It has been quite a year for Oregon film history buffs!

Oregon used to confine its film history love to an annual celebration of The Goonies in Astoria.

But in the past year……

Katherine Wilson made Animal House of Blues (2012)

Allison Elwood & Alex Gibney made Magic Trip: Ken Kesey’s Search for a Kool Place (2011)

Alexia Anastasio made Adventures In Plymptoons: A documentary on the art and animation of Bill Plympton (2011)

Umatilla County Historical Society screened Nicholas Ray’s The Lusty Men (1952)

Deschutes County Historical Society screened Jacques Tourneur’s Canyon Passage (1946)

Clinton Street Theater screened Don Zavin’s Fast Break (1977)

Oregon Cartoon Institute screened Lew Cook’s The Little Baker (c. 1925)

Brian McWhorter composed and performed a new score for Ed’s Coed (1929)

John Paul plans to tour, conducting his original chamber orchestra score for F. W. Murnau’s City Girl (1930)

Matt McCormick re-issued the Peripheral Produce AUTO-CINEMATIC Video Mix Tape (1996) on DVD

Miranda July saluted her Peripheral Produce days with a Portland-centric screening at the Hollywood

David Walker lectured on Portland’s B Movies

Oregon Cartoon Institute brought Robert Johnston to lecture on Mel Blanc’s Portland

Matt Love wrote Sometimes A Great Movie

Dan Fiebiger wrote a history of Oregon filmmaker Tom Shaw

Bill Plympton wrote Independently Animated: Bill Plympton: The Life and Art of the King of the Indies

Anne Richardson presented Oregon Goes To The Oscars at Oregon Historical Society

Ken Nolley hosted a One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) retrospective in Salem

Northwest Film Center hosted mini-retrospectives of Will Vinton, Joanna Priestley, Chel White, Lawrence Johnson, Kelley Baker, Ron Finne (with Jim Blashfield upcoming ) at the Whitsell Auditorium

Anne Richardson introduced the Dill Pickle Club’s Portland film lecture series with David Walker, David Cress, Walt Curtis, Shawn Levy, Jim Blashfield, Brooke Jacobson, Matt McCormick, Joanna Priestley, Joan Gratz, Rose Bond, Tom Robinson, Tom Chamberlin, Dennis Nyback.

Michele Kribs secured National Film Preservation Board protection for The Boy Mayor (1914)

Mary Erickson’s University of Oregon dissertation on independent filmmaking in the Pacific Northwest went online

Heather Petrocelli completed her masters thesis about the Center For The Moving Image at PSU

Lucy Burningham wrote about Oregon film history in the Bend based magazine 1859

Stan Hall wrote about Oregon film history in OMPA’s annual directory

And tomorrow, Portland Monthly’s November 2012 issue hits the stands with an article by yours truly, Anne Richardson, about Portland’s history of  independent filmmaking.

SCORECARD:

Number of new films: 3

Number of new books: 2

Number of new scores to silent films:  2

Number of articles:  3

Number of academic papers: 2

Number of public lectures: 15

Number of retrospectives: 9

Number of public screenings of historic films: 4

Number of films permanently protected by the Library of Congress: 1

I first met Bill Plympton at the Oregon Book Awards. He arrived at the Scottish Rites Temple with Walt Curtis, who was wearing a tie and jacket several sizes too large, his hair in its signature white aureole around his poet’s brow. Walt was with Marjorie, his long time friend and familiar. They entered single file, circling around the back of the room.

I was at the refreshments table, eating miniature cream puffs. Bill joined me, and we began discussing the evening’s awards, our shared New York City citizenship,  and fact that I had been to a party he gave in New York some years before, although neither he nor I remembered anything about it. We stood there talking these things over, and I remember realizing that I was thinking of things to say so that I could continue eating cream puffs, and furthermore, that he was doing the same thing. That was my bonding experience with Bill Plympton. Eating cream puffs, waiting for Ken Kesey to receive a lifetime achievement award, and silently plotting how to meet Walt Curtis.

The next time I met Bill Plympton, I was with Walt Curtis, taking him around New York.  Walt had come to give a live introduction to Peckerneck Poet, the feature length documentary Bill had made about him. Bill didn’t come to the screening, so Walt and I visited him the following day, on the roof of the building which held his studio in Chelsea. We sat around in the dusk of the city, and talked. I had picked Walt up at Bill’s apartment. It was spare and featureless, the home of a man who was never home.

The third time I met Bill Plympton was at his annual summer gathering on the banks of the Clackamas River, on his parents’ property. He was demonstrating to a young child how to use a water cannon which shot great burst of water. His mother had waved us down to the path to the river, telling us to look out for the llama. Bill was everywhere, a solicitous host. There was no hostess, although there were several women in bathing suits who were jostling for position next to Bill.

