Amateur Movie Makers (Dec 1926-Dec 1927)

splices, has no titles upside down, and no pictures hindside before, and at the end it is greeted with enthusiastic applause. With excited fingers you thread in reel number two. The lights are out, the switch on, and you are off again on a reel that is even better than number one. Silence gradually lays a mantle over the entire place. There is no enthusiasm. There are no admiring murmurs. Instead there is plain, two inch thick, case-hardened silence. The reel ends. There is no applause. You then begin to grasp what the professionals mean when they say of a new plan, "You never can tell." Reel number three is next threaded in in moist silence. You ask that the lights be put out and you start your projector. It runs, but it fails utterly to project anything. It is inky black. You are unable to see a blessed thing in the murk and you are afraid to move for fear you will tip the whole business off its box. In a weak voice, you ask for the lights again for a moment. You quickly discover that your lamp will not light. You never have had a lamp fail to light before, and so you have never been through the process of taking out the old lamp and putting in a new one. But you must do something. When the lights are on again, you feverishly fish around for the way to get at the old lamp. Your fingers are all thumbs and you are so hot that you steam your glasses, so that everything is a moist fog. Somehow you get the old lamp out. Then you think of that spare lamp which the dealer told you about when you bought your projector, and you dive into your box for it. You tear off the wrapping and you then face the job of putting it back into place. You have never done it before, and you get hotter and hotter and drip perspiration copiously. Finally you get it in and you start the projector again. Just exactly the same black condition results as before. The lights have been put out again, and once more in a week S i x t e e n CAPTAIN JEAN BAPTISTE NOEL, OFFICIAL PHOTOGRAPHER OF THE ROYAL MT. EVEREST EXPEDITION TAKING MOVIES OF THE PEAKS OF MANHATTAN ISLAND. voice you call for them to be lighted. You realize there is absolutely nothing to do but fish the second lamp out. Then some kind soul with good eyes asks to see it. He gazes fixedly for a moment and then makes the intensely interesting pronouncement that it has only part of a filament, the other part being down in the bottom of the glass bulb where he rattles it around as proof of his diagnosis. By this time your audience is talking, which is always a very bad sign, and you are feeling like a disconcerted pickpocket. What with the long hours of overwork in getting the films ready, the frightful heat, the dinner that is sitting very badly, and the shock to your nervous system, you now feel as though you had indulged in a shot of bad home brew. You are beaten, and you still possess enough strength to recognize that it is better to acknowledge it. So you falter up to the screen and make a few sorry remarks and venture upon an explanation which is about as weak as dishwater. You promise to repeat the exhibition with a basketful of new lamps the following Saturday evening if there is any one willing to sit through it. A sympathetic soul in the front row remarks something about its being too bad, and you catch the stern eye of your disapproving wife. You know now that public exhibitions are frightfully different from parlor exhibitions when it comes to motion pictures. Wherefore, I am led to remark, fellow amateurs, that when you are asked to give a public entertainment, you give careful thought to many things. It can be done, because I went through nine reels the next Saturday evening with flying colors. But I had five tested lamps, miles of electric cable, bags of two way sockets, and plugs and every thing. Then, it was a grand and glorious feelin'.