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“I didn't realize how old the machines were,” I later observed to Clare.

“Old!” she responded gloomily. “They're antediluvian. It makes me shudder to put film through them. Christ! If only we could get far enough ahead around here to buy some decent equipment. I pray for the day.”

But she was talking about thousands of dollars, and by then I knew The Classic limped along from week to week on a bank account that never rose above three low figures. For months at a time, it was all Clare could do to cover the rent and the bills. “I don't know which I'm more ashamed of,” she confessed, “Sharkey or his machines.”

Sharkey, on the other hand, loved his machines, and he loved teaching about them. All the more so since he'd built them with his bare hands from shreds and patches of discarded gear. On its mechanical side as in everything else, The Classic was a seat-of-the-pants operation, making do with secondhand and cast-off equipment, some of it just inches above the level of junk. Even my untutored eye could tell as much. But Sharkey took specific pride in the age of his projectors and the pedigree of their every salvaged part. The big, battered lamp boxes, for example. They bore a boldly scripted logo on their side whose paint had long since worn away; but the raised metal letters could still be made out. “See that,” Sharkey announced to his gawking apprentice.
“Peerless.
Best brand there ever was. These honeys have seen duty in all the finest movie houses in L.A. Opened the old Pantages downtown. Chaplin, Valentino, Clara Bow—they all traveled through that box first run. Nobody's improved on Peerless in the last thirty-five years. Look at the weight of that metal. That's industrial-strength steel. Battleship quality.”

Clinging precariously to the front of each superannuated lamp box and emitting a slow, steady drip of oil that spattered on newspapers Sharkey had spread beneath was a piece of machinery called the picture head. Sharkey's version was a jerry-built package of recycled gears, shutters, reels, and rollers. This I learned was the projector's principal muscular organ; its function was to marry each frame of the advancing film for a risky split second to the hotly concentrated blaze of projected light that gave the passing pictures their moment of life. Both heads bore the brand name Simplex, and their vintage was also antique. “Early thirties,” Sharkey told me. “These date back to the opening of Grauman's Chinese. Best quality of the day. I must've rebuilt these babies down to the last screw. But I've got them tuned to perfection. Sure, they need a lot of help; but there's history in those gears. That makes a difference. You know, like they say with
a Stradivarius: the wood remembers. Well, metal has its memories, believe me. I wouldn't trade Simplex here for anybody's so-called top of the line. Tacky—that's what they're building these days. These machines got faith in themselves; they were built with conviction. Back when the U.S.A. was king of the movie mountain. Don't be fooled by appearances. The way Dotty and Lilly handle film is a love affair. They just caress it along its way.”

Dotty and Lilly were the pet names Sharkey had given his machines—after the Gish sisters. “But,” I observed, “they do seem to chew up the film quite a bit.”

“Bah!” Sharkey answered, looking wounded. “That's not their fault. It's the state of the film stock we get sent. Lots of it is scrap condition, ready for the garbage can. Torn sprockets, bad splices … the head can't get a grip on material like that. Look here.”

He took me to the rewind table, where he was transferring that night's movie from its packing reel. This, as I learned, had to be done with each reel of every movie before it could be shown and then done again before the film could be returned to the distributor. As he went about the chore, Sharkey's trained eye would spot the breaks and burns and tears that might catch in the machine. These he would conscientiously repair—as many as a few dozen in any one film—making expert cuts and splices, so that he usually sent the movie back looking better than when it arrived. He cranked through the reel he was working on that evening, showing me the numerous trouble spots he'd have to patch. “Try running tenth-rate stock like that through a new machine; it'd be eaten alive. Believe me, old Simplex here has got a surgeon's touch.”

Working with such old, eccentric equipment presented all sorts of problems for the neophyte projectionist. Everything seemed to require special handling. “What you're learning on these machines,” Sharkey told me as if it were a rare honor, “you won't be able to transfer to another projector in the whole world. See, these machines got personality. You have to run them with charm.” And so Sharkey did. On the job, he kept a steady flow of affectionate chatter going, as if he were coaxing along a team of aged thoroughbreds who, despite their faltering pace, retained the dignity of better days.

