What NOT To Do, Unless You Want A Successful Career. Apparently.

Posted On 2023-03-07

You’ve met Flash, my exemplar for everything wrong with AMC Theaters. Today we’ll meet Cletus, a big part of the reason why Pacific Theaters and ArcLight Cinemas are no more.

Again, names have been changed to protect the innocent ears of the special people involved.

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And as an aside, the question has been asked, “is it really so wise to be talking shit about previous employers when you’re looking for a job?” and this is a fair question. But let’s be clear, I’m talking about PEOPLE with previous employers who were breaking the law at worst, and treating others like crap at best. I’m describing hostile work environments. These are not attributes that AMC would admit to anyway, so I can’t see them (for example) leaping to take credit for Flash’s illegal firing of at least one manager. From my perspective, these are the anecdotes of overcoming adversity that recruiters drool over. It just so happens that my anecdotes are more existential and hardcore than most folks are used to.

I’m used to my superiors placing my employment and my livelihood in peril on a regular basis, and I’ve put together a portfolio of experience at proudly adhering to reality. That should be a marketable skill. Besides, if you’re in the business of hiring bad people, or not training your leaders, or playing fast and loose with people’s paychecks to make yourselves look good, then realistically you’re not the kind of employer I want to work for.

Because as terrible as Flash (and AMC’s other demons) and Cletus (and ArcLight’s other demons) were, I’m also talking about the contributions made by both AMC and ArcLight to my time, and by the few exceptional people that were working there. These aren’t sour grapes, some wines are just a little bitter.

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ANYWAY.

The first time Cletus met me, I had no idea it was happening. I was the General Manager of the shuttered AMC Sherman Oaks 7, handing over the keys to the 5-plex after its last night to the incoming Pacific GM, a guy named Cameron. Now, Cameron had a carefully-cultivated reputation as a quiet-to-the-point-of-menacing hardass. But I had known him since my first hire back at Burbank. We weren’t buddies, but we were both familiar and had a comfortable respect for one another. So years later I’m handing over the keys and I’m genuinely glad to see Cameron again- it had been a few years and his menace was always refreshing. Cletus was apparently standing next to Cameron at the time, stunned into speechlessness by this crazy AMC manager who was speaking in such a familiar manner with the Pacific boss who terrified him.

Whatever.

Next time we crossed paths was 4 years later. I’d left AMC for Pacific and it was my first day at Pasadena, Cletus was now a manager and had been point accountable for the booth at Pasadena. That first Friday, the most experienced of the booth operators staged a little protest and approached the managers in pursuit of improved working conditions. I was down to listen; this was a Friday night but Pasadena was supposed to be a well-run new building and well-run buildings don’t need the managers on the floor 24/7. So I was fine with hearing them out. After all, a booth defection can be devastating. But Cletus gave them a few minutes and then basically kicked them out. He felt the timing was inappropriate; if they had a problem they had a responsibility to be unhappy when it was convenient for the business.

So yeah, turns out Cletus was the one they were protesting. Degrees of this story are already up, but responsibilities were reassigned and I spent the next few months solving for Cletus and rehabilitating the booth. The booth is only part of the story though.

There was Rasa and the integrity interview.

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Pacific did this weird thing with terminations. Every firing would be a Barbara Walters Broadcast Event in which the offending employee was guilted into some form of confession for their crimes. We could have someone ON TAPE pocketing money, and we would still spend an absurd amount of time getting these kids to speak the words before canning them. We could never say “hey we’ve got you on tape, bye”. We HAD to cajole a confession, maybe using the tape as a prop on the tabletop, before saying “yeah, that’s what we found, bye.” These were our “integrity interviews” because building character was somehow our schtick.

