I’m an IMAX projectionist. Here’s what running Oppenheimer was like during the Barbenheimer phenomenon

It’s astonishing that Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan’s three-hour biopic about the scientist who helped create the Atomic Bomb, raked in almost $1 billion at the box office and became the third highest-grossing film of 2023. But perhaps more remarkable is the role the film played in the cultural phenomenon known as Barbenheimer, which drove the U.S. box office to a post-pandemic record last year—a feat I bore witness to as an IMAX projectionist at the most iconic movie theater in the world, Hollywood’s TCL Chinese Theatre.

I was one of only 50 projectionists worldwide recruited by IMAX to show Oppenheimer in 1570 IMAX print, spending five weeks in a darkened, temporary makeshift projection booth at the Chinese Theatre. While the theater regularly runs movies in IMAX, this special print run, which was only available in 30 theaters across the globe, required something a little different. Because there wasn’t room to house the old-school IMAX projection system needed to run the print in the theater’s main projection booth upstairs, construction workers removed around 50 seats in the back of the auditorium’s main floor to make room for what amounted to a large plywood box covered in black drapes.

I sat inside the box with its bare, wooden beams and walls with gray soundproofing insulation. The temporary booth was built around the projection system, and there was just enough room for my projectionist partner and me to move comfortably around it. We ran four shows a day, eventually adding 6 a.m. shows on the weekends because tickets kept selling out. We spent hours in that booth operating an old IMAX SR projector the size of one of those tiny Smart cars you see driving around. Behind the projector, a massive Quick Turn Reel Unit with two large metal platters would spin 11 miles of 70mm, 15-perf film into it at six feet a second, feeding through an obstacle course of outstretched metal arms and plastic rollers. The film alone weighed 600 pounds. It sounded like a constant barrage of machine gun fire.

Before running Oppenheimer, it had been 15 years since I had worked in an IMAX projection booth, having left the industry behind to begin my writing career. When I left in 2008, print film was on its way out, and within a couple of years, IMAX digital would take over, a system that no longer required full-time projectionists since movies could, for the most part, simply be downloaded and left unmonitored.

Being an IMAX projectionist back in the days of print film was something of an art form, requiring attention to detail, patience, and a high tolerance for stress; something I’ve still yet to perfect. While running digital film certainly comes with its own set of special skills and stressors, the 70mm print format meant hours of splicing prints together by hand, constant equipment maintenance, and if a film crash occurred, the perseverance to repair it, which sometimes meant spending the night in the booth. If you’ve ever witnessed a high-speed train careening off the rails, you might have an idea of what a film crash sounds like, the result being, at its worst, hundreds of frames of film destroyed, a damaged projector, and thousands of dollars down the drain.

Ask any IMAX projectionist and they will tell you that this scenario is what would keep us up at night. Never would I have imagined being back in the world of IMAX, running print films again. Yet, there I was, operating equipment that once was considered outdated technology, in the most famous movie theater in the world. Brought out of retirement, this almost forgotten technology was now the subject of hundreds of news stories, blog posts, and online videos praising the return of print film. It was like living in some sort of alternate reality. I likened myself to the old gunslinger trope of being forced out of retirement for one last ride.

When I first arrived, the excitement of living in Hollywood for five weeks was almost overwhelming; a place that had been mythologized by pop culture as the shining beacon of the entertainment industry. Like many people who had never been to Hollywood before, I naively expected to see celebrity sightings, red-carpet premieres, and movies being made all over the city. Then, for very good reasons, the SAG-AFTA strike happened, and Hollywood, in many ways, became a celebrity ghost town.

Once we started running Oppenheimer, however, we became the celebrities. Booth tours and media interviews became routine. News stories boasting sold-out crowds, box office records being broken, and the re-emergence of print film were everywhere online. Some industry insiders likened it to the comeback of vinyl. YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok videos featured IMAX projection systems in action, highlighting the gigantic Oppenheimer print spinning on the reel units and the special orange reel extensions that were made because the film platters weren’t big enough to hold Nolan’s three-hour epic. I was even featured in The New York Times.

