Saw this on Reddit, but somebody said they were theater hopping and went into a theater with literally nobody in it when the movie started. After 15 minutes of the movie the screen suddenly turned off and all the lights turned on.
Somebody else chimed in and said theaters now if nobody has reserved a seat and nobody has within 15 minutes the movie automatically turns off, either because to save on electricity bills or the alternative motive was that it’s exactly to prevent people from theater hopping if they haven’t bought a ticket.
Does this actually happen? Is this a new thing since most movie theaters now seem to only have reserved seating?
I don’t know about current practices, but I had a co-worker who spent a couple of days a week every other week in a remote office 300 miles from his home office. He usually worked Tuesday/Wednesday there, IIRC, and would frequently go to the movies on his nights there. On more than one occasion, he was the only one in the theater, so the manager would give him a choice of watching the movie, or leaving and getting a pair of passes to use some other time. If he took the passes, the manager could send the the few people on duty (projectionist, clean-up crew, concession staff, etc) go home an hour or two early. Sometimes he wanted to see the movie, other times he was just at the theater to kill a couple of hours, so over the course of the assignment (6-8 months), he had a dozen or so movie passes.
This was the same guy that used to love going to the card rooms and fleecing the locals. Pat had been a world champion poker player, but you never would have suspected it.
I can’t see how this would really work in practice, though. AFAICT, in most multi-screen movie theaters you have to buy a ticket in order to gain access to the screening rooms, but once you’re past the ticket-taker, you can go into whichever screening room you want. Turning off the movie projection only in screening rooms with zero ticket purchases wouldn’t stop any ticket-holder from theater-hopping among the other screening rooms.
IME, most theater screening rooms are nowhere near sold out, even if there’s nominally assigned seating, and it’s perfectly possible to hang out for a while watching part of a different movie than the one you bought the ticket for. (Source: I generally get to the movies on the bus, and screening schedules usually don’t perfectly align with bus schedules, so spending a couple-ten minutes wandering into a different screening room and watching a fragment of some other movie before or after the screening I paid to see is not unheard of.)
What impedes more severe forms of theater-hopping, ISTM, are the requirements of showtime scheduling. You can’t have multiple movies ending or starting around the same time, due to staffing requirements for cleaning the screening rooms before each showing. And that staggered start time effect makes it more difficult for a moviegoer to pop out of the screening room of a movie that just ended, and pop right into the screening room of another that’s just starting. (Accompanied by their popcorn, of course.)
That said, I would bet that it would be trivially easy for some moviegoer in your average multiplex to buy one ticket for an early showing and just hang out in the screening rooms all day, if they didn’t mind spending probably at least two-thirds of their time watching random parts of movies instead of entire movies. (And, of course, watching nothing at all in any screening room where nobody bought a ticket for the current showing so they turned off the projection.) If you don’t exit the screening-room area, and you’re not disruptive or obviously loitering, I doubt anyone’s going to check your ticket to determine which screenings you are/were contractually entitled to watch.
Is there even a projectionist dedicated to each theater? Given digital projection, I imagine that the process is mostly or entirely automated these days.
This. I have been in screening rooms where something went amiss with the projection and it was necessary to go find a staffer elsewhere to deal with it. There was no projectionist monitoring that individual showing.
There are three periods the answer has to be supplied for:
The old, old days when film came in reels that lasted about twenty minutes then the show switched to a second projector to run for another twenty minutes while the first projector is loaded with the next reel in the sequence.
The old days where after arrival at the theater the separate reels would be spliced together and put on a giant platter. After being run through the projector the film would be taken up on another platter which, after the show’s end, would be ready to thread into a projector for the next showing.
Current day where the show is a digital file received either via a satellite download or physical delivery of a hard drive.
For the old, old, days it was a trivial task to stop the projector, unload the film from its path through it, and backwind it onto the supply reel it had just come from. Lazy or busy projectionists could simply let it run through and not start the other projector.
For the old days it was a royal PITA dealing with those platters – they weighed in the neighborhood of 300 pounds – so a show once started would run through to the end. If no one is truly watching the projector lamp would be turned off since they have a finite life. Ditto for the lazy projectionist above.
Currently all the projectionist has to do is hit the stop button.
I’ve never worked in a movie theater and my knowledge of their operations is based on reading the Multiplex webcomic.
But is it possible there is a usage fee involved here? Does a theater have to pay the studio each time it runs the movie, even if nobody is watching it? If so, this would give the theater an incentive to shut off the movie when it sees that nobody is in the room and cancelling the payment for that showing.
As I understand it, the studio/marketer (rights holder) usually collects a percentage of the box office or an amount per ticket sold, not a fee per showing. At least this was true in a couple of theaters in the 1990s.
