On Wednesday afternoon, Jim Cassedy was in the projection booth of the Alamo Drafthouse’s New Mission, the place he can be found most days. Cassedy was keeping an eye on a digital projection of A Big Bold Beautiful Journey as he talked with a visitor about the thing he’s done since he was a teenager and which, at 71, he still does better than probably anyone else: Show movies.
Later that night, Cassedy would be too busy to talk. That’s when he’ll be setting up and changing enormous film reels and operating the theater's two projectors (each equipped with 5,000 xenon bulbs that cost around $1,000) for nearly 300 attendees to watch Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another in glorious 70mm. So, hours before the sold-out early-release screening, I found the perfect time for the master projectionist to unspool some highlights from a life spent in the dark.
“Some kids are natural musicians,” Cassedy said. “For whatever reason, I've got the quote-unquote talent to understand these machines. Everybody’s got something they’re good at. The lucky ones are fortunate enough to find a career in it.”
As an A.V.-besotted teenager on Long Island, he was always more interested in what went on in the projection booth than on the screen at his local movie theater. When someone explained the Cue-mark — that tiny blob-like marker on the upper right corner of the screen that tells the projectionist it’s almost time to switch projectors and seamlessly change reels — Cassedy would turn around to see the switch.
Eventually, Cassedy made it into the booth himself. This was in the late ‘60s when movies like Oliver! (1968), Funny Girl (1968), and Patton (1970) played to sold out crowds of movie palaces that had yet to be sliced up into multiplexes. He showed Jaws (1975) three summers in a row, four or five shows a day, overtime every night. “I bought a new car just with the money I made,” he says with a twinkle in his eye. When he projected Carrie (1976), he’d slip into the back of the auditorium for the final scene just to watch the audience scream.
It wasn’t always so glamorous. For a while, Cassedy worked in a theater in East Islip, a small New York hamlet, where the projection booth was littered with beer cans and bottles left by the usual projectionist, who eventually ended up in jail. The place was such a fire trap (“technically a dump”) that Cassedy devised an emergency escape plan just in case. Looking back, though, he sees a bright spot. “It was a great education because every night something would fly off of the projector, and I had to deal with it.” Cassedy stayed there until he was drafted (“the only lottery I’ve ever won”) for the war in Vietnam. On Christmas Eve 1980, the East Islip Theatre finally burned down.
The Alamo Drafthouse-owned New Mission is a much nicer place to work and, judging by the fond greetings Cassedy gets from his much younger colleagues, the projectionist is well-liked. At an age when many people might enjoy retirement, Cassedy is working as hard as ever, running and troubleshooting the projectors, making sure the audio is just right, and running up and down between the main screen and two smaller ones on the upper level.
“A lot of people don't realize that the projectionist is the last link in the chain of the moviemaking process,” Cassedy explains.
After all the years of pre-production, the hundreds of people enlisted in the making of, and the millions of dollars spent to make a movie, the very last person who touches it before a viewer gets to see it is a union projectionist like Cassedy.
“The presentation can ruin it,” he says. “Even if it’s not bad-bad, it ruins the perception.”
Cassedy still hoists the reels onto the projectors even when the films are long like the two-hour-50-minute One Battle or, The Brutalist (2024), which tipped in at three-hour-35-minutes with intermission. At three straight hours, Oppenheimer (2024) required so many reels, Cassedy joked to a friend that if the film’s physicist subject “was so damn smart, he should’ve been able to invent a bomb in fewer than 10 reels.” (In a website for 70mm aficionados, he shared a picture of the film’s canisters nearly filling his booth.)
Small in stature yet fit, there’s something enthusiastically boyish about Cassedy, perhaps because he’s been lucky enough to do the thing he loves at such a high level of competence for so long. He says he doesn’t think about retirement, and seeing him move so fluidly up and down the metal steps in his booth, it’s hard to picture it for him.
“The last reel is always the heaviest,” Cassedy admits, but he clearly has many more reels to go before he rolls credits and fades to black.
