The topic of Jerry Lewis movie theaters has died down on this weblog but this e-mail from Mike Durrett was too good not to share…
As a professional projectionist, I actually worked in two former Jerry Lewis Cinemas in Atlanta, shortly after they changed hands and names. The cartridge projection system is news to me and I never saw or heard any evidence of such special equipment in place for those theatres. Because of the heavy expense of projectors, it's doubtful any other machines than the ones I ran ever occupied those booths. (Simplex projectors were on the premises and not the Italian machines advertised in Jerry Lewis Cinemas materials.)
(There was a continuous loop system commercially available in the 1980s, but it took an extremely experienced and dedicated projectionist to make it operate flawlessly.)
At the time, state-of-the-art film projection often involved two projectors with (sometimes) automatic changing of the reels. A two-hour film could be loaded onto two big 6000' reels, but rewinding and rethreading was necessitated for each show.
In the early '70s, there was a projection automation system available which showed a reel, switched to projector #2, and then the finished film automatically ran backwards (offscreen) through projector #1 in real time and stopped at the beginning, ready for the next show. All this while projector #2 was onscreen and all, supposedly, without projectionist intervention. One of the JL's I worked in was equipped with this system, the Eprad SWORD, as I recall. It was truly frightening, but would be a selling point to novices thinking about buying into the movie exhibition business.
You said: "I still don't believe any theater would book a genuine hardcore sex film with a Jerry Lewis movie." Yes, it is doubtful, but I am reminded of being sent by my Union to work a porno theatre in 1970. The movies were garbage, but between each and every show they played a Woody Woodpecker cartoon. Very odd and make your own joke. To me, the cartoons were more peculiar than had they also been double featuring a Jerry Lewis comedy.
It is possible Which Way to the Front? and Deep Throat played in the same theatre on the same day, but the family film probably ran only in the afternoon and adult fare at night with separate tickets required. That's a standard practice which small movie marquees don't usually differentiate, so it might appear there was a double feature, but wasn't.
Several years ago, a drive-in theatre we frequent played Disney's Tarzan and "The General's Daughter" together. In 1970, The General's Daughter certainly would have been rated X for its explicit content. So strange things do happen at the movies.
Yes, it's theoretically possible the Jerry Lewis movie and Deep Throat played on the same bill. But I don't believe it, and I certainly don't believe Jerry drove by a theater in the Valley and saw such a marquee. Apart from the facts that Which Way to the Front? was an old film by the time Deep Throat finished its initial and exclusive engagements, and that such a pairing would have been so odd that I'd have heard of it at the time, I just find the whole story too hokey. So I stand by my opinion that it never happened in L.A. and probably never happened anywhere, and that's the last time I'm going to reassert this.
My understanding is that there were a number of unsuccessful attempts in the late sixties and through the seventies to establish movie theater franchises that would use automated systems so they could dispense with projectionists. There was an article I read around '72 about "McDonald's-style theaters" that could be run with the same kind of untrained, minimum wage help that was the staple of most fast food enterprises. The Jerry Lewis effort was the most prominent one but I also recall, for instance, a company that was trying to get people to invest in opening "baby-sitter" theaters in shopping malls. The theater would seat 20-30 kids, and parents could drop the kiddos off at them while shopping at the Nordstrom. A person with probably-minimal nurse training would be in attendance, just in case, and would keep an eye on the kids while they watched Filmation cartoons of The Groovy Ghoulies and Fat Albert. I don't know if anyone ever actually invested in opening one of these places but I remember the sales pitch because I thought it was a prudent move to have medical aid standing by when someone was watching Filmation cartoons.
Anyway, Mike, thanks for the info. I don't know why I find this topic so interesting. But as my websites attest, a lot of odd topics interest me.