Movie Theater Jobs - Page 2

Hearing "brain wrap" still makes my shoulder hurt, because my method of fixing it was spinning the hell out of the platter.

"Gump" was a few years before my theater days, but I did accidentally put a reel of Blues Brothers 2000 on backwards. Thankfully it was only Blues Brothers 2000. I also got reels 3 and 4 switched on 13 Ghosts. No one noticed.

Our print of Hellboy had been so mangled by the previous theater that about two minutes after Liz goes all flamey-blue at the end had been cut out. I simply thought it was shitty editing until I saw it on DVD.

Oh man, second run prints are the worst. I was convinced that no other theater had a fucking clue as to how best to negate platter scratches and other glaringly obvious faults.

I still wince when I dark line running right down the screen. Oddly, I'm the only one of my friends who ever notices. I mean, come on! It's right there! Especially annoyed when it's the first day of a film's release, really, it came in last night and you've already fucked it up? Kudos to you, asshole.

Do you people remember what brand of popcorn you served? I have a popcorn machine but I can't get it to taste as good as in the theater. Sorry if this is off topic.

The only thing better than scratches is when a print gets a nice coat of projector oil over the entire thing. Not only does it get all over you, the platter, everything, but the picture on screen looks completely diluted.

"Brain Wrap" sounds like a Cronenberg film.

I remember we ran out of popcorn on Thanksgiving, the day after "A Bug's Life" opened. You'd think that most movie theater patrons wouldn't be hungry for popcorn after a huge feast. You would be wrong.

I don't remember, but the seeds were all in 20 lb bags.

Maybe you could find a theater that would hook it up.

The secret of the popcorn machine in the theater is the fact that no matter how hard you clean it, there will always be that butter layer that, like a nice wooden mug used only for Guinness, enhances the taste tenfold.

I remember when 'Ali' came out, and we had a riot at the theater. On Christmas day no less!

For some reason we didn't have Ali in any of our big houses (well I know the reason, AMC didn't think it was going to perform that well), but we had a large urban population bus in from Trenton that came to see Ali in droves. The assistant manager on duty kept juggling the showtimes every few hours, moving the film into bigger houses when possible.

Anywho, one of the shows was completely sold out and people did their whole "my coats are saving these spots, even though no one is coming thing" (a classic) and a fight broke out. So the fight spilled out into the hallway, our stupid supervisor pulled a no-no and tried to break it up (and got decked in the mouth as a result). Other houses emptied to complain about the noise. I got a call from guest services saying to stop all the projectors. I went out to the mezzanine, saw a few hundred angry people around guest services and went down to help with the situation. So one girl-fight turned into a few thousand people having to be given passes and we closed early that day. We had to notify all the AMC's in the area that there might be some pissed off patrons coming their way with passes.

Ah...the good old days. Needless to say that assistant manager was relieved of their duties when our GM returned.

There's a lot of shit that's happened at that theater. There was a stabbing a few years back, I think. Before I was 15 or so my parents would never drop me off there, I guess because it had a bad rep. It's a better theater than the Multiplex, though.

This happens more often than you'd think. Same thing for soda and candy. If the truck arrives late, or if people misorder (or if for some reason you get slammed unexpectedly - for instance when Pokemon came out, the schools let out early for some reason or there was a half day or some shit. We got DESTROYED. I had to run downstairs and pop popcorn and make kid packs in between threading and starting the movies. And I was solo, I had to do all 24. I hated that).

It was always good when the wrong movie is started - parents come out and complain why there are action & horror trailers on PG movies. They usually aren't happy.

I was working when the stabbing happened. Some kid walked up to guest services and said "some guy stabbed me". All nonchalant like. Apparently the guy just walked up, saw the kid, stabbed him and walked away. The cops said he was some mental patient or something. And yes, it did have a bad rep for a while, hence all the cameras and increased police presence - judging from what I've seen there lately it's really turned around. They even installed an IMAX screen.

