Just below the Casino’s mezzanine level, tucked away behind an otherwise unremarkable door within the zig-zagging confines of the building’s East Wing, lies an integral but largely unknown part of the theater’s operations.
Only in recent years with the advent of a new “Behind the Scenes” tour offered by the Santa Catalina Island Company have visitors been able to visit the Projection Room operations.
Just below the Casino’s mezzanine level, tucked away behind an otherwise unremarkable door within the zig-zagging confines of the building’s East Wing, lies an integral but largely unknown part of the theater’s operations.
Only in recent years with the advent of a new “Behind the Scenes” tour offered by the Santa Catalina Island Company have visitors been able to visit the Projection Room operations.
And unlike the vast majority of theaters across America, the Projection Room for the Avalon Theatre has remained virtually unchanged from the then-state-of-the-art facility that the world came to see in May of 1929 with the grand opening of Mr. Wrigley’s “gathering place.”
Although the Theatre now features modern digital and audio projection equipment, like much like the entire town of Avalon itself, the Projection Room (actually a five-room complex located above the theater lobby) is essentially a living museum. It is not an intentional recreation of the past, nor is it a carefully-crafted attempt to portray vintage technology from a 21st century point of view.
Isolated from the various advancements and oscillations in technology and taste over the past eight decades, the Projection Room is “vintage” simply because it has not been changed.
Its ambiance is not “retro” nor is its style “nostalgia.”
Like Avalon itself, it has simply lived through the years, generally unswayed by society’s “improvements.”
Projector lenses, spotlights, projectionist journals and even fan magazines dating to the 1930s and 1940s are neatly stacked on tables and shelves as if placed there yesterday. In the case of film projection equipment, much of it is still installed and operational. In fact, a Vaudeville-era spotlight is still called upon from time to time to supplement the modern lighting array. This spotlight uses the same technology as arc welding to produce light, not a traditional bulb.
Speaking of carbon arc lighting, the Theatre retains to of the last carbon-car projectors in America. Like the spotlights, these projectors, installed in 1939, use a positive and negative carbon rod to produce their lighting.
The specific model of projectors—Brenkert Enarcs with RCA sound heads—they are among the last of their kind in existence, not just in the United States. The entire inventory of spare parts for the pair of vintage projectors is limited to a single gear box located within the Projection Room complex. One could ransack the forgotten store rooms and basements of theaters from Hoboken to Honolulu for spare parts and come up empty-handed.
The carbon rods themselves, once produced in abundance by Union Carbide for a Hollywood-crazed world, are now precious artifacts themselves, to be consumed sparingly.
These two ancient projectors are used only once or twice a year, most notably for the Catalina Island Museum’s Silent Move Benefit.
The other 364 days of the year, the “Brenkert Brothers” wait patiently for their next performance, staring blankly at the screen and at an image projected by their much younger counterparts.
Also found within the Projection Room is a pair of antique slide projectors which also use carbon arc technology for their light. Until the post-war years, theaters around America often presented a “slide show” before or between feature presentations.
These antique “PowerPoint” presentations were designed to entertain the audience not with film but rather with music.
The machines projected the lyrics to popular songs of the time and theater-goers sang along, following a “bouncing ball” of light that hopped along the tops of the words on the screen.
The busy projectionist had to keep changing the individual slides with the lyrics on them fast enough to keep up with the tempo, all the while ensuring that he didn’t lose the carbon-arc lighting.
Like much of the other equipment in the Projection Room, these slide projectors are no longer used but are retained out of respect for tradition.
