Former General Cinema manager here (employed early 80s to early 90s). It’s true that GC was still using union projectionists while the other chains were getting rid of them. Most theaters had two union projectionists on staff, and they worked all showings. Then in the mid-to-late 80s, GC cut back to one projectionist per theater with management taking up the slack. Then they cut back the hours for the projectionist to about 35 per week, with management again taking up the slack. At that point, the projectionists were still responsible for building up and breaking down the films on the platters, maintaining the equipment, and running about 1/2 to 2/3 of the show times.
I left the company shortly after this, so I’m not sure if they use any union projectionists at all now. In fact, GC has pretty much pulled out of this area, leaving only one theater in the entire Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex.
video n 1: the visible part of a television transmission; “they could still receive the sound but the picture was gone” [syn: picture] 2: the visual elements of television **3: broadcasting visual images of stationary or moving objects. **
I understand where you’re coming from, **ArchiveGuy.
** When I hear the word video, I think of Blockbuster. But I was using it in the same sense of video being the accompaning factor to audio. The AV club in high school doesn’t just work with televisions. They also work the slide projector and those reels from '70s where half the film has a stained look and people wear socks pulled up to their knees.
Anyway, I don’t really see a problem with how I used the word.
broad·cast,v 1: cast or scattered in all directions; 2: made public by means of radio or television; 3: of or relating to radio or television broadcasting
The key word here is broadcast, a word that is only used in the context of radio and television. Film is not broadcast (nor scattered in all directions), so the definition does not apply.
And when I was in the AV club, it stood for audio-visual, not audio-video. Don’t want to be a stickler, but this is my job…
They’ve pretty much pulled out of DFW? That’s where I worked - I’m kind of sad to hear that. I was a floor staff grunt at Central Park 8 in Bedford, and then North Hills 7 in North Richland Hills between '89 and '91. Which metroplex GCC theater still remains? I sort of recall idly noting that Central Park was still there the last time I was in the area, but now that I think about it that was almost a year ago.
Yes, I have actually seen a local community play in which the cast members outnumbered the audience. And there were only 5 people on stage. What a bizarre situation!
Just to expand on this a bit, it was called an “interlock system” and is used infrequently; both because usually you’d want to stagger the start times of a popular movie for crowd control reasons, and also because it’s very technically shaky. First, you have to have two projectors that are calibrated to run at exactly the same speed. This is not to say that there are different speeds of film (aside from Todd-AO, which is a whole 'nother story) like there are records, but much as the idle of your car changes due to age, climate or maintenence, the same is true of projectors. In other words, a film that will play two hours, 8 minutes and 37 seconds on one projector my play two hours, 8 minutes and 12 seconds on another. If you have two projectors sharing the same print, they’d have to be running the same speed otherwise your print would end up puddled on the ground, or broken, depending on whether the fast or slow one was playing first. Another factor is how much of the film is unnecessicarily exposed to the air. As a film runs it tends to build up static, and attracts dust accordingly. The less time the film itself is out of its platter coil, the less it is exposed to dust. I’ve seen some interlock systems set up to run the film to the ceiling, around corners, and down hallways to the second projector. That’s likely to end up making your film require constant cleaning, which is dangerous in itself as it poses a likelyhood of scratching the film if not done correctly.
Stimpy, if you go back and reread the few posts describing the platter system and how the film runs, you’ll see why there is no rewinding without a good deal of risky monkeying with the film. In essence: the film only goes one way! lol. If you’ve ever seen a skein of knitting yarn where the yarn comes out the middle, you’ll see how impossible it would be to coil it back inside.
Not infrequently enough, I’m afraid. Managers of theaters very rarely ever have a say in when an interlock occurs–the division film office negotiates with the studio and usually is the one who decides how many prints of a film you get in addition to how many screens you must commit to that film (when the former is less than the latter–voila! Interlock).
Interlocks terrified me, and at one of my theaters, we did one on average every other week. They were particularly popular for special sneak previews, since we could throw the single print into two medium size houses and make the studio happy without giving up our big house.
