Hey Allen, here's one for those of us that used to actually 'GO' to the movies..
I'm sure this is nothing you didn't already know about, but just in case..
Have you ever noticed the little X's that appear in the upper right hand corner of an old movie ? Just before a scene change..
That was the way they used to mark the film for the projectionist, so he could time the change over to the next reel..
For those of you that weren't around then, as most all theaters today are computer driven, with hugh reels of film, and do not need such attention, a movie house had at least 2 projectors.. There was no way a full length film would fit on 1 reel, so they had a 2nd projector threaded and ready with the next reel.. And back and forth it went..
Talk about artifacts ! If you were not hip to the 'x' popping up (once u see it, you can't not see it) you might also be treated to any number of old house shenanigans.. Next reel starts out of focus, or with out sound, or the reel is out of order (or not even the SAME movie !) or it's running backwards ! Got to love it..
Needless to say, these all brought the whistles, cat calls, etc..
Oh yeah, my all time fav ? The scene ends, the film runs out, and the screen goes full blown white ! The dude upstairs had fallen asleep !! hahaha.. Man, that's when the place would go nuts.. Popcorn and candy flying
all over the place.. Every body yellin..
For a kid back then, it more than made up for the 25 cents coughed up at the ticket window... Fifty if you were lucky enough to have a date :-)
Hi MIKEY!
YUP yur bringin' up memories alright!!
I'm going to guess that we are about the same age here.
I remember going to the matinee in the late 40s and getting in for 14 cents. I'd stay at the show til either dark, or when the half a buck my Mom gave me ran out!
My Dad was a projectionist in his home town in 1914, and my sub cabinet is the same speaker cabinet we bought in '46 as part of our newer home theater system.......16mm
The sad thing about it was that we bought the new 16mm set-up, and then one year later, we bought our first TV. Interestingly, the same folks who flocked to our living room to see movies on our large screen, were the same ones who flocked over to see the fuzzy, unreliable progamming on the small one! The speaker cabinet has been re-drivered since my youngest Grandaughter grabbed a handful of volume a couple years ago.
You're absolutely right about one thing......I never miss the reel change artifacts
Rich.
There are still reel change artifacts--you'll hate me if you read further. I notice them every time.
It's a cigarette burn mark, upper right hand corner. There's one just before the reel change and another immediately after the reel change. Now you know, now you're stuck with it. Muah ha ha!
Many do look like burn marks.........don't they, yeah
Yup...these still exist. They actually talk about it in the movie Fight Club at one point (which I recommend if you haven't seen it)
I suspect that MIKEY is refering to Alan; another of us in the "Light Grey Posse"
When you reach our age, you, uh......
Anyway, bet he can also recall other things: Like paying a realistic "Light Bill" The relative luxury of a "Two Holer"! gettin' milk delivered by a horse drawn wagon(and trash taken away by the same means)
I still call it an "Ice Box" today, but then, it WAS an ice box!(well, WE had a real fridge, but our next door neighbors still recieved ice from the truck, which us kids loved to sneak on when the delivery guy took the ice inside and we could sneak a little shard off the back of the truck on hot days)
Our ring was a simple "three Shorts" but my Aunts was a more involved "Three longs, a Short, and two Longs"(if I remember correctly) And Yes, her phone really did have a crank to alert the operator when she wanted to make a call!!
You could sit, even Stand, anywhere you wanted to in an automobile!
And two or three reelers had artifacts!!
Our ring was a simple "three Shorts" but my Aunts was a more involved "Three longs, a Short, and two Longs"(if I remember correctly) And Yes, her phone really did have a crank to alert the operator when she wanted to make a call!!
You can't be old enough to remember that. Please stop, your giving me a Petticoat Junction/Lassie flashback.
Mikey,
Absolutely! If memory serves, a reel ran about 20 minutes, and you'd know the reel change signal in the upper right corner was coming up, because as the reel neared its end, there would usually be more scratches and dirt visible. This was especially true with older prints and or sloppy projectionists who didn't clean each reel when it's re-wound.
Even worse were some films (you still see this in some art-film houses) where the color values would totally shift when the next reel started, a result of poor control of "timing" when multiple prints were made. The guy who "times" a print is supposed to control the exposure so the color saturation and values remain consistent from reel to reel.
