Empty movie theaters, or, Must the Show Go On?

Factual Questions
1

A friend just left to go to the 1:00 p.m. matinee of a 3 1/2-hour long, subtitled film now showing at a rural art-house theater. I’m doubtful that she will have much company at this show, which prompted me to consider the following questions:

  1. Is there a minimum number of people that must buy tickets before a theater will show a film at a scheduled time? In other words, does the theater rent the print on a per-showing basis, meaning that the theater will refuse to show it unless ticket sales for that showing equal the per-showing rental cost? Or are they rented on a flat weekly (or other) basis, meaning that showing the film to only one or two patrons is better than none at all (disregarding incidental labor costs like ushers and projectionists who could be sent home)?

  2. If a film is scheduled to run at 1:00 p.m., and no tickets for that showing have been sold by showtime, does the theater show the film anyway on the off-chance that someone might show up late or just give up and close off the theater 'til the next showtime?
    –2a. If they don’t show the film to an empty theater, and I show up late-- say at 1:15 p.m.-- wanting to buy tickets to the 1:00 p.m. showing, will they show it for me from the beginning (assume that the time I arrive at still gives them enough time to show it in full and rewind for the next scheduled showtime)? Or would they just start with whatever reel best matches the time elapsed from the scheduled starting time?
    –2b. If they do show the film to an empty theater, how long would a theater let it run before it gave up and shut off the projector? Would it let the film run through until the end?

  3. Do theaters still require a projectionist to man each booth during the complete movie? Are reel changes still done by hand? Do films still come on multiple reels?

2

I went to The Patriot three weeks after it was released and was the only one at the 2:15 showing. Nothing like having a theater to yourself.

3

  1. I’ve been to movies by myself. I think the theater will show the movie as long as somebody buys a ticket. After all, the staff is already on duty and getting paid.

  2. I asked someone who worked at a theater about this. He said that the theater would start running the film, but with no sound and the house lights on. If somebody walked in, the lights would go out and the sound would come on. That may have just been the policy of that theater.

  3. Most theaters use automatic reel changers I believe. Although I believe there is someone around who oversees the machinery.

4

Films are now run on what’s known as a “Platter system.” On Thursday night (or Friday morning) each reel of film is spliced end to end continuously onto a platter. Each “tree” has three platters with a system of rollers in the middle (roller cluster or “brain”) that the beginning of the film feeds through. After the film runs through the projector, it is taken up on a second platter and wound onto a core, which is then removed for the next showing and the film is threaded through the “brain” again. There is pretty much no such thing as a “projectionist” anymore, as everything is automated. Films are “made-up” at their arrival and “taken down” by the managment. There usually isn’t anyone on site with any technical or repair knowledge which is why often times the simplest mishap results in the film not being shown and the audiance sent home with passes.

Policy differs by theater, but I’d usually start the film on time, and if no one had showed up by the end of the trailers I’d shut down the lamphouse and sound bulb and let the film continue to run through in the event some joker showed up after a half hour and didn’t care how much he missed. The only time a show was held was the last showing, which we usually held for approx 15 minutes before closing. Due to cleaning, banking and paperwork, this only resulted in management getting to leave a half hour, or hour early. (Unless you have an epic like the English Patient, in which case having a no show for the last show would get you home in time for the late news, lol.)

5

My brother and I went to see “Digimon” last month and we were the only ones in the theater. It was great — we could MiST the trailers without anyone telling us to shut up.

About a year ago I went to the movies with my mom on a weeknight. Not only were we the only two people in our theater, we were the only customers in the building! The guy working the projector had to ask which movie we were seeing so that he knew which one to start. So I guess some places don’t start the movie if there’s no one in the theater.

6

Back from when I worked in a movie theater 9-10 years ago…

We showed the film regardless, even when the auditorium was empty. I don’t really know what the rental terms for the print are. I was told by our manager that the film production company got a fraction of the gate (a very large fraction - approaching 90% for new releases), but I don’t know whether or not there was something on top of that. BTW, the vast majority of the theater’s profits come from the concession stand - mostly because of that huge cut taken from ticket sales.

