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They hope business will go up again after the games.

Best word of advice to any theatre hoping to rebound is to TURN UP THE QUALITY OF PRESENTATION wherever you can. A small investment in brighter and sharper pictures will pay off handsomely. When was the last time you actually MEASURED your screen luminance to see if it was near 16 footlamberts? Are your lenses older than you are? Is the port glass clean? Do you check focus frequently? Why is that exit sign still shining on the screen? You know you shouldn't be SEEING the DTS track to the left of the screen.

Is the sound all it should be? When was the last time you had the system aligned and eq'd. Do you actually go into the auditoriums and LISTEN to the sound to find any obvious problems (e.g., missing channels, blown speakers, hum, distortion)? Be sure your analog backup (SR) is everything it should be.

Handle and inspect the prints with care and attention to detail, and get an on-line film cleaner for each screen. Be so GOOD at what you do, that the print leaves your theatre in better shape than when it came in.

Anyone with a good home theatre system (DVD or Laser Disk or HD satellite, 5.1 sound, high end monitor) knows that the real competition in the future isn't the theatre across town, but the BlockBuster store across the street or the satellite dish pointed south. Film can "blow the socks off" anything available in the home, or it can look and sound like crap. It's up to you.

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Meanwhile, there are legitimate issues about who gets royalties when a work of film is distributed umpteen times on the various outlets (including, potentially, the Internet). On the other hand, the vast majority of voting members of both the Writer's Guild and the Actor's Guild are people who do not make a living at writing or acting. Sure, they want to milk the producers for every cent. Meanwhile, the "working actors" and "working writers" are having their careers held hostage by people who, perhaps, only want to quibble about where their name appears in the credits or whether or not they'll get that check for $3 when their film goes on the Internet 15 years from now. Meanwhile, Average Joe Gaffer who works in the film business is going to miss mortgage payments and be losing his house about a year from now.

Or maybe I'm completely wrong. Perhaps, in the long run, these strikes will be a good thing. Just as the summer of 2000 forced movie theatre chains to control their expansion and the glut of megaplexes, perhaps a good strike in Hollywood will stop the studios from paying some actors $20 million a pop while others are getting a few hundred a day. Maybe if a studio didn't pay someone $20 million to phone in his acting performance and, instead, the increased the movie's budget by a few million (for things like... I don't know... 70mm?).

Or maybe I'm still ill-informed and totally wrong in my analysis/hope.