I have a different opinion about hand-cranking projection
synchronization to roll played music than what Dick Twichell relayed.

I believe operators of roll playing music machines in the orchestra
pits had little control over the speed of projection.  It was not the
talkies that required motor speed controls, it was the longer films
with changeovers from reel 1 to reel 2 and so on.  The first que mark
appearing on the film meant the motor was turned on to come up to a
standard speed.  The second que mark meant to close a shutter on one
machine while opening it on the other so the picture continued
flawlessly.  Timing is close for a clean changeover and speed needed
to be constant and consistent.  This could not be accomplished by hand
cranking.

I once was a collector of early motion picture machines, and the
hand-cranking went out fairly early as the 1000 foot A/B reelers
evolved toward the big multi-reel productions such a Birth of a Nation
and The Ten Commandments.

In the big city movie houses electric motors became common long before
the talkies hit.  Electric motors were being affixed as standard
practice from 1912 and were an option earlier than that.  Powers,
Simplex, etc., projectors were fitted to cast iron bases that had motor
mounts cast into them.  Generally they were DC motors with rheostats to
adjust the speed.  However, only the deluxe houses with orchestras had
speed controls at the conductors podium to allow the conductor to vary
the speed of the motors from the orchestra pit.

As late as 1929, the finest theatre in the entire world, Charles Lamb's
super deluxe San Francisco FOX Theatre, had a speed control on Walt
Rosner's conductors podium.  Even better was that a speed meter on the
stand showed how many frames per second were being shown.  This was
just for conductors to judge playing speed against film actions.

Contrary to popular lore, only the more expensive productions had film
scores; but, theatres with deluxe orchestras did have large music
libraries for the conductors to pick out the musical accompaniment.  In
the smaller "Photoplayer" equipped houses films without scores did not
have rolls that were directly made for them and synchronization was
unnecessary.  Even if they did have a score for a longer film there
were no set of score rolls produced for player instruments so again
there was no need for synchronization.

If the left side roll on a Photoplayer had soft slow music and the next
scene was a fast chase the operator would put a fast roll in the right
roll frame and make the frame switch at the appropriate moment but
there seems to not have been many films that stipulated what rolls went
with what scenes.  Thus, for the most part the Photoplayer operator was
at the mercy of the film speed from the projection booth without any
direct control or need of it.  And, the audience was at the mercy of
the kid the manager hired for a nickel a day to run the Photoplayer.

I have worked a number of basically unaltered projection booths in San
Francisco from the 1918-1930 era where the only additions were sound
racks and sound heads.  I have never seen any type of indicator to tell
the projectionist to "crank faster or slower" in the lesser houses that
did not have orchestras.

Nitrate film, which I have run, did require that fire rollers be put on
the film magazines, a safety shutter installed between the lamp house
and the film gate, and the entire booth had to have heat released fire
shutters that dropped down or could be triggered by a pull chord at the
projection room door.

The rewind was motorized by 1912 also and many of these units were so
well built that they worked well into the 1980s when automated platters
put us all out on the street with no need for rewinding or tending the
machines in any way.  The three-man booth was short lived and even in
New York City, with the most powerful of the projectionist unions, only
two men were needed going into the 1920s.  The smaller houses and the
rest of the country with motorized projectors and rewinds had one man
booths starting in the early 20s.

As for upkeep of the theatrical mechanical musical equipment, most
theatre owners were notoriously cheap having no budgeted funds for
maintenance of equipment.  Only when things didn't work at all did they
respond.  Organs were taken care of only in the deluxe movie palaces
and you can bet that the roll-playing pit instruments saw service only
at complete breakdowns.  Tuning for the most part was done roughly upon
installation then sometimes, never again.

Al Sefl - an old crank himself...

Motion Picture Machine Operators Union, Local 162
International Alliance of Theatrical and Stage Employees

PS:  While "Photoplayer" is a brand name, Tom DeLay's excellent
commentary about surviving roll playing accompaniment instruments shows
that I am using it as a colloquial term covering a general class of
instruments made to be used with silent films.