PLANE MOVIES
2021 MARKS A HUNDRED YEARS SINCE MOTION PICTURES ON PLANES FIRST BEGAN. AND AS WE START TO CONTEMPLATE CLIMBING BACK ABOARD THOSE METAL TUBES, EMPIRE EXAMINES THE HISTORY, THE PSYCHOLOGY, THE CURATION AND CURIOSITIES OF THIS MOST SINGULAR VIEWING EXPERIEN
Altogether now: “I have had it with these motherfucking movies on this motherfucking plane!”
HHAVE WE MENTIONED that we miss the cinema recently? Okay, we might have mentioned it once or twice or, you know, 7,000 times. But it’s fair to say that we don’t just miss the pictures. We miss all of the places we watch movies, including the very real, very visceral experience of viewing them in a speeding metal tube along with a few hundred strangers for company. The in-flight movie is a film-going experience all of its very own, and 2021 marks its centenary.
It all began on an August day in 1921. Before any kind of airport had even been built in Chicago, an Aeromarine Airways flying boat — essentially a buoyant plane with a hull — took off from the watery runway of Lake Michigan with 11 passengers, a screen, and inventor Herman A. Devry’s ‘Theatre In A Suitcase’ projector. It looped the Great Lake while showing Howdy Chicago! — a promo film for the Windy City — and then splashed down, quite literally. An inauspicious start, but a start nonetheless: this was the first official in-flight movie.
After the arrival of the moving image, sound was to follow. In 1925, Imperial Flights (later to become BOAC and then BA) circled one of its planes over central Germany. Conan Doyle’s
The Lost World played on a projector, while the pilot flew among the clouds to naturally darken the cabin. The Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, thousands of feet below on the ground, provided the soundtrack to the silent film, with the Berlin Broadcasting Station transmitting it to a radio set on the plane.
This brief Roaring ’20s burst of imagination and technological advancement was cut short by the Depression, then World War II — there wasn’t much call for a showing of Gone With The Wind while men piloted Spitfires. Then, three years after the war ended, a Pan Am flight from Idlewild (now JFK) screened the John Ford Western Stagecoach. The 16mm print was delivered to the plane by a pack of horses pulling, yes, you guessed it, a stagecoach.
Commercial flights — as opposed to publicity stunts — arrived in the late 1950s as America boomed and air travel became a realistic possibility for the middle classes. The size of the technology was still an obstacle, however. The fuselage of the plane was simply the wrong shape — long, thin and all on one level, as opposed to a wide and stepped movie theatre. One innovation was to turn a 16mm projector on its side: “But even when you’ve figured out how to get the equipment in, you still have a problem with the sound,” says Toni Booth, Associate Curator Of Film at the Science And Media Museum in Bradford. So, headphones were introduced: “They could at least hear the film, even if they couldn’t see it perfectly.”
Necessity was the mother of invention, however, and a significant step was made when David Flexer — a US cinema chain operator bored while flying back and forth across the country to tend to his various theatres — developed a lightweight system to show films. The system made its debut on a TWA flight to Europe in 1961 with the Lana Turner vehicle
By Love Possessed. This was the first of what became regular showings on board, though Pan Am opted to show movies on small TV sets around the cabin.
“Post-war, America was a much more affluent society than Europe. In experimenting with on-board entertainment, they were trying to offer a more luxurious experience,” says
Booth. A Maine newspaper, The Lewiston Evening Journal, reported that “the best attractions for the jet travellers are musicals and comedies. Heavy dramas are not too popular. So far, however, nobody is known to have walked out on one.”
Through the 1970s and early ’80s, sightlines were improving — projector monitors, latterly using Laserdisc, magically appearing out of the ceiling every couple of metres. Passengers had access to “control units” in the armrest. However, it was still very much a communal experience — everyone watched and laughed at the same time. “In the early days, you had a single film being shown — you watched that or nothing,” says Booth.
The individualist culture of the late ’80s and ’90s, combined with a desire for choice and convenience, saw seatback screens appearing. And today? In the age of permanent connection and superfast Wi-fi, you could argue that entirely personal in-flight entertainment is the future. However, what technology can never truly obliterate is a very basic, very human desire to unplug from the world for a precious few hours and enjoy a curated, focused entertainment cocoon. Where your only choice is which one of the two movies you’d likely never watch on the ground are you going to press play on.