I was fascinated by much of this as a kid and an adult. Amazingly, I've come to know a guy who is an A/V reviewer (Steve Guttenberg) who worked as a projectionist for 15 years in New York. In modern cinemas I think the big reels are called "pans" and use a horizontal feed. For a time, Steve told me that the projectionist would splice together the short reels into one big pan, which eliminated the reel changes.
Regards,
Actually, and now I DO feel old, I do remember that.....cause it's true!
My Aunt and uncle lived on a farm in Illinois and were only about 14 miles from a paved road(and sort-of a town)and their telephone exchange was about thirty miles away and was staffed by a single operator who connected and reconnected wires as required!! It was quaint.
We moved into an area that was just developing and the phone system was having a hard time keeping up with that development and had to go with "Party Lines" for a couple years til they caught up.
My Father actually put an inside bathroom into my Grandparents home, but my Grandma felt there were some things you just didn't do in the house!!
Those were fun days: Washington had wrested control back from New York for a while and we had a lot more personal freedoms than we do today.
Hmmmmm......Petticoat Junction was a stretch...but Lassie(pre Timmy)was actually pretty close
Rich,
I'm not sure how far down this nostalgia path we should go! But I grew up in small-town (4,500) Southern Ontario in a rural area but I was a "townie". We were the big house and had two telephones. Our doctor's phone number was a single digit (6) and my dad's business was 76! We always had refrigerators but I remember milk being delivered by a horse-drawn wagon. We had an insulated milk door cabinet at the back of the house adjoining the pantry, where the milkman put the milk, in bottles of course.
This was late 1940s. We got a summer place on an island a few years later, and up there an ice boat came by to deliver ice for the ice box (no AC power). It was cut from Lake Huron in the winter with big saws and stored in this ice house filled with sawdust, at a resort on a nearby island, all summer. As a kid, I always marvelled that it didn't melt.
Regards,
Oh Wow, Alan.....forgot all about the insulated milk cabinet!! Ours was attached to the "Summer Kitchen" just off the regular kitchen.
We had a similar background! I grew up in town, but in the late 40s we started looking for a place in the boonies. And moved to "The Lake" when(as I like to say)"When outboard motors were finally reliable enough for one to take up water skiing" We were blessed with AC power(most of the time)and the only ice we needed was on the lake in winter for skating; it thawed completely by May
But then we went swimming and skiing
Where I grew up in Michigan, we always had 7 digit phone numbers(or at least by the 40s)but my Aunt in Illinois had a two letter prefix followed by a four digit number(Although having seen the operators switchboard on a number of occasions-another Uncle dated the phone operator for a time-I don't believe there were more than about 150 to 250 plugs being used)
The glory about taking a trip down the nostalgia path is that we almost never remember the bad times, and only relive the good.
It's jolly Fun.
Rich.
When I was an infant (Detroit, MI), I can remember my folks making calls by picking up the phone and telling the operator the number they wanted. No dial.
When we moved to Ohio, dialing was possible, but each number had an exchange (ours was Trinity), and you dialed the first two letters plus a "1," then the number. Our number was TR-1-6996. Many years later they just dropped the exchange, and it's letters, and went with the numbers they represented. Our number became 871-6996.
And yes, we got many anonymous kid calls telling us we had an obscene phone number. I LOVED it! It was cool having a "dirty" phone number.
Our insulated milk box was a portable one that sat on the back porch where the milkman would leave the milk.
I remember, in Detroit, that so many things were delivered to the house; the baker delivered bread and bakery items, milk of course, I remember knife sharpeners would push their honing wheel down our street, and a tinsmith would repair pots and pans. And, wonder of wonders, if you got sick, the doctor came to your house. No waiting then. It seems that all progress comes with a price.
I also fondly remember when everybody had a paper burner in their back yard where they burned waste paper. No identity theft back then. And one of my fondest memories was of sunny, crisp October days, when everyone raked their leaves down to the curb and burned them. The air was full of the wonderful smell of burning leaves. (I know! I know! Neither of the above was friendly to the environment, but they made life easier, and considerably more pleasant).
I am also glad that I was able to ride my bike with the wind in my hair. I was a proficient "no hands" rider. I could ride my bike from school to home, 4 and 1/2 blocks, without ever touching the handlebars, AROUND CORNERS!
In reply to:
We always had refrigerators but I remember milk being delivered by a horse-drawn wagon.
I might be mistaken but aren't there areas in southern Ontario where you can still get that service? Seemed to me some people pay big money for it.
