posted 05-25-2004 10:27 PM                    

quote:

---

I used to work for Cinema World in my hometown when I was still in high school (90-94) and for a few years after. Cinema World.........hmmmmm.......how can I put this lightly....well they were very cheap! First we had substandard equipment to say the least. They built the theater 3 years before I started and installed a mishmosh of used equipment. 8 theaters and 4 different kinds of projectors, 5 different kinds of soundheads, 2-3 different kinds of sound systems, and 5-6 different kinds of automations. The automations were so bad we would have to open the cabinet every start to a show and turn the cams by hand to dim the lights. (I got shocked several times doing this). We eventually just started flipping the breaker off to avoid being shocked. There were also 4 different kinds of platters and everything was in dire need of maintenance. The platters were so bad that when you started the film you would have to race to the take-up platter to slow it so that the carriage would not hit the top of it's travel and break the film. I visited my buddy who still works there part-time 2 weeks ago and the projectors are in worse shape than ever. You probably couldn't even get scrap money for them.

I usually got stuck with the thursday night shift. At that time we were paid $4.25 an hour with no overtime pay. Our normal rotation required 4-5 movies changing weekly (we only had two theaters in town and we got a lot of bookings). So after the shift was over I would start moving the films (by myself), changing lenses, masking, aperature plates,(all manually) changing signs, breaking down the prints and building the prints for the next day. The platters and make-up tables left something to be desired. The were badly warped and had no constant tension. As a result the rewind jobs were generally crappy. Now I am a person who likes to take pride in doing a good job, but I had enough! I got so sick of being the last one there till 5-6 am and not having any help and having to jerry rig everything to get it to work because they would not send us parts! After that my performance went in the gutter. I didn't give a rat's who got the print after me! Chances were that I probably owed them one anyways for sending me one the same way!

Once I started working at Cinemark I thought to myself "Now this is the way that a projection booth is supposed to look". They had all newer equipment that was well taken care of and on a regular maintenance schedule. We had checklists every night of things to clean. All the equipment was the same. It was like heaven to me.

I am not proud of my performance then, but I was much younger and immature and I had enough of the cutting corners by Cinema World. Maybe some of the bad breakdowns are due to laziness (actually probably a large part) but some might be because of people in the same situation I was in. I don't know just a thought.

Josh

---

posted 05-27-2004 09:06 AM                       

quote:

---

Where is the CinemaWorld's in Mass

---