Movie screeners played at schools?

[Mike Blakesley]

This weekend, my niece was visiting in town and brought her 6 year old son to Sonic 2. After the show, I was asking the kid how he liked it and he said it was good, but he'd already seen it at school. I said, how's that? He said his teacher owns the movie theater in their town and they had a disk of the movie, so she showed it at school.

Now, since this story is coming from a 6-year-old I have to take it with a bit of a grain of salt. First of all it's not possible that his teacher owns the theater in that town (because I know the owner and he doesn't even live there), but she certainly could be a manager. I have a hard time believing she would play a current movie at school unless she had express permission from somewhere.

I suppose it's possible that the teacher has some sort of connection that sends her DVD screeners, but managing a theater, why would she take that kind of risk? Unless she's naive and doesn't see the major harm, although the potential damage to their ticket sales should be pretty obvious.

So my real question is, would the studios send disks of their brand-new movies out to schools? I can't imagine why they would, but if they do, WHY the hell would they do that? This whole story has me in WTF mode. The town in question is a smallish Montana town with a two-screen theater.

[Rusty Gordon]

Makes me wonder if it may have been the first Sonic film that was shown at school.

[Mitchell Dvoskin]

When I was working in New York City many years ago, street vendors had day and date DVD’s for sale. Quality varied from camcordered in a theatre to flawless with Dolby Digital 5.1 sound. The problem was that you never knew what you were going to get. It would not surprise me to find out that this has all happening online now.

[Harold Hallikainen]

There was a Seinfeld show about the bootleg DVDs in NYC.

[Mike Blakesley]

I talked to our booker about it. He's convinced the school probably showed the first Sonic. I'm betting that is the case.

[Carsten Kurz]

We once saw a poster on a local church youth club, advertising a future in-house screening of three different movies for children that were still in theatres. We ourselves had not yet played any of them at the time we saw this. A bit of a turmoil developed around this, as they were just two streets away from our cinema, and it seemed to suggest that a church-driven youth club was showing bootlegs in public AND advertising it in public.

After a while, we found out that one person there had simply asked the kids which movies they'd want to see on the forthcoming kids movie night. And of course, the kids named all the then popular movies that were currently running in cinemas. They did not have access to any of these movies - the person in charge was actually thinking that he'd go to the local DVD-rental store prior to the movie night and expect these titles to be present there. So he just put them on the announcement without knowing that he'd probably return with some lame two year old DVDs instead of what the kids actually wanted to see. Don't expect ordinary people to know what you know. They may be plain stupid - or just ordinary people.

[Randy Stankey]

Most people just don't understand what it takes to play a movie. They have no idea of what projecting a movie entails. They have no idea about contracts and payments.

How many of us have given booth tours where the visitors were flabbergasted to see how projectors work? How many people are surprised to learn that theaters pay the majority of ticket revenue back to the studios? People are amazed to hear that we work twelve hours per day (or more) for six and seven days a week, every day of the year and we only get half a day off for Christmas.

It almost seems as though people are willfully ignorant of all the work that other people do for the benefit of their relaxation and entertainment.

If a school group or a church wanted to play a movie for their students or parishioners, I'd be willing to give them a break, both financially and logistically, to help them but if they think they can just go "pick up a DVD," that is asking for too much.

I once worked in a shop where there was a barcode reader that scanned a 2-D code patch on each part that went down the line. They were having trouble getting the system to read serial numbers reliably. I had only worked there for about a month, at the time. I asked them to show me what the problem was and, after about five minutes, I had the thing working as well as it ever had.

The maintenance tech on duty asked me how I was able to fix the reader so quickly. I told him that I was a movie theater tech, fixing projectors for almost two decades. I got a blank stare. I explained that a Dolby Digital reader has to be able to read the digital code, about a quarter of the size of theirs, do it at a rate of 96 times per second, and keep it up for twelve hours per day, almost continuously, without missing a beat. Aligning a laser scanner on a conveyor that reads one code every thirty seconds is like child's play to me.

To this day, I don't think the guy ever believed me.

Have you ever had somebody look at you like you've got three heads when you try to explain why popcorn costs what it does?
Have you had somebody ague with you in disbelief when you try to tell them why they can't just hop from one auditorium to another or stay late to catch the beginning of the movie again?

Try telling somebody that movie theaters are legally exempt, under Federal law, from paying time-and-a-half, overtime to employees. Even when you walk them over to the poster on the wall and point out the words, "Exempt: Motion Picture Theaters" they still act like you are making things up.

People think that what we do is as easy as clicking on Netflix... Willfully ignorant!

[Harold Hallikainen]

That federal overtime exemption is a new one to me. I wonder what the history of that is. It looks like state law can override the exemption ( https://www.natoonline.org/wp-conten...ions-Chart.pdf ).

Looking at https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/29/213 , I see:

(b)Maximum hour requirements
The provisions of section 207 of this title shall not apply with respect to—
...

(27)
any employee employed by an establishment which is a motion picture theater;

Section 207 generally requires time and a half for over 40 hours in a week.



Harold

[Randy Stankey]

I was told, way back when, that the reason for the exemption goes back to the days of the Great Depression when people saw movie theaters as an escape from the problems of their days. If tickets to a movie cost 25¢ it would be impossible to keep a theater alive if overtime had to be paid. Then, if a theater closed, jobs would be lost in an already difficult situation.

The thought was that it was that people working to make SOME money was better than making none at all.