Andrew Walker and Jennifer Weston-Beyer are projectionists at the Pictureville Cinema in Bradford, the home to the Widescreen Weekend and soon to host one of only four 70mm prints of The Testament of Ann Lee. Book here!
How did you get started in Film Projection and how did you come to work at the Pictureville Cinema?
Andrew Walker: Well, I’ve done this ever since I was 18. I started out at The Picture Playhouse Cinema in Beverley, which unfortunately no longer operates, in fact, it’s gone back to being a corn exchange. I was passing the cinema one day with my brother, and it just said “projectionist training, apply within”. At the time, I was working on computers in an accounts department, but I had an interest in film and science fiction. That’s how it started. As for the Pictureville…well, the door was open, and I just wandered in. I’ve worked in quite a few cinemas as a projectionist around the country, mostly in the north. Then I progressed to being a manager; I was a general manager at the Hyde Park Picturehouse in Leeds. I got made redundant, but I knew most of the guys who worked here, and the vacancy came up. So it’s 15 years this July.
Jennifer Weston-Beyer: I’ve worked here since 1992. That coincided with the date the Pictureville Cinema opened; it used to be a theatre. The following year, they were building up to opening with Cinerama. So they advertised for projection staff. At that time I lived in Telford in Shropshire. I’d gone to university, studied graphic design, and I really liked the photography element of it. But when I left university it was the height of the recession. I applied for numerous jobs in the field that I wanted to work in, then I moved back home. I just wanted to work and just earn money.
I went in the local multiplex, UCI, and I managed to get a job there. After a few weeks working front-of-house, they advertised internally to see if any staff would be interested in learning projection. I was really keen to see the magic that happened upstairs. There was no other reason to go up there, so I thought it’d be great to go up, have a look, see how it all works. At that time, it was only film; 35mm film across about 10 screens. That’s how I learned. But my manager at the time, Frank, said to me “oh, look, they’re looking for projection staff in Bradford where you’re from and they’re going to open Cinerama and they’ve got Europe’s only IMAX!” So he got me all excited about it, telling me about all these different formats. I’d only been a projectionist for about six months and I thought “yeah why not I’ll I’ll have a shot at that”. The rest is history.
I feel like it was meant to be this career for me. On that first occasion at UCI, when I was told that I got the job and I was over the moon, I told my parents and they said “you must ring your grandparents”. I rang up and I found out that my grandfather had been a projectionist for 25 years, and he met my grandma because she was an usherette. He let me have his little ABC 25 year badge.
While most of the projectionists at the time were helping get Pictureville ready, I was on a crash course with IMAX and we learned Cinerama at the same time as it was installed. I haven’t looked back since, but my job has evolved over the years. In 2015, IMAX went digital, and that was really the start. We had just installed a digital projector in Pictureville, but we weren’t really utilising it an awful lot. Then in 2015, Picturehouse were brought in to make cinemas profitable, and they were just going to be doing digital screenings from then on. So I applied to become a duty manager with Picturehouse and got that role. Some of our staff left and started new careers in different areas. But two of them, Simon and John, even though they’ve got jobs elsewhere, would always book off holiday to come back and help out with the widescreen weekend and with events throughout the year. They’re so keen to keep help out.
Then Picturehouse left and the museum started running its cinemas again, but still really with a mainly digital programme. Then we hit Covid and we’re coming back from that. And then the museum announces it’s going to close for a year and a half. Then Pictureville had to close because they discovered RAAC, so since January last year we’re just on the build again; just trying to get going and get some momentum. We’re passionate about showing films on film so they don’t just leave it for Widescreen Weekend and that’s why now we’re able to get 70mm films outside of the festival because we’ve got the staff to show it. We just reached a good point, really, haven’t we?
Do you remember your first time being responsible for the machines, perhaps what film it may have been?
Andrew: The first film I ever showed was Tron in 1982. I very nervously showed a 35mm print on a not dissimilar machine to the one we’ve got here. That was my first film, so I’ve quite fond memories of it.
