Photo: Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures
When Oppenheimer came out in 2023, Imax undertook a massive effort to project it in Christopher Nolan’s preferred format, Imax 70-mm., in 30 theaters around the world. That might not sound like a lot of theaters, but the task proved easier said than done. Two decades ago, the company largely shifted away from Imax 70-mm. — the analog format it built its name on back in the 1970s, which Nolan still considers “the highest-quality imaging format ever devised” — in favor of digital projection, expanding its theatrical footprint with cheaper, digital-only theaters while the number of “true” Imax 70-mm. venues dwindled. Few existing theaters can accommodate the format’s tall, 1.43:1 aspect ratio, and Imax literally lost the half-century-old design files for its 70-mm. projectors. As a result, rolling out Oppenheimer in Imax 70-mm. required dusting off old projectors and tracking down semi-retired projectionists familiar enough with the machines’ quirks to run them. (Among other idiosyncrasies, Imax 70-mm. projectors run film horizontally instead of vertically, like standard film projectors.) Ever since Oppenheimer’s success solidified an Imax 70-mm. renaissance, some of those projectionists have settled into a new rhythm, awaiting a phone call from Imax to see where they’re headed next whenever Hollywood puts out a movie tailored for the format, like last year’s Sinners. As the projectionist Pat Caldwell puts it, in his southern twang, “Kiss the wife, pet the cat, and head on out.”
A Tennessee native and longtime film projectionist who first started working in Imax theaters in the ’90s, Caldwell has become integral to Imax’s 70-mm. rollouts even as he considers himself mostly retired. After projecting Nolan’s Interstellar on Imax 70-mm. at L.A.’s TCL Chinese Theatre in 2014 (“a bucket-list thing for me,” he says), Caldwell returned to the same theater to project Oppenheimer in 2023 and has run other Imax 70-mm. releases closer to home in the time since. With The Odyssey, which is playing in a record 41 Imax 70-mm. locations, Caldwell took on a dual role, training up new projectionists on the format and projecting the film himself at L.A. Live, where he’s working 12-hour night shifts to meet audience demand for 3 a.m. showings.
As the cult fandom around Imax exploded over the last decade, Caldwell, 69, has also become something of a legend among Imax nerds, answering their questions about projector components on Reddit and giving them tours of the projection booth when they come knocking after screenings. Caldwell hopped on the phone with Vulture (while projecting the movie) to talk about the Odyssey rollout, Imax 70-mm. projectors, and the wild days of his youth spent projecting at various theaters in 1970s Tennessee.
It was good to hear you’re back projecting again for a Nolan film.
It’s just like Michael Corleone: When you think you’re out, they pull you back in.
How’s it been going so far?
Prior to Odyssey, we were doing 70-mm. film in ten, 12, 13 theaters at a time, but now we’re doing 41. That meant a lot of struggling from the technical department, getting projection systems ready to go. That also meant getting people ready to operate them, too. I led three training classes prior to Odyssey. There have been other people training as well up in Canada and over on the East Coast.
Imax made determinations of which theaters they want, who they want where. I thought I was going to be in Nashville, and then two weeks before I was scheduled to be in Nashville, suddenly, “Pat, can you go to Los Angeles?” “Okay, whatever. Send me a plane ticket and I’ll go.”
How does this whole thing gear up? I’m picturing a montage of semi-retired projectionists getting phone calls and heading out the door to wherever they’re sent.
Yes, a bunch of the retired people came back. Some aren’t retired. Imax film started falling out of favor about 20 years ago, and there were very experienced people back then that are still of a reasonably young age and willing and able to do it. Then a lot of new people came from the 35-mm. world and the 70-mm. world. People who had jobs in those areas are very easy to train to cross over to Imax. They just need to be trained about the Imax part.
What’s the difference there? What does learning “the Imax part” entail?
The projector would be the primary focus, because it doesn’t work anything like a standard 35 or 70 projector does. The film moves horizontally instead of vertically, and a lot of people get thrown off by that. And it’s just a different method of operation. For instance, one thing with 35 or 70, if you accidentally thread it out of frame, you’ve got a knob right there that you can quickly turn and put it back in frame. Not so with Imax. Imax, there is no framing. If you don’t thread it properly, it’s not going to project properly. So it requires attention to detail. Some people like to try and do it quickly, and I tell them accuracy is more important than speed. The speed will come, but the accuracy has got to be there.