The fourth time I met Bill Plympton was at a party in SE Portland. I had come specifically to invite him to speak at a film festival the following spring. It sounds as if I only go to parties to proposition people, and that’s pretty much true. So be forewarned, when you see me at a party. Bill listened, and said yes. From that moment on, I no longer met Bill as a distant friend of a friend. By asking Bill to speak at the festival, I had invited him to join me in some serious work. This is the way to Bill’s heart, to be hard at work on something. Bill understands work. He works all the time. How else can he draw all the tens of thousands of frames he needs to complete a feature length film? Bill lives in his work. It vivifies him. Once he and I were working together on something, all the other pretexts, the cream puffs, the water cannons, the Manhattan rooftops, fell away. We achieved perfect communion in the shared vision of work. So I have been privileged to collaborate with Bill. This is what it feels like to work with an Academy Award nominated director.

It feels like this:

Bill is practical.

Bill is concise.

Bill is effective.

Here’s the things he is not:  he is not neurotic, not self aggrandizing, not long suffering, not wasteful, and not filled with false modesty.

He is extremely focused.

Bill showed me something I hadn’t known before. It is possible to carry on an extended, productive conversation with an extremely busy person IF you are willing to grab it during interstitial moments. In the months Dennis and I planned the festival Bill was coming to, he gave us more input than I dreamed he would have time to give. Some of it came over the phone from New York.  Some of it came during brief moments we could grab while he was in transit from one place to another. We talked during a ride he needed to the airport, or between courses during a dinner he was having with friends at Jake’s, or between speaking gigs at the Ashland Independent Film Festival. He wasn’t multitasking, he was eliminating empty spots in his day. Why do nothing, when he could consult with us and improve our film festival? So that’s what he did.

At the festival, Gus Van Sant tapped Bill to present James Ivory with the Oregon Sesquicentennial Lifetime Achievement Award. I knew Bill was jet lagged, so tired he could barely stay awake, so I was surprised at the end when he asked James Ivory the final question of the evening: what is your dream project? what film would you most like to make?

I never knew that film directors wondered these things about each other.

James Ivory said the film he next wanted to make was a love story set in Peru. He told us “I want people to clutch at their hearts at the beauty I’ve made.” After the festival, perhaps not coincidentally, Gus’ next film was a love story. Bill’s next film, which he is still drawing, is a love story

All of Bill’s films may well be love stories. The stories are getting deeper, the love more mysterious and spiritual. It is as if Bill, having grown accustomed to sharing his innermost sexual fantasies in vivid, comic detail, has become so divested of inhibition that there is nothing to stop him from sharing his deepest worries, his sorrows, his pain and his soul. In Idiots and Angels, the story is so large, so expansive and so filled with grief, that it requires three endings.

Since the festival, Bill has written two books, toured the world with an award winning short, adopted an entirely new identity as a film preservationist, started an animation school, and transformed himself into a married man. And all the while, he continues to draw his next feature. I won’t say “I don’t see how he does this!” I do see how he does this. He takes everything he does very seriously. He likes to work. He likes the people he works with, he is a clear communicator, and he doesn’t waste time. Bill’s  formula for filmmaking success, repeated to audiences around the world,  is “short, fast and cheap.”

Excuse me, Bill, but what an act of artistic camouflage!  Some of your films may meet these three criteria, but your entire career defies that description.  I write this appreciation as a salute to that fact.

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Photo credit: Shawn Levy took the photo of James Ivory, Gus Van Sant, Bill Plympton and Mike Rich on May 1, 2009 at Marylhurst University’s Oregon Sesquicentennial Film Festival.

Oregon Cartoon Institute is holding its second public meeting on Sunday, Feb. 12, at 2:00 PM at 5th Avenue Cinema.

All friends and fans of Oregon Cartoon Institute are invited. If you think you might belong to this group, you do.

The agenda includes a brief introduction to the all volunteer Institute, and a discussion of what is up next. We’ll have announcements from the Mel Blanc Project and the Homer Davenport Project, some proposals to consider, and some hand outs to take home.

Reminder: last time the Institute met, Dennis Nyback supplied home made refreshments.

This year our featured attraction is a rare screening of The Little Baker, a stop motion animation short by early Portland filmmaker Lewis Clark Cook (1909 – 1983). We will also screen a ten-minute profile of Cook, made for OPB in the early 1980’s by Portland artist Jim Blashfield.

Michele Kribs, who was trained by Cook to succeed him as head of Oregon Historical Society’s Moving Image Archive, will be in attendance.

