Anybody ever seen this one before?

At my theatre, we have the Cretors 'automatic' popcorn poppers. You toss in a scoop of seed and press a button and out squirts a measured amount of popper oil.

I hear this call on the radio at about 1pm last Sunday, just as we were getting good and busy...

Johnny the Popcorn Boy: "Mr. {manager}!!! I need you at the main stand right away!!!

Manager: What's wrong 'Johnny'?

J: "Something's wrong with the popcorn machine! It's SMOKING really bad!"

M: "Okay! Shut it off!! I'm on the way!"

J: "Umm... Okay... I think somebody hooked up a box of Coke instead of Pop-oil!"

Yes, you heard right! 'Somebody' DID! If you don't know this, the popcorn oil comes in the same kind of 'bag-in-a-box' (AKA: "BIBS") that the Coca-Cola comes in!! And, YES the connectors are the same!

It's amazing to me that 'somebody' can't tell the difference between an thick, brown, gooey liquid in a box that says, "C-O-K-E" and a thin, yellow, oily liquid that says, "O-I-L"! Furthermore, it's amazing to me that it went completely unnoticed until the popper started belching out thick, black, FOUL-smelling smoke!

After I stopped laughing my ass off, I went down to check it out. The popper's TRASHED! They're probably going to need a new kettle and oil pump!

Lucky thing it didn't catch fire!

--Chris

 

We don't know who's responsible for the popper incident, yet. Whoever it is certainly isn't talking. If the popper really is trashed, 'he' is probably going to be 'in the dog house' for a while. (If not worse!)
 

The management think he is so good,they have promoted him as Senior AV Engineer for the cinema complex!!.

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At first, the thought was, "Hey! Coca-Cola flavored popcorn! We could be on to something, here! Maybe we could charge EXTRA for that?"

The resultant popcorn actually looked almost normal and it smelled like Coca-Cola but it tasted like burned sugar.

BLAAAAAAH!
 

I guess he was a bit embarrassed, because when I asked if he wanted some help, he said no go on home.

I heard that it took him about 4 to 5 hours to put that one back together that night.

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quote:

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"More human than human" is our motto.

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Scott

Many years back I was opening a new complex as a booth manager. I won't even get into the details of why the general manager insisted I train someone in the booth who did not speak one word of English!

Just imagine the training. Point...nod head yes. Point...nod head NO! Point...nod head yes. Demonstrate threading while saying things like "soundtrack" (pointing)..."roller" (pointing)..."intermittent" (pointing), etc, etc, etc. So after over a month of the most aggravating training I've ever been through I finally say "this guy's NEVER gonna get it until either he learns English or I learn whatever it is he speaks". So of course, this general manager decides, hmmm, sounds like he's good to go!

I was finishing college at the time and although I'd been working from 8am to midnight every day for over a month with a 1 1/2 hour drive to and from the theater, HAD to take a few mornings off for finals. So what happens? "Mr. Smartestmanagerintheworld" decides to put this guy in the booth one morning when I'm not there to supervise and go head nodding. By the time I get there around 2PM, the box office people pull me aside and ask "what happened?" Then it was the concessionists, "what happened?" Then the ushers too. Of course I have NO idea what evil is lurking upstairs awaiting my arrival...but I'm not liking it.

First thing I see is this fellow wobbling down the booth. Of course my thoughts were "oh shit", but I decided to follow him and try to get him to point to whatever this disaster was that apparently the entire theater knew about. No sooner did I round the corner did I see the service tech working on #2. I don't even bother following him anymore and decide to go to the English speaking tech for answers.

As I walk up, I'm greeted with "hey, how's it going?" I of course responded with something along the lines of "I'm not sure. How IS everything going?" His response was "well, your boy there stripped out this intermittent", as he hands me a "was-brand-new" Simplex XL intermittent with a red shop rag mangled around the sprocket.

Now, how do you teach a non-English speaking projectionist NOT to run the motor when wiping the sprockets with a toothbrush or a rag? Believe me, I did more than enough "NO" head shaking while pointing to the motor switch...but what can I do.