As I came to know Dotty and Lilly better, I developed a reasonable respect for the old girls' mechanical agility. Even more, there was one thing about them that was authentically amazing—at least to my amateur eye, a secret they kept hidden from sight in their inner
sanctum. It was their light source. I'd always thought projectors simply used a very bright bulb. That was in fact true of The Classic's sixteen-millimeter machine. It was also a relic of the distant past, used when nothing but sixteen-millimeter prints could be ordered. But the thirty-five-millimeter projectors were another story. It was only when we wheeled them into position, like the big guns of our arsenal, that Sharkey believed we were showing
real
movies; thirty-five-millimeter film needed far more brightness than any bulb could produce in order to drive its image-bearing beams across the length of even a small movie house like The Classic and illuminate the screen with the vividness filmmakers expected for their work. In these machines, the light came from a living flame so savagely bright that the naked eye must never be exposed to it. The carbon arc that burned inside the Peerless lamp box could only be viewed through a tiny panel of welder's glass. “There's an angry jinni in there,” Sharkey warned me. “And he's burning like all hellfire. Give him the chance and he'll singe a hole in your eye.”

It was the intense heat of the arc light that accounted for the two huge serpentine ducts that rose from the projectors and traveled up through the ceiling toward the nearest window somewhere on the floor above. But the ducts were so turned upon themselves, the fans within them so dust-laden and decrepit, that the venting they achieved was minimal at best. Whenever the thirty-five-millimeter machines were in use, the projection booth became a sweatbox filled with the odor of ozone. Before each reel of film could be shown on these machines, it was the projectionist's job to relight and adjust the thin stick of carbon that produced this small, fierce flame—then to replace each stick as it rapidly consumed itself in the act of sacrificial illumination. “Sticks cost twenty bucks a pop,” Sharkey told me. “So we burn 'em down as short as we can get away with. It's a major expense for us.”

The carbon arc, so deeply sequestered in its protective shelter, teased my imagination. It was like some sacred presence ensconced in its tabernacle, the innermost mystery of the darkened temple, never to be looked upon by mortal eyes. Unfortunately, The Classic's antiquated equipment couldn't offer that enchanted presence the respect it deserved. Instead, the carbon fire in one of the projectors (it was Dotty) had become the prisoner of a ludicrous Rube Goldberg hookup. Because of the low ceiling and descending slope of the basement
that was The Classic's auditorium, the projectors had to be mounted high and then tilted sharply forward at the rear of the room. This tilt was too steep for the waning strength of the spring that was designed to steadily advance Dotty's carbon rod as it burned down. And if the rod didn't advance as it burned, it would cool, grow dimmer, flicker, and finally go out—a common problem at The Classic. For such an ancient machine, Sharkey had never been able to find a spring with the right tension. So with a sort of spaced-out inspiration, he'd rigged up an ingenious little device that combined a lever, a pulley, a rocker arm, and a counterweight that would (supposedly) tug the carbon rod forward at just the right pace. But Sharkey had never been able to get the counterweight, which was simply a hook carrying miscellaneous nuts and washers, quite right. That forced him to spend a good deal of each screening adding weighted objects to the hook (or removing them), hoping someday to hit upon exactly the proper combination.

I recall that when Clare took over in the booth, it was this crazy task that most frazzled her; she had to resort to constant manual adjustments. Sharkey, on the other hand, found the problem an endless amusement. He'd even invented a playful little superstition about it. “Someday, when I find just the right weight, that's gonna be my lucky charm. And it's gonna give me three wishes.”

“And what will they be?” I asked.

“Well, the
first
one will be to get out of this cellblock of a basement.”

Which raised a question. “Why
are
we in the basement, Sharkey?” I asked. There was, after all, an abandoned auditorium of generous dimensions just one floor above our heads. And here we were down below, struggling to make do with a diminutive theater and a booth the size of a storeroom, which indeed is what it had originally been.

“That wasn't the plan,” Sharkey explained. “At least it wasn't the plan to
stay
in the basement. Plan was to start here, make a small fortune, take over the whole building, rebuild upstairs, become a glorious artistic-commercial success grounded in the sophisticated good taste of the great American public. Boy, talk about having one's head up one's ass, I don't know where we got that little fantasy from. Maybe we were blowing too much grass. Have you seen upstairs?”

