“Hello, tech support.”

“Hello, this is the Ibaraki Film House here. We’re having trouble getting the film to play.”

“Have you tried turning it off and on again?”

“It’s not a digital film. It’s a film film.”

“Oh, right. Don’t you have a projectionist there?”

“What’s a projectionist?”

“A projectionist is the person who receives the cans of film, counts them, splices them if necessary, loads them on the plate, unspools back into 2000 foot reels…”

“What’s a reel?”

“…replaces the bulbs if they go out. Checks for dust.”

“How do you get dust on a film?”

“Well, in the case of Macross Plus, someone actually used one of the canisters as an ash tray for a few weeks. That didn’t help. So have you got a projectionist?”

“You must mean Ken the Booth Usher?”

“What’s a Booth Usher.”

“Well, he’s the guy who makes the film start, you know.”

“Aha! So he must be your projectionist.”

“Well, he serves popcorn and hotdogs… and then when it’s time for the film to start he…”

“Goes into the back room and presses Play?”

“Er… Yes.”

“Okay, I think I see the problem. You see, you have what’s called a state-of-the-art cinema.”

“Yes we blimmin’ do.”

“And the trouble is, that a state-of-the-art cinema, in the eyes of many corporations, is simply a giant DVD player with a hotdog seller outside.”

“You say that like it’s a bad thing.”

“Well, it is if you are having a… are you having a film festival?”

“Yes, we are!”

“So you’re showing some old movies?”

“Some of them date back to the late nineties!”

“The 1890s?”

“No! The 1990s!”

“And let me guess, they’ve arrived in big round cans full of black plasticky stuff in long strips.”

“Yes! So can you tell us what we need to do. We can play DVD, Blu-ray, Digibeta, HDCAM, full-on digital…”

“Do you have a pen and paper? Okay, good. Write this down: ‘Invent time machine. Go back ten years. Remember to keep training projectionists.’”

Jonathan Clements is the author of Schoolgirl Milky Crisis: Adventures in the Anime and Manga Trade. This article first appeared in NEO #99, 2012.