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That reminds me of the time I went to see Spartacus, shown by a local film club. The projectionist mixed up the 2nd and 3rd reels but no one noticed until the film was over and they began discussing the movie.

Have fun now. Soon enough theaters will be screening digitally. Fewer projectionists, fewer mistakes, fewer stories.

Right. Because computers never make mistakes. Try: Fewer people to fix things when things go wrong.

The worst mistake I made in my two years as a projectionist was starting "Love Actually" instead of "Peter Pan" (2003). Fifty seats of small children and their parents sat through 20 minutes of trailers, the title for "Love," and the first 10 minutes of the movie before they came out to complain. And that was only because in the first 10 minutes, a fantastic Bill Nighy goes into a cursing spree. I giggle whenever I think of it and hope that a seven year old somewhere still yells, "Bugger shite!" because of it.

I did that once by accident when I was a projectionist. We had 2 different films on the same platter system and I started an R rated movie instead of the G. It wasn't as bad as it could have been because before we even got out of the trailers I had parents coming out complaining about the inappropriately graphic trailers attached to the film. Upon further inspection they were right. When all was said and done, their "real" movie began 5-10 min late. The audience members and myself were both pretty lucky on that one.

Someone once told me he was at home in Lebanon when Pulp Fiction came out and he went opening night, loved it so much he went back the following night only to find the theater had decided that they'd been sent the movie out of order and had somehow managed to cut the whole thing back together chronologically.

Worse than putting the reals together in the wrong order is putting one on upside down and backwards as happened once with Courage Under Fire.

Okay, I'm not a curmudgeon with no sense of humor, but I find it a bit disturbing that the writer found the "Hills for Mimzy" mistake "howlingly funny." In college we were once shown "Milhous" instead of "Taming of the Shrew" and we laughed our butts off, but that's not the same as scaring small kids.

I agree with Lee. But I am a wee bit curious as to why these parents didn't collect their kids and leave the cinema at once (especially considering that the opening shot contains a pregnant woman in chains, as described by the writer). I have not seen the film, so I've no knowledge of just how long this birth scene lasts...but, if any of the other films I've seen with mum's giving birth (i.e.: 'For Keeps' with Molly Ringwald, 'Children of Men' with Clive Owen) are any indication, I would assume that there was more than enough time for the parents in attendance to realise the mistake and make their exit before their kids could see the actual birth.

We were showing free kiddie shows one was transformers and the other was gobots, I accidently spliced 1 reel of Gobots in with transformers and vice versa needless to say the parents were less than thrilled

Ya, I did the same thing, It was supposed to be a showing of the movie Cars, but i played The davinci code on accident, with the opening seen of a dead naked old man...Although these parents were smart enough to leave the theatre instead of just sitting there while their kids cried.

Picture this, if you will. It's the opening night of Any Given Sunday. The smell of testerone overwhelms the smell of popcorn in Auditorium #2. All is well until the players take the field for the final game... and then the screen goes black. "Did it break?" I say to the irate customer whose neck is thicker than my torso. "It just stopped," he says. So I go to the booth to check out what caused the stoppage, but to my surprise, the film didn't STOP, the film ENDED! You see, Any Given Sunday was an extremely long movie that was delivered (by bus) in THREE cans, not the usual TWO. Neither the bus company nor the projectionist noticed the "1 of 3" and "2 of 3" stickers on the TWO cans that were delivered! So there I was, without an ending to show my already irritated football fans. I made the long walk down that center aisle and told them the bad news, doing my best to explain the intricacies of projectionism, but they were less than sympathetic as they collected their refunds and walked out the door. Then I made the call to my district manager to warn him of the flood of calls he was about to receive. And then there was the time that Clint Eastwood's TRUE CRIME played for two weeks with reels 2 & 4 reversed and nobody noticed... but that's another story for another time.

I remember seeing the 1981 film THE AMATEUR with the last reel first. I knew it was fishy that there was no studio logo. So avant-garde!

I was working when the first Pokemon movie came out and my boss mixed up the reel sequence. It ran for three days of packed showings before anyone noticed the mix-up. Says a lot about the film I guess.

