(film projector whirring) (classical music) - [Rebecca] In 2011, there was a lot of talk about like do we need to keep 35 millimeter or like does anybody care?

- [Julian] There started to be interest and talk about transitioning to digital projection.

- Luckily there were people around that sort of fought for it and now it's become sort of hip again, so we made the right decision.

I'm Rebecca Lyon.

I am the Assistant Technical Director and a Programmer here at the Music Box Theater.

- I'm Julian Antos and I'm the Technical Director at the Music Box Theater.

- The theater was built in 1929 and just in terms of like these types of movie theaters, just there aren't that many of them left.

You know, on a daily basis, like we're doing a lot of digital, we're not like Luddites.

But I think what we really care about is, is the film component.

I've been here since 2008 and I think I can claim to have been the first woman projectionist at the Music Box.

- When I was around 16 or so, I was getting into movies seriously, in fact, so much that I almost dropped out of high school in order to, I don't know watch movies and read equipment manuals and attempt to fix projectors.

But yeah, I have very strong memories of being aware from a very early age that it was film being projected.

(classical music) (film projector whirring) - If I'm about to run a show, I would come over here and look at my inspection report and then I would go over to the projectors themselves and I would swap out the lens for the aspect ratio of the film.

And then we're gonna turn the light source on, which is important.

If you don't have light, you don't have a movie.

Hopefully, it works.

(chuckles) There we go.

- Prior to running a show, we would clean the projector.

Anytime I'm threading, I just kind of go over the entire film path and make sure that everything looks okay and I don't notice anything out of alignment.

- This is our film.

I am just putting the film in the gate right now.

It's actually really similar to loading a film camera.

I think of this as like the core and you start here and then you thread up, thread down.

It's kind of different for other projectors and also it can be a personal.

(chuckles) This is, you know, some projectionists do this slightly different.

I'm skipping a lot of rollers up here because this is different sound formats so it can look like a lot of rollers.

But actually we're skipping quite a few of them.

This is when all the like hardcore, like retired projectionists watching this are like, I can't believe they're doing it this way.

Okay, this looks good to me.

So, we're at the point where I would close up the projector and just run it.

(film projector whirring) (bright playful music) - So since the screen is about a hundred feet from where the projector actually is, we always like to double check focus with binoculars because there's no way that we can see that far away as well as the person in the front row can see.

So we always like to double check.

(classical music) (film projector whirring) I do all sorts of weird stuff when I'm here alone.

- There's a lot of pacing.

- Yeah.

- I do a lot of just like pacing back and forth.

- So, I'm waiting.

I'm waiting for the movie to be over.

And as soon as I see the last image, which we have written on our report, I'll bring the curtain down, close the dowser, switch the sound over.

And once the film is all run out, turn the motor off, but kind of get into position.

(bright playful music) (film projector whirring) That's it.

- There's a good projectionist scene here, I would say.

There's just a lot of people in Chicago that are really into film projection.

There's kind of slightly fewer jobs here than if you were to live in New York or LA and do film projection.

But we're better at it.

(both laughs) (classical music)