Moviegoers would ask to see the booth, and it seemed like every day my fellow projectionist Pat and I would field questions and pose for photos. We would talk to movie fans who traveled up to 1,400 miles to see Oppenheimer in print format. Many had seen it multiple times. There were young filmmakers, fresh out of film school who had never seen a print film before and were inspired to take advantage of the format in their future films. A young boy no older than 10, accompanied by his father, loved the film and was in awe of our booth setup. “He wants to be a scientist,” his father told me.

All of the IMAX projectionists running Oppenheimer kept in touch with each other using WhatsApp. What was meant for technical support quickly filled with stories like these, along with screenshots of Reddit posts about people willing to pay hundreds of dollars for an Oppenheimer movie ticket because every showing was sold out, and how attendees were desperate to get their hands on the free promotional film strips given away at select screenings. Nolan acolytes would brag about seeing the film in print, and lament about the superiority of seeing the film the way it was meant to be seen since it was shot with IMAX 65mm 15-perf film cameras. There was a feeling among all of us, however, that something much bigger was going on in the cultural zeitgeist than simply everyone’s love of Oppenheimer.

Looking down from the projection port glass window, I remember the first time I started seeing small groups of women dressed in lavish gowns in varying shades of pink, high heels, and assorted sparkling accessories like purses, gloves, hats, and even tiaras. I saw men wearing tuxedoes, pink muscle shirts, beach shorts, and visors; unusual attire to wear to a serious biopic about the Manhattan Project. I assumed a movie premiere or some glitzy-themed party was going on somewhere else in town. But while running the film to consistently sold-out crowds day after day, I saw the theater quickly being taken over by a sea of pink, with people dancing and taking selfies before each show started, having the time of their lives.

While the print run of Oppenheimer was supposedly a film experience for those who considered themselves cinephiles, it had become something else entirely, thanks to the simultaneous release of Barbie. It was a truly shared experience among theater patrons like nothing I’ve ever seen, this mishmash of moviegoers who would spend the day at the cinema, watching Barbie first, then Oppenheimer, or vice versa. It reminded me of the era of the “double feature,” when people would spend their entire afternoons at the theater to see two movies for the price of one, excited for the chance to forget about the realities of the world for hours on end.

In the case of Barbenheimer, however, audiences made an event out of it, a grassroots campaign highlighting the absurdity of seeing two different genres of films, one right after the other, a mish-mash of light, bubbly fun coupled with inherent doom. Combine that with IMAX’s genius marketing plan of touting the nostalgia for print film, that Oppenheimer was the longest film in IMAX history, and the efforts it took to make it happen, and you’ve got a perfect storm of cinema delight. Barbenheimer gave people a reason to go to the movies, gifting them a cinematic experience that had not been embraced since before the pandemic, arguably with Marvel’s Avengers: Endgame in 2019. It delivered the promise that moviegoing could once again be as magical as Nicole Kidman’s unintentionally hilarious AMC ad claims it could be.

By the end of its initial run in September 2023, Oppenheimer had become the highest-grossing movie in the history of the TCL Chinese Theatre. Both Oppenheimer and Barbie have scored big so far this awards season, and are expected to continue that trend during the Oscars on March 10. While it’s still early in the year, anticipation is high as to what this year’s summer movie season holds, and if the magic of Barbenheimer can be repeated. The release of Dune: Part Two on March 1 will be the first movie tentpole that will offer a glimpse of what the rest of 2024 could look like, with Kung Fu Panda 4 coming out on March 8, Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire on March 29, Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire on April 12, and Deadpool 3, the only Marvel movie being released this year, on July 26. I’m no psychic, but I’m willing to bet while these movies will most likely be box-office successes, none of them will come close to being as memorable as Barbenheimer.

As for me, I’ll be flying from my hometown of Chattanooga, Tennessee, back to the TCL Chinese Theatre to run Dune: Part Two in IMAX print format. If you’re at the Chinese, come by and say hello.