In the photo above, use of which was generously made possible by the Oregon Historical Society, Lew Cook is 15 years old. That is his own 35mm camera. A doting aunt, knowing that he was in love with the movies, bought it for him. He quit selling newspapers and went to work as a newsreel photographer.

Top Four Reasons You Might Want To See The Little Baker:

4. Cook made his living as an independent filmmaker using more tricks than you can imagine. Just as Bill Plympton turned down Disney, Lew Cook turned down Warner Brothers. He chose independence. Besides Plympton, the other Portland filmmakers who followed Cook’s lead include Homer Groening, Will Vinton, Joan Gratz, Jim Blashfield, Gus Van Sant, Rose Bond and  Joanna Priestley.

3. The Little Baker was made “in the 1920’s” which means Cook could have made it anywhere between age 11 and age 20. Come help us sleuth out clues as to whether this is the work of a hard working child or an uninhibited adult.

2.  No one else you know has seen this film.

1. Although you may think The Little Baker inspired Will Vinton to consider clay animation, what actually happened was that Will saw it after he had made his start with Closed Mondays. Nevertheless, there is some powerful history here. Who knows what it will inspire you to do!

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This event is a partnership between Oregon Cartoon Institute, Oregon Historical Society and 5th Avenue Cinema.

Thank you to Kerry Tymchuk, Michele Kribs and Scott Rook of Oregon Historical Society.

Thank you to Heather Petrocelli of 5th Avenue Cinema and PSU’s Public History Interest Group.

Pittsburgh has George Romero, Baltimore has John Waters, and Boulder has the memory of Stan Brakhage.

Portland has Gus Van Sant, Bill Plympton, Matt Groening, Mike Richardson, Jon Raymond, Aaron Katz, Chel White, Jacob & Arnold Pander, James Westby, Jim Blashfield, Joan Gratz, Joanna Priestley, Matt McCormick, Rose Bond, Vanessa Renwick and Will Vinton.

Ever wonder why?

For cities wishing to replicate Portland’s densely populated cinematic scene, here’s a handy “how to” guide.

1.  Start early.

As soon as people were making films in New York and Fort Lee, they were making them in Portland. Portland’s first film studio, American Lifeograph, opened in 1910. That’s the same year movies came to Hollywood.

2. Have a show business friendly mayor.

During the 16 year tenure of theater-owner-turned-mayor George Baker, downtown Portland was wall to wall theaters. John Gilbert, Clark Gable, William Powell, Edward Everett Horton and Eugene Pallette are some of the actors who jumpstarted their acting careers on the Portland stage, some of them in Baker’s own stock company. It was Baker who renamed Seventh Avenue “Broadway”.

3. Support innovation.

Oregon’s oldest source of print media, The Oregonian, responded to the puzzling new medium of radio by setting up a station, KGW, right in their own building, the Oregonian Tower. Radio later served as an Early Warning System to identify the talent of Portlanders-gone-Hollywood Mel Blanc, Suzanne Burce (renamed Jane Powell by MGM) and Johnnie Ray.

4. Grow your own film processing lab.

After WWII, Portland inventor Frank Hood went to work for a brand new electronics firm (originally conceived as a radio supply store) named Tektronix. He processed films he made for them, after losing patience with the delays of sending films to out of town labs. Eventually, he went into business as Teknifilm Lab. A filmmaker himself, he acted as teacher and mentor to customers. More important to the development of independent filmmaking in Portland:  Hood’s lax attitude toward payment schedules, which subsidized generations of Oregon artists working in film.

5. Provide a home for an exiled Hollywood film scholar.

Andries Deinum came to Portland during the blacklist. His vision of film as a mode of social discourse laid the groundwork for PSU’s Center For The Moving Image, housed in Lincoln Hall. Jim Blashfield, Bill Plympton, and Matt Groening were among the faithful attendees of the Center’s influential screening series, run by the Portland State Film Committee.

6. Provide a day job for the guy who wants to mentor the guy who wants to revive the archaic art form of stop motion animation.

Homer Groening led a dual life – ad man by day and experimental filmmaker by night. He had a family, a home, and his own business doing what he loved – and he did it all without leaving Portland. Aspiring filmmaker Will Vinton paid attention, and followed suit. His career, like Groening’s, would encompass both television commercials and art house films, but on a much larger scale.

7. Work with, not against, a pair of cinema addled students who want to start a regional film center.

When Sheldon Renan succeeded in persuading National Endowment for the Arts to seed regional filmmaking, they went looking for the right person to submit a grant for a film center in Portland. They were pointed to Brooke Jacobson and Bob Summers, members of the Portland State Film Committee. Brooke and Bob wrote the grant, Portland Art Museum acted as fiscal sponsor, and the Northwest Film Center went into business. This year marks its 40th anniversary.