I seem to remember that, for the last showing of the day, the projectionist would kill the film about halfway through if it was empty. I think this is more to preserve the life of the projector bulb more than anything else. I’m not certain, but I think they kept the print running through the projector 'cause that’s the simplest way to get it ready for the next day (see following paragraph).

Neither of the theaters I’ve worked at, and no others that I’ve had the chance to see the projection booths of, require reel changes during the show. I seriously doubt that any “major” theaters do.

Modern projectors are draw the print, not from vertical reels, like the ones in the school auditorium, but from horizontal platters the size of a small table. These platters are capable of holding about 4 hours worth of print, obviating the need for reel changes. The prints are transported in cans on multiple reels, spliced together by the projectionist, and set down on one of these platters.

The really cool thing was that these platters draw the print from the middle, not from the outside. The print is sent to the projector and returned to another platter, where it’s re-wound around the center disk. This means that no rewinding is necessary, as the beginning of the feature is already at the center of the wind, where you need it. To ready the print for the next showing, all that needs to be done is a re-thread through the projector of the beginning of the print. Takes about a minute.

As a corollary to this, it’s pretty much fire-and-forget from the projectionist’s point of view. He’d thread the print, set a timer, and walk away. It would start automatically, and he would need to pay no further attention to it until the movie was over.

7

On a day off, I went to an IMAX theater next to a minor mall in the Chicago suburbs. I was the only one there for a 3 PM showing on a weekday, and there were one or two earlier scheduled showings.

8

There’s nothing more fun than walking to the local theater during the day, and watching a film with only two or three other people in the theater. And I used to do that, until, for some strange reason, the movie theater went bankrupt and closed a couple of months ago.

9

Though I enjoyed the film, Fight Club helped perpetuate the notion that a projectionist is sitting in a “booth” somewhere above the audience’s head. Although the cuemarks in the upper-right hand corner of the film are still there, 99% of the theaters showing FC weren’t performing changeovers. In fact, a “booth” usually consists of 4-10 projectors or more, usually manned by one staff member (not a projectionist in the strict union sense of the word).

Walk into a multiplex and you’ll usually have a long corridor with theaters on the right and left going down a hallway. That hallway has an exact duplicate upstairs, with one long room with projector after projector. There is usually only one person working in that room at any one time. Having managed different theaters with anywhere from 6 to 20 screens, we never had more than 3 “projectionists” at any one time (and that was only during prime and late sets on a Friday/Saturday night in the 20-plex). Sometimes, we wouldn’t even have someone run the projectors until after the matinees were over–we managers would usually power up the booths, thread all the films, and do all the show starts for the first set or two (there is a reason you see most multi-/megaplex shows start about 5-10 minutes apart from each other).

Since virtually all theaters use platters (as decribed by voguevixen and brad_d), you usually have enough time to start her up, make sure everything’s OK, and then move on to your next show start. Sometimes, in order to fit as many screenings as possible in a day, the turnaround time on a film will be relatively short, making it essential that the film start on time, customers or no. The way platters work, you can’t start on a feature if you want–you have to run through the ads and previews, so if you assume nobody will show, you are burning yourself if someone shows up 10 minutes late and you haven’t started the show.

That is why it’s essential to tell a manager immediately if your movie has no sound, is out of frame, etc. A lot of time, people think it will be “fixed” by the time the previews are over. It won’t unless someone tells a theater worker something’s wrong.

10

I worked in a movie theater of the older type in high school (which was 20 years ago…ick) and our manager wouldn’t start a show unless at least four people showed up. It was a great old theater with a big balcony; these little multiplex type places seem like overgrown living rooms to me - no atmosphere at all. We had a projectionist who operated two old fashioned arc lamp projectors and he had to be there to switch over reels. He got in a little bit of trouble once when he showed the reels out of order but I forget which film it was. Those projectors were kind of neat but needed constant adjustment and the carbon rods were really messy. They switched over to the platter system and built a new three screen cinema just before I left the job. I worked the last night the big theater was open, kinda sad. There was no magic in the new place, just a lot of glass, chrome, small seats and small screens.

Sorry, apparently I drifted a little… never mind me.

