My Theatre Origins

It has been a very interesting week in my personal online life.  It all started early this week when I received a blip on my friend request button on Facebook.  It was from a former coworker and friend that I have lost contact with over the years. Upon accepting Cheryl’s friend request I saw that she posted a picture of herself and another, Don, at the job in 1987.  From that point, between her, me and two others (Rich and Arland), we ended up having a nostalgia fest from those days that is currently a 1000+ comment thread on that very picture.  Others have joined in that conversation but it is primarily the 4 of us talking of the glory days.  All four of us had a ton of memories flooding back from back then and it prompted me to create a Group Page dedicated to those memories on Facebook.

For those that have been reading my tripe on this blog, Twitter, Facebook and Google+, you should know that I am currently in the movie theatre biz.  That was also my first job and it started in 1986.

Depressing...

There she is…Lynnhaven 8 Theatres.  It was AMC’s former and now closed flagship theatre in the Norfolk/Virginia Beach area that opened in May of 1986.  It is now a sad pathetic shell of a gutted building that now houses an indoor go-cart track.  It is always sad to see something like that happen to a movie theatre.  It is even sadder to see it happen to this particular one.  However, for the years it was opened, I know it was filled with many memories of good times.  I remember the summer or fall of 1985 seeing the structure start to go up.  I would zip by on my bike wondering “What the hell is this building?  The architecture doesn’t make sense.”  I knew it looked like a theatre but there was one already in the mall no more than 200 yards away.  In any case I watched it go up over the winter in anticipation wondering what it will be.  Spring rolls around and signage is going in place. By then I KNEW what it was and I was giddy.  As you already know, I love movies…I mean I REALLY love movies.  I always have too.  By having more screens in the area meant more movies for me to watch.  Little did I know how many that I would end up watching in my near future.

The building opened in May of 1986 with their big title being COBRA with Sylvester “You are the disease and I am the cure.” Stallone.  LABYRYNTH was the first movie I saw there in theatre #6. July of that summer, I saw ALIENS in 70mm with 6track Dolby in their #8 house.  That may have clenched it I think for me.  I was so enamored with that presentation that I came back a couple more times to see it.  Not the movie…the presentation.  The sound and the picture just blew me away.  I had never seen a movie with sound like that and the picture was so damn big compared to the shitty shoebox theatres I had been to before that like the shit box that UA had at the mall across the way. 

Holy shit...I am LITERALLY almost half the guy I am now.  Seriously...I am about 115 lbs there and now 200.

So, it was the summer of 1986 and I am a 17 year old scrawny geek (see pic above from 1987 at theatre) and I am about a month away to starting my junior year of high school.  I was lazing about the house and my father came to me and said those fateful words that most fathers say to their boys, “Dammit boy, go get a job and stop laying about.  Make yourself useful.”  Therefore, I got on my bike and started picking up applications for things nearby like McDonalds, grocery stores, hardware stores and the like.  I got a wild hair up my ass and decided to bike on over to the new theatre 3.5 miles away from the house and pick up an application there too.  I really did not think I had a chance but I thought “what the hell”.  Took them all home and filled them  out.  On Tuesday morning 8/5/86 I grabbed the applications, got on my bike and headed out.  My 10 year old brother tagged along with me as I was turning in applications from place to place making my way down towards the theatre slowly.  At the last stop, I dropped off the application and an assistant manager, Annette Belanga, takes the application and looks it over as I was about to walk it out.  She stops me and asks if I was available for an interview later that day.  Stunned, I nervously said yes and said I will have to go home and change.  I race home with my kid brother as fast as I could and came back about an hour early in an Oxford shirt, dress pants and a tie and waited outside.  A few minutes before I had to be there I walked in and Annette greeted me and led me to what was the employee break room to interview me.  After what felt like an eternity for me probably babbling and stammering nervously, she said that she wanted hire this spaz and to have me start that Friday.  FUCK YES!!!!!!!!  My planned course for my life was forever changed at that moment.  I did not know it at the time but it was.   I need to say this here before going on any further…thank you Annette.  You had probably had the biggest affect on my life other than my parents by taking a chance on this geek and hiring me that day.

