and none of the thanks. So whereas in the past a good projectionist would regularly look out from their box to check that all was well in the auditorium, the more modern projectionist would be on to the next movie in the next screen before you could say, ‘Oi, it’s out of focus!’

  Things got worse with the advent of digital projection, which, in theory, simply requires someone to turn a machine on, thereby in effect making projectionists redundant. By the time you read this book, the Odeon and Cineworld chains in the UK will have all but done away with celluloid, replacing the reels and pulleys of their old machines with the hard drives of newly installed digital projectors. As Phil Clapp of the Cinema Exhibitors’ Association recently told London’s Time Out magazine, ‘while a 35mm projector is a mechanical device with moving parts, a digital projector – aside from the lamp – is very much a piece of IT. Projectionists who have been able to strip down and reassemble a 35mm projector with their eyes closed are suddenly being presented with a box with an on–off switch.’

  As a result, projectionists up and down the country are losing, or stepping down from, jobs which they once loved. Projectionists like 80-year-old Ray Mascord, who was profiled in the Guardian in February 2011 on the eve of his retirement from Scott Cinemas in Bridgwater, Somerset (which, like everywhere else, was ‘going digital’). When Ray started projecting movies back in the forties he was one of a team of five who worked two projectors, with reel changes every 20 minutes. In the fifties, he projected musicals like Carousel and Oklahoma! and fell in love with an usherette, Eileen, who became his third projectionist. In between reel changes Ray would keep a watchful eye not only on the picture but on couples canoodling in the back row. ‘I used to say, “Aye-aye, where are you putting your hands!”’ he told reporter Patrick Barkham, whose wonderfully nostalgic interview also records the arrival of the ‘towers holding 12,000ft of film’ which ‘turned the cinema projectionist’s job into a solitary one …’

  Barkham’s feat
ure coincided with a number of articles documenting the end of a cinematic era. In Time Out’s similarly themed piece, David Jenkins found that ‘a lot of veteran projectionists have taken this revolution as a cue to retire’, to the extent that ‘projectionists as we imagine them are on the verge of extinction’. Tracing the changeover in the UK back to 2005, when the UK Film Council’s Digital Screen Network initiative put 240 digital projectors into UK cinemas, Jenkins notes that the initial take-up on the format was sluggish. It wasn’t until 2009 and the advent of digital 3-D that celluloid projection really started to be eclipsed, with figures leaping from 650 digital screens to 1,400 in the space of a single year. According to Screen Digest’s David Hancock, 80 per cent of the movies released in 2010 in the UK were issued wholly or partly in digital format, compared to 25 per cent in France and 35 per cent in the Netherlands. Soon, that figure will be closer to 90 per cent.

  The problem is not digital projection per se, but the lack of human accountability that the rise of digital has facilitated. In the past year I have sat in a UK multiplex in which a digital image simply froze – something which we are assured cannot happen, but an error with which many multiplex patrons will be familiar, and which no one was on hand to correct. It put me in mind of the trailer for Westworld, the futuristic Michael Crichton thriller from the mid-seventies about an amusement park in which the rides start to eat the customers – you know, just like Jurassic Park. The film was an AA-certificate outing (over-14s only), and so I didn’t get to see it until it was re-released alongside its lesser sequel Futureworld a few years later. But that trailer remains with me to this day, with its tantalising description of an automated fantasy world in which day trippers can live out their wildest dreams (‘Where robot men and women are programmed to serve you for … Romance … Violence … Anything!’) and in which ‘nothing can possibly go wrong … go wrong … go wrong … go wrong …’