11

One of my former co-workers used to go out of town on assignments a lot, and he used to go see movies when out on the road. Many times he’d be the only paying customer at the last showing, and the theater manager would offer him 4 passes for another show if he just left. He wasn’t really pressured into leaving - sometimes he’d take the passes, and other times he really wanted to see the movie so he stayed.

12

Tales from last night…

We go to the theatre to see the Legend of Bagger Vance. We’re the only ones in the movie. Pretty cool, so we sit down to watch it.
Anyway, with ten minutes to go in the film, the championship game, Damon’s last stroke, what the whole film as been building towards…the video cuts out. Bam! Just like that, dark screen. We can still hear the movie, which is quite annoying. So I go to complain.

No one at the snack bar right outside the theatre. So I walk down the empty hallway to the main snack bar. No one is there either. I scream out “hello” and nobody responds.

I go back to the theatre, and we leave. Heck, the movie is over with anyway. We go back down, trying to search for someone. We can’t find anyone anywhere. No mall security, no janitors, nobody! We started joking about how we might be the last two people on earth after a comet strike.

We tried to get some compensation candy, but they locked everything up. Cokes still worked, but the cups were all gone. We found some security cameras and yelled at them about what bastards they were, but nothing happened.

Then we go to leave the mall. The doors are locked! We try another exit. Locked there as well. We start laughing about how we’ll be stuck in the mall all night. Finally we found a restaurant that was cleaning up and we went through that out to the parking lot. We had to circle the mall before getting back to our side where my car was the only one in the lot.

So to answer your question nurlman, yes, the show goes on. Caveat Emptor for those that take them up on the offer though.

13

I worked for a year in a theater with only two screens, but both were pretty large. My manager used to say that he wouldn’t run the movie with less than 5 people in the theater, but he always did. If no one showed up, we didn’t start the film, but, if someone finally bought a ticket at 1:15 for the 1:00 show, we’d start the movie for 'em.

Running the movie isn’t really a matter of “saving the bulb” or anything, because (at least in my old theater) the projectors were turned on when the day started and stayed on. I don’t know if they took a long time to warm up or what, but we didn’t shut 'em off until we left for the night. When the movie wasn’t running, we closed a “shutter”, a physical block between the bulb and the film. Slamming that shutter closed is what’ll keep the film from burning if it gets stuck in front of the bulb.

The projectors did indeed use “platters”, as described above. Threading the projectors was a real trick; to keep the film from breaking, it’s run through a series of “pulleys”, keeping the film plenty loose before it enters the projector. On the takeup platter, you place a metal ring (well, not a complete ring, more like a letter C) in the center so that the film has something to wind around. When threading that platter up, you pull the ring out and, as noted, play the film out from the center. The three-platter system also made it easy to play two films in one theater; say the kiddie film is on platter A, the R-rated film on platter B. When you run the kiddie film, it’s taken up on platter C. If you need to show the other film next, it’ll be taken up on platter A. Having three platters also made it easy to prepare for movie changes on Fridays: we’d run the old film on platters C and A while we spliced and spooled the new film onto platter B.

I’ve spliced and broken down the film, so I became aware of the obvious “film splice” moments quite a long time ago. To keep the projector from instantly hitting a thick patch in the film, we’d tape the splices dead center on the front and one sprocket-hole off on the back. Keeping out bubbles is an art, me brothers…incidentally, it’s very easy to spot splices, even without looking for the “cigarette burns”: first, they’ll hit every 20 minutes, because that’s how long a standard reel is. Second, they’re accompanied by a lot of extra dirt on the print, because the film is handled most at those splicing points and thus gets dirtier. And, of course, you’ll hear the audio pop, because the audio just doesn’t get read right through splicing tape.

hehe. Hope you feel a bit more enlightened about the movie business. Another note: once I took a garbage bag full of popcorn home with me. I nibbled on that stuff for weeks, and it never went stale. Heavy-duty preservatives, methinks.

14

Being a former theater manager , I don’t have much to add to the explanations given by voguevixen, brad_d, ArchiveGuy, and Max Torque, except to say that we too would only hold the film if it was the last show of the night and no one had purchased a ticket yet. This would result in us being able to leave a little earlier if no one came in. However, we also ran the risk of leaving late if someone showed up for that movie before we closed the box office (which usually occurred 30 minutes after the last scheduled show started), and therefore had to start the movie late.

