Dispatches from the Popcorn Frontline
What working in cinemas taught me.
From when I was 16 until when I was 22 I worked in cinemas. Usually this was part time, and cinemas saw me right from the end of high school, through my Film, Television and Media Studies Bachelor of Arts, through my internship and into my first ‘real’ job- programming promos for a local lifestyle TV channel.
The cinemas themselves were ‘art-house’ or boutique cinemas that, despite appearances, could do big business. We knew this because we cashed up, counting all the money, and we knew what we were paid. And still every day, the morning person would carefully shake the popcorn from the day before out of the plastic bag and back into the machine. In theory it was entirely possible for a single kernel to have been in there for years.
These jobs were formative in lots of ways. For the first few years I tended to be younger than the people I worked with. So young, that I lodged my job application for the second cinema I worked at during the time I had to kill after being kicked out of Fight Club. I had lots to learn from the older kids.
The staffroom was the epicentre of this education. We called it the Starship Troopers room, as you could always find people in various stages of undress. There we hung out on the stained couch, stashed our belongings in broken lockers, ate kebabs and planned our nights. I assumed all jobs would be like this.
Importantly, I learned respect for film in a physical sense, not the way we talked about it at University. I learned how to splice together actual film, starting with old 8mm reels and Sellotape. We got excited when the tins containing new films turned up and sad when favourites got shipped out again. I listened as people recounted stories of films playing for months- years even. I started to understand that the film industry was a lot more than some dudes in baseball caps- here, at the exhibition end, a whole other kind of magic could happen.
That magic revolves around the simple act of people watching movies. I had a lot to learn about customers, the ‘audience’. Because really, that’s the bulk of the job. Customer service. Smiling, even when it’s 9am on Sunday morning and you’ve just been at a music festival for two days and the sight of icecream isn’t a good one. It was never too hard though, because we all wanted the same thing- two hours in the dark watching something new unfold.
Some of the customers we all got to know. There were two Senior Citizens who must have had a combined age of at least 170, who came and saw everything. They always stopped by to give us a review afterwards. We always hoped they’d start dating but it never happened. There was the guy who wore a tie dripping with fake blood with a plastic alien head poking out of it. He bought us a box of chocolates every Christmas, and always hung around in the foyer just a bit too long.
Other customers deserved less attention. The ‘raincoat brigade’ turned up every time there was an ‘adult’ (usually) French film on, and were characteristically gross. They’d claim no knowledge of the film they were about to see, insisting they were just there to see ‘the next thing on’ and then would head into the cinema, taking all of the serviettes with them. You had to wear gloves to clean those cinemas. We eventually had infra-red cameras installed in some of the cinemas, but you still never quite knew what people were going to go for (Dogville?!).
I got to know audiences to the point that I could pick which film a couple had come in for, I could get up in front of a crowded theatre and explain to them exactly why their chosen title couldn’t play (reasons included because we’ve lost it, and because it caught on fire), and I could also sell people on seeing certain things.
When people are choosing which film they’ll go to, they tend to fall into two camps. The first group is the majority- they turn up to go to a specific film. For the most part, this is what happens. But if it falls through- and films sell out more often than people realise- they’ve got a babysitter and they’re already there. So they turn into members of the second group. The second group turn up just wanting to see a movie. They check out the flyers, read the reviews, talk to the staff and google things.
There’s something of an opportunity here. If it takes three ‘touch points’ for a consumer to make a decision- and it’s necessary to be ‘top of mind’ at the ‘point of purchase’, the counter of a cinema is a great place for a film to hustle. Foyers have a little hustle in terms of posting reviews, posters, flyers- but there’s room for more.
At arts festivals you can’t move without having flyers shoved into your hands by ‘street teams’- people who are paid to pound the pavements and promote a show. Arts festivals also indulge in the actually very smart process of ‘papering’- giving free tickets in the hope of building an audience. If something’s going to play to an empty room anyway, what’s the harm in a few free seats?
Except for the cinema that was owned and run by a small distributor, no other distributors took any interest in us, the staff. Fair enough, we were pretty motley at best. It’s possible that whatever pittance we were getting paid wasn’t a massive incentive for huge enthusiasm, and we did tend to be tired from studying or partying or whatever. But it wouldn’t have been hard to tip us over into keen advocates for whatever title they needed to give an extra push that week. A ‘staff screening’ and a few cheeky beers and we might have all donned sandwich boards and paced the streets.
There would sometimes be a preview screening for a new film. These were always unhappy affairs from our point of view. People who work in PR tend to be scary. These screenings never seemed to be terribly effective anyway. People would get worried about giving away too many free tickets. Then, at the last they would panic about not enough people being there. So all the friends of the PR agent would be invited and they would come and talk to approximately no-one about the film, because all of their friends had seen it with them.
I did see oddly great traditional marketing at work too. The first cinema I ever worked in only had one screen and it played the same one movie for the first eight months I worked there. It was a ‘charming Irish comedy’ and I didn’t find it very charming or funny. I saw it in the first week and then got thoroughly sick of hearing the music piping through the wall. These guys were amazing at patience- giving a film the time it needed to become a ‘hit’. Because people were so used to films opening and swiftly closing again again, they figured that any film playing for the ‘Third Huge Month!’ must be good.
That job putting promos on air feels like a long time ago now. Since then I’ve worked in television production, film development, on some film festivals, for an agent, for a funding body, and finally in what I’m doing now- working in digital marketing. All the jobs along the way have been useful and have fed into one another more or less, but they’re pretty regular jobs that you might do when you’re heading into the industry. Slinging popcorn isn’t.
But maybe it should be. Despite the film degree, my best era of film knowledge isn’t the French New Wave, or Documentaries of New Zealand, it’s Art House Releases from 1998- 2004, because these are the films I had a tiny part in selling. I feel really lucky to have had this time selling tickets and serving popcorn, and to have had the insight into these ‘purchase decisions’- what’s actually motivating our film-going audiences.
For all the discussions about how we consume films now, the actual practice of going to the movies hasn’t changed that much. People are still doing it in much the same way, despite the recent explosion in viewing options. But as we all try and figure out what the new best way of getting films to people is, the cinema-going audiences are in danger of being ignored. Sure, some adjustments could be made- things have really become expensive! But maybe this is one part of the chain that’s not broken. Actually, it’s still pretty special.