I'm sad to say in my run as a projectionist I've done all of these examples at least once. The best horror story though, for me, was when the platter ate the last two reels of VOLCANO as it was spinning onto the platter. Luckily, I had seen it the night before and was able to piece it together over the next 8 hours (overnight) in time for the first showing the next day. With the damage to the film, it had to be at least a full two minutes shorter, and horribly scratched. As far as I remember, no replacement reels were ever ordered.

Haha, I got sent a print of Catch a Fire that had run on sneaks at another theater. I had built hundreds of films at the megaplex I had worked at but was just starting as projection at a different theater company. By this point I had only built The Departed, Flags of Our Fathers, and Running With Scissors for the company, so when reels 2 and 4 were switched I was barred from building films for a good while. In fact, I have only built Ghost Rider since then and tore down the Departed. Funny thing is though, only 4 people complained through four shows of Catch a Fire on opening day. At the megaplex I worked at I was the only projectionist to never start the wrong film, my friend who started Goal! The Dream Begins instead of M:I:III and United 93 instead of The Wild wasn't as lucky.

Nobody noticed the problem with Catch a Fire, Landon, because they had fallen asleep before reel 1 was over.

How long did parents watch "The Hills Have Eyes" for before they realized it was not "The Last Mimzy"?

As a teen, I used to be a projectionist for Cinemark. One time I accidently swiched reels on Dead Man Walking. Audiences were completely baffled when Sean Penn came back to life!

The Coronet Theater in San Francisco was notorious for breaking prints in the middle of screenings. When it happened at a show 3/4 of the way through "Outbreak" i wanted to ask the projectionist "could you please do that to the rest of the movie?"

i've worked at a few cinemas and seeing the wrong film showing is amusing and oddly satisfying - not as good as watching them play backwards or upside down though, when mistakes like that happen people usually don't complain because they're worried that its just an effect and they'll look stupid. The flip side of that is those dumb customers who complain the projectors not workin for a black and white film.

Done all of those things....worst is when I dropped a film on the floor. Took hours to clean up and fix.

EVEN BETTER was my double-feature that ended with me cutting off the end of my finger on a whirling shutter blade whilst changing aperture plates of our 16-35mm convertable Kinotons. Show ran fine -- audience just had to suffer through me walking through a crowded theatre with blood-a-drippin'. Good times.

I went to see " Nanny Mcphee " and couldnt imagine why the trailers before it were so graphic and all rated R, until the first shot of the movie was James Franco's naked back, with the words " Annaopolis " printed across it..

forgot to mention when the reel was corrected, we still had to sit through all the trailers that come before Nanny Mcphee, so our movie started 45 minutes later than planned.

I remember the time I put A Man Apart together out of order. I was rushing, because it was going to be shown for the first matinee and it had only come that morning. Luckily, only one guy came to see it, and he came out at the end and said "Your projectionist put the movie together our of order." He was very nice about it. Funny thing is my friend and I were watching it too - to make sure I had put it together right - and we somehow convinced ourselves that it made sense the way we saw it. Haha. It was one of my first builds and I was in high school at the time. Lesson learned! I was rather anal about reading the reel tags after that.

Imagine the fun of building "Grindhouse" which comes labeled reels 1-6 and reels 1-6. So, not only do you have to put on the right reels in the right order, but you have to make sure the CORRECT reel 2 follows reel 3. The theater I work as is very particular and we tend to keep mistakes to a minimum. We have had incidences where the wrong movie played but there was no audience to complain.

Oh man, 2+ years in Projection, do I have stories. Too bad the worst of em involved me fixing them! I started Polar Express as usual. Too bad about 30 minutes later, I got a call up saying "you should be playing Blade 3". At least it wasn't the other way around, which I could've been fired for. All the blood-thristy teens looking back up at me. Good thing for that window hah! That, of course happened a week after starting "Christmas with the Cranks" instead of "Spanglish". Then proceeding to have to move Xmas without the trailers + almost all of reel 1 later in the night. That Christmas Eve was a fun night. Then there was the time I built the second half of the trailer ring upside down and out of frame. Luckily, I got to stay an hour and a half late til after the screening was done and I could salvage it!

