Boxoffice - October 2018

the time in the shipping department of
my dad’s company until he let me do
sales; I started selling short subjects and
cartoons.
I went from that to selling film. My
territory was the 13 western states. As
a young married man, I had to travel
to Denver, Salt Lake City, Portland,
Seattle, San Francisco, San Diego, and
Hawaii every other month. That was a
great learning experience. In those days,
all the exhibitors actually had offices in
these cities. You’d actually go and sell
these guys where they lived. There’s no
replacing that experience. I wouldn’t say
it was fun, because it was a lot of pressure
on a young man to perform. If you didn’t
come back with a lot of bookings, you’d
hear about it. It was just a fabulous way
to get out there, interact with exhibitors,
and learn the business.
A lot of things were going on back
then that you don’t have now, since all
the clearances are gone. You had to worry
about clearances first and foremost. There
was a certain mileage requirement, so you
had to have these big charts: “I can’t take
that theater with this theater, and I can’t
take this theater with that theater.”
The good news about all that was
you could stay at a theater longer. You
were in a zone all by yourself, and there
wasn’t anything like home entertainment
to worry about. If the picture was doing
well, you could hold it over for a long period
of time: 10, 12, 15, 20 weeks. Now,
of course, you open on 4,000 screens
and the theaters are playing across the
street from each other. All the grosses are
compacted into the first week, which is
why we’re seeing 50 or 60 percent drops
in week 2. Nobody gets turned away
anymore. There are no lines. We used to
love lines. We would create lines! Five
years ago I owned an art house theater
up in Monterey, a six-plex. Even if there
were only 20 people and we had plenty
of room for them, we’d make them wait
in line outside until the show started,
so that when people were walking by
it looked like, “Whoa, must be a good
movie—there’s a line outside!” That’s part
of the old showmanship that’s kind of
lost nowadays. That’s how I cut my teeth;
that’s how I got started.
After you were up and running, did you
ever think of stepping back and doing
law like you intended?
Once it’s in your blood, there’s no going
back to doing anything else. My dad
retired and I started my own business.
I called it Borde Films. I created a very
successful independent company called
Legacy. Then I sold Legacy to a company
called Independent Artists and worked
with them for a year. Then I went to
work for Robert Vince and Keystone as
president of distribution—we did the
Air Bud movies.
Then I started a company called
Innovation Film Group. At that time I
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TIM LEAGUE
PHOTOGRAPHED BY VICTORIA STEVENS
OCTOBER 2018 BOXOFFICE ® 79