Each night during the mid-1910s, teenaged projectionist Charles Watzke Sr. sat in a small room overlooking a darkened theater, manning a pair of 35-millimeter projectors with each holding its own reel containing roughly 25 minutes of film. As the audience in the theater below watched the black-and-white movies, Watzke carefully surveyed the upper right corner of the large screen for a flashing mark.
Reacting to the signal, he would start up the motor on a second projector in preparation for a scene change. On alert, Watzke waited for the precise moment to act. As the transition approached, practiced hands activated the light and sound of the second projector and turned off the first projector in barely more than a second—initiating the second roll of film to keep the movie playing seamlessly.
Sometime after Watzke’s son, Charles Watzke Jr., took up his father’s craft and became a projectionist, theaters evolved to using large platters containing enough film to make switching unnecessary. Watzke’s grandson, John Watzke, remembers his grandfather calling the invention “the end of projectionists.”
“It used to be at some larger theaters that you needed about four people to run all the various projectors,” Watzke says. “With the invention of platters, you only needed one person manning the projection room. My grandfather said now three people at every theater would be out of a job, and he proved to be right.”
Charles Watzke Sr., grandfather to John Watzke, started manning a projection room in 1913 when he was only 13 years old as a way to support his family after his own father had passed away. Photo courtesy John Watzke
Job-security risks from advancing technology were far from the only danger that early projectionists faced. Until the 1950s, film reels were made from nitrate stock, which left the film highly flammable. If a film reel broke while the projector was running and a projectionist failed to react quickly enough, the film could quickly set the entire room ablaze. As an added hazard, projection rooms contained metal shutters designed to close in reaction to the heat of a fire to keep