Reflections on the last 7,573,824,000 frames.

Watched "Ed Wood" tonight for the first time in probably ten years tonight.

Ten years.

One decade.

Seven billion, five hundred seventy-three million, eight hundred twenty-four thousand frames of film.

Last time I saw it I projected it.

I knew vast stretches of the film by heart. Not only dialogue or motion but every single frame. Backwards and upside down, passing the gate. Seeing it again was like meeting an old, familiar freind. I counted frames, at speed.

The theatre I showed it in no longer stands. I never worked more closely with film than in the Cinema 150's dual booths with narrow catwalk inbetween. Never saw the images projected larger than on the D-150 wraparound screen in the Dome. It was a thoroughly magical place. I pulled the strings: I flipped the switch, I laced the Norelco projectors and lowered the music, dimmed the lights, ran the films, lit the lamps, raised the curtain, opened the shutters and encased 864 persons at a time in the three stories high, sharp focus world of any film I ever showed, and showed some of the greatest ever made.

I lugged the cans up countless stairs. Locked and unlocked doors, opened and closed. Made popcorn at the exact right moment, every time. Built and tore down the films, sometimes for days on end without a break. Test ran each single film before exhibiting. Transferred beheaded and defooted spliced nine-reelers both on and off the ring between platters across the catwalk on particleboard sliders while both sets of platters ran above and below me as I crouched between to prepare the next feature. Sold tickets, skimming thousands off the top in discards making candy sales look good. Won stolen money from the managers in late-night backroom poker games. Did lots and lots of absolutely crazy things in there I won't recount. (Eric sitting in the balcony and a "This Section Closed" sign come to mind, for some odd reason.) And started each and every show on time -- exactly.

To the second.

Meaning that for a movie starting at 8h10, the shutter opens on the spliced-together, properly tensioned, running at speed film at precisely 20:10:00, without fail, in focus, itermittent and shutter rightly timed, sound rightly looped, and ran to completion with neither breaks nor other damage to the priceless giant spools of film representing the combined fruits of thousands of people's labour, often spanning several continents.

Knew every nook and cranny of that place. All its secret hiding places. How to get up on the roof with its inimitable view of the Space Needle six short blocks away. Where to hide things -- or people.

The people that I called my freinds all fell rapidly from the face of the earth. I still don't know what happened to them all. (Ken, Eric, Jodey, Bill, Andy -- you'll be remembered, if not all of you entirely fondly.) When I raised the lights and looked around and saw that none were left, I took a Greyhound bus back home to Texas in the middle of the night. I guess none of 'em loved it all as much as I did, enough to escape with the memory of the place and time indelibly etched in memory before their complete self-destruction by a thousand different kinds of utter madness.

In those ten years' time I have relived in person many segments of the film in the places where its real subject lived. Now on the eve of my second anniversary in Albuquerque the film comes back to me to stand as bookends for the "research and development" phase of my existence on this earth. For quite some time I lived in North North Hollywood, you see, living something like Ed Wood's own "nightmare of exstacy". My first night there -- eventually spent sleeping on the floor under a Director's desk from Disney's Burbank Studios (circa Pinnochio) surrounded by Avery Daffys and Porkys and Grim Bettys and Ub Mickeys and Oswalds -- my host took me out to the Blacklight Club. Enjoyable, but neither my first nor last encounter with the women who aren't "really" women, to the apparent chagrin of my otherwise most gracious host, who must have hoped he was corrupting me.

It was impossible to find Ed's house when sober. Enough alcohol in you from where he bought it at the Circus Liquor in North Hollywood and you would find yourself drawn there. Same house every time. Impossible to find in daylight.

Right next to Circus was the North Hollywood Spa. What a place. Still the seventies in there. If you understand, you understand, and if you don't, you don't, and I'll just leave it there. Cost me what -- fifteen or twenty bucks? Well spent. Would never, again, naturally. But wouldn't live now without having already gone, either.

Torrential flood of memories unleashed upon me now. Too much, too much to write about. So many words per picture. Multiply by a thousand the above number of frames, and there's my life. These ten crazy damn years. Priceless. Long spool of film loosely wound. Run time to time. Do not bend or abrade, scratch, or shred. Do not burn. Splice only to repair.