Tag: AMC Theatres

It just is. There was an article in The Guardian about movie theater pricing that triggered some PTSD flashbacks. The sensationalism of the theater economy slowly collapsing is fun to watch and makes for a better show, but it’s always worth shining a light on how theater companies can...

Of course there were adversaries. Of course there were obstacles. In all of those theater years, of course there were folks who honestly thought their job was creating friction for others. But they were in the minority by far....

I don’t even remember how I got roped into the writing of the weekly newsletters. I’m sure I volunteered, but I don’t recall the circumstances whatsoever. I know I was at the 6 in Burbank, and writing the newsletter for the entire three-building complex (the Media North 6, the...

Way back in high school I was in a joint English/Chemistry humanities program thing. Woke liberal nonsense, in modern English. The final for both classes was a group report/presentation on a hypothetical environmental crisis. My group actually put in the work, we knew we were going to kill it,...

When I started in management, our offices were using a Linux-based version of Lotus for reporting. The sales servers were Linux, and so were the workstations. After about a year in we upgraded to a Windows system (Y2k!) and had to begin migrating everything to Word/Excel. Word was easy;...

I was closing one night at the North 6, and two of the concession registers were short more that $10. The rule was shortages by more than that had to be written up, so I always looked for reasons to not do that. Our registers at the time had...

This is vanity talking but projectionists were the theater SEAL teams in film and early digital years. The three- to ten-people cluster of mechanically inclined, take-charge, responsible types who can keep both equipment and schedules running. My first team was all that. Paul Koenig, Russ Quan, Chris Dixon, Jason...

The first big tool-building achievement was probably the weekly scheduling guide. The spreadsheet started off as a single grid that would tally up staff hours in different areas as they were assigned, for comparison against the attendance-based payroll targets that drove weekly scheduling. By the time I was done,...

At one point some manager somewhere went on a rebellious bender. For maybe 6 weeks, he sent out a self-published AMC newsletter to all AMC fax numbers. It was titled “Oppression” and until the guy got caught and fired, he spent those weeks giving his honest opinion of AMC’s...

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...