Not really a projectionist error but, we were sent reels of a Korean film (without a single spoken word) called "The Isle" instead of the Micheal Bay schlockfest "The Island" It was a low budget arthouse masterpiece, more than half the theatre stayed engrossed until the end. arthouse

When I worked in the biz, I was always super-anal about making sure I was putting the reels together in the right order, etc., as many, many people are. I also would use masking tape and black Sharpie to label the tail leader at the outside of the platter, and then I'd use white grease pencil to label it again, since the oil solution used for cleaning the projector heads would always end up making the masking tape come off. Guy I worked with started Die Hard II once instead of whatever children's movie was scheduled for that time, and he was quite embarrassed, but fortunately, the parents brought their kids out en masse as soon as Bill Sadler's naked butt hit the screen. Worst thing that actually happened to me, though, was the last two reels of Godfather III flying off the platter and making spaghetti on the floor of the booth. We didn't have enough of the suction-cup blocker things to be able to space them tight enough, and that platter got to spinning just a wee bit too fast...

Most projectionists I know have started the wrong film on a split screen, but a lot of these posts highlight the value of screening everything before customers pay to see it.

Years ago in Boston I went to a college screening of Michaelangelo Antonioni's "Zabriski Point". As soon as the movie began, I noticed that everything was squeezed together horizontally, making everybody look tall and skinny. Since I knew this was due to the wide-screen anamorphic print not being projected with the proper lens, I immediately went to the projectionist to complain. His response: "Sometimes Antonioni does interesting things with the camera." "Yeah, right," I said, and got my money back and left. I'm sure that everyone else in the auditorium stayed and watched the film in its distorted form.

I was playing some movie with Kurt Russell on two screens with the same print. It ran off one platter through projector #1, then along rollers on the wall through projector #2 then onto another platter. Took about 10 minutes to thread up. I somehow managed to thread one of them up with the soundtrack on the wrong side. Naturally it was discount night and both theatres were full. However, it's not always the projectionist's fault. One time I had the bulb die just as Tom Hanks' character was dying in Saving Private Ryan.

It would be a fascinating experience to watch A Man Escaped in between reels of Chained Heat, from cinema to porno videos, in a sense, it'd be like watching many contemporary movies, which can't seem to figure out their own medium. Showing the reels out of order, now that's another story, one that could be very fun. Projectionists should have more fun, audiences hardly notice poorly aligned or out-of-focus shows, and still, the projectionist, who at least can tell the difference between a television show and a film, has to work very hard. It hardly seems worth it.

One of the weirdest experiences I ever had at the movies was seeing "Erin Brockovich" in the theater and finding the majority of the scenes had the boom mike hanging 3 feet above the actors heads. There were only about ten of us in the theater and we all started laughing and looking at each other to make sure we were all seeing the same thing. We went to the manager afterwards, more out of fascination than anything and he had the projectionist explain it had something to do with the height of the screen. Can that be true? No one I've spoken to since who saw it had that experience. It was incredibly bizarre. The boom mike was there in a good 80% of the movie, being moved between the actors by the unseen sound man as they spoke.

I'm a projectionist at a Regal Theatre. When Smokin' Aces came out I went to the second showing on the day it came out. When the third reel started I noticed a sound glitch and said immediately to my a co-projectionist who was watching the movie with me, "this movie out of sequence" and she was like "no it's fine" 4th real starts and people are back alive and I was like, "No. Definately out fo order." The entire audience in the first showing didn't notice it, and the 4 managers who screened the print the night before hadn't noticed either. And it was an obvious mistake. On a side note, does this happen to anyone else...Something is wrong with the movie, and people's first reaction is to push in the portglass which then hits the floor and breaks...Anyone else get this or is it just the stupid people in Massachusetts?

This blog is big time now.

In my 2 years as a projectionist, luckily, I have never started anything wrong. However, I have put on reels 3 and 4 of I, Robot in the wrong order. I watched it with about 8 friends and none of us noticed. I got a call the next day because they used my print for an employee screening saying that it was in the wrong order. So that sucked. However, one projectionist did start Freddy vs. Jason instead of Finding Nemo. Needless to say, that was a fun little event. Of course, there are plenty more stories, considering I'm a manager here now so I have to hear about it all. On an interesting note, at the theater I just transferred from, someone started The Last Mimzy instead of Hills Have Eyes 2. So kind of a vice versa, but kind of interesting considering some theater in New York seems to have similar bookings to us.

