by Caleb Fort
Daily Lobo
Projectionists are the underappreciated heroes of the movie theater.
Moviegoers notice when the film burns, the movie is out of focus or the sound is bad - but they give no credit when the film runs smoothly, said Brian Gillespie, director of the Southwest Film Center.
However, running the projector is still his favorite part of working at the theater, he said.
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"It's very industrial. You feel like you're doing something, and you feel like you know something," he said. "There's this room full of people that don't really know you exist. But if you screw up, they'll come after you."
Gillespie, who has been director of the center since July, said he tries to pick movies that most students have not had a chance to see in mainstream theaters.
"We do our best to find out if movies have screened here already, and if they have, we typically won't show them," he said. "But of course, if it's something that we suspect will really do well, we'll book it."
The previous director, Justin Landis, was criticized by some students for showing too many mainstream movies.
Landis said he ordered a lot of movies from one distributor, Swank Motion Pictures, Inc., in exchange for a discount. However, he was still able to work with other distributors, he said.
Gillespie decided not to enter into any deals like that because they limited his choices, he said.
"The distributors like it when you do that, and they typically give you a better deal," he said. "But they tend to specialize so much that it's hard to get any variety."
The Southwest Film Center is an executive agency of the Associated Students of the University of New Mexico, and receives most of its funding from student fees.
Gillespie watches almost every movie that plays in the center, he said.
"It would be weird if I was booking movies I didn't want to see, so I make it to most of them," he said.
However, he has to make some compromises when choosing movies, he said.
"The student government encourages us to get titles that will generate a certain amount of revenue," he said. "If they'd let us, I'd probably just get the most obscure things that nobody had ever heard of - but not too many people would come, and I would probably get yelled at."
In an effort to please as many people as possible, he mostly books three types of movies: classic, foreign and independent, he said.
Foreign movies in this semester's series include "The Overture" from Thailand and "Purple Butterfly" from China. Independent films in the series include "The American Astronaut" and a series of short films called "The Cremaster Cycle."
"We kind of take a shotgun approach to satisfying people," Gillespie said.
The center should consider showing more mainstream movies, said student Darren White.
"I walk through the halls, and I see there's a lot of really obscure films they show," he said. "That might kind of throw people off."
However, the center should not eliminate those type of movies altogether, White said.
"I think they should show more of a mix because there are also a lot of people that like those movies that aren't very popular," he said.
Student Bruce Wong said the center should continue showing movies that are hard to find in other theaters.
"I think they should play independent films," he said. "When I see they're showing a mainstream movie I usually avoid it, because I can just watch those everywhere else."
The film center shares the theater with Student Activities, which organizes the Midweek Movie Series. The series is made up of Hollywood movies such as "The 40-Year-Old Virgin" and "The Notebook."
The only involvement Gillespie has with the series is helping unpack the films, and helping ship them back after they're shown, he said.
