The Hyland Cinema...A Jaw-some Experience (Part-2)
Our projectionist has an even better Jaws projection story dating back to the 90s at the New Yorker Cinema. It was the mid 90s and we decided to have one showing of Jaws at the cinema. Jaws had not been shown at a London cinema since the 80s at the Twilight Drive In. It was an added feature with E.T The Extra Terrestrial.
We booked the last remaining 35mm print in Canada from Universal
Pictures. There was a good chance that it would be somewhat color faded and
unfortunately, it was. Eastman prints start to fade after about 15 years and Jaws was now 20 years old. We got the print a few days before its show date and
discovered that all monologue scenes with Robert Shaw's character
Quint were actually missing! Someone had actually cut them out! We
could not get another print from the States in time and we had no
digital video projection or even DVD in 1995. Our projectionist did
have a 16mm print of Jaws however.
The New Yorker was old school 2 projector 35mm with changeovers. Every
35mm reel of film is 20 minutes max and the movie runs along
seamlessly by changing projectors for every reel. It's an art and craft
to do it without drawing the audience's attention. Now we were adding a
third 16mm projector into the mix which is a logistical nightmare and
would make most projectionists faint.
The 16mm Quint footage had to be spliced together with black film
spacers between each scene and every splice where Quint was missing on
the 35mm print had black film spacers as well. When the 35mm print got
to a Quint scene, we would changeover to the 16mm and shut down the
35mm which would stop on the black spacer film. Then when the Quint
scene was finished the 35mm projector would run up to speed and take
over until the next Quint scene. Easier said than done!
After 2 practice showings of Jaws after hours and several days of
preparation we were at "it's showtime folks!" An intro by management
explaining what the audience was about to see was given. How the Robert
Shaw scenes were missing but we would fill those with grainier 16mm to
complete this showing in its entirety. Well the showing of Jaws via
two 35mm projectors and one 16mm projector went off smoothly and
brilliantly.
The manager owner said "every projectionist in town should have been
here to witness this!"
Success!