Radio City Music Hall

hank.sykes — As a kid growing up in Streator, IL. I know what it’s like to be a fan of the RCMH in the Midwest. When I first got to see a show there in 1956 as a high school kid, I stood in the 3rd Mezz looking up at the booth ports and wishing I could see the booth. A vice-president at the Hall said when I told him that story, “Well, that ought to teach you to be careful what you wish for!” Glad to hear that RCMH still has a following in my home area.

Great pics, thanks.
Kinda sad to see those projectors wrapped up like that.
Please continue to share those pictures, they are both very intersting and appreciated. The sorta thing we don’t get to see.
What a joy it must be to get to work there everyday.

I would be interested in knowing what the staffing is now.
During the current Christmas show how many stagehands, projectioninst spotlight people does the Hall use? How does it comapare to the staffing in the glory days of movies and a stage show.

Just as movies will probably never be shown again, so too will we never see the professional spotlight operators either. I know its progress, but just as I hate platters, and prefer reel-to-reel,some things just change, and not for the better.

We still go on the buzzes today.

Vito, thanks for the kind words. I’m glad you find my meanderings worthwhile, especially since you are the reason I started posting them in the first place. You had asked if I were “still with us”, and and after looking in the mirror I decided I was!

You asked about the spotlights at Radio City. If I remember correctly we had four lamp operators in both the North and South frontlight booths, plus another operator in Center booth and one or two up in D Cove. The interesting thing was that each operator ran two lamps at one time. The Kliegal carbon arc spots were in pairs and each pair was equipped with left and right hand controls, including the handles to drop the gels in place. I believe that each man kept one spot in flood and one tightened up for spot use, but that may have depeneded on a particular use. The exception was D Cove, where the operator ran one lamp, since those were always used to pick up specific points. (Mind you I wasn’t one of the “elite” Local #1 frontlight crew, so I may not be totally accurate, although the two FR10’s were operated by #306 men, and thus we were under the control of the Head Frontlight Operator, and spent a lot of time on headset with the frontlight crew during the shows.)

The D Cove spots were interesting because of the angle. In D Cove the band car didn’t look as if it were coming out of the pit — it looked as if it were coming right at you since the angle was so steep. Indeed, it was so steep that the yokes for the lamps instead of being set on stands on the floor were hung upside down from a beam in the booth, and supported the lamps from the top rather than the bottom. (In the Center Theatre there was no D Cove, but the similar booth was actually in the chandelier, which must have been pretty toasty given the wattage of the lamps lighting the chandelier itself.)

If you figure four operators in North and South Booth and one in Center, that accounted for 18 lamps plus at least two more in D Cove. (I’m trying to remember if they had reduced the crew in each booth to three men by the time I was there, but there were still more arc lamps used than in any other theatre, and it was because of the ability of each man to run two lamps at the same time.) In addition, before I started there, there were also “towers” in each entrance on stage with operators manning lamps. Costs forced their elimination, but I was fortunate enough to see what may have been the last performances of the “Undersea Ballet” with the original lighting when I was still in high school. That number featured a number of flown ballet members “swimming” across the stage at various heighths, and the lighting from the towers following them was particularly effective. (The ballet also featured Brenograph projections of giant fish swimming along the backdrop projected from Rear Projection.) All of the arc lamps were D.C. which accounted for the large number of generators mentioned in my post above.

The cues in the days before Clear Com headset communications were given by “buzzes” which could come from the stage or the Head Frontlight Operator, and could be heard in the house if one knew what he was hearing. As a high school student who was operating a carbon arc lamp in school productions and had seen a couple used at the stage shows I saw at the Chicago Theatre, I wondered if the Music Hall might have more, but was totally unprepared as I saw my first show there, and turned around to look at the booth and saw a wall of spots extending from 50th to 51st Street, plus Orchestra Conductor spots coming from D Cove! Radio City used arc lamps the way normal theatres used incandescent lamps hung on the front of the balcony. Until the current generation of computer controlled Vari-Lites there was probably no installation anywhere that equalled Radio City’s.

All Xenon bulbs now. All spots are used throughout the year off and on.

We can always count on REndres to come in and fill us up with all the facts. Thanks Rob for a very interesting read.
I loved hearing he handled the Zhivago intermission. That was he sort of thing that made working in those days so much fun :)
With GWTW I did leave the house lights up full during the music at the end of the first half, then when the music ended I took a beat lowered the lights to half and started the music for part two.
Those Roadshow overtures and intermissions were always an adventure and a lot of fun to play with. During the tech rehersal (dry run) we would find he best spots to change the lighting levels (usually at least 2 often 3) then mark the spot with a china marker so later we could splice a “click” (one perf of stock spliced emulsion to cell) on the print to notify us when to change lighting.

