Tales from the Back of the House

So I was poking around Scott the Reader's blog and saw that he's got some great stories about his time as a movie theater manager here in New York. I'd worked for the same company for a while with Scott and have a few stories of my own. It's amusing to me now when I talk to new friends and find out just how many of them were movie theater managers in the past, it's like I've started a collection. Oddly enough, I haven't run into any former concession stand staff since back then, but what good stories could they have? Scott already covered the Great Real Butter Debacle of 1988, what else is there?

One of my colleagues (let's call him Bob) campaigned like mad to get his own theater. Every chance he had, he'd push and push for news of new theaters in our area, and since we were expanding like the spendthrift company we were, Bob soon got his wish, opening a new theater with three screens. They weren't very busy, but the place was his to run and he was in heaven. When Bob's brother got engaged, Bob requested the weekend of the wedding off. Since he only had one assistant manager, someone else had to come in to cover. As time ran out, the district manager hired a new assistant and rushed his training into two days to get him up to speed, ordering Bob to teach the new guy how we prepared nightly deposits. Since new hires weren't supposed to count cash until after a two-week probation period, Bob was skeptical but followed orders. He arrived back at his theater on Monday to a ringing phone. It was the bank, calling to notify him that the two weekend deposits were each short $2000. Bob called the new assistant to find out what went wrong. "This number is not in service." The district office called the police. The address on the new assistant's application was false. Bob, bound by protocol, was fired, but the regional vice president called in a favor with another theater chain to get him a job. Bob started in a multiplex on Christmas Day. He walked into an opening-night showing of The Godfather Part III just in time to hear two patrons shooting at each other.

Cineplex spent a lot of dough buying small local chains and individually owned theaters, so a chain of three family-owned theaters on Long Island was right up their alley. The existing employees were kept on, despite any idiosyncracies some of them might have. I met Clancy, one of the new CO managers, at a regional meeting and found him certifiable. He rambled on at the meeting as the region's film buyer listed the summer's major releases, shouting out in reaction to the stars and films he approved of and razzing the ones he didn't. Cold cuts were supplied, and he turned to me with a huge sandwich he'd built for himself. I joked that he should at least cut it in half before attacking it. Clancy replied that he'd have to use his sword to do so, but since it was outside in his van, it wouldn't be a problem. That Halloween, his theater continued their tradition of having the staff dress in costume. Clancy wore a sheriff's outfit and patrolled the aisles. To this day, I'm surprised he was not arrested that night after he broke up a necking teenaged couple by aiming his double-barrel shotgun at them and yelling, "Knock it off!"

One of the theaters I worked in was running Born on the Fourth of July. Say what you will about Oliver Stone, but I've never seen a film more capable of changing the atmosphere in a theater. The Vietnam sequence set each audience on edge from the first close-up of Cruise on patrol in the hot sun. Not everyone could take it. It wasn't unusual to see strong, able-bodied men stumbling out of the theater in a cold sweat. One night as I watched from the back of the theater, I noticed one row of patrons jumping in surprise one-by-one. Oh great, I thought, we've got a mouse, but as I was about to take a closer look, I saw the reason for their surprise wasn't a mouse at all, but a woman crawling on her belly through the row, her husband hunched over behind her calling to her. I rushed down the aisle in time to hear her rasping, "I gotta get out of the shit! Charlie's everywhere!" Her husband and I managed to get her to the lobby and into a chair, but she continued to think she was in the midst of combat. I ran off to call an ambulance, but when I came back, they were ducking out the front door, embarrassed.