Boxoffice-November.2001

Bettencourt says he's lucky—the
Brattle's staff is older, and close like a
family. But he has worked with
teenage employees in the past, including
at a Rhode Island mall theatre
where a popcorn machine fire once
forced the evacuation of the audience.
"It can be difficult." he says. "You
don't want anything to happen to your
employees. One thing for teenagers,
they usually don't have too much pride
in where they work, I've noticed.
That's tough in a fire, keeping them
there doing their job, not having them
run out. You have to spend extra time
[training] them."
Lotter of the Paradise Cinema 7
credits his staff's training for their
smooth handling of the bomb threat.
"Before they touch the cash register
or learn to pop popcorn, they get
six hours of training on safety and
customer service," he says. "If you
have a staff that is not green,... they
know what to do."
Training
regimes, like security
policies, vary from theatre to
theatre.
For Harkins, it means all new employees
are shown evacuation plans
and are trained to deal with specific situations
such as robberies, Pitzer says.
He says that training is ongoing and
that a corporate committee, including
members of both the operations and
human resources staff, get together to
revise security procedures.
For the Brattle's Bettencourt, a
previous East Coast theatre assigned
jobs to each staff member in the case
of an emergency.
"A good th ing fo
owners and managers
to think about
is to imagine if
yon didn't evacuate
and people were injured.
How are you going to
deal with that?"
"Concession would go to certain
cinemas and open the doors and let
people know, then go out themselves,"
he says. "Box office would lock the
money drawers, leave the box-office
area, then go to a cinema and help
with getting people out."
The staff were manned with special
flashlights to guide people to exits in
the dark. The staff practiced their
positions with two drills in six months,
Bettencourt says.
Compare that with a medium-sized
theatre circuit's procedures. A management
employee at an art-house that
was bought fairly recently by a corporation
says the staff — has received no
safety directives "not even an
employee handout"—from its headquarters
in the past three years.
"They don't have very much communication
with us," the employee said.
Like
The movie brings them in., but the POPCORN
NATO, its Canadian counterpart,
the Motion Picture
Theatre Associations of Canada,
does not issue specific guidelines
to its members. However, the association's
executive director, Adina Lebo,
says its members' provincial meetings
regularly include discussions of security
issues. And the national organization
helps spread that information
through its publication. Cine-Scope,
which comes out three times a year.
Lebo remembers one particularly
effective security exercise at an
Alberta association meeting in 1999.
During a police officer's lecture, a
"robber" ran in, grabbed some items
brings them BACK
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68 Hoxoiiki
Response No. 73