8. Work with, not against, a visionary film preservationist who wants to create a moving image archive.

Lew Cook was trained as a newsreel photographer by the first generation of Portland filmmakers. His stop motion film, The Little Baker, made circa 1925, proved prophetic when it came to Portland’s future claim to cinema history. He and Thomas Vaughn conceived Oregon Historical Society’s moving image archive, and Cook personally trained the preservationist, Michele Kribs, who currently presides over it.

To re-cap: by the end of the 1970’s, Portland had a film program at Portland State University, a film archive at Oregon Historical Society, and a regional film festival (now the NWFF) located at Portland Art Museum. That nucleus of film creativity on the park blocks was balanced by a film processing lab, an emerging animation studio, and a warehouse waiting to be filled with  filmmakers’ offices over in northwest Portland. No one entity owned the scene – the infrastructure and the support system served all comers.

The following timeline concentrates on factors which contributed to a culture where independent filmmakers supported each other in Portland. It does not address the important role played by Hollywood productions shooting in Oregon. The symbiotic role of Hollywood and the Indies in Portland is embodied in the career of Gus Van Sant who slips and slides with ease between these two worlds.

A timeline:

American Lifeograph founded 1910

Lewis Moomaw makes The Chechacos 1924

Lew Cook makes The Little Baker c1925

PGE makes It Can Be Done c1936

Tektronix founded 1946

Frank Hood founds Teknifilm Lab, early 1950’s

Andries Deinum arrives 1957

Homer Groening starts his own ad agency 1958

Center For The Moving Image founded 1965

Bob Summers and Brooke Jacobson found Northwest Film Center 197o, with a push from Sheldon Renan

Tim Smith and Matt Groening make Drugs: Killers or Dillers 1972

Ron Finne, Tom Taylor and Brooke Jacobson found Northwest Media Project 1974

Will Vinton and Bob Gardiner make Closed Mondays 1974

Don Zavin makes Fast Break 1977

Penny Allen makes Property 1977

Rose Bond makes Gaia’s Dream 1982

Gus Van Sant makes Mala Noche 1985

Bill Plympton makes Your Face 1987

Matt Groening makes The Simpsons 1987

Jim Blashfield makes Leave Me Alone 1988

Joan Gratz makes Mona Lisa Descending A Staircase 1992

Gus Van Sant makes Good Will Hunting 1997.

Vanessa Renwick makes The Yodeling Lesson 1998

Miranda July makes The Amateurist 1998

Chris Eyre makes Smoke Signals 1998

Will Vinton makes The PJ’s 1999

Travis Knight makes Coraline 2009

Jon Raymond writes & Neil Kopp produces Meek’s Cutoff 2010, one of five Oregon films at Sundance in 2011.

This post is dedicated to Portland filmmaker/film writer David Walker, who inspired it by raising the question “how rare is regional filmmaking, anyway?”

Basil Wolverton displays his pioneering “spaghetti and meatballs” approach to human anatomy.

As Oregon Cartoon Institute heads into its fourth year, I sat down to retrace the steps that led to its creation.

This timeline of development was originally written for Jill Hartz, at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art. Thank you, Jill, for providing me with the impetus to pull this together!

1990’s in New York

As I fly back and forth between Portland and New York, I begin noticing the way Oregon press underplays the fame of Oregon’s most well received artists (Chuck Palahniuk a great example ) while at the same time New York press omits the Oregon citizenship of an artist all together. I begin to understand the way this has created a misperception that Oregon does not produce artists.

At about this same time Columbia sportswear begins showing up on the subways. The Simpsons are becoming a cultural mainstay. Elliott Smith, the Dandy Warhols, Courtney Love, Gus Van Sant — I start to feel  surrounded by Portland even when I am 3,000 miles away.

1999 visiting Portland

David Chelsea tells me about Basil Wolverton.

I knew about Homer Davenport, the Hearst newspaper cartoonist from Silverton.

I’d heard about Mel Blanc, Portland’s most reknowned voice artist.

But I am stupefied by Wolverton. How could a guy from Central Point (pop: 12,000)  influence an entire generation of  Americans? And do it via Mad Magazine ?

A seed starts to sprout in my mind.

2001, in Portland

Dennis Nyback and I teach an avant garde film survey course at Northwest Film Center. Preparing for it, I discover avant garde animator Harry Smith was born in Portland.

Smith was both the disciplined, insightful, completely original collector behind Folkways’ enormously influential Anthology of American Folk Music and a self taught, extravagantly experimental, completely original filmmaker. I never dreamt he had anything to do with Oregon.

