I’m an IMAX projectionist. Here’s what running Oppenheimer was like during the Barbenheimer phenomenon
Running Oppenheimer felt monumental enough. Then I saw Barbenheimer make an even bigger impact
Film Features Oppenheimer
It’s astonishing that Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan’s three-hour biopic about the scientist who helped create the Atomic Bomb, raked in almost $1 billion at the box office and became the third highest-grossing film of 2023. But perhaps more remarkable is the role the film played in the cultural phenomenon known as Barbenheimer, which drove the U.S. box office to a post-pandemic record last year—a feat I bore witness to as an IMAX projectionist at the most iconic movie theater in the world, Hollywood’s TCL Chinese Theatre.
I was one of only 50 projectionists worldwide recruited by IMAX to show Oppenheimer in 1570 IMAX print, spending five weeks in a darkened, temporary makeshift projection booth at the Chinese Theatre. While the theater regularly runs movies in IMAX, this special print run, which was only available in 30 theaters across the globe, required something a little different. Because there wasn’t room to house the old-school IMAX projection system needed to run the print in the theater’s main projection booth upstairs, construction workers removed around 50 seats in the back of the auditorium’s main floor to make room for what amounted to a large plywood box covered in black drapes.
I sat inside the box with its bare, wooden beams and walls with gray soundproofing insulation. The temporary booth was built around the projection system, and there was just enough room for my projectionist partner and me to move comfortably around it. We ran four shows a day, eventually adding 6 a.m. shows on the weekends because tickets kept selling out. We spent hours in that booth operating an old IMAX SR projector the size of one of those tiny Smart cars you see driving around. Behind the projector, a massive Quick Turn Reel Unit with two large metal platters would spin 11 miles of 70mm, 15-perf film into it at six feet a second, feeding through an obstacle course of outstretched metal arms and plastic rollers. The film alone weighed 600 pounds. It sounded like a constant barrage of machine gun fire.
Before running Oppenheimer, it had been 15 years since I had worked in an IMAX projection booth, having left the industry behind to begin my writing career. When I left in 2008, print film was on its way out, and within a couple of years, IMAX digital would take over, a system that no longer required full-time projectionists since movies could, for the most part, simply be downloaded and left unmonitored.
Being an IMAX projectionist back in the days of print film was something of an art form, requiring attention to detail, patience, and a high tolerance for stress; something I’ve still yet to perfect. While running digital film certainly comes with its own set of special skills and stressors, the 70mm print format meant hours of splicing prints together by hand, constant equipment maintenance, and if a film crash occurred, the perseverance to repair it, which sometimes meant spending the night in the booth. If you’ve ever witnessed a high-speed train careening off the rails, you might have an idea of what a film crash sounds like, the result being, at its worst, hundreds of frames of film destroyed, a damaged projector, and thousands of dollars down the drain.
Ask any IMAX projectionist and they will tell you that this scenario is what would keep us up at night. Never would I have imagined being back in the world of IMAX, running print films again. Yet, there I was, operating equipment that once was considered outdated technology, in the most famous movie theater in the world. Brought out of retirement, this almost forgotten technology was now the subject of hundreds of news stories, blog posts, and online videos praising the return of print film. It was like living in some sort of alternate reality. I likened myself to the old gunslinger trope of being forced out of retirement for one last ride.
When I first arrived, the excitement of living in Hollywood for five weeks was almost overwhelming; a place that had been mythologized by pop culture as the shining beacon of the entertainment industry. Like many people who had never been to Hollywood before, I naively expected to see celebrity sightings, red-carpet premieres, and movies being made all over the city. Then, for very good reasons, the SAG-AFTA strike happened, and Hollywood, in many ways, became a celebrity ghost town.
Once we started running Oppenheimer, however, we became the celebrities. Booth tours and media interviews became routine. News stories boasting sold-out crowds, box office records being broken, and the re-emergence of print film were everywhere online. Some industry insiders likened it to the comeback of vinyl. YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok videos featured IMAX projection systems in action, highlighting the gigantic Oppenheimer print spinning on the reel units and the special orange reel extensions that were made because the film platters weren’t big enough to hold Nolan’s three-hour epic. I was even featured in The New York Times.