Back in college, I had two friends who were both assistant managers at the Eden Prairie Mall here in MN (the same mall that 'Mallrats' was filmed in). I saw most of my movies there for free, which was nice.

One day, when nobody was around, they gave me a tour of the place and showed me the inner workings of the theater. I remember it being nothing but bongs and the smell of pot. The upper management didn't give a shit about the theater and pretty much let it run itself, so the 'don't give a shit' attitude ran rampant through the entire crew.

So for those of you who didn't have the pleasure of being projectionists, what was the most bizarre thing you ever found in a theater?

I've mentioned before that I found a used condom in the front row of a theater I was cleaning.

Like I said before, I worked at a second run theater. All the equipment was shitty. So when Grindhouse came out in first run theaters, I remember how they had disclaimers about the film's "missing reels" and scratches. But at my theater, EVERY film had scratches and the occasional missing reel...well maybe not entire reels missing, but sometimes the print would brain wrap so horribly I had to cut out a sizeable portion of the film. When gindhouse came to second run, it brainwrapped in the middle of planet terror right before the missing reel. the bulb burned a hole through the mother fucker and I had to, as manager, go tell the audience there would be a slight delay while we spliced it back together and fixed the tangled mess. this one guy chewed me out and one of the other customers stood up for me saying "Didn't you hear the fucking speech or read the signs posted, buddy. Why don't you give the kid a break." I just went with it. I guess somepeople thought me interrupting the show was part of the experience. Like we're a fucking Universal Studios theme park ride. It was great though.

strangest thing I found when cleaning? well...when I would have to clean theaters there would be dirty diapers, half eaten buckets of chicken from KFC, and the occasional beer bottles. nothing too out there though. no condoms. i feel like im forgetting something...i've got too many stories from that place. One time somebody busted one of the poster frames in order to steel the one sheet for Van Wilder 2: The Rise of Taj which was strange to me.

How often did you guys bust up couples engaging in illicit activities? I remember going to a midnight showing of 'Pink Floyd: The Wall' at the previously mentioned Eden Prairie theater and OBVIOUSLY seeing a guy getting a blowjob from his girlfriend about 5 rows ahead of me.

Why would I want to bust it up? I remember a girl riding a guy when Austin Powers 2 came out (I think it was the 12:30am show). I've seen all kinds of hooking up going on.

Nothing tops me catching an usher eating twizzlers he found on the floor. He totally didn't even flinch. Like "hey, found twizzlers!"

My boss said he'd found a used syringe once.

I always loved when some goofball would lose something in an auditorium. Back then, pagers were all the rage. They also seemed to be equipped with cloaking devices. I don't think I ever recovered a damn one of them even when we brought up the house lights.

Anyone else get to use leaf-blowers to clean a theater? I always thought those were a hoot.

I really wish we had those for cleaning up after kids' movies.

One of my favorite memories was keeping a 50-something former Marine from choking to death a teenage gay kid after the kid slapped a girl for making fun of his man-purse. Marine: "I don't care if he gags on cock or not, he ain't hittin' no girls!". Solid gold.

Ugghh. Brain wraps.

I was only a part time projectionist, they didn't trust me with training on how to build up or tear down movies, I only got to thread them up and move them from platter to platter. Theater was an independent, two screens upstairs, and one screen downstairs, with a separate booth, and let me tell you how much fun it was carrying a film down the stairs, all the while hoping you wouldn't drop it, or the ring wouldn't move too much.

To this day I don't know how I did it, but one of the first times left to my own devices, I somehow threaded Lethal Weapon 4 backwards or upside down or some shit and it took the owner and the real projectionist like a half hour to fix it. It took about a week before they'd let me in the booth again.

Before that one, I worked at a Lowe's/Sony in the mid 90's, and like others have said, was being paid roughly five dollars an hour, but it was a blast. Not the biggest fan of the fake tux, especially the fake cumberbund. Set some popcorn on fire once. Was making a batch and when I was lowering the kettle back down, the element thing sparked and next thing I know the popcorn is flaming up with a quickness.