I'd managed to get a glimpse or two while I worked with Clare in her tiny office, which was as much of the upper stories as she had
access to. Mostly the place was locked off or boarded up; what could be seen was dimly lit at best and shrouded in cobwebs. A nice interior for a spooky movie.

“It was once a true cinematic emporium,” Sharkey went on. “Dates back to 1929. Guess what it was called? The Cinema Ritz. A true beauty of the period, all gilt and curlicues. But, it should have been named the Titanic.”

“Why?”

“It was meant to be one of the first all-sound houses. Best equipment money could buy. The night it opened, the maiden voyage—disaster.”

“What happened?”

Sharkey laid his hand on a stack of film canisters in one corner of the booth. It was the movie we would be screening that night:
Nothing Sacred,
part of a William Wellman festival.
“That's
what happened. Ka-plooey!”

I didn't understand.

“Nitrate film. All the old movies are on nitrate. Like this one we're showing. Nitrate is a killer. You didn't know that?”

At the time, I didn't.

“Well then, let me tell you the projectionist's basic facts of life—and death. There's nitrate and there's safety film. Everything up to postwar is nitrate. And, oh! that nitrate is a son of a bitch. That's what we got here tonight in these cans. And it might as well be high-octane gasoline. If it even gets near an open flame, bam!”

“But there's an open flame in the projector.”

“Right. But properly shielded and surrounded by safeguards—so we hope. That's why I wouldn't trust anything but the old Peerless. It was built for the danger. You didn't know you were taking your life in your hands every time you screened one of the old film classics, eh? Well, you are. That's why I'm always so nerved up when we're showing them. Probably you noticed.”

I hadn't. If anything, Sharkey always seemed blissfully laid back and unflappable in the booth. I told him so.

“That's because I burn some weed ahead of time. Just the right amount to keep me steady. If you feel the need, let me know.”

Suddenly I felt more menaced in the booth than ever before.

“Anyway,” Sharkey continued, “that's why we're working in this concrete bunker down here. You see all the asbestos on the ceiling, and the steel door? The fire chief is very particular about people like
us. He lays down lots of rules. We just barely meet them. Actually, not quite. The ventilation's lousy, as you've doubtless noticed. But that only affects the health of the projectionist, so what the hell, says Miss Swann, the management.”

“How bad was the damage upstairs, back in twenty-nine?”

“Gutted the whole projection booth and most of the balcony. Killed three people including the projectionist. So the whole upper rear of the place was boarded over. Ceiling too. It's supposed to be an Art Deco marvel: murals, lights, bas-relief. It got smoke-damaged from end to end. Nobody ever did the repairs. The old Ritz was just too elegant for anyone to restore. Place was dirt cheap to get. That's how come the old lady and me (don't tell Clare I called her that, okay?) could afford the rent. Idea was: we start in this little dungeon down here, save up, then buy the whole place and renovate. Well, it's five thousand plus bucks' worth of fixing just to rebuild the booth to code. Balcony's another five, six grand. Ceiling's another three, four, five. Floor needs redoing. Cleaning and patching and painting. You get the picture. A major capital investment. As it is, we can hardly keep this sinkhole going with hungry peons on the job—meaning you and me.”

And slave labor it was, of the most relentless kind. I'd always imagined that projectionists had a soft touch. They simply pushed a button, then spent the rest of the evening enjoying the movie or reading a book, maybe stepping out for coffee and conversation. I couldn't have been more wrong. There was always something needing to be done—reels to be changed, the carbon to be lit, the lens to be adjusted, film to be rewound, a part to be oiled—and it all had to be done to the imperious rhythm of the projectors, in the fifteen- to-twenty-minute interval allowed by the reel being shown. For the month or more I spent with Sharkey learning the trade, we found little time for idle conversation, except for the hour or so before the program started or after it ended. Then, while we packed or unpacked film, set up or finished off for the evening, we had the chance to kibitz. Not that I expected to have much to talk about with Sharkey. Clare had convinced me that he was a cross between a boob and a boor. Certainly whenever he showed up drunk or strung out, which was most of the time, he could be an insufferable dolt. But having promised Clare he would train me, he went about it as an act of conscience, remaining clearheaded and diligent, perhaps out of some stubborn pride in his craft. He turned out to be a first-rate mentor.