In my previous understanding, Oregon rarely produced nationally known artists.

Now with Harry “High Brow” Smith and Basil “Low Brow” Wolverton in the picture, I am completely confused.

2003 in New York

Standing in Kim’s Video, I stumble across a footnote in a book about Robert Crumb which identifies Carl Barks, creator of the comic books which were a huge influence on Crumb, as being from Merrill, Oregon.

I turn the book over to see who wrote it — D. K. Holm, from Portland.

At this point I compile a list of living and dead Oregon cartoonists and animators and send it to John Canemaker, asking what he thinks. He calls me, excited and impressed.

He adds two new names.

He tells me Marc Davis, one of Disney’s Nine Old Men, graduated from high school in Klamath Falls

and that Pinto Colvig, an early animator turned voice artist, is from Jacksonville.

2006 in Portland

Dennis and I interview Portland cartoonist  John Callahan for The Portland That Was.

Callahan is surprised to learn that Mel Blanc, a life long hero, is from his own home town. Our intern, a graduate of Lincoln High School, the school Blanc attended, tells us she never heard of him.

About this time, graphic journalist  Joe Sacco returns home to live in Portland, bringing with him his 1996 American Book Award.

Dennis and I return home too.

2007 in Portland

We hold the first Oregon Cartoon Institute public event, a three week screening series at Disjecta of 16mm animation from Dennis’ collection. Jim Blashfield and Rose Bond come and speak. Both have conducted far ranging film careers from Portland.

Blashfield made his acclaimed music videos here, and Bond her monumentally scaled installations. Both use animation.

Our model for engaging audiences emerges  — we will use living artists as interpreters as we raise awareness about the dead ones. Chel White, Bill Plympton, Joan Gratz, Joanna Priestly, Marilyn Zornado and Will Vinton loan us 35mm prints for the final night of the Disjecta series, which takes place at the Hollywood Theater.

Second Oregon Cartoon Institute event: Dennis conducts video interviews with visiting and local artists at the Platform International Animation Festival. We put these online.

At this point, I thought we had found all the historic Oregon animation and cartooning figures there were to find.

I was wrong.

In the course of researching Oregon film history for the Oregon Sesquicentennial Film Festival, I stumble across George Bruns, a four time Oscar nominee for animated film scores, from Sandy

and Dennis stumbles across Ralph Wright, who won the Golden Bear in Berlin in 1957. He’s from Grants Pass.

2009 in Portland

Third Oregon Cartoon Institute event: we co-sponsored Bill Plympton Day at the Oregon Sesquicentennial Film Festival at Marylhurst.

Bill is as fascinated with this history as we are.

Not all our research comes from history books. Some comes from the news. Just when we weren’t looking,  Brad Bird received first one, then two Oscars.

Looking ahead:

An interview about Oregon Cartoon Institute’s next public event, which will take place in 2011, can be found online at  KBOO.fm. Conducted by S. W. Conser as part of his Words & Pictures series, this interview introduces our first artist in residence, Heather Perkins.

Oregon Cartoon Institute is all about partnerships. As soon as the details get finalized, we will announce our upcoming partnerships with others who share our goal of raising public awareness of  this state’s rich animation and cartooning history.

In honor of the Film Preservation Blogathon, Oregon Movies, A to Z asked Dennis Nyback to talk about nitrate film. Nyback was a union projectionist in Seattle before opening his own movie theater in 1979, which started him on an international career as a collector and curator.

1. When/where/how did you learn to project nitrate film?

I was never taught to project nitrate film. I was taught to project 35mm film. I had one lesson on “threading” the projector and making a change over. After that I learned on the job. After about six months I really knew what I was doing.

At that time if I had been handed a reel of nitrate film I would have had no idea what it was. Cursory inspection of a reel of nitrate and a reel of safety film would not reveal any difference. The weight and dimensions are the same.  Both would be projected in exactly the same way.  Only later did I find that looking at the edge codes for the words”safety” or “nitrate”  would reveal the difference. Tearing off a piece at the end and lighting it with a match is another way to check.   Safety film will slowly melt.  Nitrate will burst into flames.

I did learn about nitrate, but in a more casual way.

After I got into the Seattle projectionist union in 1977, I worked in many theaters that had been built during the nitrate days.  Those projection booths had metal lined walls and ceilings, guillotine type shutters for the projection port windows, and “heat fuse linked” metal chains hanging over the projectors.  The chains were connected through rollers to heavy weights and then to the shutters.  The chain was also connected to the projection booth door.  In the event of a nitrate fire the heat would melt the the “fuse” and the weights would drop, the port windows would all slam down and the door would slam shut. It was a neat system, since a fire in either projector would have the same result.  The idea was that the metal walls and ceiling would contain the fire, and only the projectionist would die if he didn’t get to the door fast enough.