Jennifer: I can’t honestly remember what my first projected film was. I mean, I suppose being in a multiplex, I was just getting up to speed on how to handle film, how to prepare it, how to lace it up and then you started shifts where you were on your own. But I do remember the most special one that has just stuck with me forever was when I looked out and saw the opening credits for Edward Scissorhands. I just thought it was magical. Really, really different. We’ve got a 70mm print here in Bradford; we ran it just before Christmas. I always say it’s my number one film. That memory of looking through the porthole, and I saw the way the credits are like scissors coming down the screen. It’s the first time I was really aware of music in the cinema as well. I just absolutely loved that experience.
Andrew: When I was at school in the late 1800s, I formed a 16mm film club, and one of the films we showed was Jaws. This was 1977 and there’s three reels, so we had to stop twice. We had it on this huge screen at the back of the stage, and the whole school was watching it. And you may recall, if you’ve seen Jaws, there are quite a few sections which are quite frightening. especially when the head pops out of the bottom of the boat. So when this happened the whole school, as I stood at the back of this film, they all jumped.
What is the process from like in terms of like exhibiting a film? How is it different now from your multiplex days?
Jennifer: I suppose the first thing that’s springing to mind for myself is at a multiplex I remember the days you could literally have one film and thread it through however many projectors you wanted. But here at Pictureville, what’s different is they really cater for the aspect ratios, the lighting, and just making it more of a show, a theatrical performance. I’ve never done that before I came here.
Andrew: The first time I did it, it was supposed to be manual projection; you pressed all the buttons for it to do everything. The big difference between that and the multiplex, is a multiplex has got an automation built in, even to the point of the sound being turned down. Not many screens have tabs, as in curtains. So lights going down and stuff like that, which is not dissimilar from what we do now with the digital process. We have automation for digital and that does everything, though I do program all that or Jen programs it when I’m not here. Multiplexes show popcorn moves so you get them in, pack them in, rack them, stack them and then they go out.
It’s not the same as what we do. We like to specialise. When the audience comes in, they get what projectionists are supposed to do. The lights go down, the tabs open up, you know, stuff like that. A manager who is no longer with us was saying to me when I was being trained that “projection is the last point in the making of the film”. The projectionist can make or break the film just by not having the lights on the screen or having the sound wrong.
You hear apocryphal stories of directors sending out film prints with notes to the projectionists with instructions on how to best exhibit the film. Have either of you witnessed such things?
Andrew: The thing is, though, when we do get these notes, we try to do our best, but some directors that don’t realise what we’re capable of doing.
Jennifer: So they’ll say things like “play this film at volume 7.0”, which we appreciate that they probably mean loud, but you know…
Andrew: The system we’ve got, it’ll just blow their heads off. And we have done stuff. We have done stuff at seven, seven and a half…
Jennifer: But we don’t want to blow our customers eardrums out, do we? We gauge everything. If they’re having a normal conversation, what does that sound like? And then the special effects and the music come after that.
Andrew: I was always told that if there was mono sound the speech is very important. It has to be clear, it has to be the most prominent part of the film but now we’ve got things like Dolby Atmos you’ve got the whole room engulfed in sound and we have been told that we do have an extremely good sound system in Pictureville.
Jennifer: The audiences have changed. When I was a projectionist, people, most of the audiences in Pictureville would stay to the very end of the film. They wanted to see the very end and just listen to the music. These days, a lot of audiences, as soon as the rolling credits hit, they want to get up and out. But I remember things like Strictly Ballroom (1992) and anything with Kenneth Branner in. We’d get sell-out shows and people would stay to the end and you’d get a round of applause. Things like that stick with me. I’ve not heard people applaud a film for a long, long time. other than at Widescreen Weekend or special events.
Coming to Widescreen Weekend then, and specifically Cinerama, what is it like to be running the three projectors simultaneously and lining them up on the fly?
Andrew: Jen’s speciality: Cinerama.
