'The cinema staff who work the box office and concessions, and tear the tickets, my projectionists, all the cinema managers — they can’t work from home'
Photo: Getty Images “I’ve been in the business all my life,” says Los Angeles independent theater owner Lance Alspaugh. “The earthquake in California in ’94 was pretty bad. The [1993] riots in California, that was pretty bad. You had 9/11, that was pretty bad for movie theaters. But this is probably the biggest challenge.”
So they looked to one another. “My initial plan after speaking with other film heads, other cinemas in the city, all the independents, was that we were all going to take our cue from the city,” explains Gina Duncan, VP of film and strategic programming at Brooklyn Academy of Music.
But none of them harbor any illusions about the choppy waters ahead. “I’m in a different position than some of the smaller screens or other places that are just completely independent,” Duncan notes, as BAM is a not-for-profit entity. “But just like them, we rely on ticket sales and fundraising, and both of those things are hard to do right now.”
That’s proving a difficult proposition for these small theaters, with overhead to cover and nothing coming into the box office. At Alspaugh’s theaters in Los Angeles, which include the Vista and the Los Feliz 3, he’s working out strategies to stagger pay periods, provide vacation pay , or worst-case scenario, let people go so they can apply for unemployment, though “we don’t really want to terminate anyone.
They set up the Cinema Worker Solidarity Fund, a GoFundMe to provide immediate assistance to those employees. “By Monday morning, we had raised enough to guarantee a $200 payment to the first 150 people who applied, and that will be sent to each person directly using information they submitted to us,” Pettengill says. “Now, we’ve raised our fundraising target to $62,000, which will allow us to give the same amount to another batch of 150 who have applied and are waiting.
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