Yes. There were exceptions but the standard agreement was the first two weeks the exhibitor gets 20% of the gate and the distributor 80%. The next two weeks it’s 40/60 then 60/40 for another two weeks then finally 80/20 for the rest of the run. That’s why when a movie has legs it sticks around forever.
As DesertDog says, it depends on the era you are asking about. I can only speak of the heyday of 35mm projection, when we were using platter systems.
The main issue was that you couldn’t not start the film on time because someone might buy a ticket 5 minutes in, but once you started the film you were committed and had no choice but to run the entire film through the platter system.
Even back then (late 80s) one projectionist would run many theaters. In my case I had 9.
Weeknights were slow, so it was not unusual for a theater to be empty for the 9pm showing on a Monday night. But nobody really cared–we started it on time, and if someone came and bought a ticket 5 minutes into the show the movie would be going.
I suppose one could shut off the lamp to save some of its hours (they were good for around 1500 hours), but nobody ever did this.
The one exception to this for me was for whatever film was the last show of the night. At one point I remember that was “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade”–it was a 7 or 8 reel movie that went on to 12:30 at night, Since everything else ended at around midnight, that film determined when I could go home.
Because of this, if I saw the theater was empty by, say, 11:50pm I’d shut the projector off, turn on the house lights, unthread the projector, and free-wheel the platters until the end of the film–by that point there was only 30 minutes, so this wasn’t an arduous task. Then I’d thread up all of the machines and go home at midnight.
Perhaps the whole platter system weighed 300 lbs (not relevant), but a two-hour 35mm movie print was nowhere near that weight.
The film was spliced from 6 twenty-minute reels, and if one needed to transport the whole film to a different theater, we would put some flimsy aluminum clamps around the pancake of film, pick the whole thing up off the platter, and carry it under our arm like a bicycle tire over to its destination.
I usually didn’t even bother with the aluminum clamps since they were annoying to use and scratched the platter. I would just pop the center ring up enough to slide the film off the edge of the platter, flip it vertical in one swift motion, and carry it gently to its destination.
I did manage to drop a film once. It was “Backdraft”, and I spent an hour or two, and much profanity, cleaning up the resulting mess.
I can’t speak to industry standards, let alone current ones, but…
The weekend after I turned 18, I thought I’d celebrate by catching a late show X-rated feature at the local multiplex. This was in the late 1970s. Apparently, I was the ONLY person interested in watching this feature, and the middle-aged woman selling tickets begged me to get lost so they could all go home early. She assured me it was softcore crap of the worst sort. I left and came back a week or two later with a friend, also celebrating a recent March birthday, to see the lame softcore epic HOT LEGS. Anyway, yes, they will turn it off.
For two-projector setups, “turn it off” is simple.
For “modern” platter setups, once you press start you are committed, so not starting is better.
That sounds like what the woman was trying to do.
For those interested, in the first video I posted above, I show images of platter systems and some video of them in operation, so you can see what is really going on, and get a better idea of why “stopping” wasn’t that easy.
I quite enjoyed it! But perhaps real firefighters rolled their eyes. I haven’t watched it since.
Since we’re getting historical here, I’ll toss in my experience from the early 70s.
My student job at a college in Boston was with the A/V department. We ran the projectors at the various campus classrooms and venues, including the film study courses. There was one auditorium that had two 35mm projectors. (Everything else was 16mm.) Because it was 35mm, we had to have a union (IATSE) projectionist. This was the case even though we were no longer using arc lamps or nitrate films. And, of course, an academic institution was going to be absolutely sure it complied with all union rules.
But prior to 1975, you had to have TWO projectionists. So I was quickly (and with no prior training on 35mm) enrolled in the union. I seem to recall it was Local 182, but my card is long since gone. That way, I could be the second projectionist…and earn union scale, which was way above my regular hourly rate as a student worker.
From time to time, a faculty member would be scheduled to show a film (usually for a film studies class) and would have to cancel for some reason at the last minute. If this happened, we got paid anyway. In discussing this with the “real” union projectionist, he mentioned that he often was asked to stop a showing in a theater, but that he always got paid regardless. Again, this was Boston in 1973 and second-hand knowledge on my part. But he seemed to think it was a great thing when he got told to pack up and leave while still on the clock. At that time, he was NOT using platters…it was all by reel.
As recently as Superman, I was the only one watching the film, and no one asked me to comeback another day. This was a 24 plex in a large city. Still, there was practically no one in the lobby or hallways. The clean up crew, at least, had only one spot to clean (sorry about the dropped popcorn!)
