So You Think I’m A Barstard

On Monday afternoon, the 1st o December the company that owns the building where my work is located came in and seized the premises. This has effectively made me un-employed as on Thursday the 4th December they had the Metro Cinemas Orange put in the hands of liquidators.

To say that this has upset a few people would be an understatement, apart from the 35 people that have lost their jobs, there is the Film Distributors who cannot get their films out of the building, and the Church that uses Cinema 1 on Sunday mornings for their services and they also store all their gear under the tiered seating in that Cinema.

Rumour has it (and I can only go on rumour as they have not contacted me to say what is going on, as promised by Tracey Sunderland from Fleetstone Group of Companies) that they are trying to re-open the cinema themselves, but due to the stupid way they closed us down, they are now meeting some resistance from the film distributors, who quite rightly don’t like being treated this way, especially this close to the busiest time of the year. I honestly don’t know what they were thinking but because they obviously didn’t know themselves, they are now at the bottom of a very long and greasy slope, and if they think they can have a profitable business going in anything less than 18 months, then they obviously have rocks in their heads.

Firstly they will have to regain the trust of the distributors, and THAT will take more than a few assurances and some cash, those people have VERY LONG memories. whoever they get to do the film booking is going to be holding the dirty end of a long shit covered stick for some time.
Then getting the necessary licenses to actually be allowed to show any movies that they may eventually get will also take a while and this close to Christmas it may be game over until at least mid January. One of the Aces up our sleeve when the Metro Cinema’s was operating was the fact that we were going to be getting state of the art 3D digital projectors, this would have allowed us (or whoever we leased them from) offload our 35mm film projectors at a decent price as there will be a glut of them on the market in a short while. you see the big Hollywood studios are currently making the next batch of children’s movies in 3D digital, for digital distribution and will be dropping film print distribution in the very near future. So that’s another expense they will have to wear, and at around $170,000 each, it will soon eat into any profits that they might have been expecting.

I could go on with all the hurdles they have put in front of themselves for no good reason but hey, why should I help them, suffice it to say the biggest hurdle they now face is regaining the trust of the local cinema going public, as we operated in a competitive market against an established cinema, we have gradually eked out a 70% market share (figures are from within the industry ) we didn’t do it by being cheaper, we weren’t, we did it by being better, we did it by not treating the public as a cash cow, the truth is, our opposition used to only spend as much, or should I say as little as possible to put a picture on a screen, the majority of the seats in the cinemas were/are second hand and came out of the Adelaide Entertainment Centre when they refurbished it, so the seats are circa 1970’s vintage. How do I know this, because I was the head projectionist there for nearly 10 years and I was there when they expanded from a single screen to a 4 screen complex. The sight lines are the minimum you could get away with, because if they improved them, seating capacity would be reduced and the screens are a joke, there were supposed to be curved but because they did everything to a price, the screen frames turned up as flat and the actual screens themselves turned up from England the wrong sizes, this means that in the majority of screens there, you cannot get the edges of the picture focused. Did I mention that our screens were all curved and professionally installed, as well as having the lensing of the projectors all correctly worked out.

Anyway, that’s my story for the moment, hopefully I will get some real information from the storm troopers at Fleetstone and when I do, I will pass it on here.