Jennifer: I don’t know if you know the story of how Cinerama came to be in Pictureville, but we were the first IMAX in Europe, and the IMAX engineer that came two or three times a year to service IMAX for us, Willem Baumeister, travelled all around Europe and was visiting cinemas where equipment was being stripped out. He was part of the International Cinerama Society, so he was gathering Cinerama equipment. The dream of the society was to get it installed somewhere again and Willem really pushed the museum. At that time we were called the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television. He approached the museum and said, “I’m gathering all this kit and equipment, I’ve got people and supporters behind me, we could install this in the museum and get it going again. You’d be the only place in the world showing this!” Eventually it all came together and they installed Cinerama in the in the Pictureville cinema.
The museum was running it pretty much every day for the first month and then dropped down to twice a week. Then it got its spot in the first Saturday of every month. That’s how people got to know to come, through writers like Bill Bryson, who wrote his book, Notes from a Small Island. We get so many visitors because he wrote about it in his book.
We tended to have two to three staff running it. By the time Andrew came along we weren’t really running it that regularly. It was more to fit in with the Widescreen Weekend. But you’ve learned and you’ve trained along the way, haven’t you? But we’re just not running it regularly enough. You show somebody how to do something, but then if you don’t do it again for a year…
Andrew: Yeah, I mean, one of the things with being projectionists is when you lace up, especially 70mm, you have to be really, really careful, especially with 70mm or Cinerama. The rule of thumb is that you check it three times. When we were in a multiplex, you didn’t have time to do that.
Jennifer: We’re being even more careful now. The Cinerama equipment, if we damage those, there’s not a lot we can do. Where do we get replacements from? It’s not often that we get to run these things and it’s only by running them and getting people interested in and excited about them that you get to keep doing it. There’s not many new prints coming along, even though it seems to have be having a bit of a revival. This Testament of Ann Lee (2025) print that’s coming, four 70mm prints are coming into the country and we have one, which is amazing. Usually it’s just one print and it’s going to London.
What things can go wrong with Cinerama and how do you coordinate?
Jennifer: In 1952, they would have somebody on every projector and every sound system and somebody in the auditorium on headsets talking to each other. These days, our system is modernised, so I’ve run Cinerama on my own. It’s not ideal but essentially, you go around to prepare the film, you get all the start frames behind the lens, you get the sound over the magnetic sound head, and then we can magically interlock all the projectors together. So just by pressing one button, it just starts all the machines together. Back in 1952, it was everybody pressing a button at the same time.
We have a place in the central projection room with a panel where we start the films, focus each machine, and we can move the pictures of the side projectors up and down. Because it can be distracting if you have a horizon line that’s not even, so we bring those horizon lines together to make it less confusing for the viewer. We’re tweaking the left and right up and down. The person in the main box is running the show. There are certain scenes where we bring in the back wall speakers. It’s where speed boats fly over your head. So we’re telling the sound system operator to use the back wall speakers for certain scenes and then go back to the side walls. The other projectionist ideally is just walking from machine to machine and just checking that everything’s running smoothly.
The three booths are known as Able, Baker, and Charlie. Baker is the central projection room. Charlie’s projection room is the first one you come to in the Pictureville [to the left of Baker as you look at the screen]. You might think that’s A, but it’s because it’s image goes over to the far right of the screen. So when we’re on our headsets talking to our colleagues its “I’m in Abel, everything’s fine. I’m going to Charlie”. So we still use these references affectionately.
The museum got a new print of This is Cinerama (1952) in 1993 so it was like running a new film. But with How the West was Won (1962) and The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm (1962), those are original prints. So when we run those, we do like to have somebody on each projector, because there’s a lot of preparation goes in to getting the prints ready. They’re shrinking, they’re brittle, they’re buckled. and we just want somebody there on the machine to let us know to stop the show if something breaks so that we risk minimal damage as possible.