Hi Jack!!
Ours was temple-2-3870, then we moved to the lake and it became empire-3-oo32
I couldn't tell you what our number was at the old house just one year ago, but my Wifes next door neighbor back in 67 was em-3-5624.
Isn't it funny how memory works?
Or dosen't work
(Wow-your neighborhood sounded like our neighborhood-cool)
Close.. My movie going stated in the early 50's.. But my dad was also a projectionist.. He got his start in Ill, then did his time with WW2 and Korea.. We all moved to So Cal, and settled in O'side.. Read: Camp Pendleton..
The trick was, when the movie we wanted to was playing at the theater he worked at, we got in for FREE ! There was the Star, the Crest, and the (Jar Heads only) Palomar..
And, along with the old fuzzy black and white sets, we were one of the 1st in the neighborhood to have a COLOR ! Sweet..
Man, was I in that big a hurry last night ? haha.. Should have been Alan... Tied in with his latest new letter..
Yeah.. I called it an Ice Box for years.. My grandmother hung her clothes out to dry, and had those long poles to hold up the line to keep the sheets off the ground..
Getting ready for dinner could be quite an experiance.. Like, wacking the head off the chicken ! And yes, if they flopped out of your hands, the body would run off !!! If I'm lying, I'm dying.. Funnest damn thing you ever saw..
Don't forget the coal shoots.. How black can a kid get ? hahaha...
I still have a scar above my left eyebrow, where my gramps nailed me with the coal shovel.. I walked up behind him as he stoked the furnace.. He swung around, BAMM !!
Oh yeah, the car.. I had a brother and a sister.. The cars back then were so big, you could have a three ring circus going on, and still be out of reach of your dad.. We kids would fight to be the one that got to lay up on the rear seat deck.. At night, it was like you own personal observatory ! Oh, I'm sorry.. For those of you that might not be aware, there are stars that come out at night.. Used to be, you could see them from anywhere.. Now, you're doing good to see the moon, what with all the big city lights and all the smog.. It's a shame..
Wow....and the coincidences keep right on coming....my Dad was a projectionist....in Illinois too, at the "Roxy" in Toluca, Ill. is that cool or what!
We were one of the first in our neighborhood to get a B&W TV, but color had to wait til we got a really good longrange rotatable antenna. Even all(I didn't give this a thought til just now)but even all our 16mm movies were in B&W, they were mostly "talkies" but they were all in black and white!
Trivia for all you youngfolks, and this is startling, but in those days Telephone came in over a cable, and Television was sent over the air like a one way cell phone. But, unlike a cell phone, we didn't have to pay for it.
unless you count the four minutes of comercials we had to endure per each half hour
I think you'll agree, but I believe movies were almost more fun in the old days. You could make a day or evening of it, what with an "A" feature, a "B" movie, a cartoon, a serial, a newsreel, exciting coming events, nobody to chase you out til closing time, and NO COMERCIALS
Rich.
Holy cow..... You guys must be fartin dust by now.
Ah yeah, Grandma doing laundry! She used to use only water from the rain barrel unless it were an emergency-like no rain. And yup, the long poles were an absolute requirement!
I think I mentioned, but my Aunt had a farm and we used to visit quite often for months at a time in the summer when I was a wee little guy(I used to sleep on the floor in the back seat of the car going down, my little brother got the rear seat deck cause he was just a little smaller than I and if he fell off would do the lesser damage)but my aunt asked me one morning which chicken I thought was the best, I answered, and still feel guilty for causing the early demise of that poor little foul. When the ax, the stump and that chicken neck got together at the same time, it was the darndest thing I ever saw. I thought it was chasing me even if it could no longer see. It ran in my direction for just an instant, and I ran in the other just as fast as I could and never picked out another chicken dinner
ever!
Speaking of coal shutes, yup, we had one. We only had a coal furnace for a few years after I was born, so I thankfully don't have any unpleasant memories-other than hearing one of the neighbors telling my Mom that the new gas furnace, while requiring no trips to the bunker in the middle of the night; may well be the end of the entire neighborhood when the gas furnace, new technology that it was, blows up some cold winters night. It, thankfully, never did.
But, oh yeah......the stars you could see from that farm in the 40s
Rich.
Hey bray! Actually were just kids too......I'm not even 61 yet!
Well......not for another two weeks yet, that is!