If the patron-less show was earlier in the day, we would run it as scheduled for this reason: if no one was there for a 1:00 show and we didn’t run the film, but someone showed up at 1:30 and wanted to go in “late”, starting the film 30 minutes late would throw off the schedule for the rest of the day. So we would run the show as scheduled with the lamp maybe turned off. Then we would dash upstairs to flip the lamp on if someone came in late.

15

Enderw23 said

Um, I assume you see what’s wrong with this sentence.

16

ROFL! It’s true…It used to slay me when someone would complain about 30 minute popcorn being stale. That stuff has a shelflife of about 30 YEARS!

17

i went to see a time to kill and something went wrong with the projector for 10 minutes, just as matt was revving up for his finale speech. we missed the speech, but when cries went up that the film be rewound, we were advised that this was not a possibility with the equipment they had. they told us that they had to let the film play to the very end… it was the last show of the evening so we wouldn’t be putting the schedule out, of course it would mean the staff would have had to stay behind, but as i recall there were other films still running when we left (with our money back AND a pass i might add!)… is this true? once a film gets to a certain stage can it not be rewound? as the rather sharp manager put, “It’s not video you know!”

18

At the theaters that I worked as a floor grunt at, they would occasionally schedule simultaneous showings of a movie in 2 auditoriums - the old “On Two Screens” thing. (These were 8- and 7-plexes, respectively - kind of small compared to the 32-screen behemoths I see today, but typical of my area circa 1990.)

Usually in adjacent auditoriums, it was set up so that the same print was running through both projectors. It drew from a platter on Projector 1’s tree, fed through Projector 1, went down the room (guided by rollers mounted from the ceiling for this purpose) and into Projector 2, where it was collected in a platter on Projector 2’s tree. Next set, they’d just reverse the order. Obviously, one auditorium’s presentation led the other’s by 10-15 seconds.

If you want staggered start times, I don’t think this would work. At least, I never saw it done while I was there.

This was General Cinema, and they had dedicated projectionists. So far as I know, nobody from the floor staff or the management ever did any work with the prints or the equipment up there. These guys were (I believe) union members, and they had the know-how to fix the projectors when things went wrong. With 7 or 8 screens, only one projectionist was on duty at any given time. They were all a bit strange, but fun to talk to. :slight_smile:

Shortly after I quit working there, I was in another theater chain. I turned around near the start time of the movie to peer up into the booth, and I saw a kid in floor staff attire (vest & bow tie) threading the print. I was kinda surprised - that did not happen where I had worked.

19

Since he mentioned that the audio was still there, saying the video cut out is entirely accurate.

Whether that’s possible or not, I dunno, but there’s nothing logically wrong with the statement.

20

Please show me a dictionary that uses the term video without it related to television transmission or magnetic tape recording. I suspect you won’t find it.

Video is a specific media. To say the visual went out would be accurate; to say the video went out in a movie theater with traditional 35mm projection would not.

I can assure you that GC does the same now–a direct result of the competition between the chains. Dedicated union projectionists are extremely costly; most union techs I know now rotate between several theaters within a chain in a geographical area to fix any major problems–this keeps them busy without paying them for things that most staff members can do just fine (if they are well-trained and good workers–unfortunately not always the case).

Yes, this is true (well, sort of). Because of the platter system, there is no rewind mode (since films no longer need to be rewound) on the projector. Although it is possible to unthread the projector, lift a certain section from the take-up platter and move it back to the other platter, rethread the projector and run the film again, it is a major pain in the ass and something a lot of managers and floor staff aren’t trained well enough to do. Given that there is the real risk of something much more serious going wrong that might damage the print if this is tried, most managers will just use the “can’t be done” excuse, particularly since (1) it would take at least 10 minutes to perform this operation anyway, and (2) it’s a very imprecise solution, and you run the risk of starting the film 10 minutes or more before the problem started, thus extending everyone’s time by as much as 1/2 hour–simply not worth it for most managers, since under those conditions, they’ll need to give passes out anyway