The thing about that though, if you’ve been to any of those Cinerama shows, a lot of our audience want us to breakdown because we’ve got two reels that are called breakdown reels of Lowell Thomas saying, “oh dear, there seems to be a problem in the projection room. Let me tell you about my holiday in America, North Egypt, etc. while they try and fix it”. And two minutes later he goes, “let’s see if they’re ready… no they don’t seem to be ready so let me tell you about when I went to…” They’re they’re about 10 minutes long and they’re just never long enough to fix a problem. The audience knows this now and I think at first they thought have have we broken on purpose to show the reel. They know that we don’t do that now, but they want us to breakdown because they just love it. It’s an added element to the show
We have the world’s only known of print of The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm. And we hadn’t run it for two or three years because it kept breaking down. But we thought, what is the point of having this print if we’re never going to show it? So we got it out again, gave it a lot of love and attention and in the festival just gone, we ran it and there was no break. It was absolutely amazing. One of the parts was so buckled we had John hand-winding as it was feeding through the projector just to keep it on the spool. So he was sat there for each shot of 45 minutes to an hour and a half, just trying to keep this film going because it just wasn’t settling nicely. But it went through and that was amazing. Now we’ve been given all the digital restorations, but yeah, we want to run the prints if we can.
Andrew: We can actually show it digitally so it shows from our digital projector. So rather than having three projectors, it just shows from one. It’s called Smile Box, and it does give a very good representation. It fills the curved screen but is easier to do. So it’s very cleverly made.
Jennifer: We always have that running in the background, don’t we? So that if for whatever reason the film breaks, we’ve run the breakdown reel, but we really can’t get everything back in sync, we’d always switch over to the digital projector to finish the show. But we haven’t really had to do that. We’re doing as much preparation as we can to make sure we don’t have these breaks and slip ups. And we’re not running these films all the time for these things to happen.
What makes the 70mm format so special? And are there any specific preparations and considerations you have to make?
Andrew: The 70mm of today is polyester, so it’s not acetate. So you have to be careful with that. You have to make sure that if it does go through its feeder in the centre of the plaster. Otherwise, it does get stuck but it doesn’t break. It’ll pull to the point where it will damage the projector and the feed mechanism. So you do have to be very, very careful with that.
Jennifer: We’ve got two projectors in the projection room here that are capable of running 70mm. This film (The Testament of Ann Lee) won’t be classed as an archive print, so it won’t be something that will be running on changeovers. It will be a print that we assemble as one and it’ll be run from the platter.
Andrew: There are different words for these things, but I mean, I use a pay-out feeder. So for example, the actual mechanism for showing the transportation of the film to the projector varies. We’ve got a platter, a 5T platter, which you don’t often get. I think it was designed for here. It’s like a normal platter at the bottom but then there’s a bit on top, which is two extra plates. There’s also a tower mechanism. We do use a tower in the side booths for showing Cinerama. which is basically a device which has reel on top reel on the bottom which is also duplicated on the other side so you don’t have to rewind it. With our five tiered platter which is a non-rewind system. Rather than coming up from the end it’s coming from the middle and they go through the projector through the platters stand on the projector and back off onto another ring in the middle again, hence the reason it’s called non rewind.
The older style prints from the 60s and 70s of 70mm have a soundtrack, which is basically taped on the side of the film. We call it magnetic, and it’s adhered after the process of developing the film. And the soundtrack, six tracks, can be put onto this. Today’s prints of 70 mil, more for convenience than anything else, they use a track which is mainly DTS so on the print itself it has a timecode basically that the device will pick up and then synchronize with our ingested soundtrack perfectly regardless of if there’s anything missing. So as well as the film, you get a set of discs, three or possibly two, depending how long the film is, and you ingest this into the process of the storage device. And that’s it. Our device is itself has over the years got loads of soundtracks on it. So when the film comes back, we don’t need to ingest the discs. It just simply picks up. So we show 2001 quite a bit. So there’s no need to ingest an additional soundtrack.
Jennifer: It’s not very often, but there are different speeds that you run films at. For example, with 70mm you’ll get the usual 24 frames a second, but then you can get some films that are made at 30 frames a second, can’t you?