So we concentrate on the projector and its idiosyncrasies. You cannot let film run out of an Imax projector like you would a regular projector — it will tear every sprocket hole in the last two feet of film up.
How are the newer projectionists doing? Do any of them come in overconfident?
I think they’re overwhelmed at first. They were intrigued by the opportunity, and now some of them wonder if it was the right thing to do because there is quite a bit to learn. [Laughs.] Their graduation is to thread a five-minute test reel up and run it three times with no errors — something you can sync sound to and check focus. And that seems to work out pretty good.
Pat Caldwell at work. Courtesy of Pat Caldwell..
Pat Caldwell at work. Courtesy of Pat Caldwell..
Has Nolan sent any words of wisdom down the pipeline for Imax 70-mm. projectionists during the Odyssey rollout?
Yeah. You can boil it down to one main instruction: Don’t do anything dumb.
So on the weekends at L.A. Live and other Imax 70-mm. locations, they’re basically running The Odyssey 24/7. Does that mean you’re working 12 hours on, 12 off? Three screenings in a row?
Pretty much. I come in at 5:30 p.m. and work all night till 5:30 a.m. Then Owen comes in at 5:30 a.m.
Do you prefer the night shift?
Yeah. I do my best work at 3 a.m. I prefer to do evening screenings because it’s higher attendance. If something goes wrong, I want to be there to fix it. It goes with the nature of having been a chief projectionist for so many years — you don’t want to leave it to someone even though you know they’re perfectly capable. You still want to be there if something happens with shows selling out. God knows what they’re charging per ticket for seats here. So if you have something go wrong, I’d rather be there than not.
What kind of things can go wrong? I imagine that this being such a hyped-up movie raises the stakes. People are booking tickets weeks out and traveling to see it.
Mistakes and mechanical breakdowns do happen. There have been several instances in the past — it hasn’t happened this time around — of people not getting the sound synchronized when they start. If you don’t have it properly synchronized at the very beginning of the film in Imax, there is no way to recover synchronization. You have to run the film all the way to the end, which means no audience. You got to refund a full auditorium.
Everything before Odyssey — Project Hail Mary, One Battle After Another — all those films used our old audio-playback system, which was a 30-year-old design. It was running Windows 2000. So it’s out. Imax designed a new system for theaters running film for Odyssey. I’m quite pleased with it. But sound was a big factor in previous film launches.
Have you had any other tech issues running The Odyssey?
Well, I’m struggling with my own issues here. My air compressor has failed. You want the air to be dry going into the projector because emulsion on film and water do not mix. We’ve got the compressor guy coming tomorrow. He’s going to work on the projector between 3 a.m. and 7 a.m. Then Thursday we go back to running six shows a day.
You must’ve seen The Odyssey 20 times already. What do you think of it?
Excellent movie. Excellent photography, excellent acting. All these complaints over which actor is playing what role — all that is meaningless. That’s just people trying to raise a ruckus, as we say in Tennessee. And it’s obviously doing well. I’m not going to debate the point of whether it’s Nolan’s best work, but it’s different and it’s good. What more can you ask?
It must make your job easier if you like the movie you’re showing over and over.
Yeah. Now sitting in Dallas and forcing myself to watch Joker 2, that was bad. I would love to meet the guy or girl that gave the green light to spend all the money on a movie that sucked. Opening night, the first show in Dallas, we had people walking out.
But you must’ve seen it at least 30 times anyway, right?
Oh, yeah. I ran the rerelease of Lawrence of Arabia on 70-mm. back in the ’80s, and I ran it four times a day for I think six months. I knew every line of dialogue in Lawrence of Arabia. I ran all three of the first Indiana Jones, all three of the first Star Wars in 70-mm.
Can you tell me how you got into projecting movies as a kid?
When I got into the theater business in the ’70s, I got a summer job as an usher. I was in junior high school and worked my way up through the ranks. And then I was at the Colonial drive-in working in the box office. After the box office closed, I would bug the projectionist to let me watch him run the movie. Well, Sam was the gentleman’s name. Sam was an alcoholic. So Sam taught me how to run the projectors, and he got drunk, passed out on the couch. And after the concession stand in the box office closed, I would go up and run the rest of the movies for him. This went very nicely until one night there’s a knock at the door. I opened the door and here’s this old man standing there. And I said, “Well, who are you?” He says, “I could ask the same question. Who are you? I’m the business agent of the local projectionists’ union.” I explained what was going on. He woke up Sam, chewed him out. And the next day they made me an apprentice. I trained for a year with no pay at all the local theaters in Nashville.