You did a great job explaining it, voguevixen. Another problem we faced was when creating the right amount of slack between one projector and another. Too little and you risked a (double) film break; too much and you find your film on the floor after going through the first projector (and having seen a reel dropped on the floor, I know exactly what that horrifying uncoiled-knitting-yarn experience is all about). One thing we would do to create the right amount of slack is to thread both projectors with absolutely no slack (ie. too tight), and then when we ran the film, we would take a film roller (like a spool exactly the film width) and suspend it on the length of film running from one projector to the other. This way, the extended length of film could flux back and forth, but there was always a bit of weight that created exactly the right amount of tension. A truly bizarre thing to see when walking (or ducking, since the film crossed the length of the room) into the booth.
Another reason interlocks are possible is that filmstock is now made out of an extremely strong polyester, not the traditional acetate introduced as safety film in the 50s. I remember working a film festival that inexplicably ran an acetate print of Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil on interlock. There were no less than six film breaks! Awful, but completely avoidable if they had realized they were dealing with a print that wasn’t strong enough for an interlock.
The only GC still left here is the one at Irving Mall (a couple of years ago they closed both of the Irving Mall theaters and replaced them with a 14-screen stadium-seating multiplex). Just a few months ago they closed Central Park, Arlington Park and Ridgmar plus whatever was left over in Dallas. So basically our movie chain choices are AMC, UA, and Cinemark now. I guess I better get over to Irving before they close it too and use those GCC gift certificates I got for Christmas last year!
So you worked at North Hills, huh? Was that when Steve Budd was the manager? I’ve worked at both Town East theaters in Mesquite, both Red Bird theaters in Dallas, Irving, and Valley View (boy, that one dates me!) I was Assistant Manager at each of the Red Birds back in the late 80s to early 90s.
Excellent thread, with excellent information. (What else do we expect from the SDMB? Except on the topic of circumcision, of course. Ahem.)
I have only one small trivia detail to add: Lucasfilm, in its distribution deal for Star Wars Episode One: The Phantom Menace, specifically forbade exhibitors from utilizing the interlock system. Lucasfilm’s stated reason for this was that using interlocked platters accelerates damage to the physical film print, and they wanted audiences seeing the movie a month later not to have to tolerate a print that was more degraded than necessary. Of course, cynics said the real reason for the proscription was that Lucasfilm thereby guaranteed higher rental revenue: one print for every auditorium.
Lucasfilm specifically commanded a number of things re: the release of TPM (trailer approval, THX-certified theaters only, etc.), but didn’t get most of them. Can’t speak for the interlocks, but I think the extra rental fees would be relatively insignificant compared to the BO% they got anyway.
It’s been a few years since I last worked at a theater, but if memory serves only about half the prints produced are polyester film. I remember it would be weird to be running a double feature or split screen of two prints and one would be acetate and one would be polyester – sometimes the shorter acetate film would take up more room than the longer polyester one! lol. The "pro"s of poly film are that it takes up less room (I’d say you could fit 25-30 minutes of film on a reel as opposed to the standard 20 minutes with acetate) and is less likely to break; however, the strength is a downside in the rare instance when you need the film to break, such as when a “brainwrap” (film stops feeding correctly through the center roller cluster and backs up onto the platter) occurs. Instead of breaking at the slightest hint of tension, the film continues to pull and pull until it stops moving and melts in the aperature plate of the projector. If you have ever run up to your projection booth and found a tight pizza size amount of film squeezing the death out of your roller cluster (and sometimes working its way over itself and onto the floor) you know what it’s like to curse the inventors of polyester film! Polyester film seems to build up more static (much like polyester clothing, haha) which both attracts dust to the film, and causes it to sometimes cling to itself, which is also a leading cause of “brainwrap.” For this reason, many projection booths are kept fairly cool in the winter (so the dry heaters don’t accelerate the dryness of the air) and quite a few keep boxes of fabric softener on hand to rub across the edges of their prints a couple times to kill the static.
No, that was absolutely fascinating…and so very useful to know.
When I worked a single screen movie theater, we sent people home from Hope Floats six times because the film had static cling and would inevitably brain-wrap. A group of friends tried to come back to see the film three times. The third time they showed up at the halfway point and we let them in free so they could finally see the ending.
We had a miniscule staff. Usually just a manager, a concessionist and a ticket taker. So it we had to take shifts watching the film and separate the clinging film by hand as it fed into the projector. Though if sometimes the film would cling in a way that there wasn’t enough time to stop it from causing a brainwrap.
As for the OP…
We were unfortunately schelduled to show the re-release of one of a Pierce Brosnan Bond film shortly before it went to videotape. Now, we had a hard enough time filling the theater for first-time films and there was no way people were going to come to our rinky-dink theater to shell out $6.25 for a film that was at the dollar theater only a few months ago.
