From an interview of Tim Meyers, a retired cinema worker, conducted by Sebastian Becerra for the first issue of the zine Cashiers du Cinéma in August 2023.

sebastian becerra: When did you start working at movie theaters, Tim?

tim meyers: July 1971. Hillside Theater, in Hillside, Illinois. It was my neighborhood theater. One big screen. 1,437 seats.

becerra: How did your impression of the theater change while you worked there?

meyers: The theater that I worked at was the new one, the flagship one. The other theaters were old theaters that they had gotten from Warner Brothers when they broke up the monopoly and sold the theaters. With those theaters came two employees who had worked for Warner Brothers. When I started there in 1971 they were old men but they had grown up through the movies there. One, Mr. Wheeler, had retired, but the one I worked with, Mr. Kennedy, became a good friend. Mr. Kennedy worked in the movies before there was even sound. He would tell me that they wore uniforms, they had to stand at attention, and that there was an inspection of the ushers. It was like an army of ushers. He came from that so he was very strict. We had to make sure the movies started every two hours on the dot. If you got too far behind—if you ended up past midnight—you were dead because the projectionist would charge double time and a whole shift if they stayed a minute past midnight.

becerra: Was that all on you as an usher?

meyers: It was all on us kids who were making $1.25 an hour! The projectionists made $27.50 which was like a lot of money in 1971! It was honestly a very corrupt union. If you charged $1.50 a ticket you had one projectionist and if you charged $2.50 you had to have two for the same job. Most of the time one of them wouldn’t be there. It was completely mobbed up, that union.

becerra: Was that a Chicago thing?

meyers: Oh yeah. Chicago for sure. The names of the projectionists were the same names of the gangsters you’d read in the newspapers!

becerra: Did you guys have time to get into any mischief there?

meyers: Oh, all the time, of course. I liked to explore the movie palaces. There was a theater, The Tivoli, in Downers Grove. It’s still there. You could climb up all the way in the back behind the screen and get up into the ceiling; you could look down into the audience. There was a theater called the Little Giant of the Loop that had about five hundred seats and was right next to the Chicago Theater. The union would make you run movies there starting at nine in the morning. I would go in at eight-thirty for the screening room and the manager would go up and say, “Okay, we’re gonna have a special screening! I hope you guys like it!” to an audience of sleeping people and I would write my little report. Who goes at nine in the morning to a movie?

becerra: Could you envision a life where you kept working at movie theaters? What would’ve been the ideal path?

meyers: No, I couldn’t. I had my ideal life. . . . The theaters in Chicago were incredible. I would lay in bed at night and think, Instead of counting sheep, I could count movie theaters.

becerra: Now how many of those are left?

meyers: One, maybe two. And they’re like “art centers,” you know? They’re not movie theaters anymore. It’s a shame how exhibition has become so institutionalized. You used to be like, “Let’s just go to the movie. It probably starts at two o’clock. If not, we’ll wait around.” You know? You didn’t have to go and look in the paper and be like, “Oh, it starts at four o’clock, seven-forty-five, and midnight. Oh, and with a lecture! And with a Q&A!” It’s like going to a school! It’s supposed to be entertainment.

I think people would rather just go to the movies. I don’t think they need to have the lecture or the book signing and all the stuff that they do in coordination with opening a freaking movie. If the director doesn’t tell me what he’s going to tell me during the movie, he doesn’t get to explain it after that.

Kids’ shows, even! Kids’ shows—you would dump your kids off at the theater, the kids would DESTROY the theater—candy and shit all over the place—and they would go home and have that memory forever. Now it’s like they have to go there at a certain time with an advance ticket and their assigned seat and a person comes and explains to them about the theater. I don’t need a lecture, it’s the movies.

becerra: Well, if you work at a movie theater long enough you start to feel a certain ownership over other movie theaters—

meyers: I remember one night I was managing the Carnegie in Chicago and the usher didn’t show up. He finally called and said he was in jail! I had to take petty cash and go to the jail, get the kid out, and get him back there by the time the evening show started. It wasn’t the first time a manager bailed out an usher. Over the years you see so much.

becerra: It sounds like the projectionists had a lot more power back in the day.

meyers: Yeah, you would be afraid to be murdered by them. They killed a guy at the Bijou Theater in Chicago. It was a porn theater. They didn’t have a union projectionist and the guy was murdered.

becerra: The non-union projectionist?

meyers: The owner was murdered. I can’t remember exactly. And during the day, too.