Things had been going pretty well for Goldberg Brothers up until the conflagration. A producer of theater equipment since 1913, it had signed a valuable contract with Kodak in 1940 to produce film reels and was significantly expanding that side of its business. The fire was a devastating blow, but it wasn't the end of the story. Despite losing its factory and a chunk of history, the company survived and continued to specialize in movie theater hardware.
In fact, if you catch Oppenheimer on 35mm film at the Sie FilmCenter, or anywhere else, there's a good chance you'll be watching it on Goldberg Brothers reels.
"Today the company is still the industry leader in film reel manufacturing," says Rick Reid, Goldberg Brothers marketing communications manager, "but the market has become much smaller." After several moves, the company now resides in a quiet and leafy industrial park in Littleton. And its former location on 35th? That's the home of the former EXDO Event Center, rebranded as ReelWorks Denver two years ago, in a nod to its original mission.
Traditional film is created when a strip of transparent base is treated with a light-sensitive emulsion, giving it the ability to capture images. These strips are gathered on massive rolls thousands of feet long and stored on metal reels, which are then run across the light source of a projector at high speed, casting images out onto a screen. Today's digital projectors replicate this process.
A few figures in the movie world, most notably Christopher Nolan and Quentin Tarantino, still champion old-school film — especially large-format film, such as 70mm — as the best way to watch flicks because of the medium's sharpness, clarity and visual depth. Using their considerable clout, Tarantino and Nolan have fought to preserve the outdated format, using it for such films as The Hateful Eight and Oppenheimer. But when they plan these technology-bucking passion projects, they still need the metal reels to play them. That's when they call Goldberg Brothers.
The business began in 1897, when Russian immigrant and tinner Simon Goldberg opened a small tinsmith shop in Denver with his sons Louis and Nathan, who were eventually joined by their brothers William and Jacob. Arriving just as the effects of the silver industry's collapse were waning and the progressive movement was gathering steam, it was a good time for innovative entrepreneurs in the city. The company grew to become one of the largest sheet-metal hardware manufacturers and wholesale distributors in the western United States.
Bolstered by the Kodak contract and several years of profitable government war work that saw Goldberg Brothers producing a wide variety of equipment for the United States Army, the firm rose from the flames of the 1944 disaster and continued to expand into a wide array of theater products. In addition to film reels, Goldberg Brothers manufactured projection port windows (which it still makes for an international clientele of theaters), film editing tables, ticket boxes, film rewinders, speaker mounting brackets and a patented "no-draft" speaking tube for theater ticket booths. This diverse catalog carried the company through much of the twentieth century with a distinctly cinematic character.
"Goldberg Brothers remained the market-leading manufacturer of film reels for theaters, schools, the military and amateur filmmakers until the mid-1980s, when home video cameras and VCRs became widely available and replaced most of the 8mm and 16mm film reel business," Reid says. In 1977, perhaps detecting the winds of technological change, the Goldbergs sold the business to Moviola, a maker of editing equipment. That was the first in a series of new owners; today its owned by the Golesh family.
Led by president John Golesh, starting around 2009 the company diversified into both custom decor made from old movie equipment and barn-door hardware for the home, an increasingly popular feature of "farmhouse chic." But owing to the firm's expertise and reputation, film projects big and small continue to roll in. Most recently that's been Oppenheimer, for which it made more than 200 70mm reels. For 35mm presentations, though, Goldberg Brothers reels were made in such large numbers during the twentieth century that many are still in use decades later and don't need to be created from scratch.
The manufacturing process for classic hardware is an interesting mix of old and new. The most common item, aluminum flange reels, are sliced in pieces from sheet aluminum with a fiber-cutting laser, then assembled by hand. Much of the final work is still done the old-fashioned fun way: by bashing it with a hammer. Having weathered more than a century of changes within and without, Goldberg Brothers is proud of its long history with the movies and continuing status as an industry "go-to" for film reels and projection ports.
"Film reels are very much a part of [our] brand identity," says Reid. "We want to keep that connection to our past as we look toward the future."
