* * *
The booth was long and low and hot as a kitchen, and it hummed. Two projectors stood side by side at the front wall, aimed through little square ports of glass at the screen far below, great black-and-chrome machines on cast-iron pedestals with SIMPLEX lettered on their sides and lamphouses behind them the size of steamer trunks. Between them, on a shelf, sat a rack of film cans, gray steel, stenciled with the name of a distributor and the words BACK TO THE FUTURE and REEL 1 through REEL 6. A rewind bench ran along the side wall under a pegboard hung with tools, splicing blocks, a roll of yellow tape, a can of film cleaner, and a calendar from Hutchinson Salt Company that was still turned to March 1979. There was a stool and a hot plate with a percolator on it, and a small radio, and a framed photograph on the wall of a woman in a cloche hat sitting at the console of an enormous theater organ, laughing.
"Thought you might want to see how it works," Ansel said. "Since you've seen how the rest of it works tonight."
He had threaded the projector on the left. He showed Danny how: the film coming down off the top reel in its fireproof magazine, around the sprockets, a loop above the gate and a loop below, through the gate where the light hit it, past the sound drum, down to the take-up reel in the bottom magazine. "Loops have to be just so," he said. "Too small and the film tears. Too big and it slaps. You learn the size by feel." His gloved fingers moved through the machine the way Danny's mother's hands moved through a load of laundry, without looking.
"Most places now, they got platters," Ansel said. "Splice the whole picture into one big reel, lay it on a turntable flat as a pancake, run it start to finish on one machine. Kid can do it. Kid can run four houses at once with platters, which is the whole idea, out at that Cinema 4. I'm not against it. It's just not how this booth was built." He tapped the side of the left projector. "Two machines. Twenty minutes a reel, give or take. When one reel runs out, you switch to the other machine without the audience knowing. That's a changeover. You do it right, nobody in the house ever knows you exist. That's the job."
He took Danny to the right-hand port and had him look through. Far below, the screen was dark and silver, the curtain closed.
"Tomorrow I'll show you the cue marks," Ansel said. "Little circles in the upper right corner of the picture. First set's the motor cue. You see it, you start the other machine. Count to seven. Second set's the changeover cue. You see it, you throw the douser. If you hit it right, the picture jumps from one machine to the other in one frame and nobody sees a thing. People call 'em cigarette burns." He made a face. "Nobody who runs a booth calls 'em that."
"Why are you showing me this?"
Ansel took off his gloves, finger by finger, and laid them on the rewind bench.
"Because you froze," he said. "Down there. And you're going to spend tonight and tomorrow and maybe a long time after that thinking that freezing makes you some kind of coward. I wanted to tell you a thing first, before you get too far into thinking it."
Danny's face went hot. He looked at the projectors.