"This might be my last year", said Renz, 61, a veteran motion-picture projectionist who works at Missoula's Cine 3 theater. "The projectionist is about on the way out. With automation and all, it's gone pretty much to theater managers doing the operating". Not that Renz minds so much going the way of the matinee, theater ushers, dime popcorn and highly flammable nitrate-base movie film. "It's getting very routine for me because I've done it for so many years", he said as he prepared to do some splicing on "Night Patrol" for the evening show.

A Beulah, N.D. native, Renz still has the motion picture projectionist's card issued to him by the North Dakota State Board of the Electricians in Jan. 1942. The card allowed Renz, who was 18 at the time, to go from the janitor to projectionist at Beulah's Roxy Theater. "It took two people to run the (projection) booth in those days, everything was more or less hand-operated".

Hand-operated and, to some extent, dangerous. "In the early days, projection booths had to be fire-proof, if that nitrate base film ever hit a hot light bulb, it'd burn. Once a film got to burning, your best bet was to get out of the booth and let it burn itself out, I've seen a few fires, but nothing that ever got away from us".

Film characteristics have changed for the better, and so have wages. "I started at $55.00/month, that was pretty good wage in those days." Projectors have also changed for the better from the days of the Simplex machines. "You used to have to oil anywhere from six to 12 places on a projector every night, now that's done automatically."

"In the early days, you also had five or six reels to an average movie. You had to switch back and forth between two machines to get the whole picture shown. Sometimes you'd get the reels mixed up and start showing one you'd already run. That'd take a couple of minutes to fix, but down there, in the theater, two minutes to customers seemed like 10 or 15."

Equally annoying to moviegoers was when a projectionist missed a cue near the end of one reel of film and allowed black-and-white messages such as "End of part 1" to flicker vertically across the screen- "When people would hiss and boo you'd get excited and want to hurry up and get things, going again, the more you hurried, the worse things got. Drive-In theaters were the worst places for that problem. The movie would stop and people would start blowing their horns. You get two or three hundred people blowing car horns and it gets pretty noisy".

Renz entered in the Army in 1943, served as an aircraft instrument mechanic and part-time projectionist until 1946, returned to Beulah, then moved to Hamilton. There, he became a projectionist at the Roxy and Liberty theaters as well as at the Star-Lite Drive-In. Moving to Missoula, Renz had to join Local 339 of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees and Moving Picture Machine Operators. A fellow union member was the late R.J. "Dick" Hale, a former Missoula County surveyor, pilot and fireworks expert.

Renz and Hale teamed up with search lights and a sizable fireworks display to help add excitement to the Missoula premiere of "Red Skies of Montana" in the early 1950's. Excitement was rare in local projection booths, but Renz remembers when a restroom fixture broke at the State Drive-In, "next thing I knew I was standing in water up to my ankles," he said with a laugh. "We had to shut down for about a half an hour."

The Rialto, situated on the south side of East Front Street in the 100 block, left something to be desired. "The booth was hot and up in the attic, you had to duck under a beam to get from one projector to another. If you ever hit your head, you didn't forget it."

The projection room of the Cine 3, where he operates expensive, semi-automated, Italian-made projectors, is both spacious and air-conditioned. People assume he enjoys watching new movies as they come to town. "I very seldom watch the movies, in the days of single-screen theaters, you often had to piece the film together three or four times. Nowadays, with three screens, you're also kept busy. After I've shown a movie three or four times, I pretty well get it pieced together in my mind as to what it's all about". Renz said he has to go to the movies on his day off to enjoy them. "I go to maybe two or three movies a year, and then they pretty much have to be Academy Award pictures."

One drawback to being a projectionist is the hours. Renz works at night. Another is repetition. He has seen "Gone With The Wind" more time than he cares to think about. There also are friends who ask for passes to the movies and wives who kid you when you fumble with 8mm film while threading your supposedly simple home-movie projector.

Renz, who went to Hollywood to see the movie business from a different angle, is looking forward to some travel with his wife, Viola.