Movies in the Sky

When I was a movie projectionist, the highest-paid union brothers in Local 306 threaded up reels of film, like I did, but they never entered a movie theater. They worked on airplanes, but they never left the ground. Not on the job, anyway. They were technicians for Inflight Motion Pictures, entrepreneurial pioneers and, briefly, a factor in Hollywood. In an age when regulated air tickets were much costlier, a non-stop coast-to-coast or international jetliner ride was a symbol of elite status. In 1961, TWA was first to offer the added luxury of passing the flight time watching a movie.

Inflight Motion Pictures controlled the proprietary technology. IMP technicians were the only ones permitted to handle the films, which had to be taken out, rewound, and reset for each flight. IMP was also an intermediary between the airlines and the studios. The compromises they worked out shaped the tone of most airline movies for decades to come; above all, inoffensive. Not unreasonable. Though it’s easy to make fun of censor cuts and blandness, most travelers prefer soothing to edgy. Dramas and historical films can fit the formula, but romcoms have become airline movies par excellence.

Edits, even heavy-handed ones, of censored scenes or simply to fit a timeslot were an accepted Hollywood practice in the era when Inflight took to the air because editing for TV had already set the precedent, and the basic standards for airline film presentation. Like TV, the assumption was that children may be present. Over the decades, as public acceptance of looser standards took hold, filmmakers with any industry clout became increasingly indignant about being edited by anyone. Unless they’re a Nolan, they seldom have the right to prevent studio re-cutting for TV or airline use.

But directors do have the contractual right to take their name off a film they don’t approve, which is why so many movies on planes claim to be directed by the mysterious Alan Smithee. He’s the agreed-on pseudonym used by the Directors Guild of America.

A timeless ritual began, of cabin attendants renting and then retrieving the headsets--acoustic ones used nowhere else, just hollow plastic tubes chosen to be incompatible with home earplugs or headphones. The rental was how airlines defrayed their costs.

For a generation, films in the air meant just that: a flat reel, about the diameter of a large pizza, that dispensed a ribbon of 16mm film threaded through a slot in the ceiling, running along almost the entire length of the cabin. Each cabin class had its own screen, each with its own miniature, ceiling-mounted automatic projector. The film ran through them consecutively, with minutes of lag time. It’s amazing this Rube Goldberg setup worked at all, yet it did for twenty years, until video took over inflight screen entertainment around the dawn of the Eighties.

Eventually, as IMP’s tech edge faded, the studios and airlines absorbed many of the middleman functions of Inflight themselves. Both industries are image-conscious, make and lose unfathomable amounts of money, and hence are understandably obsessed with the daily challenge of filling those seats.

Near the end of the Seventies, the cheapest flight between Los Angeles and New York was a $99 redeye on World Airways. World’s all-DC-10 fleet were the first planes I’d ever been on with video projection instead of film, but I’d already read that somewhat more respectable airlines had already made the jump or were just about to. There were still three screens in a “jumbo” but now they were simultaneous. Just punch in the VHS cassette and you were done, no muss, no fuss.

Studios made special VHS copies for airline use only, for use as much as a half year (back then) before a film’s general release to home video, although some inevitably leaked into the black market. There were still certified technicians working on airline video systems, but the decades-long gold rush enjoyed by my Local 306 film union brothers, on the industrial side of coastal airports on overnight shifts, quietly ended.

What really caught my eye was a camera in the nose of the aircraft, giving passengers a cockpit view of takeoff and landing. 47 years ago, that seemed almost magical. Then from 1982 on, the moving maps of Airshow became a mass tranquilizer in between the movies. Airshow had a subtle reassuring effect: in the skies above a limitless ocean, or crossing awesome mountain ranges, everything was under control. You were en route.

For years, the holy grail of inflight entertainment was individual choice and a personal screen. They finally arrived as chunky little LCD screens that folded between business-class seats. (First class got individual video players and a choice of DV cassettes, as seen in 1996’s Mission: Impossible.)

But what everyone wanted, and what we finally got later in the Nineties, was a good-sized seatback screen, the kind we glimpsed decades ago, in 2001: A Space Odyssey, aboard the Orion orbital spaceplane and the Aries lunar shuttle. Those props looked right because Stanley Kubrick didn’t go to Hollywood set decorators, but to industrial designers who worked for top electronics and aerospace companies. In 1966, when most of 2001 was filmed, there was no viable way to put a television in every airline seat, due to the depth of the picture tube and demand for wattage. But Kubrick correctly bet that flat-screen technologies would take over. He expertly faked the displays with concealed film projectors.

Once there was a screen at every seat, satellite TV was another advance, giving a comforting illusion of still being in the flow of a normal day, although you might be flying among dozing strangers at 500 mph through the Arctic night, six miles in the air.

Amid the ever-rising expense of upgrading entertainment systems, and their power consumption (which contributed to a Swissair disaster in 1998), there’s a new twist in the 21^st century: personal devices—phones, mostly—are enabling some airlines to phase out passenger displays altogether, replacing it with a Wi-Fi link to an onboard digital library. Still, the long-haul routes, especially in Business and First, will stick with seatbacks. Most people don’t want to hold their phone all day.

When writing any kind of media technology history, you make some threshold judgments. What constitutes “the first”? I try not to count one-shots and publicity stunts, like a silent film shown in-flight between London and Paris in 1921, or Philo Farnsworth demonstrating a crude TV set for reporters aboard a DC-2. Most of the time I’m looking for the historical moment when something suddenly crystallized, when it became recognizable as we know it now. Often that’s not a story of pure invention, but of invention and marketing.

The old projectionists used to warn, in their thick Old World accents, “Just you wait. Someday we’ll all be replaced by the machinery.” They were right, of course.