I had run successful booths at a handful of buildings, and I’d closed out a building, but I never opened a building with AMC. I’d helped with a few shifts at the Woodland Hills opening (closed last year), but that was it.
I signed up for Pacific with a reputation for the booth, and sealed it by rehabilitating Pasadena. Pacific had maybe one other manager in the field who was in my ballpark, and he was tied up with the ArcLights. There were managers who were acquainted with projectors, but it was a skill cultivated even less urgently at Pacific than it had been at AMC.
Okay, that was a silly thing to say. Pacific didn’t cultivate skills, they collected friends. “Who first, then what.” But anyway.
After a few months of saving the Grove and a year of salvaging Pasadena, Pacific was looking to open a new building in Glendale. I got the nod to join the opening team as the booth manager. Identifying and training candidates, setting up systems and schedules and processes, and getting the projection machine running in a building that was looking to challenge the regional dominance of Burbank. For me it was heady stuff.
But for scale, I have to go back to the previous comment about cultivating skills. The idea was that heavyweights in each field would be opening ops. We would be documenting the process as a guide for future opening teams and developing codified systems binders for our areas, as texts to be used elsewhere. So getting the nod was supposed to be a big deal. But in terms of actual delivery, I also set the controller pieces in place – on top of booth – when that manager didn’t deliver. There were concession pieces that weren’t settled until much later when I was covering concession ops – on top of booth – months after opening.
So as shallow a pond as it turned out to be, it was still a project that needed to get done well, and needed to be done right the first time. After we’d done all the hiring and completed a baseline of training over at the Grove, the managers sat down to divide folks up. We needed supervisory, concierge, and booth staffs- this was our chance to call dibs. There was some overlap in potentials and some compromises, but I got almost everyone I wanted. One girl I knew would be good for booth but I knew she would be better as a supervisor, so I didn’t argue. Another I did push for, but the concierge group needed her personality more than I wanted her work ethic. We started with maybe 8 operators- one vet from Pasadena, and of the newbies two turned out to be sleeper all-stars, two were stinkers, and the rest were solid role-players.
The finish line we were racing to beat was 2008’s ‘Iron Man’. That and ‘Made of Honor’ were going to be our opening headliners. I put together some test film loops and we spent days on threading workshops. The strongest newbies were brought into buildup and trailer work a bit, but the early months of buildup were always going to depend on myself and the Pasadena vet a bit. The Grand Opening prints showed up the day before, and we were given a mixed blessing- we were only opening a dozen or so prints on our 18 screens. This greatly reduced the amount of buildup that needed to be done before opening. On the other hand it meant interlocking those prints through multiple projectors to cover all the screens, which creates more risk for the film than single-screen runs. The risk was for later though.
For a Friday opening, we started at noon on Thursday. We started firing up screenings as soon as prints became ready, I’d built up 3 or 4. Once all of the other prints and screens were built and underway and ready for their big debut, I sat down for my own screening of one of the prints I’d built, this was at maybe 2am- fourteen hours in!
By 430a my show had ended (had to stop the 3rd reel to replace a cement splice), but there was more work to do. One of the early screenings had a defective reel, so Paramount raced out a replacement that showed up sometime during my show. So once my own screening was set, it was time to pull and replace the bad reel. There were splices to check in other prints, screening corrections made by the staff in the moment, that I was responsible for making sure correct for audiences. My rule was that any splice not made by me, was checked by me or through a projector before it ran for an audience. The Friday openers started showing up for their shifts before my Thursday was done, that pre-opening night was a 21-hour shift.
But we pulled it off. Not perfectly, there were some mistakes made. We didn’t lose any interlocks, but at least four prints were scratched over those first few weeks. That risk that was for later? Later showed up. All things considered it could have been much worse. We came out of that opening with a clear sense of where everyone was at, the lemons had been pulled and replaced, and booth was the only area that turned out its process bible on time.
We mixed things up for a win along the way. Standard practice across most any booth is to have teardown complete Thursday night, a requirement that can add hours to your Thursday if there’s a lot of movement. But only one courier picked up Friday mornings, the other usually not until Monday. So I adapted and ran our booth so that only the Friday pickups were torn down on Thursday nights; the later pickups were held thru the weekend to train operators on teardown.
It didn’t matter, those guides and practices were never used. Glendale was Pacific’s last opening. The rest of the company’s growth was through ArcLight conversions, and they were far too special to lower themselves to Pacific’s level or see any value in Pacific’s guidance. I made three copies, one for the booth and one for each of the two offices. I kept one of the office copies on my way out.
A lot of us put a great deal of time and effort into opening that booth and getting it off to a good start. We were opening a new showcase building just a few miles from Burbank- you either go big or you get crushed. We never took as much from them as I’d hoped, but the booth wasn’t why. You better believe our booth at Glendale was as solid as any that I ran while I was at Burbank, the team just as capable.
