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Stanley
Written
by Peter Hanson
Photographed by Leif Zurmuhlen
 ‘About
90 percent of this job is just walking around and turning
things on,” observes Stanley Blakeman, a projectionist at
the Spectrum 7 Theatres in Albany.
Blakeman slides out of the multiplex’s smallest projection
booth—the one he calls “the coffin”—then walks through an
upstairs men’s room to reach one of the other booths. For
about an hour, he zips back and forth, activating the projectors
for each of the seven theaters. According to a pedometer he
once strapped on, Blakeman walks the equivalent of about eight
miles each shift.
This wiry man with long, shaggy hair and a hermit’s dense
beard does his job with practiced ease, gracefully threading
strips of film through the various pulleys and gates of the
projection system. He even reacts to a crisis with aplomb.
The Italian for Beginners print in theater No. 3 snaps
right after he starts the projector, so Blakeman grabs a splicer,
joins the two broken parts, and rethreads the picture, taking
less than a minute to do so. Then he peers through an observation
window at the patrons below him. “It’s rare that anybody will
thank the projectionist,” he says. “It’s rare than anybody
knows there’s somebody there.”
Despite his hirsute appearance and the solitude of his job,
Blakeman isn’t a recluse. He’s been married to jewelry designer/hospital
worker Merricat Blakeman for more than 30 years, and he’s
also a prolific writer. He calls his books “psychological
bildungsromans,” borrowing the German term for books about
personal growth, and his oeuvre includes seven novels. Although
the first was completed in 1974, none has been published.
Born in Rawlings, Wyo., Blakeman studied theater at University
of Wyoming, where he met Selkirk-born Merricat. After school,
he and his wife moved from Wyoming to the Capital Region so
he could pursue a career as an actor-director in New York
City. That didn’t work out (“I didn’t have enough ego to get
through those really bad times,” he says), so Blakeman sought
another way to make a living. All the while, he continued
writing novels.
After a stint as a security guard, Blakeman took his first
movie job in 1978, managing a now-defunct East Greenbush drive-in
called the Auto Vision. “That was seven months of hell,” he
says, “what with the neighborhood kids setting fire to the
field behind the screen and them going around breaking up
the speaker poles. By the end of the summer, I was quite frazzled.
I learned a lot about people.”
A few stops and starts later, Blakeman found permanent work
as a projectionist in 1981, the same year he began working
for the Spectrum’s owners at their first theater, the 3rd
Street in Rensselaer. Although he says he considers himself
a writer first and a projectionist second, Blakeman digs many
aspects of life in the booth.
“I
watch the credits because I like the names,” he says. “One
of my favorites is Brick Mason. I’ve seen him on a few. I
think he’s like an art designer or something. . . . Sometimes
I’ll remember very clearly what a movie was about, but I won’t
remember the title or director. I showed Fiddler on the
Roof for a month, and I knew all the words.”
Blakeman’s post atop the Spectrum gives him a unique vantage
point for observing colorful moments. “We had a cross-dresser
at one time come in as a man,” he recalls. “People came out
of the theater and said ‘There’s someone in there making a
nest.’ He was changing into women’s clothes and drinking Listerine
and yelling at the screen. That was one of my favorite moments.”
The projectionist says that one of the pleasures of his job
is seeing how audiences react to onscreen thrills, chills
and weirdness. “Mulholland Drive—there were certain
scenes where I liked to walk in just to see the audience reaction,”
he says. “After a while, you can predict what’s going to happen.
People don’t realize what they look like from above.”
Sections of Blakeman’s novels have been written in the booth
between movie starts, including parts of Icons, which
came closer to publication than any of his other tomes. Completed
in 1982, the book is the second in an ambitious trilogy. “The
trilogy started out in Russia with this acting couple—their
theater life—right about the time of the revolution, and it
got them through to when they’re exiled in Scotland,” he explains.
“The second novel is about them adopting a little Scottish
boy and moving to America. It turns into political science
fiction.” The Scottish boy grows up to become a subversive
in a United States overtaken by right-wing extremists.
In 1988, after more than two dozen publishers turned the book
down, a small press offered Blakeman a “subsidy publishing”
deal, in which the author funds printing costs while the publisher
handles marketing. “The only reason I did it was I was so
frustrated with having all those books—it was my sixth novel,
and I hadn’t had any luck with the others,” Blakeman says.
After Blakeman sent in his sizable investment, the publisher
flew the coop. Years of legal battles followed, and Blakeman
eventually reclaimed the copyright to his book as well as
a fraction of the money he invested. “It was very frustrating
when Icons was almost published,” he says. “The letdown
was horrible. It almost stopped me writing entirely. The world’s
rough out there in literature. The last few years have been
really difficult for me to keep on writing after that whole
debacle.”
As he’s completed one novel and started another since the
Icons incident, it’s clear that Blakeman has made peace
between the rigors of the marketplace and his need for creative
expression. And even with his busy writing schedule, he’s
found time to pursue other hobbies: He plays the flute for
relaxation, and he’s working toward a pilot’s license. “I
soloed on the 16th of February, right before I turned 50,”
he says proudly. “That was one of my goals.”
Blakeman says he’s comfortable with the path his life has
taken. “I don’t feel like I’ve done nothing other than projecting,”
he notes. “I think I’ve done enough other things in life—my
life’s been a learning experience. I’m psychologically sound
enough to realize that some people make it in their chosen
profession, and some don’t.”
Still, Blakeman takes pride in the work to which he’s devoted
much of his life. “There have been times where I’ve gotten
prints that are so destroyed that I’ve been embarrassed to
show them,” says the man who once stayed at the Spectrum from
11:30 PM to 5:30 AM to reassemble a print of the epic Sunshine
after it spilled off a projector. “I have enough sense of
professionalism after 30 years that bad prints are an irritation
to me—I feel like I’m cheating the audience.”
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