For the next 3 years at this theatre, I had the most influential period of my life. The people there I worked with and for were like family.  Yeah, we had our share of working alongside morons, bullies and jerks but all families have those too.  You have to take the bad with the good.  And there was much  more good than bad when I look back.  I am not even going to dignify this post with calling out the idiots there because in looking back…I would not be the person I am today if it was not for EVERYONE there.  The managers there acted more like parents and counselors than bosses.  We recieved guidance more often than punishment when we screwed up.  There was an air of camaraderie among the staff even if we were all part of different cliques and went to different schools outside of work.  We would playfully call each other awful names, play pranks on each other, bust our asses together, have parties after work and fought with each other.  Much like a strong family unit, we had respect and dare I say it…love for one another. I strongly believe that the head honcho there was the chief person responsible for setting up that environment.

Ed Moyer was the General Manager.  When he walked in the building, you knew he was the one that was in charge by the way he carried himself.  He really never had to repeat himself.  Whenever he said something, that was it and it was understood.  He surrounded himself with most dynamic and versatile team.  Each one of them had very different strengths and he used them effectively.  Moyer was really good, but his team made him appear nearly infallible.  To this day, I try to emulate him in many of those aspects.  I try to surround myself with strong team with different skill sets.  I try to be fair but firm.  I am a strong believer of second chances and giving out guidance instead of doling out punishments. I do not think I am a fraction of how good he was there.   However, using what I have learned from him, I have done quite well for myself in this industry.  It has gotten me the GM spot at a theatre in Colorado that is about to expand with IMAX.  I could not be any happier either.  Thanks Ed…maybe one day I could live up fully to what you have become.

While at Lynnhaven, I became a projectionist or what they called a “booth usher”.  It was a double duty position where we ran projection and helped the ushers.  I remember hounding the managers all the time when I first got there to learn the booth.  A couple a months later, the managers put me in.  I do not know if it was because they felt I had the talent or I just wore them down and they just gave in to shut me up.  In any case, I was taught by some really talented projectionists…Liz and Jonathan.  They really set in me the importance of proper presentation and showmanship.  I eventually got a key to come in the building early in the mornings to build up and screen the new prints every week.  Even though I loved running the booth more than anything else there, it afforded me to fuel my passion for movies.

Similar projector head that we used at Lynnhaven 8

I saw so many movies while I was there.  I would skip school and stay there all day watching movies sometimes.  I would see movies that I would never have given the time before starting there.  As of now, in 2011, I have calculated that I have probably seen, give or take a few hundred, about 20,000 movies.  That equals about 4 years of my life of solid continuous movies.  Hell, as I write this, I just finished watching THE THING from 1981 and rolled into watching 3 O’CLOCK HIGH from 1987.

While at Lynnhaven 8, I was in high school up through the first year or so of college.  Even though school was teaching me for what I originally thought was going to be my career path of computer programming, Lynnhaven 8 was making me like a heroin junkie for the biz.  However, with me being a male hitting twenty and going to college, I started getting all sorts of head strong and self righteous.  You can say that I caught a case of swelled head syndrome with a dash of know-it-all-ism.  I felt I should have been pushed up in rank and further along than what I was then.  I was feeling combative and resentful as result and by the spring of 1989, I said fuck it and left so I could concentrate on my school.  I probably burnt a few bridges, but I did not care at that time.  I had a couple different jobs in the video game industry repairing arcade machines and then got a programming gig near the mall.  Even though I was think that I was fulfilling my work I did in college by programming, I was not happy.  It did not help that the boss was a religious nut job that had us indirectly working for an even bigger religious nut job, Pat Robertson.  I felt like a fucking sell out and I got progressively more depressed because this was not what I went to school for.  I kept looking back at the time I had at the theatre and wondered why I had my head up my ass.  Luckily for me, I also had a second job repairing games and managing a game room in Pembroke Mall and the theatre across the hall from me was just bought out by Regal Cinemas.  One of their assistants that I knew was promoted to GM to take over a new theatre going up in Chesapeake.  I saw an opportunity and I jumped all over it.

I basically came back to the first job that I loved in 1995.  I had surgically removed my head from my ass that I had firmly placed up there 6 years earlier from feeling self entitled. I started at the bottom of the food chain there and busted my ass for 2 years until they gave me the keys to my first building to call my own and to be cliché, the rest is history.   

And I owe it all to that little 8 plex that was at 2736 North Mall Drive, Virginia Beach, VA.

Now I have some catching up to do with some old “family” members…