Oh, AMC Theatres. I hope terrible things happen to you every day for the rest of your life.

So after four years of waiting, I finally went to see The Wolfman tonight.

Werewolf of London was the first Universal Monster Movie I ever saw. Universal Monster Movies are the reason I became a filmmaker. I was pretty damn excited.

I get to the theatre, I pay for my ticket, I sit down.

And then the bullshit begins.

First, they've got some aspect ratio issue with what must have been a digital projector because everything is in 4:3 and numbers keep flashing at the corners of the screen (which at this point are located on the ceiling and in the second row). They several configurations, all of which STOP ME FROM BEING ABLE TO SEE THE MOVIE, and none of them look right.

Everyone, including myself, is at this point too distracted to enjoy anything on the screen. Great.

They finally get the image to fill the screen. By stretching it. Guess what, it looks awful. So they put it back into 4:3 with the image spilling all the way off the screen at the top and bottom. Lots of people leave and complain, because this is a midnight showing and everyone wants to see the damn thing.

Finally, an employee walks in, stares at the screen, and walks back out. "Oh wow, yeah that's pretty terrible. I should probably leave before someone gets angry."

Eventually they fix the image so it looks like an actual 35mm film being projected onto a movie theater screen. Everyone breathes a sigh of relief. This is about forty minutes in. Unfortunately, everyone soon realizes that they actually adjusted the image so everyone is cut off at the shoulders. Great, we fit the screen, yet we can't frame properly.

I was a projectionist for almost three years so at this point I'm considering going up and fixing the damn thing myself, since there's no reason a projectionist can't get a movie on the screen, let alone can't turn the goddamn framing knob an inch to the right.

Some asshole comes in and extends the screen ratio to 2:35. Seeing as the film is 1:85, all this does is make nice, glowy black lines on either side to distract us further. Thanks, prick.

Finally, an hour and fifteen minutes in, they adjust the image so we've got feet on the top of the screen, a big black bar in the middle, and heads on the bottom. You can't see or understand a single image. And nobody fixes this. They leave it that way.

That's when the shit hit the fan. Hard.

Everyone storms out of the theater at once. I walk out and see people angrily running around the lobby. Some look lost. Some are yelling obscenities. Yet, I see no employees. I finally get one of the thirty or so people to stop running around long enough to tell me that there are no employees ANYWHERE.

So what did we all do? Well, people started splitting into groups and searching. We searched through theaters, we went upstairs to the offices and banged on doors, we used the phone at reception to dial every extension, we even went into the projection booth.

Every employee bailed.

Wow, AMC. Well played. You tried to upset us with the framing, clever. You made it unwatchable, daring. Ah, but abandoning the theater in the hopes of avoiding an angry crowd of horror fans? Bold, AMC. Quite bold.

Around then people started discussing the possibility of pilfering posters and standees, candy and pretzels. Hateful notes were left at reception. I think mine read:

"To the manager responsible for 2/11/10 Midnight screenings-
I waited four years for this movie to come out and I didn't even get to finish it.
You've made it clear you don't care by not being here to apologize and not fixing the problem.
As a customer, fuck you. As a filmmaker, fuck you. Thank you for being a terrible movie theater. Go to Hell."

Now, I'll have you know this was the latest in a series of blatantly unnecessary technical issues at this theater. For the curious:

AMC Theaters 20 at the Tallahassee Mall
Tallahassee, FL


They ruined Wolfman, the bastards.