Film Festival

Alright, last week was some stupid film festival. I should have written about is sooner obviously but whatever. The main point of this is just for a small rant about how stupid those film fest people were. Seriously, if someone had come to me last Wednesday, the day before the festival started, and told me, “we need you to organize this,” I probably could have done a better job then these people.

So, I’m going to skip most of it for you guys and just talk about the last night of it, last Sunday. This was the night that the film festival was showing the new Michel Moore movie “Capitalism: A Love Story” or something. This was the only movie they played that seemed to draw a crowd. A crowd that hung out extremely loudly and filled our whole lobby for a good 45 minutes. You see, they said that they were starting the movie at 6:30 so people started showing up at 6:15. However, they film fest organizers failed to pay attention to the fact that the movie they were playing before that didn’t end until about 6:50.

Now obviously this is bad, and it makes US look bad. Which is stupid as shit because WE weren’t running any of this. We were literally a place of business that the film fest was renting space in to do their own thing. We had no information about what movies were playing, where they were playing, how long they were, nothing. So when customers came to ask us questions about it we, obviously, told them to talk to the festival people. The kicker being, the fucking festival people started asking us questions about shit. Ugh, hold on I’m getting ahead of myself.

So the second showing of this Capitalism movie was supposed to start at 9:00. Considering how late the first one was its no surprise the second one started late too. But of course, before it was supposed to start people began to show up. First was 2 elderly people saying they were volunteers and they were supposed to be able to watch the movie for free tonight. As usual I told them to go talk to the lady at the festival table. She wasn’t there though, no one seemed to know where she was. Well more and more people start showing up and finally the first showing ends. That organizer lady comes out of there and starts talking to us and asks if all those people, now somewhere between 8 and 12, were here for the festival. Fucking terrible.

Then around 9:15 when most of the people who would be showing up had, and they are waiting to get in, she comes up to our counter, “Do you know when you will be able to start this movie?”

When will WE start it? Its not our fucking job to start your shit. Just like it isn’t our job to know where you fucking movies are. That is why you had to fucking hire that god damn projectionist lady from fucking 50 miles away at last minute, to play your shit. It isn’t our fucking problem.

I did not say this to her of course. Eventually they finally got it started, sometime close to 9:40.

When the movie finally ended there was one last kicker for me. A person came out of the theater, and came up to me to tell me a problem he had. Something about the houselights not seeming to go down and how it bothered him the whole movie. I very politely, as I always do, told the man I was sorry and we might have been able to do something if someone had told us the problem during the movie. He didn’t seem to want to here that though, he wanted to tell me about how we should really make sure it doesn’t happen again. I explained how we at our establishment work very hard to make sure things like that don’t happen but unfortunately we were not responsible for the film festival movies or anything they failed to do. I assured him that we never let that happen when WE played movies. He gave me a look of “Oh I’m sure it wasn’t YOUR fault, of course it was someone else.” It dripped with sarcasm and all I could do was be pissed off as he walked away.

I am not a particularly angry person or anything. However if there is one thing that ticks me the fuck off, its people not understanding shit like that. When you start looking at the work my people and I do, and start telling us we are doing our jobs wrong when it isn’t our job, I will explain it to you. If a theater doesn’t get cleaned, fine that is our mistake, we can and will take responsibility for it. But when you start telling me or my team we are doing things wrong because you don’t know who is supposed to be doing it or how it is supposed to be done, then FUCK YOU.

We were doing shit we weren’t supposed to do just to keep those film fest fuckers afloat. We saved their fucking festival and what happens? They still managed to do so fucking terrible that it makes me and my team look bad simply because it happened at our location. Now, if we had done something bad, if me and mine had made ourselves look bad, then fine. But we didn’t, they made us look bad, and I am still fucking pissed about it.