I'm no bigshot - but I do love wide movies!

The good-looking guy to your right is me, or actually it was me before middle age and baldness set in. Anyway I am a projectionist and cinema engineer, or actually I was before the demise of widescreen cinema, the rise of multiplexes and smallfilms of 35mm and less. By less meaning digital cinemas.

 

Due to my severe youth, I never did a Cinerama show before an audience. I fondled and played with the remains of it though and spent more than 20 years of my life in various 70mm projection rooms, from Doctor Zjivago to Alien 2 (if you only count the 70mm movies). Most time I've spent at the "Draken" in Gothenburg, Sweden. A 742 seat 70mm and former Cinerama theatre, so I've done thousands of 70mm shows in my day, which is a slight compensation for not having worked the Cinerama. (I hope?)

Today I am retired at the age of 58, spending my elderly days in teaching adults history, civics and various computer related subjects on Senior High School level and constructing national tests in civics together with my collegues at the university of Gothenburg.

I hope you like my widescreen views and my pages about my old working place the Draken (the Dragon). Today Draken is run by the Swedish Labour movement. That means she is misstreaded, unattended to and left pretty much to demise. She's only a cinema during special venues, as the Annual Gothenburg Film Festival, but she's still around and that's good - and she's one of the few that still can run 70mm and true film!

 

Towards the end of the big-screen era, 70mm were less and roadshows few. The image shows a procectionist loading a reel of StarWars during Easter of 1977. He seems fairly happy with smallfilms too - or maybe he is just drunk? :-)