Moviegoers would ask to see the booth, and it seemed like every day my fellow projectionist Pat and I would field questions and pose for photos. We would talk to movie fans who traveled up to 1,400 miles to see Oppenheimer in print format. Many had seen it multiple times. There were young filmmakers, fresh out of film school who had never seen a print film before and were inspired to take advantage of the format in their future films. A young boy no older than 10, accompanied by his father, loved the film and was in awe of our booth setup. “He wants to be a scientist,” his father told me.
All of the IMAX projectionists running Oppenheimer kept in touch with each other using WhatsApp. What was meant for technical support quickly filled with stories like these, along with screenshots of Reddit posts about people willing to pay hundreds of dollars for an Oppenheimer movie ticket because every showing was sold out, and how attendees were desperate to get their hands on the free promotional film strips given away at select screenings. Nolan acolytes would brag about seeing the film in print, and lament about the superiority of seeing the film the way it was meant to be seen since it was shot with IMAX 65mm 15-perf film cameras. There was a feeling among all of us, however, that something much bigger was going on in the cultural zeitgeist than simply everyone’s love of Oppenheimer.
Looking down from the projection port glass window, I remember the first time I started seeing small groups of women dressed in lavish gowns in varying shades of pink, high heels, and assorted sparkling accessories like purses, gloves, hats, and even tiaras. I saw men wearing tuxedoes, pink muscle shirts, beach shorts, and visors; unusual attire to wear to a serious biopic about the Manhattan Project. I assumed a movie premiere or some glitzy-themed party was going on somewhere else in town. But while running the film to consistently sold-out crowds day after day, I saw the theater quickly being taken over by a sea of pink, with people dancing and taking selfies before each show started, having the time of their lives.
While the print run of Oppenheimer was supposedly a film experience for those who considered themselves cinephiles, it had become something else entirely, thanks to the simultaneous release of Barbie. It was a truly shared experience among theater patrons like nothing I’ve ever seen, this mishmash of moviegoers who would spend the day at the cinema, watching Barbie first, then Oppenheimer, or vice versa. It reminded me of the era of the “double feature,” when people would spend their entire afternoons at the theater to see two movies for the price of one, excited for the chance to forget about the realities of the world for hours on end.
In the case of Barbenheimer, however, audiences made an event out of it, a grassroots campaign highlighting the absurdity of seeing two different genres of films, one right after the other, a mish-mash of light, bubbly fun coupled with inherent doom. Combine that with IMAX’s genius marketing plan of touting the nostalgia for print film, that Oppenheimer was the longest film in IMAX history, and the efforts it took to make it happen, and you’ve got a perfect storm of cinema delight. Barbenheimer gave people a reason to go to the movies, gifting them a cinematic experience that had not been embraced since before the pandemic, arguably with Marvel’s Avengers: Endgame in 2019. It delivered the promise that moviegoing could once again be as magical as Nicole Kidman’s unintentionally hilarious AMC ad claims it could be.
By the end of its initial run in September 2023, Oppenheimer had become the highest-grossing movie in the history of the TCL Chinese Theatre. Both Oppenheimer and Barbie have scored big so far this awards season, and are expected to continue that trend during the Oscars on March 10. While it’s still early in the year, anticipation is high as to what this year’s summer movie season holds, and if the magic of Barbenheimer can be repeated. The release of Dune: Part Two on March 1 will be the first movie tentpole that will offer a glimpse of what the rest of 2024 could look like, with Kung Fu Panda 4 coming out on March 8, Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire on March 29, Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire on April 12, and Deadpool 3, the only Marvel movie being released this year, on July 26. I’m no psychic, but I’m willing to bet while these movies will most likely be box-office successes, none of them will come close to being as memorable as Barbenheimer.
As for me, I’ll be flying from my hometown of Chattanooga, Tennessee, back to the TCL Chinese Theatre to run Dune: Part Two in IMAX print format. If you’re at the Chinese, come by and say hello.
47 Comments
I’m a chocolate bar. Break off bits of me and enjoy me all day!
This was a great read! Please more stories like this AVClub, this was a lovely and interesting article.
Great piece. I tried to see it with my sons (they bought the tickets three weeks in advance). But thanks to the heat in Dallas and rolling brown out, the power went out about 45 minutes into the movie. Even though it came back after ~10 minutes, a power outage seems to be similar to a crash for a projector. We were told they couldn’t restart the movie because they would have to restart from the beginning (apparently the video and audio needed to be synced at the very beginning of the film) and there was another showing after ours.We ended up watching it in digital at another theatre. Not quite the same experience, but memorable.
