Anyway, I do believe people pay attention to the presentation of a movie. I have gotten many compliments on my presentation (mostly from regulars that come every week or so). When you are both "Upstairs" and "Downstairs" you get to hear what the customers think of the place and how the movie is run.

Its just really funny that when people say "Tell the projectionist....blah blah blah" and I say "I am the projectionist" I've acually had people fight with me about really being the projectionist and saying, "I know there is someone upstairs DON'T LIE TO ME, your name tag says Manager NOT Projectionist"!

I agree that there THE manager should not have to actually *run* the booth, but THE manager should be able to do all aspects of running the booth, including daily operations, buildup, breakdown, trouble shooting problems, and repair of common problems with the given equipment in the booth.

Of course, teaching anyone all this, PLUS the added duties of floor level management, is a most troublesome thing to do...

I know... I've been doing this for too long.. It's just sad that more people don't CARE about what they do for a living....

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There needs to be at least one person within earshot of the projectors pretty much at all times. You can't take care of customers, clean theatres, babysit all the ushers AND run the booth simultaneously! (Unless you are Flash Gordon, of course! )

Qualification: I know that there are some smaller theatres where only one or two people run the whole kit & kaboodle. I'm talking about the average Googolplex.

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quote:

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It has been said most people don't complain. They just don't come back!

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That's long been an old saying, also: "Bad publicity can't hurt you, but a bad show will."

I think the important point is that audience members don't have the vocabulary or technical knowledge of critical points to verbalize what they don't like. But even if they can't tell you what's in tune or not, they'll sure prefer to go to a professional symphony concert than any school band concert. They'll enjoy one, & avoid the other (unless their kids are in it...)

We got most of our prints from New Yorker and Kit Parker. Of course, they were all pretty trashed.

I would often find myself talking to people after the show and the subject would come up... "OH! You're the projectionist?! Nice Job!" I really hated to tell them that I didn't like the film because it was dirty and scratched. Nobody really seemed to notice but me.

After the first year I got a Work Study student in the booth. We would sit in the balcony, near the booth door and screen the movie and have chips and soda while we watched. We had a rule... whenever you saw a cue dot you had to go up and check the film. At first I would have to tap the student(s) and say, "Cue Dot!" After a while they started learning how to predict when cue dots were comming.... because the heads and tails of the reels were always FREAKIN' FILTHY! (A phenomenon we dubbed "The two-minute warning")

What I was seeing was that their "mental bandwidth" was increasing as the year progressed. They were learning to see things that they hadn't noticed before.... Without being told.
These were all smart people to begin with, so it wasn't an intelligence issue. That's why I call it "bandwidth".

Then, in the third year we got FilmGuard. NO two-minute warning. Absolutely NONE, except on the worst-of-the-worst prints. I found that some people in the audience noticed the improvement and some didn't. When I pointed it out to the ones that didn't the answer would be, "Oh! Really? Come to think of it, you're right!" They were "seeing" the improvement but it wasn't registering on their radar.

Here's where it gets wierd: The Work Study people started to miss the two-minute warning for about a month. Then they started to predict reel changes again. You can sometimes tell by an indellible scratch or something. Other times you just "KNOW" by the way the film is edited that it's comming to the end of a reel. They were starting to "see" things they hadn't before. Again, bandwidth was increasing before my eyes.

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Example: On our print of All the Pretty Horses, one of projectionist's assembled it, placing the first cut approximately one minute into the actual show because she thought it was the attached trailer when there was none (at least on our print). In the two days it was like this, I must have handled at least a dozen complaints about the lights not going down, even though they were to go down a minute later.

Guests notice this, but not an ugly green scratch running down the middle of the screen or bad framing, etc...

Customer: Can you have them turn the lights down in *such and such* movie?
Staff memeber: Are the previews still playing?
Customer: Yes...
Staff member: Don't worry, the lights will dim once the previews end.
…and the customer will walk away, looking a bit puzzled…

Hey, all my cue readers actually work, and I put all my cues on the films.
I can't say that the same is true of that nearby Hoyts location.
Heh, I won't even get into the topic of their booth staff's *framing prowess* (or should I say, lack thereof...? )

~GLB

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