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The first time was for All About My Mother at the Montgomery Cinema arthouse in Rocky Hill NJ (north of Princeton). This was in March 2000 on the Saturday before the movie won the foreign-language Oscar. All About My Mother has a long, slow end-credits crawl. The booth took it upon itself to shut the show down before the end. Not only that, there were no trailers before the feature and the sound cut out 3 times in the middle. The theater did have room for rolling stock adverts though. I have not been back to that theater since.

After the Oscar win the Regal in East Windsor NJ picked up All About My Mother for the following weekend. I go there and -- sure enough -- the booth cuts off the show before the end credits are finished. What's more, that particular Regal is a stadium but only in 12 of the 15 halls. All About My Mother got put into a non-stadium hall.

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At a drive-in that I once worked at;it was common practice to cut the end credits.Saves time go home early(That's what the manager would say) In the Fall we would even start the co-feature with reel #2,thenstart selling tickets.Again(Saves time ,go home early) But I always did what I was told! Good little me!

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You mean that the people didn't get to see the first reel of a movie that they were paying to see? I hope I'm misunderstanding something about this, but if the management's primary goal is to go home early, why not just show one entire movie per night with nothing else and close afterwards, or better yet, with that attitude, just get a day job and close the theatre?

Fortunately, I have seldom had any problems watching credits in the local theatres. Many times, I leave as the credits start but if I want to see the credits, either because I want to see information about a certain song I liked from the movie, suspect that a joke scene may be in or after the credits, or for some silly reason want to see the masking move back to flat position after a scope film at Carmike 10, by gosh it's my right to watch them and feel that it is part of the movie experience that I have a right to see in return for buying a ticket.

Occasionally, projectors have been shut off before credits have been done, or ushers have come in and turned on auditorium lights during the credits, which I will deduct for in my rating system. I've never been forced out during credits, though. If that happened during credits I wanted to see for one or more of the above reasons, I would definitely not use my "no more than 2 points deduction for anything happening during the credits" rule and deduct more heavily for it.

In the "Projection Quality Review system changes" thread in the Film-Handler's forum, in my opening post, I have an example review from one particular attendance, and one of the deductions is "projector shut off about 10 seconds after credits began" (-2) . The problem code for that is "C" (credits not shown in entirety). Since the projector shut off 10 seconds into the credits, I didn't even have time to get up and leave before they were shut off. If they'd waited 15 more seconds, they may have gotten away with it.

Customers must not give in to these types of practices and let their opinions be known. Customers have already come to expect a certain amount of carelessness and sloppiness in presentation as the norm, as well as ushers coming in an cleaning the instant that credits start. If customers remain apathetic, these trends will continue. Carmike looks at my site (hits from carmike.com appear in WWW logs) occasionally and I'm sure they see my reviews of presentations at their two local theatres (currently 125 presentations reviewed from their two theatres here). It is a feedback mechanism, and it's a shame that the theatre companies don't have good mechanisms to support reporting problems with the level of detail that I use on my site. Regal's "comment card" is better than nothing, but is limited (due to the 255 character limitation). Carmike does not appear to have any real mechanism for reporting presentation problems on their site.

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Evans A Criswell
Huntsville-Decatur Movie Theatre Information Site

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Another argument for keeping them off is that the emergency (maintained) lighting in a cinema should be bright enough for customers to see their way out in the event of a power failure. If they can see their way out during a power failure then they can see their way out during the end credits. Therefore by keeping the house lights off during the credits you are testing the emergency lights during every show and making sure that they're doing their job properly.

Show it all, boys and girls, that's what the patron is paying for and besides ..it's only good projection

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