A couple of notes about the information above. I was Head Projectionist at the Hall during the “GWTW” 70mm screenings, and yes there were short intermissions. As Vito notes, we also played the music for the end of Pt. 1 and the start of Pt. 2, which did indeed increase the actual length. As a side note: “GWTW”, “2001” and “Dr. Zhivago” were the first films to play the hall in a roadshow format. We had discussions with the production staff about how to present the material. They wanted to feature the organ in addition to the music supplied with the film, and we discouraged them from doing that during the intermission, since the music at the start of Pt. 2 in each case was designed as “call-in” music to alert the audience that the 2nd half was about to start. It was also necessary to just close the “silvers”, the traveller curtain behind the contour, but not bring the contour in, since it would have muffled the call in music. House lights remained lower during the intermission, and the C cove fixed floods which were used in the stage show were used to light the silvers in a kind of random pattern as curtain warmers.

The intermission we had the most fun with was for Dr. Zhivago. I had seen it at the Palace Theatre in Chicago in 70mm and was impressed with the opening of the curtain for the 2nd half. At the end of the call in music, the screen is black, and then there is a dot of light in the middle. That dot grows to become the end of the tunnel the train carrying Zhivago and his family is going through. It continues to widen until the train comes zooming out into a full screen vista. At the Palace, the stagehand opening the curtain timed it so that it parted just ahead of the apperance of the dot of light and then continued to open just ahead of the tunnel mouth until the last moments when the wide image hit it as the train emerged. We worked with botht the front of house and stage crew to try to emulate the effect at the Hall. The silver traveller was operated by a motor with four selectable speeds, and we spent the first few shows finding the proper speed and timing to get them to open just ahead of the tunnel mouth. We finally did achieve a pretty good simulation of the effect.

The file cabinet referred to above is indeed a treasure trove, although I have some material from it at home, as I was afraid that it would someday just be thrown out by someone who didn’t know or care what was in it. I have the plan of the theatre which shows the auditorium in both a lateral view and from above done to scale. That particular plan enabled us to plan the lensing and screen sizing for all of the various film effects in the stage show as well as for video projector specs for the various concerts and award shows we did. Now it can all be done on computer, but then it was done with a ruler and a calculator.

The cabinet also contains the payroll books for the projection crew going back almost to the start in 1932. They were just plain school notebooks, but contain a wealth of infomation about crew sizes and pay rates not only for the main booth, but also Preveiw A and B and the rear projection booth on stage. We had a request from a projectionist who visited to keep a couple of the books as keepsakes and we gave them to him, but the rest are still there. A number of the daily show reports are in the cabinet as well, detailing not only the logged starting times for each event, but any mishaps that arose during the day. There is also a neat letter from Disney to Ben Olevsky detailing the magnetic track layout for “Mary Poppins” which has the wrong information. (Ben showed it to me the first time I was in the booth which was during the original run of “Mary Poppins”.) It is reassuring to note that the cabinet is still there, and hasn’t been discarded in the name of “progress”, and that there is still someone there who appreciates the material it contains.

On another note: that isn’t a generator room, but rather a rehostat room for the booth and the center spot booths. When I started there, carbon arc lamps were still in use in all positions, and the ballasts for the projection booth and center booth lamps were in that room, which is vented to carry away the heat generated by the ballast resisitance. The generator room itself was one of the most impressive places in the hall. All of the generators for all of the D.C. equipment used both for lighting and projection were in that room in the basement. I can’t remember how many generators were used, but there were probably over 20 of the size used in most movie theatres in those days. The main projection booth generators were huge. There were three of them, and they supplied power for the HyCandescent projection lamps as well as the FR10 spot lamps in the main booth and the Klieg spots and slide projector in the center spot booth. Two were alternated by show — when a new movie started, the generator supplying the projectors was switched. This enabled the other generator to be serviced during the movie, and then put on line for the stage show. At the next show change, they would once again be reversed, so that there was always a time they could be serviced. They still had three full-time generator technicians on duty, who not only took care of the booth generators, but also those for D cove and the two screening rooms. It was probably the largest generator room ever built for a theatre and was truely awesome!

The five minute break would have been in addition to the exit and entrance music between parts one and two. As I recall that would have added about 7-8 more minutes.
GWTW had music everywhere, at the beginning and end of part one,
as well as the beginning and end of part two.
In one of the 70mm engagements I ran in order to fit all the music and still fit in three showings the projectors never stopped rolling between parts one and two. The music was enough time for the intermission.

earlier today, channel 13 in NYC showed the radio city xmas spectacular commercial free in hd. It’s no better than going to see it at the hall!!!

hahahaha!!!!

If they indeed ran an intermission, then all of the bathrooms in the building (there are a lot) would be packed for 15 or so minutes and the concession stands busy before the movie resumed its second act!!!