Cinema: How to Run a Theater

Seldom have the trials of a movie exhibitor been dramatized with such Aeschylean awfulness as by Manager W. H. M. Watson in last fortnight’s Motion Picture Herald. Manager Watson runs El Paso’s Mission Theater. “From the beginning,” he writes, “the boys and some of the girls . . . decided they were going to run things as they pleased.” Sometimes “when told not to roam the aisles, to quit talking, smoking, etc., they would sneer or spit in your face.” Plenty of the young folks smoked marijuana. In the Mission’s first three months, Manager Watson lost three customers by sudden death. The Mission, Mr. Watson observes, “is not a class movie.”

Watson’s first attempts to cope with aggressive adolescence usually misfired. “I am not,” he writes sadly, “a wrestler or bouncer . . . and sitting behind a theater desk for about 25 years does not make a man in the pink.” He picked up a bit of judo from a sailor and “this worked—sometimes.” But once Manager Watson was thrown out of his own theater by one of his customers, and “that is bad for business.” At last Watson solved his problem “by using show business and showmanship in the show business.” Now he dresses for work in: 1) a Sam Browne belt, 2) a .38 automatic (with three extra clips of cartridges), 3) an iron-claw in a scabbard, 4) a blackjack, 5) a pair of handcuffs, 6) a “very shiny” gold badge, 7) (“on extra busy nights”) a 24-in. police club in one hand and a flashlight in the other. His ushers also spread “a little propaganda” through the neighborhood “regarding how ‘tough’ the boss is, etc.” Result: “the kids have learned who is boss”; “the better patrons” come now because they hear the Mission “is properly operated”; for a year there has been no serious ruction. “Admittedly,” writes Manager Watson, “it is a rare way to run a theater, but we have reduced our vandalism and rowdyism by 80%.”

OWI recently announced that many movie managers are hard beset by juvenile delinquents. In Berkeley they caused a $35,000 fire. In one Oakland theater they caused four fires on four successive nights. Some exhibitors write the parents of offenders, but “in the more exclusive suburbs they are fearful of offending… ” Ushers, usually kids themselves, are usually helpless. One Cleveland manager “turned the tide” by exhibiting in his lobby a ravaged seat under the slogan “Vandalism Is Treason.” One Philadelphia theater was harassed by a gang of small fry “led by a six-year-old boy who crawled under seats, opened purses in the dark, and pocketed the contents.” Police got their child when the six-year-old appeared at the ticket window with a $5 bill and two little girls, aged 5.