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Being a theatre owner involved heavily with day-to-day operations (Projection, selling tickets, BOR sending, equipment monitoring, etc.) can lead to a bizarre work schedule.

I'm wondering what work schedules you "involved" theatre owners use to make sure you get: the bills paid on time, the BORs sent and paid for, etc...

- mannooss

There are 168 hours in a week. Sleep on average seven hours a night. That leaves 119 hours. Read trade magazines when I eat alone. Shop for theatre goods and supplies and preview movies on my "day off". Check bigscreenbiz and read trade info on internet. Transport supplies back and forth between theatres. Pay bills. Order stuff. Bank. Box office reports and stats in Excel. Schedule employees. Repair stuff. Upgrade other stuff. Book movies. Write and send newsletter. Change answering machines. Respond to telephone messages and e-mails. Make-up, tear down movies and trailers. Weekly Rotary Club meetings. There to open and close and everything in between (including cleaning toilets) at every showing at one location. Check on other location. Pull hair out when time available. Time left?

[This message has been edited by BurneyFalls (edited December 03, 2006).]

I don't have kids: We own two theatres. My wife runs one and my manger the other. We doo all book work and booking and management from the office. There is no possibility of a standard 40 hour work week for a small theatre owner. Yes we work longer than 40 hours but we can also take off a night or a day if we feel like it and we do.

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Michael Hurley
Impresario

I am on vacation this week which means shutting down for the week. I eat, drink and sleep this business. I do 100% of the booking, projection, accounting and most of the cleaning. I have somebody run the shows for me on Tuesdays and Wednesdays but otherwise my wife and I are the Elkader Cinema. We live upstairs so we are always there and I find myself working morning, noon & night almost evry night. We try as hard as we can to not do theater stuff on Tuesday and Wednesday but we don't always get our way. I have a computer set-up in the concession stand so when the show is on I can do lots of the bill paying, website updating sort of computer work during the movies which helps. Schedule? Jeez, I wish I could keep a schedule.

Wow leeler--you shut down for a week. Are your patrons mad at you for taking a few days off?

no, we started shutting down a few weeks a year and it has been fine. The trick is to find the right weeks to take off. We figured mid December was a slow week anyway. We also closed down for county fair week in August. I'd like to do one in the late spring/early summer time frame too, but we'll see if some week presents itself. Maybe first week of the swimming pool being open? Anyway, the customers don't seem to mind and they understand we need a vacation too.

The family I grew up working for has closed on their parade day for probably 50 years. They also take a couple of short, scheduled breaks a year... maybe a week or so. It's been going on for many years, and the community doesn't seem to mind.

Like anything else... the first year or so would probably be the hardest.

I have always gone to weekends only between Thanksgiving weekend and Christmas. I have been doing that for over 35 years now, and no one seems to be concerned about it. If I were open those weekdays, very few people would come anyway. There is just too much else going on during the holiday season to give people time for movies.

If you play a decent movie during that period you have wasted it. It will do only half the business that it would do a few weeks later. I have often had people say to me: "When are you going to play such and such movie?" I'd answer that I played it in mid December, and they would tell me that they were disapointed to have missed it, and why did I play it when people have no time to get to the theatre while preparing for the holidays.

I don't think anyone misses the theatre during that period, and therefore it's a great time to close and take some needed vacation time.

How about late February, early March, when us snow bunnies are very tired of winter?

For us this is a very important time to be open as gift certificates sales go through the roof. If we were closed we would lose a ton of sales. Also watch the grosses over this coming weekend as Chatlottes Web takes off. Also we have a many schools bringing groups as a reward prior to vacation. All of these allow December to be a very good month for us.
If I were to close it would be after Labor day -Best time of the year to be outside in Maine.