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47 3 A Roof with a View o S C A r h A M M E r St E I N ’ S o LyM P I A was a towering, fortress-like structure covering the east side of Broadway between 44th and 45th Streets. It had been built in 1895, as the first theater north of 42nd, and held a glassed-in roof garden, a small concert hall, an eighteen-hundredseat playhouse, and, finally, the Music Hall, with thirty-eight hundred seats and no less than five tiers of horseshoe-shaped balconies. It was into one of these, at a spot directly in the auditorium’s center, that Billy Bitzer was trapped on the night of 12 October 1896, having been forced inside a maroon-curtained projection booth. Earlier that evening, at the press screening of the new biograph projector for “moving pictures” (no one was calling them “movies” yet), everything had gone fine, although perfectionist Billy had noticed that the image was riding a bit too high on the Music Hall’s screen. Now, in preparation for the biograph’s public debut at 9:45, he had attempted to fix the problem, with disastrous results. Somehow the whole contraption, embedded within a six-foot wooden crate that Bitzer called the “coffin,” had stalled with the extra bit of downward tilt he had given it. In anger, one of Billy’s associates at the American Mutoscope Company had pushed him inside the booth and shut the door. If he didn’t fix it, the man had said, Mr. Hammerstein himself would come and personally throw him out the window. “Imagine,” Bitzer later wrote, “two powerful open arc lamps, a hunk of nitroglycerine big as a roll of garden hose, flimsy cotton-nap curtains, and me—alone.” There was little room for movement inside the booth; the box containing the projector nearly filled it. Billy could only squat on a low wooden riser as he worked in the billowing heat. In truth, the projector box looked more like an overturned armoire than a coffin. It was a giant rectangle pointed toward the screen; long end on top, short in front, with the flat expanse—what would have been the armoire’s front section—facing Billy. On this side the outer covering of wood had been removed, so that the guts of the thing were open to him. A single light bulb hanging from the booth’s ceiling helped him to examine the feeder 48 Chapter 3 reel, which was positioned in the upper-left corner of the box, the nitroglycerine film roped around it. From there the film had to travel about two feet to the right, where it disappeared into a dense cluster of pulleys and drums. It was within this initial two-foot span that Billy discerned the first challenge: the film itself was so dry that, left exposed to the air, it was beginning to curl at its edges to form a trough.1 Lightly Bitzer draped a layer of damp towels, already carried into the booth as a precaution against heat, across the expanse of film to give it moisture. He kept these in position until shortly before the exhibition was to begin; then, at 9:45, he removed them and flipped a power switch. The machine roared like a streetcar—a good sign, proof that the motor was working. Billy used his right hand to grasp a lever that controlled the film’s speed. If allowed to move too slowly or quickly while passing over the lamp, it would surely buckle up elsewhere. Simultaneously, with his right foot, Billy depressed a small pedal; this action opened a light shutter and set the powerful rays on their journey through the film and out into the black expanse of auditorium. He likely felt like a one-man orchestra, forced to perform with every part of his body. Yet the film kept moving. Having passed the projector lamp, it descended to a second group of pulleys at the lower right corner of the box, zigzagged upward to more pulleys in the center, and then moved down again into a take-up reel located directly beneath the initial feeder. Billy thrust his left hand into a toolbox at his feet, casting around until he could feel the ridged contours of a monkey wrench. Loosening the upper portion 3.1. Filming at the American Mutoscope rooftop studio, 1897, as featured in Scientific American. [18.191.84.32] Project MUSE (2024...

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