Mr. Projector Benefit at Aurora Theater

Ball was injured in a single-vehicle scooter accident just after Hurricane Ike. At the hospital he was treated for a minor leg fracture and sent home. A few days later, Ball began to feel worse, and soon found himself back in the hospital with an antibiotic-resistant staph infection. The infection spread quickly, infecting his heart and kidneys before it could be accurately diagnosed, and the damage was so severe that Ball had to undergo open-heart surgery to replace his badly-infected mitral valve.

The open-heart surgery took place just a week after the original accident. Ball spent more than two months in the hospital recovering from the ordeal before being released to continue his recovery with home health care.

Unfortunately, Ball, has no health insurance. The 39-year-old now faces a lifetime of medical expenses for blood-thinning drugs and preventive care.

The idea for Mr. Projector first came to life in 1997 when Ball won a large collection of 16-mm educational film reels at a school district auction in Kansas City. Ball's father was an art director who worked on B-movies including the cult classic The Legend of Boggy Creek. Ball had grown up around movie sets and was a lifetime film lover. He paid about $75 for the batch of reels, which included more than 2,000 films from the '40s, '50s and '60s. Some films were as old as the 1930s.

"I also got about 6 projectors out of the deal," Ball said. "It took 3 trips with 3 pickup trucks to get them home.

"I had films that had been sitting in basements for 50, 60 years that all of a sudden ended up in a parking lot, in an auction. I didn't know at the time anything about education films, but I loved the look of film, I loved the feel of film.

"A lot of them had been water damaged, so I took 3 days vacation from my day job," he said.
"They were occupying all of this space in my garage. I started running them, started playing them, and became instantly fascinated with the material. When you watch so much of this material, you develop ideas that people probably wouldn't develop with normal exposure."

Soon, Ball started his own business, ThinkStream Films.

"I started selling the films and started renting them as stock footage. Through that I started meeting people who were doing the same thing," he said.

Back then, the technology didn't exist to make digital copies of films. DVDs and the internet were not in wide use yet, and Ball began to lament selling what he thought of as rare relics of a bygone era.

"These were ephemeral films, some of them one-of-a-kind last surviving prints. If I hadn't bought them they might have been thrown in the dumpster," he said. "They really display this post-war mentality, these films paid for by the government for educational use. There was a huge fear with the Baby Boom that these kids would be running around, doing drugs, having sex. It is almost like looking at a snapshot of what we learned in school 50 years ago. A whole generation was influenced by these films."

The films in his collection covered topics as diverse as dating etiquette, the atomic bomb and teenage hygiene. Most of the films are 10 to 11 minutes long.

"I started thinking about how you could utilize this material in a way that would be entertaining," he said. "Wouldn't it be fun to take these films and put them into context that sort of makes fun of itself."

Ball was inspired by the television hosts of old B-movies, like Vampira. He was also interested in using new technology to share the films.

"At the time, podcasting was really coming into it's own. I really loved the anachronism of these educational films shown through modern technology," he said.

Mr. Projector was born on Halloween of 2006.

"I did everything pretty much in one day. I put together the first episode, made business cards, went to a thrift store."

Mr. Projector's look — horn-rimmed glasses, bow tie and checkered jacket — was inspired by a real-life expert on Cold War Russia named Alfred J. Rieder, who narrates one of the films in Ball's collection, 1962's The Soviet Challenge.

Rieder's demeanor stuck in Ball's mind, so much that Ball uses his image in an episode of the podcast.

"He's so pompous. He's giving this information like it comes from the Bible."

In the early episodes of the podcast, Mr. Projector served solely to introduce the educational films. But soon an entire story-within-a-story developed, and Ball now incorporates references to mainstream films as well as educational films into the podcasts.

"Now it's no longer about just having a host introduce film. There needs to be an entire town of people who basically are the content of these films. They exist in a 1950s educational rule book," Ball said.

"Mr. Projector is a citizen of Projectorville. His entire book of knowledge is made up of the content of these films. There is a level of ignorance that comes from the mentality of this world."

In the podcasts, Mr. Projector is an ambassador of sorts for Projectorville, interacting with the modern world outside.

"We're a lot more independent now than people were in the '50s. These things surprise Mr. Projector. All he knows how to do it throw a baseball like a guy, or how to protect himself in a nuclear fallout shelter. But there are women out there doing Rollerderby and calling themselves Atomic Blonde."

Ball has shot a total of 20 episodes of the podcast, but only 8 are available online, either through iTunes or the ThinkStream Films website. Saturday's benefit will feature a never-before-seen episode of Mr. Projector featuring an interview with Andrea Grover of the Aurora Picture Show, along with outtakes from other episodes and unpublished interview footage. Those who want to donate to Ball's medical fund but are unable to attend the benefit can do so via the Paypal link on ThinkStream Films' website.

Before his accident, Ball had even bigger plans for Mr. Projector. He wanted to tape and publish the world's first 3-D podcast in the style of science fiction B-movies. He experimented with live video screenings hosted by Mr. Projector, including one event at the old Super Happy Fun Land. He's also been approached to write a Mr. Projector movie, which he plans to work on while to recovering.

His biggest goal, however, is to continue sharing his film collection with people.

"When talking with younger people at the screenings, they tell me, 'I had no idea these films existed,'" he said. "There are still some films that I have left that I have never seen."

Mr. Projector Benefit and Screening
Admission: $10
Date: November 22, 2008
Time: 6 pm
Location: Aurora Theater, 800 Aurora Street in the Heights — please park in the lot at 6608 N. Main Street