Review of The Projectionist

Awesome flick, starring Chuck McCann. In some ways, a very haphazard and unfocused mess, but also, obviously, an intense labor of love for the director, and maybe also for Chuck McCann, the kiddie-show star of our youth. Chuck is a projectionist at an old movie house (run by Rodney Dangerfield), who fantasizes that he is a superhero. The superhero segments, filmed in Fort Tryon park, it seems, are very amateurish and cheap, remind me of a super-8 superhero film my friends and I made when we were in 10th grade, in which I starred as some sort of superhero. But the director, a guy named Hurwitz, also interspersed hundreds of clips from old Hollywood movies--at one point, the screen was divided into five parts, with different segments of Hollywood films showing in each of the parts. (I guess no one was enforcing film copyrights in 1971.) The Projectionist opens with a segment from a Gerald McBoing Boing cartoon, which then goes off the reel, and contains a lot of news footage showing the awful events in the world, police beating demonstrators, KKK hanging blacks, etc. It also contains fake coming attractions: one for a film about our awful future in which men become the slaves of robots, and another for a film about our glorious future, in which we ascend to heaven on earth. And then there are the scenes of Chuck McCann walking through the streets of New York of 1971, including a stunning walk down seedy old 42nd Street (one of the marquees says "Save Free TV"--remember the campaign against pay TV becoming the norm?) and a visit to a magazine shop with racks full of girlie mags (racks full of racks?) and a photo from one of those mags, a naked girl on a rug, turns into a fantasy segment for Chuck McCann. The movie is nuts, total anarchy, gloriously unfocused and idiosyncratic, and wonderful, and ends with the film we're watching pulling out of the aperture, and the screen going white, then black. Then the lights in the theater go on.