As for stopping while the movie is running, there was a time, in 1996 (the film was The Nutty Professor) I went to see a dollar-theater presentation. The film was scheduled for 2:40 pm, I got there about 2:30 and the film had already started. There were about 10 people in the theater. After double checking that I hadn’t read the schedule wrong, I complained to the manager (this wasn’t a sin back then! ) and, believe it or not, they rewound and restarted the film! To this day, I wonder what the other patrons thought.
As for shutting it off when no one is watching, well, isn’t that a Schroedinger’s cat/Heisenberg type of unsolvable problem?
Wow, it was either an archaic setup (20 minute reels) or they did a hell of a lot of work to restart the film. Platter systems are like 8-track tapes: they only go forward. There is no way to rewind a film that is being shown using a platter system, which would have been standard in the 1990s.
I agree. Maybe because it was a dollar-theater? Maybe they used individual reels? I still wonder.
To be complete with facts, this wasn’t some seedy 70s Times Square dive, this was in a mall (Superstition Springs mall, to be precise). A good sized 8-10 plex. I knew about the existence of platter drives, but by the timing it must not have been. It only took 5 minutes or so to get it back. Which, coincidentally, got it going at the published start time anyway.
I don’t think I was wrong to ask. The schedule was published, and really, who starts a movie early? Sure it was only a buck, but I’d have to come back again, buy another pop and popcorn.
There are crafty ways of getting around the “rewind” problem. You can boldly unthread the projector, grab the first 10 minutes of film wrapped around the core ring on the take-up platter and sort of tuck it into the center of the main film, then re-thread and go. This would usually leave an inch thick loop of film sort of flopping over the top of the main film, but that would be consumed after 10 minutes and everything would return to normal. That’s likely what they did. Not practical after more than 10 minutes.
This was a technique we often did to insert trailers into an existing film without much faff.
This does happen, but it’s penny-wise, pound-foolish thinking that is generally discouraged when the corporate office is watching the individual locations.
Yes, in theory you save a little on the power bill and extend the life of the expensive bulbs in the projector by not running them unecessarily. At the cost of:
-your already skeleton-crew theater staff taking time, that they are being paid for, to constantly check which auditoriums have 0 sales and manually turn things off instead of working on what they should be working on
-a nonzero amount of times when you forget to turn everything back on properly before the next show and have disgruntled customers/more unecessary work you’ve made for yourself to fix it
-constantly sending a message to customers that they are an unwanted inconvenience (imagine showing up to McDonalds and being told “we don’t want to make hamburgers today, would you accept a coupon for a hamburger tomorrow” not because something unexepectedly broke but simply because the staff has decided their first priority is going home early)
-”closing early” and having your doors locked and lights off before the time when they are supposed to be, thus duplicating that message of “we’re either already out of business or close to it and we don’t want you here” to everyone who drives by
In the old film-based multiplex environment the only time it made sense to do this was when you had 10+ screens going and you could kill the one that is NOT the last show after waiting 15 minutes or so to make sure nobody had shown up. It avoids all the “closing early” issues and it’s not really as much of a risk of screwing it up or a waste of wages because it’s your dedicated projectionist who’s worrying about it. Now with digital cinema there is no projectionist.
99% of cinemas are digital-only and basically have one member of management who knows how to load in each week’s new releases from hard drives they get in the mail and maybe spends half a shift per week cleaning dust off the machines. Everything from that point on is programmed in, usually from a corporate office or an offsite third-party that handles this. There is no one by default in the “projection booth” while movies are running and possibly no one on-site who knows how to fix anything if there is a problem, depending on who is scheduled.
What a waste of time compared to just shutting off the bulb, especially if you’re there doing the (suboptimal) practice of pre-threading all the other machines anyway.
Ever since all first-run content went digital (which is 10 years ago at this point) you’re actually much more likely to see a changeover system. Archives do not allow their prints to be cut for plattering and will only send vintage prints to changeover houses. The only time platters are ever used anymore is when a Paul Thomas Anderson or Christopher Nolan type puts out a new 70mm release to commercial venues and the film is actually running 5 times a day. For all of your museums and places like that running one-off analog shows of old prints, there won’t be a platter in sight.
You can’t literally “rewind” it onto the platter but you can cut and drop, especially if you’re only a few minutes in. Non-platter transports like 6000-foot reels on towers generally do work in reverse and must be rewound after every show. These were not practical in 20+ screen venues but smaller theaters very commonly used them right up to the end of film. It’s entirely possible that any given moviegoer recounting an experience from before 2013 or so was dealing with that technology.
) and, believe it or not, they rewound and restarted the film! To this day, I wonder what the other patrons thought.