My father had been a projectionist briefly in the ’50s, and that smoothed my path into the union, which was a very closed union. The first question on their application to join was: What is your religion?
What was the “correct” answer?
Well, I was honest, and apparently nothing was said. When you went to the city to take the knowledge test to get your projection license, the union provided them with the test. There were a couple of trick questions on there that you had to have been told the answer to or you wouldn’t get it. That’s how they controlled who went in the union. There’s other stories I could tell you about being arrested as a purveyor of pornography.
Well, I have to ask for that story.
You don’t start at the nice theaters. The new guys get the lousy theaters. So that is the porn theaters back in the mid to late ’70s. So once I finished my apprenticeship, the business agent, Ben, put me at one of the nicer porn theaters — 35-millimeter equipment, very good equipment, well-maintained. And so as he’s leaving the booth, he says, “Oh Pat, by the way, up under the rewind bench there’s an envelope.” He says, “There’s $142 in that envelope. Don’t mess with it. You’ll know if you ever need it.”
I forgot about it. A year goes by. One day I’m sitting in the chair upstairs reading the National Geographic, and there’s a frantic knocking at the door. It’s the police. They’re busting the place. So they barge into the booth, two or three of them, and shut it down, turn up the house lights. They arrest me. They arrest the ticket lady. And that was the charge: “purveyor of pornography.” And so I’m arrested, sitting in the booth. And I said, “Well, what happens now?” The cop says, “Well, you’re under arrest, but you can post bail.” I said, “Well, how much is the bail?” He said, “$142.”
So the fix was in with the law. They took the handcuffs off me. The court case was dismissed. They left. And all the people that the cops chased out, they were still hanging around outside. So the cops leave and we step out the front door and we’re waving at them all, “Y’all come on back. We’re open again.” It was business as usual.
I guess that’s Tennessee law enforcement in the ’70s for you?
Yeah. I found two dead people in theaters too. That was kind of crazy.
Back in those days?
One was in one of the porn theaters, and sadly the other one was in a projection booth. I went up to relieve a guy one night, and I relieved him. Had to make several changeovers while waiting for the funeral home to come pick him up. He’s dead in his chair.
How old were you at that point?
Nineteen, 20, I guess. It’s not a big deal, because I have relatives in the funeral business, so it’s not unknown to me.
So how did you get from the pornography theaters in the ’70s to projecting stuff like Lawrence of Arabia at regular theaters in the ’80s to working for Imax?
When the union fell apart, the theater chains scrambled to find people capable of running films. So Carmike Cinemas hired me as a manager projectionist, and I happily ran a little ten-screen theater for them. And then in 1991, I got hired by Regal as a 35-mm. technician — so I was traveling and fixing theaters. When Regal opened its first Imax theater in Lincolnshire, Illinois, north of Chicago, they asked me if I would quit being a service tech and be a projectionist again because no one at Regal had 70-mm. experience. So I went to Lincolnshire, hired the projection staff and trained them. Regal then opened up New Roc City in New York, Mall of Georgia in Atlanta, and then Nashville. And I went to each of those and trained the staff and went to the next theater basically. In Nashville, my Imax service tech guy asked me to come over to Imax to be a technician. And I said, “Oh, yeah.” Because Imax is the pinnacle for projectionists to get to operate.
Even then?
Yeah. For me, working in the TCL Chinese Theatre running Oppenheimer and Interstellar was like a bucket-list thing. And once Oppenheimer came out and became so immensely popular, then suddenly film was a thing again. And it’s kept me busy. It was really excellent timing with my retirement. All of a sudden, here I am retired, but people need me to run movies. So I work for them when they need it and train people when they need it, and eat some popcorn occasionally.
Over your years as a projectionist, what’re some pet peeves you’ve developed, whether it’s audience behavior or something about different projection booths?
Let’s start with the audience. Cell phones. People are just no longer aware of what’s going on around them or don’t care. It’s an all-me kind of attitude today. Me, me, me, me, me, and to hell with the rest. We had a guy the other day who wouldn’t leave. He had already sat through and watched a second showing of The Odyssey. And we only knew that because he admitted it. And then we said, “Oh, okay. You’ve seen two shows. One you didn’t pay for. Now you want to stay and see a third?” And he got argumentative. LAPD came and hustled him out of the door, and that was the end of that.