I think our ticket sales for the week was about 3 total. Not only would we not run the film, but we would sometimes just lock up the place and go home.
Note: The theater was schelduled to be closed at the end of the summer and was operating at a loss. We were pretty much adrift from the rest of the company since upper management never came down for visits. So we may have been acting against standard company procedure or have been given special leeway to not show a film and shut the doors as a cost cutting measure.
An important thing to add to this is that most theater projectors have alarm arms as part of the film path through the projector. If there’s a film break, the alarm arm falls, the projector shuts down, and an alarm goes off to alert a manager/projectionist that one of the films is offscreen.
With polyester film, if it gets caught in the gate, the alarm arm doesn’t fall–meaning that the platter keeps spinning without advancing the film (and thus, making the dreaded brainwrap worse and worse–how I hated those things). If that’s not bad enough, since the alarm doesn’t go off, there’s no way a manager/projectionist can know that there’s a problem until an audience member tells someone.
I’ve had union techs tell me that the polyester stock can be so resilient, it has been known to actually move the entire projector rather than break if caught (this is in older theaters where the projectors aren’t bolted to the floor).
Whew! Glad to see some other people are interested in hearing this stuff.
Just wanted to jump in one last time with, well, a bit of a hijack I guess, about movie audiences.
When I first started working at the theater, we were showing Back to the Future III. This was a pretty standard old theater, not like the “stadium seating” you see everywhere today, with a long, sloped floor. Near the front of the theater was a drain, where, if there was a major liquid spill, one hoped the spill would go. Well, this drain had evidently backed up, and MAN did it reek in there. The smell was just horrendous, as if something had died in there. It took around a week to get that fixed.
During that time, the only complaints we ever heard from that theater were “turn it down, the volume is too high”. I’ll never understand how anyone could sit in that theater for two hours and be bothered only by the volume.
Once in the late 1970’s I was the entire audience for a
run of 2001 A Space Oddysey. It was in a small four-plex theatre, so it wasn’t like it was a huge auditorium, but
still it was great. For that particular film I’d say it
intensified the experience, though I doubt if it would for
more conventional fare.
ROFL! That reminds me of this time some kid ate an entire one pound bag of Twizzlers (berry-flavored licorice whips) and threw it up in one of the auditorioums. THAT is hands down the foulest smell I’ve ever smelled in my life. Even after we threw sawdust on it and cleaned it up the place still reeked. We ended up opening all the exit doors and dumping an entire gallon of industrial-strength pine cleaner along the floor in the back of the auditorium, so it would trickle down the entire length of the theater and hopefully overpower the stench. We ended up with a theater infused with the scent of pine-flavored Twizzler vomit. ::Shudder::
Re: The weirdest complaint we ever had was one we didn’t receive at all. Now after a good ten years or so in the business I’d heard near every weird complaint in the book. “The screen is too small” “The Dolby doesn’t sound like my home stereo” (SERIOUSLY! Some guy actually said that!) “I set my drink down next to the trash can and now it’s gone!” :rolleyes: “This popcorn is stale” (when served right out of the popper) and on and on. One winter our near decripit old-time single-screen movie house became rat infested. We were able to wipe them out in merely a couple days EXCEPT one smartass bastard who would hide out until making his “appearance” during the busiest show of the evening by running straight up the middle of the screen while the show was running. No one ever complained or even seemed the slightest bit disgusted. After the inital shock wore off, several people helpfully alerted us to the problem. Bizarre! If only they were so understanding about the 50 year-old clanking heater and the 30 year-old soundsystem, lol.
No, I don’t recognize Steve Budd’s name. I just worked at the theaters in the summers, and Iraj Zadeh was my manager. Between the summers of '90 and '91, he moved from Central Park to North Hills and a lot of the summer help (me included) followed him over there. He was a good guy to work for.
I’m still bummed to hear that they are closed now. Oh, well…
I went to a theater that did not show the film if nobody bought tickets. Me and my friend had a pass and wanted to see ‘The Full Monty’, but it was a No-Pass movie. We used the pass to get tickets for ‘The Game’ and then snuck into ‘The Full Monty’. We sat there a while, the lights never went down, and they never showed the movie, because we were the only ones in there. ENded up having to watch ‘The Game’.
