Tales from the Splice Boys

Whilst doing our enforced 731 days of National Service back in the early `60s, my mate Dave Millman and I got ourselves jobs as projectionists at the local AKC Globe Cinema in Paderborn, Germany.

Our main motivation was to improve upon the 15s 9d (78p) weekly pay from the army and the cinema paid us quite well for doing a skilled job seven nights a week. And it wasn`t just any old cinema, but a state of the art (for the early `60s) establishment with full stereophonic sound, stage and curtain lighting, cinemascope screen and two synchronised Bauer projectors - a bit like the one illustrated - which was fired by carbon arc light.

Having bluffed our way into employment, we more or less picked up all the technicalities as we went along, despite the manager - a lovely man named Bert Dorsett, who knew even less about it than we did - being obliged to refund tickets for our first couple of evenings, as we grappled with the complexities involved (we blamed an unheard of breakdown in the ruthlessly efficient German electricity supply.) Eventually though, we became very proficient at the job, which included not only the shows themselves but also the need to `make up` the running order of `B` picture, newsreel, adverts, trailers and main feature - some of which were standard size and others cinemascope - which changed every couple of days.

Our main fault was perhaps a propensity to cut some bits we liked out of films before we sent them off to the next cinema in the chain. Over the 18 months we were there we spliced up our own film of extracts which were then shown to an invited audience in the dead of night. I remember both Dave and I fell deeply in love with Yvette Mimieux (see above) when she starred as Weena in The Time Machine and we had quite a few clips of her which ensured a good night`s sleep after our hectic days `working` for the army and then in the cinema. Cinema audiences which followed ours in the chain were thus deprived of the enjoyment which Yvette (and countless others) brought to us and doubtless subjected to the occasional jump in the continuity of the films they were watching.

Some of the `B` pictures were seriously awful (as was the genre at the time) so much so that on more than one occasion we used our experience as film critics to shut them off before the end - a practice which the audience often appreciated. We sometimes took our cue from the reaction of the audience and pandered to their own critical wishes. A memorable example was a `western` shot on Dartmoor with a gang of Devon farmhands posing as desperados and a sherriff desperately seeking to clean up Princetown - it lasted until half way through the second reel before it got the chop.

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