Heh Heh. The coal chute reminds me of the coal burning furnace that had the habit of going out at the worst times. And that reminds me of the movie "A Christmas Story" where the father (played by Darren McGavin) could be heard in the basement enthusiastically cursing the coal burning furnace. I have vivid memories of my father, a very gentlemanly man who could curse a blue streak, doing the very same thing.
In fact, that movie has a ton of things that echo my childhood.
In reply to:
In fact, that movie has a ton of things that echo my childhood
Does that mean you almost shot your eye out with a Red Ryder or that you stuck your tongue to a metal pole in the winter?
I don't know how close I came to shooting my eye out with the Red Ryder BB gun I inherited from my older brother, but I have distinctly painful, memories of my lower lip sticking to the metal railing of a bridge over the creek near my home. I just ripped that sucker right off that railing................and regretted it for days!
LOL, Jack your avatar fit's you to a 'T' and 'A Christmas Story' what a classic!
LOL! Old guy; old sound system!
In reply to:
old sound system!
Naaahhh... I'll bet vinyl on that thing sounds better than CDs, with their cold, sterile....oh, never mind. I'm just gonna get myself in trouble and take things further OT....!
Oh man, my BB gun ! My dad gave me a 'used' Red Ryder for my 11 birthday.. Prob got it from a friend of his, who's own kid had shot himself in the eye !?! Haaaa
Never shot myself, but nailed my sister, my brother, their friends, my friends, and countless neighborhood dogs and cats ! We even had small scale wars, with every kind of bb gun you can imagine.. Handing out 'ribbons' made of painted up clothes pins for those that didn't duck fast enough ! hahah.. Remember, we were all military brats by then.. With tons of surplus gear.. Sweeeeet.. We even had our own medic..
O'side was different back then.. No one would give two looks to a bunch of kids walking down the sreet loaded to the teeth with bb guns, back packs, canteens, flags, etc..
That movie is one of my ALL TIME fav's.. And yes, I still have my Red Ryder.. It's hanging on the wall, in the big room, just off the home theater room.. I love seeing the looks on the faces of folks our age when they come over for a visit the 1st time.. Talk bout a conversation starter..
Oh, and yeah, I was one of those that learns by doin.. Like sticking MY tounge to the icetray ? Gotta luv it.. My sister had to pour water over it to get me unstuck.. (She was 2 yrs older, so she knew bout those kinda things).. Funny, now that I think about it, she managed to pour the whole pitcher on my head ? Hmmmmmmm.. I think it's time to pay a little visit to my dear sweet sis...
Phooie!!.......
.....I no longer have either my Red Ryder, OR my Daisy Eagle(With real 2X Scope) They were both at my parents house in the garage.....and then they weren't.....RATS
Or my Crossman B-B pistol that I shot the lamp above the TV during "Shock Theater" on TV, one Saterday night!
Yup, times were different! I used to take my Red Ryder into the local grocery store and stand it up on the counter like I saw the "Rifleman" do in the saloon in his TV show, and nothing was ever said about it, it was perfectly "normal"
I was looking through a magazine recently and there it was: The Leg Lamp!!!! remember that part of the movie?
This has gone from "artifact" to "old fart"!!!
It's funny... we were always shooting each other with BB guns, and picking them out of our legs, but nobody I knew ever lost an eye. It's astounding in hindsight...
We always wore diving masks and goggles and leather jackets and the "Old Style" levis with denim as thick as the sail cloth of the day. Gloves were optional, as were football helmits. We played mostly in the swamp at the north east end of the lake around the tree that we used to swing out over the water from. The muck was deep there, but none of us ever drowned if we slipped from the rope, which happened a lot, mostly for fun, but our Moms' didn't find it funny, cause laundry was more of a chore then.
My parents weren't big TV watchers, so we had a black and white console TV with rabit ears until 1977. Then, Whoo-Hoo, we got colour AND a proper antenna with rotor!
Our first stereo was a "Hi-Fi" - a big wooden coffin with built-in speakers. The lid would open to reveal the turntable, tuner, & amp. Ours was the "Deluxe" model with aux inputs on the back!
By the mid 80's, my parents went through a sort of "electronics awakening", and we were the first people I knew to get this new "Dolby Surround Sound". It was the first generation designed to work with a HiFi VCR - not even "ProLogic". No center chanel, no sub, just 2 rear speakers. And at that time, that's what they were told - put them as far back as possible.