Now, at the time it was considered a universal truth that staff who were deleting things off of their registers were up to NO GOOD. There was a transaction report that would call out deletions for that exact reason. Oftentimes your name showing up on that page more than once was enough to get you fired. After Cletus was reassigned away from the booth, he directed his peculiar brand of charm to enforcement. One day, he noticed on these reports that Rasa was deleting a large number of items off of almost every single sale, and Rasa’s fate was sealed. It was right there in black and white, he was deleting items – so many! -and that meant theft so Rasa had to be stealing. So the schedule was arranged for Rasa to get fired, Cletus was taking the lead on the integrity interview, and I was the witness.

But Rasa simply wouldn’t budge.

No matter how much Cletus leaned on him, Rasa refused to admit to stealing anything. No matter how strongly Cletus implied that we had some kind proof of some kind of wrongdoing (because coughing up the reports and saying ‘explain this’ made too much sense), Rasa just sat there insisting he’d done nothing wrong. For half an hour they went back and forth, essentially both just saying the same thing over and over again. And from a pay scale perspective, Rasa is doing everything he’s supposed to, he’s bringing himself into the room calmly and professionally and he’s answering the questions he’s being asked. As the manager, it’s on Cletus to work the situation to wherever it needs to go. And yeah, I could see Rasa getting mad, which wasn’t great. But I could see Cletus getting mad right back and HE was the guy getting paid to set the example.

Meanwhile I’m sitting there just appreciating the irony that while Cletus couldn’t be bothered to spend half an hour on a Friday night off the floor saving the jobs of his booth staff, he had no problem with finding that time to try badgering one of his staff into accepting that he deserved to get fired.

After a little while though that becomes abusive, so finally I interrupted with a question instead of an accusation. And the weirdest thing happened- Rasa gave a different answer! Just like that, we broke the cycle of accusations and denials, and were suddenly one step closer to having an actual understanding of what was happening. And it turns out that Rasa hadn’t stolen anything. It turns out he was just clearing his screen between each sale. This was an unnecessary step that we didn’t train for that – turns out – was misreported as product deletions. So five minutes of questions and dialog uncovers that there’s a glitch making staff across the company look bad. From an issue to a root cause to a solution, boom. But at that point it was too late, because of course Rasa had been so affected by the intensity and persistence of the accusations that he was never as committed after that day.

Totally cool with half an hour on a Friday night determined to fire a guy for doing nothing bad, totally NOT cool with spending that time saving the jobs of the guys responsible for doing everything good.

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There was some spare office space behind the box office at Pasadena, it was mostly used for storage and clutter. One week a few supervisors and I cleaned it out to make it a functioning workspace. There were some gaps between the cubicles, I put some posters up. Transformers. Star Trek. We made it into a movie theater office.

The next day Cletus took the posters down. They were unprofessional. Only bare walls would do, only beige captured the true spirit of the movie business. You think I’m kidding? I’m not kidding. These were not even R-rated titles that had gone up, this was just Cletus being Cletus. Pacific’s corporate office had movie posters lining the halls and Cletus knew this. I can’t imagine how much it must have frustrated him to know that his corporate overlords were so misled about their own professionalism, considering how quick he leapt on the offending merch in his own building.

I’m being sarcastic of course. Working with Cletus was like working with a beginner, every day. For years.

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But the problem was that beginner somehow had clout. Pasadena’s GM was inordinately deferential to Cletus, for reasons I never understood.

Managers working on paperwork or other busywork through breaks was a common occurrence at every theatre everywhere. The presence of customers and staff means that sometimes you simply don’t have the time to get your own work done. So sure, fill out that incident report while you’re working on a hot dog. Not ideal but far better than staying hours late every day just tending to paperwork. Cletus though had a thing about germs. Cletus didn’t like managers eating in the same space where he was working. It bothered him personally.

So at one of your weekly meetings the GM set up a vote. Should we continue working breaks, or should manager breaks be taken in the breakroom with the rest of the staff so that the office could be reserved for clean fingers? Every single one of us voted for working breaks except Cletus, but the whole “vote” was staged anyway and Cletus’s preference carried the day. NO IDEA why the GM was so fearful of Cletus’s disapproval, but as of that day we were no longer allowed to eat or listen to music in the manager’s office. It was absurd.

