AMC Theatres: A Wretched Hive of Scum and Villainy

Posted On 2022-02-28

Yep, I said it.

There’s another good booth story, but it introduces our second villain before you’ve even met the first.

AMC had a handful of villains along the way. There was the micromanager, the bad mom, the thief, the stooge, the two backstabbers, the two paranoid headcases, and those are just the ones off the top of my head. As a group, these folks were all self-centered jerks who saw others as their personal steppingstones, and acted as their empty souls guided them. Then there was Flash. She was just evil, and bad at her job.

Names have been changed btw, to protect losers who don’t deserve it.

Flash’s first sins weren’t particularly exceptional. She was a little lazier than most managers- a good chunk of at least one prime set per week was spent hanging out in my center booth, not on the floor. This was more nuisance than anything else- the center booth was the break area for the booth operators, so when she was busy hiding out, my crew had to stay on their toes instead of relaxing.

A few years later though she’d taken some substantial leaps and had graduated to railroading and staging the firing of managers she didn’t like. I watched her do it twice- first to an unspectacular but decent-enough guy, and then to me. So these aren’t sour grapes, this is a woman who was breaking the law on AMC’s behalf and fucking over other people for sport.

I was taking over for Flash as the GM of Sherman Oaks. Sherman Oaks was two buildings, the Twin and a 5-plex, both among the slowest theaters in the valley. AMC had bought it from General Cinemas’ bankruptcy and was at the time just running it to honor lease terms. The place was budgeted to lose money, it was not any kind of jewel in the circuit. One day that summer the Twin sold 13 tickets ALL DAY LONG. In total. And I would have told you that night it couldn’t get any worse, but the next day we sold 12! As movie summers go, that was an awesome season.

Anyway, the first day I walked into the Twin to start the transition, there were three lights out above the concession stand. Very first thing I noticed, you couldn’t miss it. Three lights out of five. And there were no customers to help, and tons of bulbs in storage, so there was no reason why the opener couldn’t have been taking care of them right then. But those dead lights were just normal. That was the operation I walked into.

I introduced myself to my team- two of them I’d already known, three were new to me, and the sixth is really best forgotten anyway. Aside from that last guy, it was a perfectly adequate team for a site as slow as SO. Some veterans, some newbies, and nothing but free time for training and making everyone better. One of the new faces, we’ll call him Job, had a plea in that first conversation though. He’d felt mistreated by Flash, and asked that I approach him with an open mind and not be too heavily influenced by her. And Job was right- he was due to be fired. Flash had set the process in motion and the timing of our switch meant I was gonna be the one to break it to him. Not on that day though! On that day I was just meeting people and learning what I could.

But he made me curious, so I looked. And the more I looked, the more clear it became that Flash had set out to screw this guy. His file was almost an inch thick, but it was a joke. He had a side gig as a writer, Flash had written him up for using work computers for personal use, and printed up Job’s entire manuscript as “proof” to pad the file. There was nothing there though that said any of the work he’d done hadn’t been while he was legitimately free for lunch or break, when non-porn personal use was perfectly fine.

Then there were his reviews, which were just bad. We used a 5-point scale at the time- 5 was the unattainable “perfect”, 4 was the practical goal, 3 was for slackers, 2 or below meant trouble. These scores were applied across a dozen or so categories, and Job’s average was in the mid 2’s. Which was a problem. But hey, I was the GM so I had access to the other manager files as well. And Flash had been so OBVIOUSLY playing favorites when you saw those files all together. Example- one of Flash’s favorites was the concession manager. During the most recent period, the favorite had gotten a perfect 5 for concession ops (and he got that 5 for running a stand with dead lightbulbs), while Job had gotten a 2. Realistically, those two scores are impossible. If there was a manager so consistently failing at concession, then there’s no way the guy in charge of the stand gets a PERFECT score. It’s a simple, practical, and crummy outcome of being responsible for a team. Besides which, the lights alone should have precluded a perfect score for anyone so she was clearly making her own rules.