I wonder what percentage of American movie theaters can even play movies on physical film anymore? It has to be under 10%.
It was already under 10% ten years ago (did some Googling and found a 2013 article saying “92% of screens are now digital”) so it’s probably down below 2% or even 1% by now. All that’s left are these few IMAX screens, the “indie/arthouse” niche of chains like Alamo Drafthouse, and college auditoriums doing one-off screenings of the old classics
If it’s an independent theater that has been around for a while, there’s a very good chance that they have a projector in use or in storage. Some large chains in major metros keep film projectors around for events like these. There’s an AMC near me that plays just about every film that releases in 70mm on a film projector.I think at least 10% of theaters could project on film, the problem is theaters don’t necessarily have the will to do so. As shown in the article, they have to hire people that can run and maintain a film projector and more things can go wrong compared to digital. The smaller PACCAR IMAX in Seattle still has their 70mm IMAX projector, and even installed an expensive rail system to switch back and forth with the digital projector, but it hasn’t been used in a very long time.
The Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago used to project IMAX films in their Omnimax theater (now “Giant Dome” due to copyrights) and the projection machine was on display, since it was a science museum. It truly was huge and the film reels were equally impressive, even just for 45 minute documentary films. I saw Rolling Stones at the MAX there one evening and they had to have an intermission in the 90 minute movie to allow them to change the reels.Now it is digital and they don’t even bother to display the projection room.
I remember when they built the Henry Crown Space center addition at MSI. As a kid who loved space and dreamed of being an astronaut, it was the best. And that IMAX screen was amazing. Now that area feels like a no mans land that a lot of people don’t even realize is in that Museum(which, to be fair, is because that Museum is huge and there is a lot more to see these days, like the huge underground area for the U-505). I honestly can’t remember the last time I saw an IMAX movie there and we are MSI members
That’s the thing that sucks about digital: it’s all just anonymous, boring black boxes. All the stuff is done by lines of code, cranked out by some anonymous techbro in a basement somewhere. You get the box. You plug it in. You turn it on. It does stuff. Here endeth your interaction with the device. I hope, if there’s one good thing that comes out of Oppenheimer its the resurgence of film.For the past ten years, film’s been in that dangerous limbo zone where it’s well, not quite dead, but everyone assumes it will be, so all the makers start cutting back…then everyone wants to try it, and people without prior photographic baggage start buying it up, then momentum builds to stop its death.I’m…I’m sure you’ve got a medical term for it.I think a lot of kids are missing the tactility of stuff like film cameras, record players, cassettes. And the concept of ownership – actually, personal, physical control over both a medium and a its tools. Lomography’s taken off, and old film cameras, especially 90s point-and-shoot compacts and 70s compact RFs, go gangbusters, as do old manual SLRs. Pentax is building a new film camera. Granted, that’s Pentax, and Pentax is absolutely batshit insane and used by crazies who refer to themselves in the third person like The Pete Murray Darling Basin Authority, but they’re building one. From scratch. Not a remake of a classic, not something that Shenzhen Opto-Mechanical Factory #15 cranks out for $1.20/unit for a thousand unit order and are willing to slap the Pentax badge on for an extra $0.06.Full manual, minimal electronics, save for the light meter. The ol’ stroke-’n’-crank for winding on. Fixed focus.They’re doing it, they say, because they want to preserve the engineering skills for cogs and wheels, but there’s gotta be a market for it else they wouldn’t do it. (Granted, they ain’t been good at judging these things, but still.)Harman, makers of Ilford black-and-white film, came out with a new colour film last year. And I mean new new – sure, a lot stuff has been sold rebranded (there’s been a lot of cine stock sold as still film, and Kodak’s been keeping its head above water by cranking out badge-engineered stock for dozens of sellers). They’ve never made colour film before, but they did it. From scratch. A new formula, new dyes, new base.Kodak made a goddamn new Super 8 camera that’s…hideously, pointlessly expensive, but I’ll give them credit. Ironically, after all the other shit they tried, they came back to film. It was so gratifying to read that there’re film studies kids who wanted a tour of his booth, who’d never seen film before. I guarantee at least one of them is hitting up eBay for a vintage Bolex or Krasnogorsk.
….how in the hell did nuAVClub actually manage to get an actual real deal classic AVClub theme-like article??? Did someone on the inside sneak it through???Charles, great story thank you for sharing (and I hope you got paid!). I am going to look up the NYT article you referenced. I subscribe but I don’t recall seeing it.