And it was also just the beginning!

After my successful year at Pasadena cleaning up after Cletus’s booth, Cletus was assigned to be the booth manager (???) at the newly-opened ArcLight Sherman Oaks and I was tapped to build/open the booth at Pacific Glendale. Then after a successful year at Glendale, I was assigned to clean up after Cletus again at Sherman Oaks (and Cletus was moved into show scheduling). This story has been told in part too, with more alienated staff and Cletus needing to run actual shifts, but again the problem runs far beyond the booth.

Some of those problems were institutional. The ArcLights were fundamentally incompetent and wasteful on almost all levels in the name of “standard of service”. Some of that just meant excess retail inventory that was never going to sell. Some of that meant a core group of managers spending 4 days a week hiding in the offices (“planning”) instead of actually running the building. I can’t fault Cletus for taking three days to craft a performance schedule when it was also taking the HR manager three days to build a staff schedule. For scale, every other building everywhere gets that shit done in a single day.

I will absoultely however fault all of those guys for letting their labor get so far removed from their work.

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Staff shift changes happened at 6, which meant things in concession were always in a state of transition from 6-630 or so. In an effort to pack shows on the schedule, there was for a few weeks a 615 show in the mix that consistently went poorly for staff and customers alike. So at one of our meetings there was a consensus reached that there would be no shows scheduled from 6-630.

And the next week was great. No conflicts on the schedule, no seven days a week of certain friction between systems and customers.

Then the week after that Cletus dropped another 615 show on the schedule, and we went back to having unhappy customers. So I spoke up at the next scheduling meeting, only to get criticized for not being a team player.

Why? Because the kowtowing GM from Pasadena had since himself been reassigned to Sherman Oaks and was now looking out for his favorite beginner at the expense of everyone/everything else, all over again.

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Along with the scheduling pressure to put shows into unusual time slots, came pressure to compress gaps between shows so more performances could be crammed in at the start or end of the day. Digital was also becoming a thing (we’d had a few digital projectors at Glendale) and those projectors needed less reset time between shows. Mother’s Day of that year was led by a documentary film about baby animals. We were selling out. Anticipating crowds, Cletus scheduled those shows with 20-minute gaps in between instead of the 40-minute defaults.

Now, Sherman Oaks didn’t have all digital projectors. Those shows ran mostly on film, those projectors took time to properly clean and reset, and at bigger buildings not a day goes by where those 40-minute film gaps create the room necessary to recover from a crisis without it hurting the business. But yeah, the digital benefit was still used to justify the film change. And sure enough, the Baby film snagged during one of the matinees. Caused the affected show to run 10-15 minutes long so the snag could be corrected, so we had one sold-out crowd walking out the door right when the next sold-out show was supposed to be starting. The dominoes that toppled from that schedule pissed off HUNDREDS of customers that day.

At the time we had to record these little video diary entries at the end of each shift. The corporate office was trying to get a sense for why Sherman Oaks was running so poorly, and email wasn’t doing it for them anymore, They wanted to hear our voices and read our body language as we were speaking for the different needs of the operation. When I recorded my video that day I asked who was speaking for the needs of our customers? Because I’d just helped hundreds whom we’d just treated like sardines on a subway.

Only to be criticized for not being a team player. For speaking too strongly on behalf of the guest and without due respect to the efforts and feelings of the (supposedly booth-familiar) assclown who wrote the damn schedule in the first place.

But Cletus was the official exemplar. Flash at least wound up quietly leaving AMC after the collateral damage of her hostile work environments. Cletus on the other hand, all along could do no wrong. He went on to the Film office, and GM of one of ArcLight’s headline sites. There was always going to be another Flash, so AMC ultimately was never going to be the place to be. But there was always going to be Cletus, beginning anew every day, assuring that ArcLight had no future for me (or anyone else, turns out) either.