When you rent gear from Christie Lites, you get a long list of every cable, nut and bolt, rigging piece, etc., on a spreadsheet. I normally hate these things, but last month I happened to look through it just to see what was listed. All the cables were in weird lengths. There are no 5- and 10-foot jumpers. They are 4 feet and 8 feet instead. The multi cables are not all your industry standard lengths of 25-foot increments. Nope, they are all just another facet of Christie Lites founder Huntly Christie’s way of doing things. I tried to decipher the logic of this. It wasn’t metric, and it didn’t make sense. Not until I sat down with the guy himself and asked him why. “When I started out, I was keen on some of the latest technology and what one could purchase at the time. Back in 1985, there were no people I found that were mass-producing truss in America for what I wanted to do. But Thomas, a truss manufacturer out of the U.K., was building and selling pre-rig truss. The same stuff you get today for double hung rows of PARs, etc. These truss sections were all standard 7-foot, 10-inch sections,” Christie states. “And I just hated the fact that all the cables, when they reached the dimmers, were different lengths. I found it messy and there was a lot of unnecessary copper lying around so I borrowed the idea of 8-foot cable denominations from two smart Quebecers — Jacques Tanguay and Louis Racine.” Interesting concept, one that I think is unique. And pretty cool if you can get away with it for three decades.
—Nook Schoenfeld, from “LD-at-Large,” PLSN, June, 2013
