Remembering Good Times at the Cinema

I am in a personal golden age of making cinema memories right now with the fam.

The local stand alone Imax theater has started showing big ticket movies in the evenings and a couple showings on Sat/Sun. Recently saw: Black Widow, Dune(twice), Ghostbusters Afterlife ,Polar Express 3d and of course Spider-Man. The Batman preview is epic.

It’s a big theater that holds approx 400. Gigantic 66 foot tall x 89 foot wide screen. Dual 4K laser projectors and a booming 12 channel sound set up.

Saw Spider-Man on second viewing elsewhere and realized I am getting spoiled. We know the projectionist and have been trying to line up a behind the scenes tour. This pic doesn’t quite do it justice, there are folks on the steps bottom right for a little perspective
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Halliwax said:
Never seen any of those in my life
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They might have only played at Regal theaters. Not sure, but they were super cheesy and quite annoying. Worse when you are on a 2 hour ticket shift and it plays in the lobby every minute or so.
The main reason we made our own rejected versions.
Made plenty of other theater videos as well.
 
We used to have a dollar theater here that almost worked like a grindhouse. Cheap tickets, cheap seats, cheap snacks; all around crummy place, but the movies they played was everything that had come out in the year and it'd play them well into the new year. I think it's gone away for some years now, though. They also had little to no trailers before the show. Really didn't know how good it was then until it went away.

I remember a friend telling me that when Revenge of the Sith was released, he sat through the trailers, the movie, and then the credits to fully absorb the experience (since it was billed as the last Star Wars movie ever). He also needed to go to the bathroom midway through the film but held it in until after the credits. Wound up with a terrible kidney stone.
 
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Of the promotions we did for different movies, one of my favorites was for the first Narnia in 2005.
Using just the poster and trailer, a manager and myself (and I had a friend help out) you can see we made the ice castle out of styrofoam.

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Building the castle. There were a few times we stayed up til like 8 in the morning working on stuff.
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Me painting the logo on the box office glass.
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Downtown Orlando has a parade around that time, so we entered as a Narnia themed float, got a vehicle, trailer, and brought most everything we had put up at the theater and made the float out of it all. That manager, who is next to me, also got a few kids from a preforming arts theater to portray the kids from the movie.
As the parade was just about to start, they announced that all the had to be a certain brand as they were sponsoring it, (Ford or Chevy, but I can't remember now), well....we had the wrong brand so they weren't going to let us be in it.
I don't know what she did and who she chewed out, but they finally let us do it.
I was filming it all while walking in the parade for our video as part of the movie promotion.

75.jpg


I found more pictures right before I posted this. These were the kids of course, now back at the theater after the parade.
I sadly never got a picture of the float all put together. I probably have the video on some tape.....but which one, I have so many, and I was bad at labeling them.
Castle.jpg


I actually forgot that when you went up the escalator and were about to get your ticket torn, we had a high school theater class make us the wardrobe they go into.

wardrobe.jpg


People had to go through this to go on the down escalator to leave. You can see the giant 30 sheet poster that came in pieces and made of paper. I had to buy PVC pipe and make a frame and hang it from the ceiling.

30sheet.jpg


Me putting it together. These pics are SO out of order. Mainly because they are all in a folder with pictures on my computer, and all those pics are a mess.
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Little poster we had on display by the castle.

IceCastle.jpg



Anyone ever go to a theater having a big promotion for a movie?
I was involved in the creation process as you can see, but others I only filmed and edited the footage for whatever manager was running it.
Some I definitely still have the tape, and labeled.
 
Boy, you really went above and beyond at this place. You'd think you'd run the place after all this effort.

I almost forgot that theaters used to do promotions for films. The cinema we have here got renovated in the mid-late 2000's I think and it, by that time, was too large to do any real promos like they bothered to. They used to put up some small corporate displays that the studios sent out and sometimes painted the lobby windows but they don't do that anymore. I can't even remember the last time they did that.

There was an old theater that used to be off one our main highways, from the 50's or 60's, and it was the only theater we had in town. The others were the drive-ins an hour drive outside. The "Showcase Cinema 53" was what I knew it as but older folks knew it as the "Cinerama," I believe. It had 8 or 10 screens, but it was small enough that they could still do big things with it. They'd cover the entire front of lobby, made of glass windows, in large murals for big movie releases and would hang displays and signage at the entrance. I don't know if it was coincidence or not, but the carpeting was like the Overlook Hotel from The Shining. It was fun seeing that the just how closely the red vest and black slacks the staff wore made them all look like hotel stuff or bag-boys. The last mural they put up was for one of the Rugrats movies and it stayed there for the longest time when the theater had to shut down to make way for the cinemaplex further up the road. It was actually quite melancholic to look at, these paintings of babies and children on the glass still up, faded and sun-bleached. Stayed like that until the lot was sold and the building demolished.
 
