Eric Bayliss’ office is more than a football field worth of space above the Alamo Drafthouse in Winchester. He traverses the area daily, downloading new content, creating and uploading specialized pre-shows, converting individual files to meet theater standards, handling movie posters and running AV for special events. Beyond the day-to-day operations, he is also knee-deep in organizing nearly 30 film files for an upcoming festival that will be hosted at the theater over an entire weekend. These are the usual duties of a projection manager in the digital age of movie theaters.
The job of a projectionist is portrayed in a romantic, almost magical way in the film Cinema Paradiso. For most of film history they have been a key piece of the movie-going experience, serving as the men behind the curtain, so to speak, helping to deliver screen classics to theater audiences. But in the last 10 years, the film industry and theaters have made the move to digital, and the old ways of the projectionist are rapidly fading away. You’ll find few in the profession shedding a tear, however.
“I don’t miss it whatsoever,” says Bayliss, the head projectionist at the Winchester theater. Bayliss has been working as a projectionist for 16 years and has been at Alamo since it opened in 2009. The projector setup then was six 35mm projectors and two that were digitally capable. By May 2011, the theater was primarily using Barco DP2K digital projectors on its eight screens. Today, Alamo has just a single 35mm projector in rotation, which according to Bayliss is only used about twice a year for a local film club, and even then only in the event an original print might be discovered or an older film hasn’t been converted to digital.
Running a slew of digital projectors basically breaks down like this: Each projector is hooked up to a server not too different from a computer. The daily schedule and film content can be uploaded either manually or through a separate software program, and from there the projection manager plays the pre-show, trailers and the movie at the designated times. The upgrade has made showing a movie easier, but not necessarily foolproof.
“That’s the dream,” says Bayliss of relying entirely on digital automation, “but that’s assuming your equipment runs 100 percent properly every time. We find it very important to have somebody available to fix problems when it happens.” Still, any of those issues pale in comparison to a film roll coming off the spool and turning into a spaghetti plate of celluloid.
Less than 10 theaters throughout Northern Virginia have projectionists on staff to run the digital projectors. “They’re very idiot proof,” says Chris Colson, a general manager for Cinema Arts in Fairfax, who runs their digital projection system in tandem with another general manager. Bayliss has his own team, including one other full-time projectionist and a number of part-timers. However, Bayliss does recognize it may be tougher for smaller theaters to keep projectionists on staff, though he has heard of some regretting it when problems arise and refunds have to be given out.
Save for filmmakers like Christopher Nolan or Quentin Tarantino, few are clamoring for film projections of new movies, and Bayliss understands why. “The easiest way to compare it is going from VHS to Blu-ray,” he explains. “There is just no comparison from 35mm to digital cinema, it’s just much better.”
Alamo still has a few of its old, out-of-commission Christie projectors taking up space in the theater, not-so-lovingly referred to as “dust collectors.” Bayliss is too busy to wax poetically about it though; the duties may have evolved in the digital age, but a projectionist’s work isn’t done yet.