A headline photo of the projectionists would be much prefereable to a still photo from the movie. If you find one please share.
Here ya go, amiga. Charlie, look, if I may say so, 90s as fuck. Loading Oppenheimer – note the orange reel extensions he mentioned in the text.
Well done! I had trouble finding anything useful. I hope folks enjoy this.Talk about being in the belly of the beast, lol.
A bloke called Yves Leibovitz put this POV video up in 2020 – years before Oppenheimer – of him loading that Captain America dog film:
It’s literally a whole room.That dog film is only 45min long, but you can see, that’s still a huge load of film. Those crates he walks past in the beginning are the film “cans”.Also, as a stills photographer, it freaks me out that they’re so cavalier with the stuff because it doesn’t matter as much for movies…
That was amazing and I am now dizzy af. I can’t believe the film doesn’t have fingerprints all over it.I read that early projectors were based on the stucture of the sewing maching, and now I can see it. Wheels, winders, levers, guides.Cool.
Yeah, it doesn’t matter so much for cine film, because you’re only seeing a scratch or print for 1/24th of a second. But on still…that’s the only frame you’ve got. So much mechanical stuff started out from sewing machines and looms, because apparently walking around in the nuddy was still frowned upon in the 19th century, so sewing machines were a great place to get some solid mech eng skills going, and then applying them elsewhere. Husqvarna, Toyota, Mazda, Suzuki, Tikka…Lotsa little fiddly bits having to move in and out of other fiddly bits. Unlike…pretty much every other industry…sewing was not something that could be sped up by throwing more peasants at the problem, as was tradition. There’s only some many women with needles you can shove around a petticoat before they get in each other’s way, and despite what Beatrix Potter said mice are not a viable option.Sewing machines. The ur-text of the precision mechanical world.
I hope you write elsewhere. I’m working on that myself.Right now it’s a lot of poetry on my FB page. I’ve got some scores to settle and, hey, it’s just a poem, lol.
I do, occasionally, but I’ve been worried about pitching stuff to the new editor at the place I write for because…eh. We don’t get on as well as I did with the old editor. The new editor…owns horses and is married to a coder who works from home in regional Australia. Lifestyle rural, y’know? Although she is actually from the country. I think she may be aware of the fact that I don’t trust or like horses since the fucking things have tried to kill me on numerous occasions. (It’s kinda a bummer when your essentially trust a thousand-pound quadruped over you when it comes to your own safety, in regards to not letting his kids have motorbikes.)Plus she doesn’t get my sense of humour. The last one did (and the last one was also Chinese-Australian, and was fascinated by the fact I grew up in the country). Right now it’s a lot of poetry on my FB page. I’ve got some scores to settle and, hey, it’s just a poem, lol.Do it! Enter some competitions, find a magazine or journal that publishes poetry. Try not to, if you can, give it away for free.
What a coincidence! My sociopath sister still lives on the farm where I grew up. Her daughter and Big Banker husband built a house on my old stomping grounds and what is she all about? Horses. Guillermo del toro worked with them on Pans Labyrinth and he called them “perverted” and “psychopaths”. I have been kicked, bitten, tossed off, rolled over and scraped off by a low-hanging tree. I can’t stand those MFs. And I don’t what anyone says. They lack a prefrontal cortex and they’re idiots.
And the things they make them do at competitions and races are baarbaric. I don’t think I’d be cool with those horsey people either. I’ve published in a couple local magazines and I do public readings. It keeps me in “good trouble” lol
Lol, my ed just yesterday posted about how she spent $1000 on feed and care for one of her horses last month. She’s got five of the things. (I don’t think we ever spent more than about $400 on a whole horse.) And she’s still learning to ride.As they say, horse girls are just crazy cat ladies with money.Look, I guess, I don’t dislike her, I just I could, on some level, any level, just connect with her. I’m pretty damn good at that, but it’s like talking to a brick wall. You’d make a joke, or laugh, and if I had to write out what her reply was like, it’d be “…”. So far, she’s doing pretty well at avoiding what I loathe about any rural-oriented publication (turning it into a fucking safari-dress-and-sourdough wank), but I miss having it run by an actual, y’know, journo, and not someone who was some indie politician’s nonspecific comms flack in her twenties. Also, if pressured, I could probably still ride a nag. But, y’know, one that’s not fucked in the head.