In just about every booth I worked in I found this archaic system still in place.  It wasn’t in the way, so there was no reason to do remove it.

Two projectors were used because film came on twenty minute, two thousand foot, reels.  Every twenty minutes the projectionist would change from one projector to the other. The crowd had no idea what was going on.  With the advent of Xenon projection lamps which replaced  the carbon arc system, automation became the norm. Automation used a single projector. The film would be spliced together to run continuously from opening title through the credits. I became curious about the heat fuses and shutters and stuff and was told by older operators about nitrate film. Like everyone else, I assumed that nitrate had been discontinued over safety concerns.

It was my buying a very old 16mm film in the early eighties that led to the correction of my error. It was an original World War I newsreel.

I asked the projectionist Doug Stewart if this 16mm print could be nitrate.  He told me there had never been any 16mm nitrate. I asked him, if they had safety film that long ago – in World War I – why did they keep using nitrate into the fifties?

Doug said “Because it  looked better.”

Nitrate film had a very high silver content.  If you see it on the screen you’ll be struck at how black the black is.  If you pause to think, you’ll realize that you’d never really seen black in a motion picture before. Safety film is literally a pale imitation of the gold standard of nitrate.

Television cut into the profits of the studios in the fifties. Before that there was never a need to cut corners by getting rid of nitrate.  At the same time the Hollywood studios were searching for ways to keep the profits up, introducing Cinemascope, 3-D, and stereo sound, they were dumping nitrate for the cheaper safety film. If you think about, if nitrate was so dangerous, why did we end up tearing down most of the old movie palaces, when they should have burned down by themselves long before that.

2. Did you ever have any close calls, safety wise?

I would generally stand by with a fire extinguisher in my hand just in case whenever I would project a nitrate print ( Ed. note: he means from his own collection).   No, I never had a problem.  Nitrate film first used during the first twenty years of the century was much more flammable than later nitrate.  The early years were when most of the nitrate fires happened.  The really big fires occurred in film storage buildings.  That is one reason so many films from that era are now lost.  The newer nitrate was generally referred to as “safety nitrate.”

There were other safety measures to prevent nitrate fires.  The projectors had ‘fire rollers.”  Those were rollers at the top and the bottom of the projectors that were calibrated to snuff out any burning film that passed through them.  In most instances they worked well and the take-up (bottom) reel almost never caught fire.  The greater risk was the fire would jump to the top reel.  A fire would almost always start with the film jamming in the film gate with the heat of the projection light igniting it.

In most instances there would be flash of flame and then it would go out. If it jumped to the top reel the fire shutters would slam shut.  A projector also had a “fire shutter.”  That was device that blocked the projection light from going through the gate.  As the projector gained speed it would rise up.  If the projector stopped it would drop down.

Most of the heat in a projector came from the light.  The shape of the projected picture is cut down from round to square by the “aperture” plate, which is in the projection gate.  It would get very hot. Projectors in the bigger theaters were “water cooled”.  Water would run from a pipe in the wall through steel or copper lines  to cool the gate. The film reels were also contained in a metal housing with a door that swung open  to enter or replace a reel. In most modern theaters the doors were often removed just to make the job a little easier.

The Stanford Theater in Palo Alto has been running nitrate prints for the last thirty years.  Last year it had a fire.  Apparently all the safety measures worked and the fire was contained in the projection booth.   Most of the damage was caused by the water sprinkler system.

3. Did you ever hear of other projectionists who had close calls?

On my website, you can read a story I wrote about a nitrate incident that happened in Seattle in the thirties.  The story was told to me by the projectionist Ash Bridgeham.  I trained with Ash at the Duwamish Drive-In Theater at the same time I was working at the Green Parrot Theater.  Ash had entered the projectionist union in 1927.

There was another funny nitrate story from the Embassy Theater.  I worked there in the early eighties.  There was a big dent in the metal ceiling above the toilet in the corner of the projection booth.  The story was that a reel of nitrate had caught fire and the projectionist had grabbed it and tossed into the toilet and the toilet had exploded.  A new toilet was installed.  A while later the projectionist was cleaning his gun, or something like that, when it went off.  The bullet struck the toilet and broke it a second time. The dent was either from a piece of the first toilet, or the second, hitting the ceiling.

I worked with dozens of old guys who had run nitrate.  Those are only actual fire stories I ever heard.

