Video Killed The Static Sticky Star
Sometime around late ’13 to early ’14 I was tasked with looking into upgrading the menu boards above Winnetka’s concessions with digital panels. AMC had switched over to digital menus years before but we at Pacific were still working with magnets and statics. It was honestly kind of embarrassing....
This is my Eiffel Tower. This is my Rachmaninoff’s Third. My Pieta. It’s completely elegant. It’s bafflingly beautiful. And it’s capable of, well, math.
At Pacific we had a tool for generating attendance and gross estimates. We had a tool for payroll forecasting and staff schedule planning. We had a tool for projecting concession sales. We had a tool for reporting results and planning adjustments. The was no tool in existence for reforecasting...
References? Why yes. I’m glad you asked.
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,...
Control Freak
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;...
What NOT To Do, Unless You Want A Successful Career. Apparently.
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. And as an aside,...
Let’s Talk About Bean Counting
Completely unrelated to anything, I did some fiddling with the site’s CSS the other day to fix some issues I have with this theme’s formatting for posts. It’s entirely possible those code changes have borked some manual formatting done on posts up to this point, but I don’t really...
We Can Build It, We Have The Technology
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...
2 + 2 = 57 And A Bonus!
My closeouts and scheduling tools created a framework of numerical accuracy and consistency around the day-to-day manager decisions that had immediate financial effects, but getting my boss fired for embezzling thousands of dollars would be my standout money moment with AMC. The Ops Notes that I built out for...
Not The Hero That AMC Wanted, Just The One They Deserved
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...
Projection Teaming. Yeah, I got this.
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...