College Road Trip - 5 Tubs

I was on door duty between sets on Saturday. A rather unattractive woman with a German accent came in with her husband who was in a wheelchair. She handed me one ticket and when I asked about the ticket for her husband, she gave me this line about he didn't have to pay because he was in a wheelchair and did not take up a seat. I explained to the lady that he was paying to see a movie, not to rent a seat; she insisted that she'd never had to pay before - but we hear these excuses all the time and if he wanted to see the movie, we were going to need a ticket. About that time a wind storm, with wind gusts up to 50 MPH knocked out power to our theater. It was out for about an hour and a half. We had to clear the theater, auditorium by auditorium, with two managers going around giving everyone a rain check for a later movie. It went pretty smoothly on the east side of the building, but the fans in College Road Trip were less than understanding; in fact they were downright rude and extremely messy. One can forgive the mess - their show had just been interrupted and they'd spent all this money on concessions only to get half way through the movie and have it quit on them. What we won't forgive is the rudeness and the refusal by many of the people in College Road Trip who, rather than waiting inside the auditorium as requested, flooded the lobby and hindered others from getting their rain check as quickly as might have been possible.

One bitch - there's no better word for her and God knows she's a bitch - demanded double rain passes for her and her spawn due to our inconveniencing them. She pushed past others who were patiently waiting and started accusing the manager of causing the power failure. I'm surprised she didn't accuse George Bush - he gets blamed for every other act of nature.

When the power came back on, the movies picked up where they left off, because you can't just reverse the projector and rewind the film. It has to play out onto a platter, which is then lifted and taken to a separate table where another machine rewinds the film for the next showing. So once the lights were back on and I could see how to clean the theaters, I went into College Road Trip to clean up after The Bitch and other impatient patrons. It took me 45 minutes to clean that auditorium. Three trash containers were overflowing and I filled two more 45 gallon plastic bags with trash left by the movie-goers.

The thing is, regardless of whether the power had failed or not, these guests were not going to take their trash with them anyway. That's the quality of our audience that is attracted to this sort of film. In two weeks, Meet the Browns will open, and I predict right now that the same people are going to completely trash the theater. If they don't, I'll quit my job at the theater. Past experience has taught us that G-rated movies and movies that attract a predominantly black audience will require twice as many ushers and twice as much time to clean as any other movie being played at the same time. It's not a matter of racial prejudice, it's just the way it is. Even our black employees dread this sort of movie and some are already planning on calling in sick when Meet The Browns opens on Good Friday.

College Road Trip is a pretty tame family movie, starring Raven and Martin Lawrence. It's about a dad who doesn't want his little girl growing up and moving away. His job is to protect her. Raven's character wants her freedom and for her dad to trust her to make the right decisions in life. Donny Osmond and his on-screen wife are the token whites who are portrayed as being obnoxiously positive. CRT would have made a better made-for-TV movie than a big screen release, but that's not going to stop fans of Martin or Raven from throwing hard earned money away along with a ton of trash. I hope I'm not working when The Bitch or the German woman returns with their raincheck.

I wanted to write more positive stories about theater patrons and the movie industry in general, but there's little I can say positive about the kind of people who first demonstrate their total lack of respect for others and who think that their color or disability or other 'difference' makes them better than the rest of us.