There’s a place in Vancouver on West Broadway where the dull grey sidewalk is briefly interrupted by a stretch of faded yellow and green speckled concrete. Stretching above, the neon-laced marquee announces the screenings for this week with slide-in vinyl letters; today’s double bill is True Grit and Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. Above it all towers a vertical neon sign that spells the word HOLLYWOOD, the paint behind it peeling in large patches. Down on the sidewalk sits a foggy white A-frame that’s more chalk than board which screams “MATINEE” at the knees of the Kitsilano residents and shoppers that walk by, oblivious, on this sunny afternoon.
I approach the empty ticket booth and peer inside. The glass-enclosed capsule is cluttered with pencils, pens, keys, newspapers and old business cards curling at the edges. Giant rolls of yellow, blue and white ADMIT ONE tickets sit on top of the stainless steel AUTOMATICKET console, its push buttons worn from seventy-six years of ticket sales. As I begin looking at the faded movie postcards pinned to the back door of the booth, it swings open and I am greeted by a wide-eyed, smiling man who removes the semicircle metal blocker at the base of the window between us. “Hey! You here for Psycho?” I tell him that I am, and I pass ten bucks through the hole. He spins on his swivel chair to face an old metal till and pulls out the top drawer to insert my note, then the bottom drawer to scoop out my change, which he slides across the stainless steel with a yellow ticket. “Come on in.” I push through the double red doors and enter the Hollywood.
Once inside, the guy from the ticket booth has spun around in his chair again and stepped out of his booth to greet me inside the lobby. “So you’re a big film buff, are ya?” I tell him that this will be the first time I’ve seen Psycho and I’m really glad that it’ll be on a big screen. “It’s an original print, y’know. Acetate. It’s so fragile; it just crumbles in your hands. I’m really excited to screen it.” He introduces himself as Vince Fairleigh and shakes my hand firmly. The girl serving popcorn behind the concession stand yells out “Viiiince, how do you spell Hitchcock?” He spells it out for her and the little old lady that she’s serving. I’m surprised that this is the same guy that I spoke to a few years ago to apply for a projectionist job – I would have expected someone in their sixties, not their forties. I remind him of our prior conversation and he snaps to action, locking the ticket booth and passing the keys to the popcorn girl, “Well, if you’re a projectionist, you gotta see this print. 1960s original. It’s so fragile!”
Dressed in all black, Fairleigh almost disappears in the darkness as he bounds up the stairs two by two. Once at the top, he reaches up and swings open the door of the elevated projection room. Taking hold of a metal bar, he hoists himself up into a space dominated by two silver Simplex XL film projectors. Like most projection rooms, it is cramped and cluttered with all manner of zenon bulbs, film spools, transport cans and the odd beer can, too. Fairleigh clicks on a lamp overhanging the work bench that illuminates the print of Psycho, laced between two spools. “Just look at this,” he says, picking up one of the many scraps of film and tearing it apart with ease. I pick up a small piece and hold it up to the light. It is two frames of Anthony Perkins, looking so normal and conservative that it’s almost creepy. “Oh yeah, that’s a good one. You can keep that if you like.”
He picks up his work where he had left off, cutting out the damaged sections of film and re-splicing them with tape. “I told my Dad to get a re-release print but he goes and orders an original ‘cause he’s such a space cadet. It pisses me right off; I’m the one who has to repair this mess. Look at this:” Fairleigh holds up a two foot length of film where almost all of the sprocket holes have been ripped. “Sometimes you can’t fix it all, you just gotta do the best you can and run it through the projector, breaks and all, and hope it works.”
After rewinding the film, he lifts the giant spool, places it on the projector and then carefully removes the lens and places it in a box. I crane my head in for a closer look and peek out the tiny glass window to the theatre. The bottom of the window ledge is lined with sticky fly paper that serves as a densely populated insect cemetery that possibly dates back to when the Hollywood first opened its doors in 1935. Fairleigh returns with a new lens for the projector and catches himself, “Oops – I suppose I should check to see if it’s dirty, huh? Whoa! Look at this!” He blows off a layer of accumulated filth like it’s a dusty library book. Holding the lens above his head, he blows on it while he flutters a soft paintbrush across its surface, “We don’t have compressed air, so I gotta make do.”
“I’ve worked here all my life, but this isn’t all I do. My mother is Nisga’a and I learnt wood carving at an early age. Art keeps me sane. I’ve been the artist in residence at the Museum of Anthropology a couple of times, but with the economy so bad, it’s hard to sell art.” I ask him about the rumour that the Hollywood has been sold, “Yeah,” he replies, matter-of-factly, “we close our doors next month. Just take a look around – Tim Hortons, Starbucks, McDonalds, Subway. All these big corporations are pushing out the little guys, we just can’t compete. I think I’m gonna try my hand at real estate for a while, property development, that’s where the money is.” He dons a black fedora and jumps down and out of the projection room. We stand there and look out over the balcony at the empty theatre below. “Y’know, they say there’s a ghost up here. Sometimes people say they see a man wearing all black with a black fedora on, but it’s not me. It’s a ghost.”
I follow Fairleigh down the stairs, into the chandeliered lobby, where he picks up a box of vinyl letters and continues into the main theatre. We walk through the velvety crimson room, past row after row of empty seats. “The Historical Society is very supportive in the press, but when I spoke to them in person, they were like, ‘Yeah, it’s a pity to lose the theatre, but what can we do?’ The city should have stepped in, but they don’t really care, either.”
We continue down a narrow set of stairs to the basement, where Fairleigh sets down his heavy box of letters next to shelves filled with alphabetized stacks of dusty, old-style 3D letters. “If I was a billionaire, like this buyer is, I couldn’t just tear this place down. Could you?” I ask him what will happen to all this stuff, like these plastic red letters. He picks up a big letter Y and inspects the cracks and chips in the plastic, “I suppose we could sell them, but who would want this old junk?” I tell him that I would. “Really? Which letters would you want?” I spell my name: D-R-E-W. “Go ahead,” he says as he tosses the Y back onto the shelf, “just take them.”
In the hope of seeing the ghost, I find a springy red bucket seat in the back row of the balcony and set my letters down on the wooden floorboards. Fairleigh appears below, and greets the six patrons with excitement in his voice once again. “Hi everybody! Thank you for coming to the Hollywood Theatre screening of the Hitchcock classic, Psycho. It’s an old print, so it’ll be a little jumpy and scratchy, but remember that you’re watching an original. Enjoy the show!” The lights dim slightly and I hear Fairleigh scrambling up the stairs and fumbling around in the projection room until a shaft of light cuts through the room, illuminating the fine particles of dust in the air. The opening credits of Psycho begin with screechy violins, the audio crackling and popping like a needle on a record. The music warbles and slows, then stops all together, sounding a lot like the violinist has been dunked under water. There is silence as all six of us wait patiently. The credits eventually reappear, the image shifts left then right, up then down until it comes to rest in the centre. The lights go down and when my eyes have adjusted, the colours of the room have faded and everything appears monochrome, matching the flickering image of a partially dressed Janet Leigh. The world is now black and white, except for a glowing red clock to the left of screen, which slowly counts its final days.
Creative Nonfiction by Drew Clarke 