Andrew: There’s a 36 one as well. But there’s different films for Cinerama. It’s a 24 and what’s the other one?
Jennifer: This is Cinerama. It’s 24 frames a second or 26. And those frame sizes are six perforations high, 35mm wide rather than the traditional 35mm, which is 4 perforations high. So they’ve got a higher frame rate. But again, it’s 70 mil. So it’s just things to consider that we’ll consider at the festival. There could be different speeds that you need to run the machines at so there’s a bit of tweaking to be done with the sound format if you’re running at faster speeds or slower speeds.
To what extent is that knowledge and that awareness of how to run these things and what they ought to look like just instinctual at this stage?
Jennifer: We’ve had quite a few films over the years, and we’ll keep records of how we run those as a show and what lenses we’ve used or which screen we’ve used, all that detail. With something new like Ann Lee, I only know little bits, but that’s usually from Facebook groups these days; specialists and specialist groups where projectionists are all talking. Somebody sent me a shot of some of the frames from Anne Lee and where most films would fill the fine perforations by the 70mm width, Anne Lee doesn’t. It looks like it’s got a black crop around it. Which would be visible if you didn’t make any alterations to your masking. So it’s just things like that. I’m learning, I’m learning through reading things before it gets to us, but it’s not until it gets to us and we’ll have Hopefully have time to test the a reel. on each projector with lenses after plates, and just use what we’ve got already and try and make it look the best.
Each reels checked on the bench as it arrives. So it’ll go through the hands of probably Andrew or one of us, and we’re writing a report as we’re going. So for example, you’ll get reel one out and there’s some information on the countdown readers there about the type of format sound. Then we’ll be writing that. “Oh, it’s got a certificate, the MGM lion, whatever it is. Just a few visuals so that you know what to expect when you’re starting up the projector. Then we’ve tested; we’ve probably tested reel one. You’ve got a good idea of what the volume setting is that you’re going to have to start off with where the sound kicks in or sometimes it can throw you that there’s no sound but that’s just because the opening credit’s silent. It’s just to know these things in advance.
Is there a dream print or a particular format you’d love to project at Pictureville?
Jennifer: Well, yes, mine would be Cinerama every time. As I say, we haven’t got all the prints, so it’d be great to crowdfund or just be able to somehow get a new print together and be able to run that be absolutely amazing. It would be great to get another travel log and show something different.
Andrew: We had Tron, there was a digital version, but it would be nice to show the first film I’ve actually shown. I mean there’s loads of films. When I worked at the Playhouse in Beverley it was all film. People keep asking me “what’s your favourite film?” It’s really difficult. You could have 20 best films you’d like to see again at the cinema and we have a lot. One of my favourite films is E.T. So I’ve shown E.T. 16 times and I’ve seen it 16 times. It’s a lovely film, very emotional film. But it’d be nice to screen that.
I was working at the Playhouse and Return of the Jedi played, which was on 70mm and the cinema held 900 people. This is in the 80s and it was just a fabulous experience of seeing the cinema absolutely packed. As soon as you’re approaching the door, you can smell all the sweets. You know, there wasn’t much popcorn around that time. You can sit there and watch this film. I’ve been traveling from Beverly to Leeds, which is where the playhouse used to be. It was a big day out for me and there was like five or six of us and we all worked in the cinema so it was like a busman’s holiday. We always try and bring that atmosphere here at Pictureville but I mean we we only have 300 seats here. We can’t have a screening of almost a thousand people. There’s so many cinemas around this small island that we live on that are being knocked down. It’s just so sad that that has to happen. There is a society who look try and look after cinemas, but they can’t do everything. So we’re losing a big part of our heritage.
Jennifer: But I guess that’s what’s special about our jobs here, isn’t it? It’s lovely to talk to people that are interested like yourself or inviting people into the projection room to educate them and teach them about the magic that is behind the movies. Just to create some some of that special atmosphere when they then go in to watch it and think about the work that’s gone in to their experience. It’s nice to talk to people about that.
Book your tickets for The Testament of Ann Lee here!