04/15/2026
Projection Booth (a TRUE story)
by Michael H. Hanson
It was during the Summers of ‘73, ‘74, and ’75 that my Father worked part-time as a Projectionist at the Route 56 drive-in theatre located just a few miles outside of our home town of Massena, NY.
And it was on humid Friday and Saturday nights that he would invite me, or one of my older brothers to accompany him, and keep him company while he rewound 35 mm movie reels, and spliced damaged film.
I remember that dark forbidding second-floor cavern whose inner floors, walls, and ceilings were covered in sheets of brushed quarter-inch steel, a protective remnant of an earlier time, when flammable nitrate film was in use. A background musk of grease, mold, and cheap floor cleaner perfumed the air.
After the sun finally set, warning bells would announce the Reel Changes and he would stare out through the open metal shutters at the distant, massive white movie screen, separated from our small building by multiple rows of cars, waiting for the crude cue marks to appear on the upper right of the projected image, which told him when to start up the other large projector with its prepared reel of tonight's movie, thus granting the illusion of nonstop continuity for a ninety minute or two hour movie.
And I would swat mosquitoes, and wipe sweat from my brow as he remotely adjusted incandescent copper sheathed carbon arc rods with two external k***s, while peering through a small, green smoked-glass viewer at the nearly blinding incandescent electric arc, like some kind of futuristic engineer in the bowels of a charging spaceship.
The movies that appeared before me, quite often double-features, were a wild dramatic mix of genres, old black and white monster movies, modern low budget vampire flicks, Hammer horror anthologies, popular large-cast disaster films, incredibly inappropriate soft-core fare, sci-fi flicks, Ray Harryhausen fantasies, and so much more.
My father always kept busy while I watched, and when each finished reel was rewound and the next five to fifteen minutes of a boring movie threatened he would turn to me, his 11+-year-old son, with a blank look on his pale, doughy, middle-aged face, covered with black plastic rimmed eyeglasses (basic U.S. Army issue eyeglasses, better known as Birth Control Glasses or GI Glasses) and sadly pontificate his views on his life and woes.
His voice was a resonating baritone, occasionally nasal, but he used it well, like an orator, standing before hundreds, and it was in that persuasive, deceptively educated sounding voice of his that he would calmly and rationally, tell me how completely and utterly worthless sh*ts my four siblings and I were.
An insecure, nervous, captive audience, I would sit there, on a small old and rusted folding metal chair, a mere two feet from him, unnerved, as he stared out at the night sky, like some doomed tragic figure, and continue to tell me:
"I had so many dreams when I was your age, so much promise, so many things I wanted to do, and places to go... something that sh*t-*sses like your brothers and sisters and you could never truly appreciate. And I gave all that up having the five of you. It's just not fair."
And he would go on in this endless profane vein, barely aware of my presence, like some great wounded prince relating his unfair life and trials to the Gods, until the warning bells went off for the next reel change, and if I was lucky he would send me downstairs to the Concession Stand to purchase hot buttered popcorn, greasy barbecued beef sandwiches or hot dogs, paper cups filled with ice and coca-cola, and melting ice cream bars…
