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...
Pacific Theatres HR: Walk like A, Talk like B.
HR at Pacific was a completely different beast than with AMC. AMC had sought control of every aspect of scheduling and development, with authority that was very carefully and specifically delegated. Pacific on the other hand came from a place of empowerment. At least, that was their goal. The...
The Tools of the Oppressor
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,...
American Multi-Chattel Human Resources
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...
I WAS BARELY 17 AND I’D ONCE KILLED A CUSTOMER WITH A MILK DUD
He had it coming, too. I used to do hiring- interviews, orientations, everything related. As much as people make my skin crawl, those interactions I was totally cool with. Other managers tended to hire poorly. Other managers were crummy educators. This isn’t vanity, that was self-preservation. When I was...
I REMEMBER EVERYTHING
I remember every little thing as if it happened only yesterday… I remember the compliments. I move forward by beating myself up, and I tend to not take the observations of others too seriously because on any of several levels people just have no idea. Even praise becomes iffy,...
AMC Theatres: A Wretched Hive of Scum and Villainy
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...