The stuff didn’t just burst into flames by itself.  You should realize, movie theaters weren’t the only places where nitrate film showed up.  It was the film stock shot and processed all over the world.  It was routinely shipped on trains, boats and planes.  I have some of the old containers used to ship nitrate prints.  The only difference between them, and newer containers, is the presence of stickers saying to keep the container away from open flame.  The tank of gas in your car is a lot more dangerous than a nitrate film print.

4. You said you preferred jobs projecting nitrate. Why?

I never said I preferred jobs projecting nitrate. There were no jobs projecting nitrate.  It wasn’t just from another era, it was against the law. What I did prefer was to show movies with carbon arc light.  When Ash Bridgham retired in 1980, the Duwamish Drive-in closing down, the projectionist union president, Tommy Waters Jr., wrote “All the different forms of automation are upon us here in Seattle. We have only five theaters left that are manually operated with carton arcs.”  I think I worked at all of them.  I ran carbon arc reel to reel at the Moore Egyptian, Embassy, Duwamish, Bellvue,  Northgate, Southgate and King, theaters, and maybe some others.  To me it was the standard, as opposed to exotic.

I first used carbon arc at the Moore in 1975.   The last place I ran carbon arcs was at the King Theater in the early nineties.  That was a 70mm house.  Many smaller or medium size theaters used copper clad carbons that were 8 and 9mm.  Those were about as big around as a pencil.  Big theaters used 13s and 14s.  Those rods would be as big around as your thumb.  One of my great pleasures was running Lawence of Arabia in 70mm with those huge carbon arcs putting the beautiful light on the screen.

5. Can you explain the mechanics of carbon arc projectors? Is it true that the image on the screen comes from a complex interplay of fire and water, light and dark, dream and material reality — all interacting in real time within the projection booth, under the supervision of a real live human being? Tell us how it works.

You got that right!   Film is a very tangible thing.  You can hold it in your hands. You can look at it against a light and see the picture.   It is for all intents a series of photographs, or more properly, photographic slides.  It is a directly captured moment in time.  Digital looks at an image  and breaks it into little pieces and then puts it back together again.  It is the difference between a Vermeer and a jigsaw puzzle.

I already mentioned the water cooled gate.  The fire is from the carbon arc light.  To put the picture on the screen you have to set it in motion at 90 feet per minute.  It is carried through the projector by spinning teethed sprockets meshing  with sprocket holes on the edges of the film.   If you projected a beam through the film outside the gate you would have a blur.  The film has to stop briefly  while it is running.  Below the gate is what is called the intermittant sprocket.  There are four sprocket holes per individual frame of film.  The intermittant pulls the film down four sprocket holes and  pauses and does that 24 times per second. .At the same time a shutter is cutting off the carbon arc light 24 times per second to coincide with the pull down movement of the intermittant.  The light only passes through the film when it is stopped.  There is a brief flash of dark every time the shutter cuts the light.  Something called “persistence of vision” keeps you from noticing that.

Carbon arc lamps have a small open flame that burns very very bright.  Old search lights used carbon arcs.  If you see old movies of search lights scanning the sky you are seeing how a carbon arc light could put a light on an airplane in the sky.  Spotlights in theaters, such as the Super Troupers, used carbon arc.

The way it works is that inside the lamp house  two rods, held by metal teeth,  would face each other across a short gap. The rods are placed there by the projectionist with the lamp house door open.  That was called “trimming” the lamp. The door is then closed.  Each rod is connected to direct current electricity from a rectifier.  A switch turns on the current.  The projectionist  gives a knob, about the size of a door knob, a quick  turn, which kisses the two rods together,  a flame is created, and then with the a quick reverse of the  wrist movement,  pulls the rods apart just enough to keep the flame arcing between them.  A concave mirror in the back of the lamp house turns the arc light to a reflected beam. The beam goes through a condenser lens, the motion picture film, the projection lens, and puts the the picture on the screen.

The rods consume themselves as they burn.  A small motor in the lamp house moves them inexorably together as they use themselves up.  You can monitor the arc through a dark view window and adjust it, if it varies from perfect.  If you were to look at the open flame you’d  be blind in nothing flat.   The lamp houses have little metal chimneys on the top of them for the smoke to go out .  Underneath the arc is usually a small removable square pan.  The copper casing on the rods fall off in drips.  The drippings fall into the pan.  In most booths there would be a coffee can at the base of the lamp to toss the copper drippings into.   The copper in the cans  would then be collected at the union hall and sold as scrap.  The proceeds went  to the Jimmy Fund.  Most booths had a sign spelling out the practice.  In the days when every theater in America used carbon arcs, the era extending into the early seventies, the drippings generated real money for the charity.

