Boxoffice-March.1988

SPECIAL REPORT
ON THE TEXAS PRAIRIES!
NORMAN
By Jim Kozak
Associate Editor
LEAR'S A 3 Company paid
a substantial sum of money to
acquire San Antonio's inveterate
Sanrikos theatre circuit in 1986, but at
the time it seemed hke money well
spent. With that purchase, A 3 was able
to stand astride the city like an exhibition
colossus. Gaining control of over 90
percent of San Antonio's 73 Englishspeaking
screens, A 3 inherited what a
lot of exhibition chains probably only
get to dream about: a stranglehold, if not
a virtual monopoly, on a major American
city's moviehouses.
On Nov. 5, 1987, A 3 president and
chief executive officer Scott Wallace
formally announced that Santikos was
in the process of cementing the circuit's
domination of the "Alamo City" by adding
51 new screens, a move that would
establish the Southwest's largest multiplex
in San Antonio and nearly double
the circuit's size.
Less than five days later, Wallace
would get wind of the disturbing rumor.
Word was out that a tiny Arkansas
exhibitor named Tony Rand had been
quietly snapping up Texas real estate
since 1985, and was about to construct
his own fleet of 162 brand new Texas
screens. All the new Rand screens were
said to be due for completion in 18
months, with 30 of them earmarked for
San Antonio. If the rumor proved true.
Rand was likely to manifest a serious
threat to A 3's cozy hold on San Antonio's
film patronage, and his plans were
likely to seriously dilute the value of
Santikos itself
To make matters worse, another 28 of
the Rand screens would be headed for
Austin, the same city that houses A 3's
latest acquisition, the 18-screen Presidio
circuit, which A 3 is already in the process
of expanding to 52 screens.
Today, the big question is; are Tony
Rand's plans coming to fruition? His
plans to take Rand Theatres from 33
(most in Arkansas) to 333 U.S. screens
Little Rock entrepreneur Tony Rand says
his 300-screen expansion is going to
break A 3 Theatres' stranglehold on
San Antonio exhibition.
A war of words has broken out
on the range.
by mid- 1989 would certainly constitute
one of the most ambitious expansions in
American exhibition history. By comparison,
Cineplex Odeon, perhaps North
America's most aggressive exhibition
chain in terms of expansion, only built
or acquired 208 U.S. screens in 1987, and
those over a much larger area. A 3's
Wallace can express little more than
incredulousness over Rand's claims.
"I hope that people don't get suckered
into believing that everything
somebody says is true," said Wallace in
November. "All retail businesses use
press announcements to maybe scare
off competition or to get some other
leverage in the marketplace by giving
[such] information to the press. "If
you added up all the screens that he
[Rand] says he's going to build in Dallas,
Austin and San Antonio, he would build
more screens in a single year than AMC
has ever built in a single year itself, and
[AMC is] a pretty aggressive company
with 30 or 40 people dedicated to
theatre construction."
William Anthony "Tony" Rand, 46,
the Little Rock native behind the 16-
year-old Rand (previously Multi-Cinema)
Theatres chain, really doesn't seem
to care what outsiders think of his
march into Texas, and points out that
he has never actually issued any kind of
announcement. "I've actually dodged
the press for about a year and half,"
shnigs th(' soft-spoken Rand, who has
owned many Liltk; Rock ventures over
the years, including a food and beer dis-
(amtunicd an piigt: _'2)
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