So now here's the amazing thing, this tech (who was known for checking sound problems by sticking his head out of the port hole window during the then mono trailers for 5 seconds and saying "sounds great nothing wrong") actually had a loop of RP40 running through the machine and the image on screen looked good! In fact, the projector was running smooth too! What could I say to the man but "thanks!" It had been a very rough month with virtually no sleep.

He tells me to leave the machine running for 10 minutes or so to "let the oil circulate" and asks me if I would help him carry some of his gear out to his car. I obliged.

Some 10 minutes later, after having to answer questions to the staff who had nothing better to do than get gossip, I returned to the projector, stopped it and took the loop out. The show was to start in 10 minutes and my non-English speaking operator was nowhere to be found, so I decide to go ahead and thread it up. Just one problem, when I walked around the projector to get to the platter I found a bit of a mess that the bonehead tech had left...all over my brand new print! What was this crap? I touched it, smelled it, looked at the walls, floor and ceiling around the platter and was imagining that someone had taken a 5 pound sack of shit and slung it all over the place. Well, it wasn't shit...it was the oil from the XL...because the BONEHEAD tech never put the back cover on the projector!

There was no oil left in the machine, for it was all over the print. That house stayed down for 2 days while we junked the print and scrubbed the platter, rollers, ceiling, walls and floor. The only amazing thing is, there's no telling how long that XL was running with no oil while that loop was running, yet it was fine once the cover was put back on and new oil was put in.

 

-Aaron

 

The manager at one theatre decided to hook up a box of iced tea at the downstairs concession stand. Unlike the upstairs soda fountain, this one could only make carbonated drinks. Result: no one wanted to drink the sparkling iced tea and those who did got a refund. Not real bad, just funny.

A tech decided we needed a snood on the outside of the port glass to correct a problem we were having with the picture. So he made one. He did this by sawing the bottom off a trash can and taping the can up to the port. It worked until it came crashing down to the floor during the first show, luckily without whacking a customer on the head. Someone then picked it up and placed it in the rear of the theatre and patrons proceeded to fill it full of trash, not knowing it was bottomless. It was kind of funny though, seeing the projection beam emanating from a garbage can. A real quality show

One day while talking to my coworker while he was working at the rewind bench, I noticed a straight 'line' of some black substance going straight across the bench. I touched it and found that it was some kind of oil. I went to get the '409' to clean it up and noticed that there was a similar black 'line' going up the front of my white Cinemark Uniform. Then I noticed another line going up the wall and across the ceiling. Retracing my steps, I discovered that all of these lines were on a plane that intersected the top of the table at an almost 90 deg. angle. "Hmmm", I thought. I went to get the '409' and came back. By that time by buddy had started up the rewinder again. This time, I saw a 'rooster tail' of oil flying off the friction disk on the left spindle! Somebody had decided to OIL the "friction pad"! (If you ask me, "OIL" and "FRICTION" are two MUTUALLY EXCLUSIVE concepts! Now, I can understand that a few drops of oil could be beneficial. (Personally, I wouldn't do it unless it needed it.) But this bone head totally saturated the pad! I had to spend about an hour cleaning up the mess and getting the oil out of the rewinder. To this day, there's still oil in places you never thought even existed! Well, at least we'll never have to oil it!

I found out who it was. It's the same guy who tried to stop a 6K reel full of film, spinning at top speed using his bare hands! I don't know why he'd do that unless he seriously enjoys pain? I know he understood that spinning reels are like buzz saw blades. We used to demonstrate that concept by taking an old reel and cutting pencils in half, saying, "This COULD have been your finger!")
 

One of the casuals of a now-closed premiere house once attempted to clean a dusty print by soaking a towel with water and then rewinding the film at top speed while, um, _cleaning_ the print with said towel...