Projection rooms — poorly maintained equipment because the company that owns them won’t put money into it. And not being given the tools to put on a good show. The Chinese Theatre has nice movable masking for the screen. L.A. Live does not. So we have to work around that little problem simply because they cheaped out and didn’t get masking.
And that’s to frame the image correctly on the wall?
Yes. You always want a nice sharp edge, and masking provides that sharp edge. And you need masking — especially for all these different formats now with designer aspect ratios.
Last time I spoke to you, you said Imax superfans and other people would come up to the projection booth after Oppenheimer screenings at the Chinese Theatre, say hi, give you a compliment, and ask for a tour of the booth. Have you had the same thing happen with this movie?
Not at L.A. Live. For Oppenheimer at the Chinese Theatre, they had to build a special booth, and people soon discovered the entrance to it. As soon as the credits came up, every show, there’d be people knocking on the door. And had I remained in Dallas, I think that would have happened again with this movie. I’ve got a guy, and — bless his heart. I’ve known this guy for several decades. He’s sending me one of those Imax-camera popcorn buckets for me to sign. Me? Why? [Laughs.]
You’re a legend to Imax nerds, Pat!
Apparently in some people’s eyes. I had quite a following down in Texas. One guy brought the whole staff of the theater a barbecue dinner, gave us T-shirts saying “World’s Greatest Projectionist.” Every movie that came out and I ran there, some of these guys would bring me a little gift basket of candy. And I said, “Are you crazy? I work in a theater. Last thing I need is candy.”
I talked to another Oppenheimer projectionist who said he memorized the flow of the movie so he could know precisely when to hit the dust-removal button to keep particles off the projector, which are especially noticeable during brightly lit scenes. Are there moments in The Odyssey when you have your finger hovering over that button?
The specks of dirt on the screen, that’s a byproduct of the process that Imax projectors use to advance the frames. You can’t get away from it. But we have a very good way of cleaning that dirt off — simply a button that we can push. We’re hyperaware of dirt on a light background in the movie because that’s when it’s most visible. Movies like Everest — oh my God.
Because of snowy mountains?
Yeah, and at that time in history, film was being released not on Vision3 stock, but on a different Kodak stock called “Triathlon.” It was terrible film to project with, and it made the projector very dirty. God, that was trash film.
Has that been an issue during any specific Odyssey scenes? I saw it on Imax 70-mm., and you do notice when something’s on the projector since it gets blown up to such a massive scale.
Yeah. Some of the daytime ocean scenes make it quite visible. But this is Vision3 film stock. It is the best thing since sliced bread. It’s the best film I have ever used. It has good anti-halation properties — halation is the effect you get around white letters on a black background. And it’s lubricated differently, too. It doesn’t leave waxy buildup on projector components. It’s very easy to clean. It’s just superb film.
How do you feel about the online griping about the fact that Nolan shot all of The Odyssey for Imax 70-mm., which can only be displayed properly in 41 locations?
It’s a problem that we might have created for ourselves, and we had the help of the theaters. Some theaters, when they converted to digital 20 years ago, it was up to the theater what to do with the Imax 70-mm. film system. What did they do in Austin, instead of just keeping it and putting it in a corner? They threw it out, took a cutting torch to it, cut it into pieces big enough to get through the doorway, and threw it in the dumpster. Lots of places thought, Oh digital, we’ll never run film again. And look where we are now. We’re running film.
At this point in your retirement, would it take a Nolan film to get you to do this again?
Well, no. Anything on Imax celluloid will get me out of bed. I did Joker 2. [Laughs.]
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Related
Recent Imax 70-mm. releases like Sinners and One Battle After Another played on only about ten Imax 70-mm. screens globally.
Projecting a movie on analog Imax film requires a device that synchronizes the film’s sound to the theater’s digital sound systems. If that auxiliary input — which Imax recently upgraded — fails during a screening, sound and image can’t be resynchronized while the movie’s playing.
Joker: Folie à Deux was shot digitally then printed to Imax 70-mm. film for certain locations, as opposed to being actually shot on the analog format, as The Odyssey was.
Masking involves moving dark curtains or panels to frame a projected image with crisp lines. It’s especially necessary in theaters that project films in different aspect ratios to avoid distracting black bars around the frame or the image spilling off the side of the screen.
The 1998 Imax documentary, not the 2015 Jake Gyllenhaal movie.
