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over and a visit to the cinema can be a deafening,
slightly out of focus and sterile experience, shared
with 2 or 3 others in an empty theatre. If anything goes
wrong - well, you get your money back.
FOOTNOTE: The title of this opus stems not only
from the Bible, but from a teenage experience I had
while working nights as a relieving Assistant Operator
for Hoyts Theatres in Melbourne. I received an urgent
call to go to a cinema where the Assistant had taken
ill.
After the usual panic of making up the show on the
run - and learning to thread the unfamiliar machines,
I noticed that the Operator always struck the arc with
a great flourish while saying loudly "Let there be
light!” This was always punctuated right on cue by
the "splat" of the arc striking. This happened 10-12
sometimes, 15 times a night. At first it was amusing - Interior of a Powers lamphouse, showing
then its constant repetition became very annoying, the vertical arc and the condenser lens
partly because that was all he ever did! while I rushed
around like a hairy goat working to keep the show running.

By the end of the week I was planning murder - perhaps a dynamite charge attached to the carbons
"Let there be light!" BANG!!! Oh Joy! Just at that moment a new Assistant arrived to take over
from me. "What
happened to the other
Assistant - the sick
one?" I asked. "Oh, he's
gone bush" was the
reply. I wonder why?
All illustrations are
from Kev Franzi's
Australian Cinema
Heritage Collection.

Dialogue sequence
from "The Picture
Show Man" by Joan
Long and Limelight
Productions Pty. Ltd.
1977.

Left: A Powers 6B hand
turned projector with a
lamphouse containing a
vertical arc.

September 2020 REEL DEALS 11