Dreaming of a Booth

[Michael Putlack]

Who else has dreams of being at work or specifically being in a booth?

I had one last night that I stumbled into a movie theatre in Fort Worth that had been shuttered since 1992 or 1993 but everything had been left as it had been since it closed. The expired candy was still behind concessions, and there were still films on their platters. I threaded up a copy of Jurassic Park and started the projector was working like a charm, though the print has some strange vertical line issues (at least in the trailers). Then a guy came in and started to clean things up. Apparently, he just bought the place and was going to re-open it and I offered to help. He didn't find it odd in any way that I was there screwing around with his stuff.

I've also had dreams where I'm back at my first movie theatre job. I'm my current age, but get hired without telling them of any of my industry experience, so I keep making suggestions that surprise my manager. Of course, that theatre is still running film as well. Sometimes, I'll have dreams where two of the cinemas I've worked at have been weirdly combined into one. It has the booth of one site and the concessions of another and the lobby of a third. Very strange stuff.

Who else has these kinds of dreams, or something similar?

[Jim Cassedy]

Yes, I've had "booth dreams" although they usually somewhat take on the form of a nightmare. There's one that seems to repeat itself every so often:
In this dream I am my present self and age, but the booth I'm in was a carbon arc/change-over booth I worked in for many years back on the East coast in the 1970's.
In the dream, the theater has a full house, (which was about 800 people) and I've got a changeover rapidly approaching when I discover that the next reel is "missing". It's not in the projector I thought I'd threaded, and I can't find it anywhere in the booth. Although such an event would be professionally embarrassing, in the dream it takes on almost a 'life or death' tone. I usually wake up, sometimes actually in a sweat, just as I realize there's no way for me to 'save the show'.

In the thousands of change-overs I must have done, I'm not going to say I'd never been in that situation. Never had a reel actually 'disappeared' on me, but there were a few times I'd put one back in the wrong bin, or absentmindedly put a reel back in the bin without re-winding it. But, thankfully, one of the BIG rules I was taught when learning the craft was that immediately after a change-over, the FIRST thing you do (after making sure the 'incoming machine is running OK & cleaning the film path on the empty projector) is to thread the next reel and check/change the carbons as necessary. That avoids the possibility of getting distracted and not realizing you've got a misplaced or un-rewound reel until it's too late to do anything about it. 99.9% of the time I followed this rule, so missed change-overs due to misplaced or un-rewound reels was an extremely rare occurrence.

The last time I remember this happening was during a film festival where I had about 30 or 40 reels in the booth. I didn't have enough house-reels or film bins to accommodate everything, so I was always inspecting, re-winding, & packing & unpacking reels. I somehow got a couple of them mixed up, and because I had gotten distracted, I realized I'd threaded the wrong reel only a few minutes before a change-over. I managed find the right reel, and swap it with the wrong one on the projector just as the motor cue hit the screen. Fortunately (for me) these two reels ended with a fade-out/fade-in, so with some judicious operating of the manual dowser & sound mute, I was able to do what looked like a perfect transition between reels, even though I'd actually missed the motor cue by about 1½ seconds. It just turned into slightly longer fade in.

[Sam Chavez]

One of my teachers told me of this grindhouse he worked back in the '50's called the Tele News. All they ran was three reels over and over all day long. Short reels at that. He would get this feeling that he had the wrong reel up even though there was no way. One reel in projector one, a reel in # 2, and the third reel in the rewind, ad nauseam.

I had dreams where I'd bolt up from a deep sleep at home and shout, I missed a changeover! It was indeed black.

[Carl Martin]

what a great thread to expose our deepest anxieties! every so often i have a projection nightmare (is there ever a good dream about this?) where i'm in a booth i've worked in the past. in the usual scenario, the house is packed, showtime is approaching, and for the life of me, i can't figure out how to thread the projector/find the right lens/whatever. in a memorable variation, i've been given a laserdisc to play, and the only thing i can find in the booth to put it on is a record turntable.