Fade to black: film's death is nearly complete

This article originally ran in the West Valley View on June 22, 2012. 

GOODYEAR, Ariz. — Technology brings about change. It also brings about death. Just look at the graveyard: VHS, cassette tapes, dial-up modems, typewriters, rotary phones.

Add to that list film projectors, which, at nearly 118 years old, had a longer shelf life than most.

The 35mm film format will get a quiet send-off this week when Dickinson Theatres, operator of the Palm Valley 14 theater in Goodyear, brings in a dozen new digital projectors to replace a dozen film projectors. They are the last film projectors showing first-run movies in the West Valley, and some of the last ones in the entire state. AMC Theatres is now entirely digital, as is Valley-based Harkins Theatres with exception to one theater, Arcadia 8 in Phoenix, that will likely be closing within the next year.

The movies will always be called films, but now it’s nearly impossible to see one on actual film.

“It had to change eventually,” Daniel Pineda, projectionist at the Dickinson theater, said recently as he bounded up the stairs to the Goodyear projection booth. “35mm was a great format, but it’s time has come.”

Pineda’s workspace is a long dark corridor high in the guts of Palm Valley 14. Up there, amid 12 clicking and clacking film projectors (and 2 silently humming digital projectors), the air is hot, but luckily, Pineda said, he doesn’t have a dress code.

Today he’s wearing a T-shirt with the Punisher skull on it, which is an ominous image to see as he stalks the dark corridor, zigging and zagging between the projectors and the massive film platters attached to them. These spinning platters, held in place by a metal frame called a tree, are where the film prints sit while the movies play. They’re as round as pitcher’s mounds, and as Pineda zips past them he gives them a big spin, which sends the tail of the film print flapping through the air.

He can reel up — or, as he calls it, “lace up” — a film in under two minutes, which involves weaving a piece of film from a platter through a series of wheels, gears and a roller-festooned brain. The process involves big, sweeping movements from platter to tree to projector, but also small intricate articulations when the film is guided through the projector housing, where the light beams through the film, moving at 24 frames per second, on its way to the screen down below.

Pineda, a Buckeye resident who’s worked as a projectionist for two years, doesn’t romanticize film’s passing.

“This is my job, so digital or film it doesn’t really matter to me,” he said while he guided the tail of a Prometheus print from platter to projector. “I’ll tell you one thing, I won’t miss having to worry about the humidity and all the problems that film has.”

Humidity is a film projectionist’s worst enemy. Too much and the film starts sticking to itself, which can lead to film calamity: “One time I came over here and the film was on the floor looking like spaghetti noodles,” Pineda said. “It was a mess.”

There are other pros to the demise of film: no more annoying scratches in the film prints, no more late nights assembling the films (they as separate reels in boxes or cans), and no more reeling up the movies to the projectors, which may take only two minutes each but it all adds up, Pineda said. The digital systems are run on keystrokes and single buttons. The movies are on hard drives or just downloaded from the studios. They aren’t without their little quirks, though. For instance, troubleshooting a problem with a digital projector is nearly impossible without calling the company that made it.

“And it might get boring,” Pineda said. “Right now, I’m busy while I lace up movies and then there won’t be anything to do up here for like 30 minutes, but then it starts all over again. With the digital systems there will be a lot more down time.”

Palm Valley 14 general manager Rick Kasting said there were no immediate plans for the 12 film projectors and the equipment that goes with them, things like film splicers, building tables and metal reels.

“I just don’t know what’s eventually going to happen to all this stuff. Nobody knows,” he said. “Film won’t be made anymore, so there’s really no reason to have it around.”

Until Dickinson — which is headquartered in Kansas and has theaters throughout the central time zone as well as in Goodyear and Mesa — decides what to do with the projectors they will most likely just stay in storage at the Goodyear theater, Kasting said.

From the Lumière Brothers and Thomas Edison in the 1890s to mothballs in the 21st Century, film has had a long and full life. Kasting said he would be sad to see it go.

“Film had its ups and downs, but it was a great format. I loved working with it all these years,” Kasting, a former projectionist said. “When 35mm first started, it was easily breakable and would catch fire and all that good stuff. Now it’s like plastic, so it can stretch. Working with it really made you appreciate film. Yeah, I’ll miss it.”