I don’t know if she’s a crazy horse girl; just bored and rich (new money Bougie) and anti-social. I think most of it has to do with dominance and control. Her husband has ALL the money; I figure she has to dominate something – and make him pay for it all. I can actually say I would not want to be a fly on their wall.
When I read that Moss stopped being a projectionist in 2008, I also wondered if that was also thought that’s the period of AV Club writing he was for. Fucking great piece. Spanfeller, people like Moss still exist. There’s more to pop culture than limp-dick snark and warmed-over media releases.
Excellent article! AV Club needs more like this.
It is excellent, but would be much more excellente if some phones of the projection booth he described were included.
Photos? I agree.
I was interested in that, and it’s well-written.
Picked up Oppenheimer from Free Library Philadelphia last Wednesday. Haven’t watched it yet. Was #60 on waiting list. Took only 3 wks to access. FLP is very good city resource. I make donations to them.
Why DVD instead of VHS film? And did you also consider Free HD over the Internet?
Great stuff! What an interesting article—please more of this!I think one of the best things about the whole Barbenheimer phenomenon is that it was based around two original movies, rather than the endless parade of sequels we typically see in the summer. Hopefully this will encourage the tentpole machines to take a few more risks–not that an IP and director everyone knows were big risks, but still, it’s encouraging to see even the smallest risks taken anymore.
Barbie isn’t an original movie.
? I mention well-known IP, but it is 100% an original movie.
It’s an adaptation.
This feels more like a semantics issue, but whatever. If you consider an original story written around an existing toy (s) to be an adaptation then who am I to argue?
Don’t worry, you were very clear. It’s the other person who is arguing in bad faith and purely trolling (deviating from the point you wanted to make) for fun.And you are right – it is kind of refreshing. EDIT: who took that guy out of the greys? Look at their comment profile ffs
Even Judd Apatow says that guy’s full of shit!
I’m not trolling, and arguing a logical point that you can’t rebuke
Judd Apatow says you’re full of shit.
who?
When exactly did you see the exact same movie before this past summer?
it’s an adaptation
What were even the smallest risks here? That people would be uninterested in a Barbie adaptation? That a biopic about a scientist wouldn’t sell tickets? In Barbie you have one of the most identifiable IP in existence starring one of the most popular young actresses in the industry, co-starring one of the most popular actors in the industry. In Oppenheimer you have a hugely successful and popular director with a rabid fandom of cinephiles making an obviously cinephile film about an important figure in American history. Art school kids and their jingoist uncles can both have a good time!I’m not looking to take anything away from either movie but the discourse around both is just ridiculous.
Cool story bro!No, seriously…really cool story. Quite a good read!
This was a fascinating read. I used to be a projectionist back in the late 80s, very early 90s, so I never had the pleasure (or pain) of working with IMAX film prints/projectors. In fact, I only had experience with 35mm, although we did have one projector that was 70mm-capable. I had wondered if anyone was still using film anymore, not realizing it’s really only for special events like this one. It’s interesting – never would have thought that a movie “on film” would become a niche specialty – like music on vinyl. I love it!
“If you’ve ever witnessed a high-speed train careening off the rails, you might have an idea of what a film crash sounds like, the result being, at its worst, hundreds of frames of film destroyed, a damaged projector, and thousands of dollars down the drain.”Wow, given this while sitting in a box that sounds like machine gun fire going off, this guy is the Tom Cruise of projectionists.
The film alone weighed 600 pounds. It sounded like a constant barrage of machine gun fire.
Hope you had some ear plugs.
This is my Chinese Theater story. I decided to watch Raiders of the Lost Ark there in 35mm celluloid film (no IMAX yet and it was Mann’s Chinese, not TCL). I saw the handprints cast in cement outside the theater. I don’t remember if I saw Excalibur before or after Raiders at the El Capitan Theater across the street. These were the movies I saw in theaters. I was 15 years old. The other 1981 classics, (ET, Escape from New York, Mad Max 2) I would see in my home country, The Philippines. Some I would even catch much later in VHS (Evil Dead, The Thing, Prince in the City). Magical year, magical theater, magical medium (celluloid film). I’m 57 years old now.
The best movie experience I ever had was watching Interstellar in IMAX 70mm at the TCL opening weekend with a packed house. Would do almost anything to re-live that experience.