Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: No Pride in Tinsel Town

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Posted by Kenn Fong (Member # 118) on 12-20-1999, 12:33 AM:

A friend told me he attended the first matinee of "Anna and the King" in Hollywood on Friday. It was the first show of the run. Sometime after the first hour, the film broke. Lights up, an usher came in and said, "Don't worry, everything will be fine in five minutes."

Forty-five minutes later it rolled. As the patrons left, they were given readmits.

It's pretty amazing that even in the company town, some exhibitors don't take enough pride to hire qualified union projectionists.

(It was a General Cinema.)

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Kenn Fong http://qwertyuiop.net
Screenwriter's Home Page

Posted by George Roher (Member # 91) on 12-20-1999, 12:59 AM:

Well, in the company town, all the big players have their own screening rooms or hang out at the Director's Guild. They are watching shows run by projectionists who only have one screen to look after and get paid very well. And since they are pushing E-Cinema on us, we can't count on Hollywood to care what the average person is seeing on screen.

Of course, General Enema has gotten pretty bad. I used to work for them, and it was a less than lovely experience.

Posted by Ken Layton (Member # 133) on 12-20-1999, 01:08 AM:

The General Enemas and Blows Silly-Plex in Tacoma, Wash. have union operators ONLY on Friday and Saturday evenings. All other showings are manager run.

Posted by John Walsh (Member # 168) on 12-20-1999, 11:09 AM:

"General Enemas and Blows Silly-Plex!?" I'm laughing so hard, I can hardly type!!

I think almost every industry is going through this kind of 'cost-reduction.' I work for an electronics company (I do PC board design) and design cycles are shorter and shorter. But the tools also become better. I use to hand tape mylars to create PCB's; now I have a PC. In the same way, I use to run one carbon arc theater manually; now I run eight with automation.

I don't think the exibitor end of the motion picture industry is at rock-bottom yet; I think other industries have cheapened much more. Don't get me wrong: the quality of showmanship is much lower then it was 30 years ago, but all thing consitered (high inflation, high real estate prices, high labor costs, EPA, OSHA, ADA act, theaters still only getting 10% of the ticket price, lack of quality product, etc.) I think the quality is still at least OK and the price of a ticket is still a bit low.

Of course, we know there will always be a few garbage dump theaters, but that's true of any product/company.

My thought is that training is the key. It seems that it could provide the biggest gain, at the lowest cost. A knowledgeable person can make a big difference, even in a dump theater. It really doesn't take much more time to do something right, but someone has to show people how. If there was a inexpensive, nationally standardized training course, I think things might improve. Someone might create a curriculum, then send it to commumity collages, techinal schools, 'continuing education' classes, etc. Even if there's no 'hands-on', a person would probably be better off then being trained by the current booth idiot.

That's why I was a little disappointed with SMPTE. I thought they were in a good political position to create training classes, training manuals, etc. SMPTE started with that first projectionist manual, screen check program; then seemed to lose interest. Luckly, Kodak has stepped in and is doing something.

Ah, well. I'll shut up now......

Posted by Stephen Jones 1 (Member # 114) on 12-20-1999, 04:20 PM:

I agree with John. True, while it is sad that the presentation has gone down considerably in most theatres, there is still a good number of theatres that show fantastic presentations everyday. Even with the best trained people, mistakes still happen. I recently had a projectionist, who had been running film for quite a while, put a trailer on upside down. Problem was, no one said anything until the very last show. So, even with someone who very well knew what they were doing, Green Mile had an upside down trailer through the entire Friday. I'm sure the audience wondered what kind of idiot we must have in our booth.

As mentioned in another thread about upselling customers to other products: This happens everywhere. It's a known fact that it does raise per capita at theatres, which makes that theatre more profitable, which means that it will have more to spend in the booth. I used to work at a theatre that had such a high percap that the company would do anything for our booth, because they knew it was profitable. That included all theatres getting DTS players. So, if all it takes is Joe Concession to upsell, to get me the bell and whistles in my booth, then I say upsell all you want. As far as prices, well, you could just close the concession stand at all the theatres, but then we'd all be out of jobs. No first-run theatre makes enough on admissions to stay profitable.

I felt like I had to defend the operation of most theatres. I could go on about Onscreen slides (not pre-show ads) and how they helped pay for two of my DTS players but I won't...

Posted by Joe Redifer (Member # 3) on 12-20-1999, 05:23 PM:

Talk about bad presentation. Once when we had the greastest film ever made in the history of mankind, Armeggedon, playing at our theatre, we had some loser watching it when it was in the small house and he and his pals where the only ones in there. Anyway it was too loud for them. I had to take it out of digital, into mono, turn the volume down to about 1.4. I went into the auditorium and listened, and I could barely hear it. Because I was so pissed off at this guy who yelled and screamed at the manager about it being too loud in the first place, I went back upstairs and turned it down to 0.4. Bastard.

Posted by Nicholas McRobert (Member # 205) on 12-20-1999, 07:36 PM:

I think that people are a lot more tolerant in the USA of bad presentation, both from personal experience when visiting and from reading some of the articles both here and in rec.arts.movies.tech. It seems that when there is a technical problem in my theatre, people are VERY reluctant to take complimentary tickets and 99% usually demand their money back AND in some cases, comps as well!

A result of this "typical" British/European attitude and lack of tolerance to shabby presentation is to employ professionals, or at least people who can SUCCESSFULLY carry out the job.

It's rare (apart from the US-owned UCI chain) to find people employed as Manger/Operator or Usher/Operator in a Cinema here. Most have dedicated operators, no kids in the booth, half-decent/excellent equipment as well as company field engineer teams for installation and regular maintenance. Warner-Village theatres in the UK even have a permanent training facility set up for new projectionists, as do Odeon Cinemas. The result.....little or no breakdowns, and *happy* customers. Fair enough, there is always going to be the odd problem here and there, but in comparison, how many breakdowns a week would one of your 20 screen teenage-run Googa-plexes have?

I just don't understand the mentality of people who pay for a movie and happily sit back watching something that looks/sounds like it has been dragged around the floor without asking for a CASH refund! If everyone was to do this EVERY time there was a problem, things would soon change!