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46 PRODUCTION SOUND & VIDEO – Fall 2022 The Family Business by Doug Miller I worked in television production for thirty years. When somebody asks me how I got my job, I start the story with my grandfather, Harold V. Miller, and I begin around 1930 because ours is a multi-generational story. My grandfather came to this country with his parents as a very young boy from London. He was an engineer son of a bike shop owner. By the time he was a young man, he had purchased a small movie theater on the west side of Los Angeles. It was during this time, he made friends with another engineer type who worked at Mitchell Camera Company. With his knowledge of gears and bike chains, he and his friend came up with an ingenious idea. With two paired stationary electric motors and two bike chains, he locked a 35mm film camera with a 35mm projector accu- rately enough to shoot the projection and have no frame line flicker. With the addition of a translucent screen and a rear projection, they could place talent in front of the screen, light them, and shoot them with a moving projected background. The process was cleverly called "Process," more accurately known as "Rear Screen Projector/Camera Interlock." When two such electric motors are wired cor- rectly, they sit idle. Any movement applied to one is replicat- ed exactly by the other. With one motor on the camera with gears and a chain and a second on the projector connected also with a chain to replicate the movement of the camera, the two are perfectly locked and can never drift. Growing up in a bike shop had paid off. His work was written about in Who's Who around 1932. The invention would change the way movies were shot for the next eighty years. He was forced into early retirement by cataracts of the eye that made him legally blind before his untimely death from a heart attack and stroke while on his first trip back to the UK in 1964. The seeds had been sewn, however, for my father to follow in his wake. Growing up in La Cañada and running movies at The Montrose Theatre, my dad, Robert V. Miller, became a Projectionist at the tender age of sixteen. His love of the moving picture was second only to his love of sound record- ing. While the gig paid well, he eventually went on to get a degree in sound from Pasadena City College. An older neighbor down the block heard of my dad's love of projection and bequeathed an old machine to him upon his death. It was the second projector ever owned by Cecil B. DeMille. The old man had one stipulation. If they ever built a Hollywood museum, he was to donate that old 16mm with the shutter in front of the lens to the museum. I grew up in a house with that projector displayed prominently. When they finally moved the Lasky Barn from Paramount to the location across from the Hollywood Bowl, my dad followed through and donated it. It sits on the floor at The Hollywood Heritage Museum in a glass case, but it needs a plaque or something to explain its importance—something I have been meaning to correct for years. After meeting my mother, Peggi McClain, who was an usher at The Montrose, they wed in 1960. He was committed to projection, but he really loved sound. His first few calls beyond The Montrose were at Paramount as a cable wrangler in the sound shop. One day while working as a daily there on Dobie Gillis, he heard that the old Process Gear on Stage One had failed and a feature was going to be shut down for months while they shipped it to Minnesota where the only living guy left who could fix it was located. Dad went over and fixed it on his lunch break. When the Projection Department heard what he did, they came to his stage and asked, "Hey kid … how the hell did you fix that so fast?" "Well, my dad invented that." He was swiftly offered a weekly in projection, which he of course, accepted. After a short time there, I was born into the family the first week of '63. Little did they know at the time, how this busi- ness would continue in our family. My mother's brother, Tom McClain, studied to be an Industrial Design Engineer at Long Beach State College. When he met my dad, he expressed a desire to learn the art of projection too. My dad showed him all about the simplexes and carbon lamphouses he loved so much and helped my Uncle Tom get a trial in the Projection Department at Paramount Studios. Tom tells the story as a trial by fire. He was in the projection booth and in comes a big pile of track and picture. After threading up two picture machines and two sound heads, about two minutes into running, he hears over the intercom "Next!" so off they come to the rewind bench while reel two is running and he threads up reel three just in time to hear "Next!" again. Off goes reel two and while three is now running, he loads up four … "Next!" This went on while he was sweating up there trying to keep up. Which he did. He was told it was Robert Evans out there saying "Next!" but he always suspected it was my dad, who informed him shortly after that he had a job at