I guess I, as an audience member, have been pretty lucky as I have never been shown the wrong movie or been shown a movie in the wrong order. Anyway, the worst thing that happened to me was that one time I was with my Grandmother watching "Dances With Wolves" and suddenly in the middle of the movie, the screen went blank! Apparently the projectionist was on break at the time, without thinking about having to change the reels. The most annoying part, though, was the fact that the next reel wasn't started until the projectionist finished their break, which resulted in about a 10 or 15 minute “pause” in the movie. I tell you, that resulted in some angry senior citizens!

Most appropriate projector snafu: The film breaking and melting at the climax of Memento, just after the b/w bleeds to color. Thankfully they were able to rethread, but boy was that a nail-biting 20 minutes. Worst: Having to wait for the multiplex goons to rethread the final reel of Hollow Man, which they had put in upside-down and backwards. By that point, it was clear the dreadful movie wasn't going to get any better, but I was obligated to stay even though I know it would take the better part of an hour to fix. Luckily when the same thing happened years later during Bewitched, I was free to walk out.

Worst experience I've ever had was actually at the American Cinematheque's Egyptian Theater. The movie was "Two-Lane Blacktop" and I was totally into it. I watched the whole thing and right at the big climax, the film burned up. Gone. Anyone see it? Who won the race?

Had a couple of interesting experiences along these lines... Checked out a rep screening of John Carpenter's THE FOG. About ten minutes in, when the titular fog is creeping over the town and lights start flashing, things in town start going wrong....the theatre lost power, ending the film there. I waited for about forty-five minutes, but the power remained resolutely out. Everyone I told the story to in the weeks after thought it was hilarious and appropriate. Me, I just wanted to see the damn movie. Another time a screening of STOP MAKING SENSE switched reels 2 and 3. Startling to those of us familiar with the film, going from the deliberate build of band onstage - David Byrne, then Tina Weymouth, then Chris Frantz, then Jerry Harrison, then HOLY CRAP it's the whole band doing "Making Flippy Floppy". My co-writer and I figured this would be an excellent festival idea - screen different films than those listed, but with appropriate thematic choices, so that your audience is revved up for a certain experience, and in a perfect frame of mind for a stylistic suckerpunch. For example: list SAVING PRIVATE RYAN, screen Borzage's anti-war film NO GREATER GLORY.

I remember going to see a screening of LA Confidential at the University of Kansas in the Union and the boom mics were visible for a couple of scenes. It was really bizarre. And I've never seen anything like that again. Does anyone remember the old 400 Movie Theater - now the Village North - back in the day when you could almost count on the fact that something would go wrong every time? The reels were almost regularly put out of order there.

I've seen many projection mishaps over the years but the funniest, to me, was at a screening of "The Constant Gardener" with a friend who is a stickler for staying to watch the entire end credits of a film. About five seconds into the end credits the projectionist just shut the film off. My friend was outraged and complained loudly to the manager. We both got free tickets for a future screening, and a few other people lined up behind us to claim their free tickets too.

I remember during a screening of David Lynch's "Mulholland Drive", the film broke in the projector. It was right during the mental collapse scene when Naomi Watts is fighting back visions of little people crawling under her door and the film builds to this nightmarish climax.. then... tear.. the reel breaks and the screen goes black. Interesting thing was, I was so into the film and believed in Lynch's horrific head trip, that I and the 5 other people in the theater sat there for about 3-4 minutes before we understood this was NOT the intention of the filmmaker. Leave it to Lynch to disturb and screw with the viewer so much that we get lost in reality!

I've been relatively lucky; I've only had the reverse of the Antonioni experience above: watching The Minus Man, it started out with everything very squat, and after a few minutes of it I decided it wasn't an effect. And it wasn't. I went to ask about it; the projectionist corrected something, and suddenly everyone was no longer in a funhouse mirror.

i once sat thru the entire running time of Buffalo 66 with the print screened too low. the result: we could see the boom mics and the lighting, and everything else. i was just so fascinated and transfixed by the strangeness of it all, i didn't complain.