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PoopaPapaPalps said:
We used to have a dollar theater here that almost worked like a grindhouse. Cheap tickets, cheap seats, cheap snacks; all around crummy place, but the movies they played was everything that had come out in the year and it'd play them well into the new year. I think it's gone away for some years now, though. They also had little to no trailers before the show. Really didn't know how good it was then until it went away.

I remember a friend telling me that when Revenge of the Sith was released, he sat through the trailers, the movie, and then the credits to fully absorb the experience (since it was billed as the last Star Wars movie ever). He also needed to go to the bathroom midway through the film but held it in until after the credits. Wound up with a terrible kidney stone.
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We had a 2 dollar theater here, like you said cheap everything except concessions.. and you brought beg bugs home with you

Once the beg bugs broke out the theater never recovered.. closed down.. had to be 20 years ago now

Another great theater we had in the city, it had 5 dollar movie nights, if s movie premiered that weekend, wait until Tuesday and that same 13 dollar movie was 5 bucks, Tuesday’s was always packed! Full house

They switched over to a luxury setup like we are use to today, But someone was pricked with a syringe that was left in a luxury seat it hit the press and the theater never recovered.. dead…
 
I work in a theme park that used to have large format film projection and there really was some magic in being around them while they ran. It’s 100% gone now which is a shame.
 
We also had a super cheap, dumpy theater that had 2 screens only. They had this really bizarre pre-movie fyi video. No smoking, no alcohol, no rowdiness, no red meat, and something else I can't remember. That red meat line got the crowd laughing every single time. Very strange. Its been gone 25+ years now. Shame.
 
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RModin said:
We also had a super cheap, dumpy theater that had 2 screens only. They had this really bizarre pre-movie fyi video. No smoking, no alcohol, not rowdiness, no red meat, and something else I can't remember. That red meat line got the crowd laughing every single time. Very strange. Its been gone 25+ years now. Shame.
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You know… I think I remember being young and seeing the no smoking logo before the films…
 
So On entering our local Showcase multiplex To watch The Hobbit in super HDef I bought a bag of Skittles to share with the family..
The lights dimmed the movie started, I couldn't see what I was doing and at what have been the quietest part of the movie ripped open the bag sending Skittles flying all over the floor..now the thing is this cinema had hard wood flooring and a sloape so for the next what felt like a lifetime of tumbling Skittles rattling under the seats.
I dont take them anymore..
 
I was seeing a movie and someone knocked their empty beer bottle over and it rolled all the way to the bottom of the theater, hitting every seat support on the way, twisting around, and continuing on its merry way. It was just like that one Office episode with Andy's Sweeney Todd play.
 
Ah, movie-going in the early 80s. What memories. Me and my buds driving around for hours before the show trying to score a nickel or dimebag. Hitting up the local record store to buy that little brown bottle of Rush labelled as "record cleaner" (that stuff was awesome for heavy special effects sequences). All of us pooling our money to buy one ticket, then that person sneaking down to the Fire Exit to let the rest of us in. We never wasted our money on soda and popcorn, so by the time the movie was half over we'd have the cottonmouth so bad we were almost choking. Being so stupid we thought if we sat in the way back, we could smoke cigarettes. Getting caught, getting thrown out........ Doing the exact same thing next Friday night......What a life......God, we were idiots........
 
mottrex said:
So On entering our local Showcase multiplex To watch The Hobbit in super HDef I bought a bag of Skittles to share with the family..
The lights dimmed the movie started, I couldn't see what I was doing and at what have been the quietest part of the movie ripped open the bag sending Skittles flying all over the floor..now the thing is this cinema had hard wood flooring and a sloape so for the next what felt like a lifetime of tumbling Skittles rattling under the seats.
I dont take them anymore..
Click to expand...
While reading the post I could actually hear them running down the floor lol
 
PoopaPapaPalps said:
Boy, you really went above and beyond at this place. You'd think you'd run the place after all this effort.

I almost forgot that theaters used to do promotions for films. The cinema we have here got renovated in the mid-late 2000's I think and it, by that time, was too large to do any real promos like they bothered to. They used to put up some small corporate displays that the studios sent out and sometimes painted the lobby windows but they don't do that anymore. I can't even remember the last time they did that.
Click to expand...
I think I was much to ADHD for them. I was always trying to have fun and get work done, but put all my effort in the job...but "they" were just trying to run a business to make money. I clashed plenty of times with management.
 

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