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Figure 2.2 Human billboards, drawing by Dr. Juli McGruder, 2016. Based on a photo of advertising done by the Majestic theater, Tanga, in Showman 3, no. 3 (1954): 12, published by African Consolidate Films Ltd., Johannesburg, South Africa
Much less visible but arguably more central to the success of the shows were the projectionists. These men were typically far more reserved than managers, doormen, or walking billboards but no less revered. As Abdul, manager of the Majestic Cinema in Zanzibar, said, “Everyone, everyone wanted to be a projectionist. It was the dream of nearly every young man.”13 This job carried immense prestige because, in addition to being highly paid, it was—as trade publications described—“the heart and soul” of the show. Being a projectionist was highly technical and required a great deal of craftsmanship, mechanical ability, and engineering skill. The knowledge needed for the job increased exponentially over the years as films, projectors, and sound systems became more advanced. Only in the twenty-first century has this trajectory reversed, allowing one person to operate seven or eight multiplex screens with the touch of a few buttons. In the early years, projectors were hand-cranked, and films were rarely more than a minute or two long. Later, typical Indian movies ran for three hours and came on as many as thirteen reels of film, each of which had to run in order and be started as soon as the previous reel reached its end. It was incredibly easy to drop a reel of film or mishandle the take-up reel and end up with a tangled mess on the floor. Heaps of unspooled film were the nightmare of every projectionist but something nearly everyone encountered at least twice—once when he was learning to operate a projector and again when he was teaching the trade to someone else.
Fire was also an ever-present threat. Film was coated with nitrates and highly flammable, and until quite recently, the light that illuminated the pictures came not from a bulb but from a flame burning just behind the celluloid. It was extremely easy for the film to catch fire if it was not in continuous motion. If a film combusted and the operator was inattentive, a fire could quickly get out of control, potentially burning the entire building to the ground. Indeed, the earliest and most elaborate municipal fire regulations often emerged from quite legitimate fears of fire at moving-picture shows—which was as true in Chicago and Birmingham as it was in Zanzibar, Mwanza, and Dar es Salaam. Usually, projectionists were equipped with buckets of water, blankets, or fire extinguishers, and most learned a variety of tricks for putting out a fire before it spread. But the nitrates on the film produced nitric acid when burned, so even if a man managed to save a cinema, burning film harmed his lungs. Fortunately, most projectionists were quite skilled operators, and no one I interviewed had ever seen such a fire.14 A much more common threat was the malfunctioning of the carbon rods used to produce the flame that illuminated the celluloid. Every projectionist I spoke with mentioned how fickle and problematic carbons could be, and they emphasized the skill required to maintain just the proper distance between the two rods to produce the precise amount of illumination required. Readers might recall watching videos of old black-and-white films, where the picture fades to gray or even black and then returns with vivid luminosity: this is what happened if a carbon burnt out and a new one was installed but not properly adjusted.
A young man learned how to run a projector, handle film, and adjust carbons by serving as an apprentice to a skilled projectionist. Every theater had a gaggle of youth eager to learn the trade, and managers often had to set limits on the number of people allowed in a projection booth. A boy given the honor of entry into the projection room would spend years simply watching the professional at work, picking up knowledge as time went along. If he was lucky and trusted, he then advanced to working as a rewinder, using a separate machine to put a finished reel back onto its original spool. If he was paid at all, he might earn sixty-two shillings a month, compared to the four hundred shillings earned by the projectionist, but many times, his only payment was simply the social cachet that came from sitting next to the projectionist or maybe free admission for his siblings and friends.15 The position of assistant projectionist was the next step up the professional ladder, where one earned half as much as a full-fledged operator. The assistant could be trusted to keep the reel running or even start the next reel while the projectionist stepped outside to smoke a cigarette or nodded off for a nap. Being left in charge like that was a huge sign of professional maturation—and a huge responsibility. If a film jumped the sprocket, the gate tension slipped, or a splice broke, the projector could jam or the film could flutter into a pile of spaghetti in no time at all. There was no hiding such mistakes from the projectionist, for he would be roused from his sleep or his smoke by angry cries from the audience lamenting his incompetence or shouting evil things about his mother and the dubious circumstances of his conception.
In many cases, the only way an assistant projectionist could become an operator was through the death or retirement of his boss or through relocation to a town that was opening a new cinema and had no one to run its machines.16 Suresh Solanki began his training in Tanga at the Majestic. Over the course of his five-year apprenticeship, his salary increased from half of what the cinema spent on rat poison, when he began, to one-third of what the full-time projectionists made, when he was promoted to assistant projectionist. His family then took over the management of the Plaza Cinema in Moshi, near Kilamanjaro; Solanki moved from the coast to join them and at last became a full-fledged operator there.17 Had he remained in Tanga, he might never have advanced to the status of a projectionist—a job men coveted for life.
The talents required of a projectionist went well beyond running a machine and included splicing and editing film as well. Considerable skill and a steady hand were required to make a straight and clean splice, and since few projectionists in East Africa owned a splicer, most relied on a simple razor blade to make their cuts. Care had to be taken to join a film so that missing parts were unnoticeable, and sprocket holes had to be aligned to ensure a consistent feed. In addition, emulsion had to be gently scraped off the film and a special cement applied before the two pieces were carefully joined and then held together until the glue dried.18 If not properly done, a splice would result in considerable disruption for the viewers, or it could cause a film to jump the sprocket and unravel, jam, and start a fire or damage the machine. And if a projectionist forgot to use a black marker to cover the sound track on the back side of the film, the audience would also be subjected to annoying audio thumps when the splice fed through the machine. Poorly joined films caused projectionists innumerable headaches. Splicing required adjustments to tension on reels: if the tension was too tight a splice might break, bringing an unwelcome intermission at a key moment of dramatic tension in a film. Cutting and splicing made projectionists the local technical and creative equivalent of film producers.
Censorship of films was routine during the colonial and postcolonial eras, and it was extremely common for certain types of scenes to be deleted, which of course required frequent splicing. In the colonial era, scenes depicting violence, juvenile crime, “unladylike” behavior, nudity, drunkenness, lovemaking, or the ridicule of Europeans—along with nearly a dozen other censored subjects—had to be cut. The particulars changed somewhat during the postcolonial era, but the list of forbidden visual fruit remained long. Given that there was often only a single print of a film circulating in all of East Africa and that Zanzibar, Tanganyika, Kenya, Uganda, and many regional towns all had their own guidelines and censorship boards permitting and excluding different material, every projectionist had to be adept at splicing, joining, and fixing botched jobs done by others.19 The last projectionist to show a film in a region governed by a censorship board had to reinsert all the parts that had been cut before the film was passed to others in the regional circuit. By the time a print had completed the circuit, it was often a cut-and-glued mess. Projectionists did sometimes have fun with splicing, joining miscellaneous cut parts from various films on hand into an original montage of sex, nudity, and violence to entertain fellow workers or friends on rainy days.
A good projectionist was not only an artist and craftsman but an engineer as well. Maintaining and repairing a set of projectors was no simple job, especially in a region of the world where spare parts were nearly impossible to find. Because the first