But the proof was right there- this guy’s evaluations were absolute trash, and his peers were being graded as if she were hoping for favors. He was getting fired for no reason other than she decided to fire him. She rigged the paperwork, she rigged the process, she railroaded this guy. So I emailed HR. And I was careful, because HR already knew my name and I was on a quest of my own to rehabilitate my image. I let them know that I understood that a separation decision was already underway, but that I’d come across additional information that might be relevant to the process. Their response? They told me to shut up. The decision was already made, they said, and I should be more careful about what I put in email.

So I had to fire the guy.

Which is not true at all, I didn’t have to do any such thing. I could have refused. I could have contacted CA Labor. I could have blown things up by putting my concerns in plaintext in an email, instead of hinting at them carefully. There’s all sorts of things I could have done, each of which in my calculation would have resulted just in my getting fired too. So yeah, I saved my job. To this day it pisses me off that she got away with it. The guy got a gig later on for some Hollywood industry magazine, I’d see Job’s byline come up sometimes and not feel so bad.

At the end of that summer, Sherman Oaks closed. The 5-plex was sold to Pacific and the Twin was shuttered outright. It’s now the parking lot for a Best Buy. After I finished shutting down the operation (that was a fun week), I was off to Century City. Got bumped down to an ops job, working for Flash who’d been bumped down to a Senior Mgr role, with both of us working for one of the paranoid headcases.

And everything that I’d seen her do to Job at Sherman Oaks, I watched her doing to me. The same crummy reviews, the same complete scam.

When the first review time came around, there were a whole handful of those 2’s on the page. The eval was a complete loser, so much so that I signed it with a disclaimer that I felt I was being held to standards not listed on the page. By this time, AMC Century City was a trainwreck. The paranoid headcase GM had disappeared, but we weren’t sure if it was on (another) “official” leave, or if it was part of his own dismissal. There were two Senior Managers left in charge- Flash and Berry. Berry was an ok guy, but in over his head. Not a details guy. So Flash was effectively running the building, with no oversight and an HR department back at corporate that had already demonstrated their subservient ignorance. It was just a lousy few months and there was no easy fix.

After the first crummy eval, I had to write an action plan, a humiliating exercise in explaining how I would promise to try harder, really. Not that effort was needed. Flash had started up a mentorship program for the staff at one point- each of us managers had about a dozen staff we were supposed to check in with every other week or so to help move them along. I was the ONLY manager in the building who held up my end. There were staff asking their managers if they could transfer to Team Dave because my people were the ones getting shit done. Even Flash failed to meet with all the supervisory staff she’d hoarded for herself (so they could benefit from her expertise lol). I still got a 2 in HR that period. It was a joke.

When the next review came around, the first thing I did was look at the scores. Sure enough, it was worse than the first. Even more 2’s the second time around. I put my copy down on the desk and said I wouldn’t sign it. When I asked how it could have possibly gotten worse than the previous one, even Berry was surprised. Her bullshit had become so overt that even Berry had started to pick up on the scent.

I don’t think I ever did sign that eval. It went to HR, but their bigger concern was replacing our headcase GM. The new guy wound up settling the issue by arranging my transfer to Santa Anita.

Even the ending to this story fits- the new guy was an AMC rockstar, he’d been named “GM of the Year” around the same time he was posted to Century. Maybe his second week there, he told me I was being transferred to Santa Anita. It meant doubling my commute, but I hated Century and Santa Anita’s GM was pretty cool. I asked straight-out though if the move was intended to separate me from Century and he said NO. It was because the GM there had asked for me. The new drive was a problem though, so I eventually asked her later if she’d really asked specifically for my transfer. She hadn’t. AMC’s “General Manager of the Year” was just a lying sack of shit too.

This is the one AMC villain story, I’m not about to go through the whole list. AMC bred toxic managers, so some level of shittiness in the workplace was to be expected. I don’t want to give these fools credit for being better at sucking than the rest of the cesspool. But Flash? She gets no excuses at all. Just a miserable and defective manager.