Invasion Of The Reel Snatchers

Across a post-apocalyptic landscape on the outskirts of town, in a dark room on the second floor of an abandoned movie theater, footsteps echoed.

Had the zombies finally arrived for one last cinematic encounter?

That was the scene Friday morning at the shuttered former Ciné 4 movie complex at 371 Middletown Ave. in Quinnipiac Meadows near the North Haven border.

As the scene came into focus, the true picture emerged. Those weren’t zombies rooting around.

Rather, a film archivist named Brian Meacham had broken in (with permission) on a mission to preserve a piece of New Haven’s cinematic past.

He was looking for old film equipment he could bring back to his workplace at the Yale Film Archive in Sterling Library to put to good use storing and preserving and projecting 35 millimeter movies.

That’s why Meacham ended up on early Friday morning scrounging around the barely illuminated projection room at the former Ciné 4 (pictured above).

Despite the promise of months-old ​“Now Showing” movie poster displays (for Mrs. Harris Goes To Paris and Elvis) that still stand by the building’s front entrance, the four-screen independent theater remains closed for good.

It shuttered back in August when the second-generation owner of the 1971-opened movie theater sold the property to the Friends Center for Children. The affordable childcare nonprofit plans to turn the ex-cinema site into a vibrant hub for teaching, learning, and play for young children and their families.

In the meantime, the building remains empty — waiting to be reborn, still bearing some of the flotsam and jetsam of its filmic past.

Which is what Meacham, joined by Friends Center Facilities Manager Ken Beeman, was on scene Friday to scavenge, save, and repurpose.

“Ciné 4 was the last commercial cinema in New Haven to phase out film projection” back in 2013, Meacham said on the drive up to I‑91’s Exit 8.

It was also the ​“last non-multiplex, mom-and-pop theater of the old style” in the city. 

“It was unpretentious.” Cash only. Seats that didn’t recline. Stubbornly affordable tickets. A place that cineastes could catch up with British costume dramas like Mrs. Harris Goes To Paris and Oscar nominees like Nomadland and arthouse-adjacent provocations like Elle on a big screen in case such a movie had skipped downtown’s Bow Tie Criterion Cinemas or was otherwise available only to stream online.

“It was no frills. But it was reliable,” Meacham said.

It also still had a few pieces of film equipment that had remained in the projection room since the theater switched to digital a decade ago. Meacham hoped to bring that equipment over to the Yale Film Archive to help out with his team’s academic preservation and public presentation of 35 millimeter film prints.

As Beeman looked for a light switch in the upstairs projection room, Meacham scanned the room to appraise what might be useful for his archive — and to narrate what each piece of equipment did and the role it played in putting a movie on screen.

“These were the platters that would feed the film out to the projectors,” he said as he gestured to five large metal disks hovering one atop the other like a miniature model of Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

“The platter system was the technology that enabled one person to run multiple shows,” he said. Instead of having to carefully change reels for different projectors, ​“the film would be all threaded together into one continuous massive platter,” it would come out from the edge and go through a series of pulleys and then into the projector, before coming out of the bottom of the projector and back onto the platter to get ready for the next show.

It was sort of an automated system, Meacham explained. It ​“ended up ruining film prints and, for most people, ruining the art of projection.” It made it so that the same person who served the popcorn could also be the person standing in as projectionist, ​“which is not a good outcome.”

A few feet away, Meacham found the first cine-treasure he’d be bringing back to the Yale archive.

“These are split reels, which we wind film onto,” he said, holding up a perforated metal disc used for storing and transferring film prints. ​“These look almost brand new. These will be amazing to have in the archives.”

Someone who came by to help work on one of the site’s digital projection machines said these split reels are top of the line, Beeman said. What brand did he say those were again … ?

“They’re either Hollywood Film Company or Goldberg,” Meacham guessed.

That’s right! Beeman replied. Goldberg.

Further down the table, Meacham found the second piece of equipment he’d be carrying back to the archive — a ​“film rewind.”

“You can crank here and the film would go from one side to the other” to inspect and repair film. The device was bolted to the table. Not to worry, Beeman said. He’d find a way to screw it loose. Keep looking around, he urged Meacham.

And so he did. 

Across the room, Meacham found a half-dozen old 35 millimeter projection lenses. 

“These are nice,” he said, holding one up for inspection. ​“But if you don’t have the right projector, the lens doesn’t really do you much good except as a paperweight or a coffee mug. And the last thing I need is more stuff I can’t actually use.”

Meacham did, however, decide he could use some of the film splicers sitting right nearby. ​“We have plenty of fine splicers” at the Yale Film Archive already, he said. He took four film splicers with him with the idea that these might be helpful to give some day to another film archive that is just starting out.

Back across the room again, Meacham found still more reels of interest hiding in a cabinet.

“These are projection reels,” he explained. That is: the equipment projectionists would use to actually present the film, as opposed to store or transfer it. 

“We’ll definitely take these,” he said about the projection reels. As for the cabinets, they’re ​“nice, but we don’t have the room for them, and they’re kind of a bear” to move around.

He took one more long look at one of the projection reels before stacking them in a to-go pile. ​“These are really just beautiful pieces of cinema technology,” he said. ​“Really, really sturdy.” If they’re not bent, they can still be put to good use projecting films.

As fascinating as former projection booths can be for a film archivist like himself, Meacham said, these weren’t often the most exciting places to work.

“People would be sitting here for hours, just bored out of their skulls. There’s always tape up and around, notes, drawings, posters, stickers.” 

Much of those markers of projectionists past appear to have been cleaned out by the time of Friday’s visit. Still standing was an August 2012 film projection schedule (Moonrise Kingdom, To Rome With Love). It was encircled by a hand-drawn sketch of the outside of the movie theater, the parking lot filled with customers’ cars, and trees and clouds and a moon-filled night sky in the distance.

Beeman told Meacham that one of the ex-movie theater’s screening rooms was recently restored and will likely be used for community movie screenings as part of the Friends Center’s renovated campus. One of the digital projectors had also been updated to allow for laptops to connect to it. The others will be ​“used for spare parts,” he said about the projectors. ​“They’re not worth much anymore.”

After one last survey of the room, Meacham’s work was done for the morning. He left with four splicers, one rewind, and more than half a dozen reels.

As he and Beeman made their way back downstairs to load the goods into the back of Meacham’s car, any concerns this reporter may have had about being stuck in a slasher pic or an Omega Man reboot faded away.

Instead, this outing seemed to fall into that genre much loved by movie fanatics: a movie about movies, about the weird melding of art and technology that sometimes ends up as magic. 

And, hold on, the horizon line … was it at the bottom of the frame? The top? In the dreaded middle? 

Eh, looks good to me.