Carbon arc was replaced by Xenon starting in the fifies.  A xenon lamp is more or less a very bright light bulb.  The carbon arc rods were petroleum based.  When the first oil embargo happened in 1974 the price of carbons doubled and it was downhill from there.   A xenon lamp also doesn’t need to be trimmed.  It just turns on and off and gets replaced every three thousand or so hours.

There is an aesthetic  difference in the lights.  Carbon arc is warmer and more representative across the color spectrum.  Xenon often has a cold, blue tinge to it, some more so than others. You might not notice it in a multiplex. At the Film Forum in New York City they do reel changes with xenon lamps.  The color difference between the two projectors is jarring, especially with black and white film.   Xenon lamps were the first nail in the coffin for the projectionists.  Automation followed and the projectionist unions shriveled up and died. In the early days of movies the films were hand cranked.  There was also no motor advancement for the carbon arcs.  It generally took two operators, one to crank the projector, and one to feed the carbon.  The reels then were only 1000 feet, or ten minutes each.  It must have been a choreographed art to have the carbon feeder, at the end of a reel,  move to the second projector, strike the lamp, and crank the next reel up to speed for the change over.

6. As a private collector yourself, are there any nitrate films you want to see preserved, or lament because they were not preserved?

Any nitrate film should be preserved as long as it is in good condition and runnable.  It is possible to open a can that once held a reel of nitrate and find only dust inside.As the film deteriorates the more flammable it becomes.  There is a lot of old nitrate out there that is all that remains of  specific films. A tremendous number of silent films are unaccounted for.  The Vitaphone Project has done a great job in getting nitrate originals married with their sound discs and then printed as safety film.  They have a backlog of projects that are waiting funding.  There are tons of nitrate prints in a bunker in Denmark.  Hard to say how much is squirreled away in various other places around the world.  All of my nitrate prints are now in LA in a special warehouse for nitrate.

I’d like to see nitrate routinely screened.  The Hollywood directors in the silent era and into the fifties were masters of lighting.  All of their calculations were predicated on nitrate film being the conduit of their vision.  You might be knocked down by the visual beauty by a Hitchcock, Ford, Hawks, Borzage, Murnau, or other old Hollywood film you see now, but you aren’t seeing the film as the director intended it, or as the audiences first saw it when it came out.

Do I lament things not preserved?  Here is a specific story.   In the late nineties I was at the 6th avenue and 26th Street flea market in New York on a brutally hot summer day.  On an open table, baking under the sunlight, were dozens of old film cans.  I opened one can up and found a good condition silent nitrate reel.  I opened another can and found a good sound reel.   I went to the guy in charge of the table and offered him a hundred bucks for everything on the table.  He refused the offer.  That meant I had to look into more of the cans.  I found that maybe half of the cans contained dust, or deterioration.  I walked back to the guy and told him my offer was now fifty bucks for everything on the table.  I also told him it was nitrate film and shouldn’t be out in the sunlight.  He told me that if no one bought the film that day they would take it back to their store and I should check in on Wednesday, the next day they’d be open.

On Wednesday I went there.  I was told that they had freaked out about the film and had thrown it away the day before.  Hard to say what was in the cans. There might have been a print of Hats Off.  Too bad we’ll never know.

7. Anything else you want to say?

The last time I showed films at the Roxy Theater in SF I saw that they still used carbon arcs.  I hope they still do.  I would imagine there are a few more places in the United States clinging to the old technology.

When I owned my own theaters I would occasionally project nitrate for a very lucky few.  The last time I did that was at a theater I cannot name where I did a day of “secret cinema.”   It’s too bad we couldn’t spell out just how really secret it was.   The last time one of my nitrate prints was publicly screened was by accident.  It was an event at a theater doing a program of old films projected with live music accompaniment.  I had provided twenty minutes of 35mm and forty minutes of 16mm for the show.  The people putting it on really liked the 35mm material better.  I was in Europe showing films at the time, so a friend who had a key to my  film storage let them in to grab some more 35mm.

Later I heard from someone who had been to the show who told me that  she had loved one of the films.   I asked which one.  I was told “The boxing one, it looked so beautiful.”   Wow, the only boxing film I had was a nitrate original ten minute short.  Just by luck it was one that was grabbed and projected.  Luckily, no one was hurt.

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The National Film Preservation Foundation is the independent, nonprofit organization created by the U.S. Congress to help save America’s film heritage. They work directly with archives to rescue endangered films that will not survive without public support.

The NFPF will give away 4 DVD sets as thank-you gifts to blogathon donors chosen in a random drawing: Treasures III: Social Issues in American Film, 1900-1934 and Treasures IV: American Avant Garde Film, 1947-1986.

Here’s where you can give generously to the National Film Preservation Foundation.