My theatre which was built in 1930, has a balcony. Since before I was in the picture, the balcony has been designated an "adults only" area. The kidless adults really appreciate this, especially at Disney or other family films.

We have two signs, one at the bottom of the stairs and another at the top stating "Balcony reserved for ADULTS ONLY" in fairly large letters.

Not a week goes by that some bonehead doesn't look at the signs and then ask me, "can I take the kids into the balcony?" or "If they're WITH ME, can they go upstairs?" or other nonsense.

Most amazing of all is parents who start to go upstairs, and then THE KIDS read the sign and say "We can't go up there!" I've actually seen parents arguing with their kids, saying "It'll be fine, just follow me, etc. etc. etc." whereupon I step up and say that the balcony is in fact reserved for adults only, meaning if you're a kid, you can't go up there.

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I swear, the next parent that comes into my theatre and tries to tell me how to do my job and how to hadle my employees, I am going to strangle them in front of their child.

I've lost count of the times that I've heard 'I know its a 15 certificate film, but is it all right if my 11/12/13 year old comes in to watch it with me...'

Grr!!!

states:
Statutory censorship of moving pictures was finally introduced
into the UK by the Video Recordings Act 1984. This Act made the
BBFC—which changed its name to the British Board of Film
Classification—the statutory censorship body for video recordings
intended for viewing in the home. Its role as film censor remained
on a non-statutory basis (emphasis mine).

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--Sean McKinnon
Manager
Loews Cineplex Entertainment
Liberty Tree Mall 20
Danvers, Mass

Although the BBFC ratings are voluntary, they are usally enforced by the local council.

In order to run a public cinema in the UK, you need a Cinema License. The terms of this license are set out by the Local council and in most case's the BBFC ratings are enforced as part of the terms of the license. If you let underage people into a movie, you could loose your Licence.

So different localities would have different laws on this, then?

I know that some places (states, towns, whatever) in the United States make the MPAA ratings statutory, so this is similar to what goes on in the UK.

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Tao Yue
MIT '04: Course VI-2, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Projectionist, MIT Lecture Series Committee

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The BBFC was started precisely because in the early part of the last century, this happened on a large scale and threatened to seriously damage the cinema industry. What would happen is that a film would be banned in one town or country but passed in the neighbouring one, and so anyone wanting to see it would simply get on a bus, meaning that the cinema which was barred from showing it would lose revenue.

The legal basis for this was the 1909 Cinematograph Act, which allowed local councils to introduce the system of licencing as described by Phil. The act was introduced for health and safety reasons - there had been a number of highly publicised, fatal nitrate fires, most of them in converted shops and halls that had hastily been pressed into service as cinemas during the industry's initial boom. So the idea of the act was to enable dangerous venues to be closed down.

But councils soon started imposing licence conditions which had nothing to do with health and safety, which resulted in a court case in 1912. A south London cinema sued their local authority for banning Sunday opening, claiming that the act did not give them the power to do that. However the judge disagreed, and the BBFC was subsequently established as a private company in 1912 (initially bankrolled by the Cinema Exhibitors' Association) with the aim of vetting films on behalf of local authorities.

For more on this see James Robertson, 'The British Board of Film Censors' (London, 1985).

Wow, how was that for my first post to this list???

quote:

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Parents are idiots, and so are msot people in general...I could write to you for hours about how stupid many of our visitors are, but i wont. Here is one of my famvorite examples--we are an imax theater, and before each show, we have an usher announce that once the bottom doors are close, they are emergency exits only, and that people should use the upper staircase and exits for restrooms, ect. Well, almost the second the usher finishes this speech, i almost everytime, there is a family/parent/child (usually its not the kids alone) walking out the bottom doors, or asking ht ehost if they can leave through those doors.

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I'm afraid that is actually a case of the architect is an idiot, which is 'way too common also. Studies of exit patterns of people in theaters during fire emergencies, etc. shows that people will almost always try to exit the same way they came in, even if they're sitting under another door with EXIT in big luminous green letters.

If they came in that way, they'll try to go out that way.
People are so disposed to go out via the route that they came in, that some will literally fight in non-emergency situations to go out the way they came in.

And you've probably noticed that most of the folks who use those exits down front in a regular theater after a movie are more often in the "interesting social margins" category.

Either your architect or whoever decides those doors weren't to be used during a show didn't speak to each other, or just didn't know they bidness.

I swear sometimes it seems that everything learned & utilized relating to theater crowd traffic management peaked in & then became totally ignored in the mid-30s.