I've found all kinds of shit in movie theaters, from money to drugs, to brown paper bags with gold spray paint caking the bottom, but the worst ever, and I think I've talked about this before, was the opening of Batman Forever in 95. It was Friday night, a sold out theater (and yes, we had it interlocked) and somebody took a shit in the back of the theater, in between the last row of seats and the wall. Not a little kid turd, but a foul, human sized, pretty healthy shit. Thing is, I'm still not that offended by the fact that somebody did this, my opinion of humanity had already disappeared long before this, but I'm still amazed by the fact that somebody found Batman Forever so engrossing that they couldn't leave the theater for five minutes in which to take a dump.

As someone who didn't work in a movie theater, could someone please explain to me what 'interlocking' and 'Brain Wrapping' are? These stories are great but I'm unsure what these terms are referring to and I'm not able to access google from where I am now (client site).

Can't tell you. It's a secret fraternity.

Interlocking is when you have a system that shows the same print in two separate theaters, right across the hall from each other. You run the print from one platter, through projector A, then it goes across the booth to projector B, and ends up on a second platter. You may think only the fancy schmancy chains can pull this off, but you'd be surprised.

I'm not good with the technical stuff, but the brain is the thing that you run the print through, in the middle of the platter, and a brain wrap is when it goes all kooky and the print wraps around it, eventually shutting the projector off. Major pain in the ass, but fixable, nowhere near as bad as when a bulb goes out and there are no replacements on hand.

EDIT: This is roughly what I was working with, the brain is the thing in the middle of the print.

I didn't know it was called that, thanks. My friends that worked at that theater showed me the setup that they had to accomplish this. With all of the gears/pulleys/implements of destruction that they had, and by using all of the strategically places slits in the ceilings, they could show the same film on all 6 screens if they wanted to.

I remember them telling me that they would occasionally 'cancel' a shitty movie that hadn't sold any tickets and show a popular movie that had sold out in that now-available venue. From a business point of view this makes sense to do, but I'd have to think that they probably violated contractual agreements by doing this. They were too high to really care, though.

I've got a question for the projectionists. One afternoon, the audio was out of synch with the picture during a screening of "Entrapment." Of course the audience lost their shit, and the manager had no idea how to fix it. How does something like that happen?

And keep in mind, the only limit to how many theaters you can interlock is how many interlock rollers you have on hand. I once did six theaters and I was sweating bullets the whole. Fucking Saturday morning kids' movies.

Could have been a bad print, but more likely than not, in my limited experience, the manager probably didn't want to deal with it, as it was probably threaded up wrong.

Being a projectionist can be a curse, because I won't tolerate even the slightest bit of shit anymore. Slightly out of focus? Fuck you, get up there and turn that knob. Forgot to change the lens to scope from flat, or vice versa? No excuse. Get up there.

EDIT: I'm sure somebody can tell you for sure, Brad, there was a reason I was only a part time projectionist. I do know it's possible to thread up wrong so you can actually see the soundtrack as you're running the print. Kind of neat, but not very productive.

I never had to interlock on more than two screens. Fuck that six screen nonsense.

Tru dat. The worst is when the belt slips and the picture starts to 'ghost' on the bottom of the frame. Fucks up your foreign film viewing like nobody's business.

This thread is giving me projectionist "Nam Flashbacks". Glad I bailed from that gig when I did.

"the horror...the horror..."

Yeah it does kinda ruin movie-going for life for you. My biggest pet-peeve now (besides the wrong lens being used), is shit being out of frame. That drives me up a wall. You also sound like a loon when you are trying to explain to the 16 year old at guest services about ghosting, whether or not the sound keeps dropping in and out of format (thanks Sony, for your shitty SDDS readers!) or if the masking had adjusted for the proper format as well. Nothing like crawling underneath a screen on a soda encrusted floor to fiddle with a fucking masking motor. I should add though, that it would drive me up a wall that people would watch an entire film that was scratched, had horrible sound or some other problem and never brought it to anyones attention. Especially with prices where they are.