 

After a manager built up a print of "Nell", and was screening it he discovered that he had placed R4 on backwards. So he let the rest of the reel run though no big deal so he could reverse it. Here is where the "bone head" part comes in... once the reel had run through he stopped the projector, broke the splice and proceeded to pull reel 4 off ONTO THE FLOOR!!! by hand. This was a brand new theatre so he knew the carpet would be full of construction dirt (even though we vacumed nightly) so upon loading the film back onto the platter he decided to clean it, using a DRY PAPER TOWEL!! Needless to say that reel looked like complete crap. This manager also INSISTED that we shoepolish reel changes.
 

Is this the same manager who had to have a splicer by EVERY projector "for when the film breaks"??? I'll bet it is.

If it's that same guy, he literally couldn't make it through more than one 70mm presentation per week without the film breaking at a minimum of once! I know all the assistant managers always cheered when "it didn't break". They went through thousands of passes just because he was such a firm believer in "the 2 finger loop". (Of course, the man had HUGE fingers and his loops slapped all over the inside of the projector.)

I always felt for the poor AW3s at that theater. When he spliced he would punch the splicer with all of his weight to the point I'd swear his feet would jump off of the floor...because he ALWAYS spliced with the splicer on the edge of a platter deck. To this day, those axles are all bent to crap.

He also thought the only way to remove a trailer was to pull it by hand through the brain onto the floor. At that point he would carry the glob of film to the rewind bench and start untangling it onto a core.

That was back in the acetate days too. Geez, I'll bet he's turned over his fair share of platters and consoles with polyester!
 

Last I heard he's no longer in the movie business though.
 

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"If it's not worth doing, I have allready been there and done it"
 

"Why are you opening all those beers?" I asked her as she moved on to the 20th. "Are there some customers coming out?"

"No!" she said. (duh) "It's supposed to be busy at the matinee tomorrow so I'm saving time for then".

It ended up there was a small party at the end of the show after all that.

(Well, you can't go wasting good beer now, can you?) (hic)

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"It's not the years honey, it's the mileage".
Indiana Jones
 

When I worked in TV, we had the OLD RCA TP-6 telecine projectors with one reel at the top and one just above the floor. We were running a 2000' reel loaded with "The Towering Inferno" In those days, we would transfer the film to tape so we wouldn't have to physically cut the print. Anyway, it was late at night, and the projectors were in another room. I loaded the reel and cued it up. Then I went back into the control room to start the 2" VTR and start the recording. I started the tape, then started the projector. I heard it start from the other room, and I saw the film running on the monitor. I checked the sound, and sat down to continue doing all the other stuff I had to do.

Anyway, at the end of the reel, I stopped the tape, stopped the projector, and walked into the projection room. I found 2000' of "Inferno" in a heap on the filthy floor. The take-up reel had split and I didn't hear it. The bad thing is that my "helper" tried to pick-up the lump of film--to keep it from getting dirtier.... He thoroughly tangled it up.

We ended up paying for a replacement R3-4 of the movie. That is R2 on 16mm. Twentieth Century TV actually inspected the print and saw what our station had done to their only new print (at the time) and billed us.

From then on, I instructed our guys to keep an eye on the projectors while we were dubbing at night. There were always people around during the day.

I transferred around 5000 features to tape during my stay there.....
 

When I arrived at the theatre about an hour before last Sunday's screening, thinking that an hour would be more than enough to prepare a couple of archive reels and a short, I was told by the manager of these special screenings that this particular "short" was actually a short sequence, a monologue by the director of the old classic, that was part of a seven-reel feature. The Swedish Film Institute had helpfully sent us the whole film, not just the right reel.

My first question to the manager was, obviously, what reel the sequence belonged to. He didn't know. What does the scene look like? He didn't know. Does anyone know? Well, yes, one of the other managers might, but she was at a restaurant somewhere, eating lunch with the guest director who was to speak to the audience before the show. They'd be back in time for the show, not before. Can we phone the Swedish Film Institute and ask? No, not on a Sunday, they're closed.

The manager, looking rather worried by now, thought for a moment, and then asked if I could "simply fast-forward the film and look the scene up"...

Sigh.