This is a bit of a fun thought experiment and no insult or injury is intended to my turntablist friends, but it is (semi-) amusing to contemplate, all the same.
What would happen if projectionists, at movie houses and cinemas, behaved in the same way that disk jockeys, at discos, clubs and raves, behaved?
Might they:
- Change their names to PJ <whatever their name is>?
- Launch a range of self-branded street attire?
- Wear sunglasses at night and baseball caps backward?
- Cause people that want to go and see a movie to ask, “Who’s the PJ tonight?”
- Have bigger billing, on the front of house marquee, than the film they were playing?
- Wear a lot of ostentatious jewellery and bling?
- Change the way they speak, to affect a street cred accent?
- Insert selfies at regular intervals, during the movie screening?
- Cut between two different movies, using stutter effects?
- While playing the movie, insert reel stops and restarts, or scratch effects?
- Refuse to project anything that isn’t white-labelled?
- Regard calls from the audience to “focus” as akin to a DJ being asked to “turn it down”?
- Dance and gesticulate, while the movie plays, in front of the audience?
- Speed up slow action sequences so that they can do a crossfade edit with a car chase?
- Engage in bitter turf wars over who gets to project movies?
- Make shout-outs to the audience, mid-movie?
- Talk over the dialogue whenever they feel moved to do so?
- Remix movies, on the fly, so that the scenes appear in a different order?
- Refuse to project movies that they consider are too main stream?
- Insist on a cut of the door takings?
- Insist on free drink tickets?
- Say, “You want me to project what?!” a lot?
- Turn the projector lamp up, way too bright?
- Put every film into its own obscure sub genre and refuse to project films outside of their favourite sub genre?
- Play one frame out of every ten and call it minimal or glitch?
Perhaps not 🙂
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