Most I've ever interlocked was 6 theaters as well. We technically could have synced at 24, but that would've required a mile's worth of leader. That shit is expensive.

I've heard stories of people trying to steal prints (what the fuck would you do with it?), and of drunk people finding their way into the booth, but nothing TOO crazy. The yokel who used to deliver our prints - our non-technicolor ones anyway - got fired from his projectionist gig for fucking prostitutes in the Booth.

Ah, out of frame. Makes me want to kill folks.

That sense of dread during the trailers, "Are they going to fix it? Surely somebody realizes what's going on? I don't want to get up. I shouldn't have to get up. God dammit."

And yes, explaining to the kids, "Look, just tell the projectionist that he needs to change a lens. A lens. The movie looks like it's supposed to be flat, and he's got the scope lens on there. Scope. Look at the screen. It doesn't look right does it?"

Best part is when they try to tell you that it's supposed to look like that.

Never had sex in the booth, but drugs, you betcha. Also a good place to hide when it was time to do other work.

Just to confirm: In your job interviews, was it mandatory that you let them know that you planned to smoke pot throughout your entire shift? It sounds like it was a prerequisite for the job, along with not having a need to bathe.

I didn't smoke IN the booth. I had some strange loyalty, and smoke is bad for the system. Cocaine, that's another story. Maybe that's why I was a part time projectionist, I'm always been rather fond of bathing.

Oddly enough, never smoked pot while working. Definitely did bring up a few girlfriends during the late nights and mess around a little bit (nothing major).

Edit: Bob, really? I had a few out-of-syncs over the years and never had to cut it. Just unlaced the projector portion of the film, fiddled with a few knobs and we were good to go.

We had a projectionist/assistant manager who cleaned out the safe, stole a "Shakespeare in Love" poster(?!) and then ducked into a screening of something or other. The manager on duty managed to tear herself away from gossiping with the ushers long enough to piece together what had happened. She called the cops, and the dude was arrested in the lobby after the show.

He was also the chief suspect in the theft of the "Phantom Menace" banner from months earlier. Whoever stole that was clearly stupid enough to be him. The culprit had torn it down from off the wall, ripping all four corners, and sold it to some pawn shop 90 miles away.

No interlocking?

Oh, that projectionist humor.

I agree, the soundtrack problem usually could be fixed without splicing the film, but you still had to shut down the projector, wait for the film to wind down, and by the time it's fixed, and you start back up, the patrons are just going to bitch about the few minutes of film they missed anyway, so fuck it. I agree with Bob, it's pretty hard to fuck up like that, but it happens.

You mean 42 female co-workers to hit on.

Somebody stole a five or six foot Darth Maul replica thing from one of the theaters I worked at. Had to be an inside job, but noboby ever figured it out because the cheap skates had cameras, but they didn't record. You would've thought somebody would have noticed a six foot Darth Maul being carried down the streets of downtown Indianapolis at three in the morning, but I guess not.

I worked at a big theater in Syracuse through high school and college. We also had the great Gump Interlock Disaster of 1994. And an idiot manager that moved a print without locking it and spilled it all over... a promo showing of Nine Months I believe. As the dedicated theater rodeo clown it was my job to distract the unruly mobs while Humpty Dumpty was put back together again in both cases.

Weirdest thing I ever found while cleaning a theater was a relish laden cocktail weiner on a cocktail napkin centered in front of the front row. It resembled an offering to the movie screen.

We had stabbings and burgeoning riots a couple of times. A gun shot once. I was working concession and the manager told us "if anything happens lock your drawers and duck under the counter." I remember thinking this guy had seriously misplaced priorities.

My favorite memory though was when our slide projector was broken in one house so we had no pre movie trivia. I asked my manager if I could entertain the crowd before each showing and accidentally gave away a key component of "The Color of Night"

Oh! And we our popcorn kettle fell off when it was being dumped one. The guy working it tried to catch it. When he started dropping it because his hand was burning off he used his other hand to stabilize it. Then he went to the hospital.