Competing Theaters Pray for Films Rated L--for ‘Legs’

Does “National Lampoon’s European Vacation” have “legs”?

David Guastavino doubts it.

“I think it’s already dropping off,” said Guastavino, manager of Woodland Hills Cinema, where the film is playing.

Two weekends ago, the goofy comedy starring Chevy Chase sold $12.3 million in tickets to become the nation’s top-grossing film. But Guastavino is not certain that it will continue to fill theater seats over the long haul. Movies that do so are said to have legs.

Last summer, Guastavino’s three-plex showed a comedy called “Ghostbusters” that had legs to die for. The surprise hit helped produce the best summer in box-office history, with a gross of $1.58 billion.

Microcosm of Business

The people who run movie theaters worry about legs, and nowhere more so than in Woodland Hills, where there is hot competition for customers’ $5 bills. There are almost 5,000 seats to fill in four theaters in a square-mile area anchored by Topanga Plaza and Promenade Mall.

As they jockey for summer films and film-goers, that cluster of theaters is a microcosm of the movie business, as indicated by recent visits to the four theaters.

The movie everyone wants to see is usually playing in only one of those theaters at any one time because distributors typically parcel out first-run movies to one theater per distribution zone. Yet seats must be filled even when a theater doesn’t have “Rambo.”

Each of the complexes in the West Valley has a character of its own. Removed from the film-buying end of the business, their managers pray for good pictures and customers who can’t resist the snack bar.

The Woodland Hills moviegoer who doesn’t want to leave the neighborhood can choose among Guastavino’s three-screen complex in the Best Plaza on Victory Boulevard, the Topanga Twin at Victory and Topanga Canyon boulevards, and the six-screen UA Warner Center on Canoga Avenue.

Besides the first-run movie houses, the Boulevard Cinema, just into Canoga Park on Topanga, reopened in June as a single-screen “sub-run theater” that shows double features.

Lucked Into ‘Ghostbusters’

“For us, this summer isn’t quite as good as last year,” Guastavino said, although he wouldn’t say just how steeply business has declined. “Last summer we lucked into a couple of pictures that nobody expected to be as successful as they were--namely, ‘Ghostbusters’ and ‘Gremlins.’ ” The smart money was on “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.”

The key to making money in the movie business, Guastavino said, is having the right picture. No theater owner knows what that picture will be until he’s got it--and he’s got a crowd-control problem outside and people inside throwing money at the concession stand.

Guastavino said he thinks pictures for mature audiences do particularly well in his theater complex. The Woodland Hills has 30-foot-wide screens, in contrast with the Topanga Twin’s 60-foot-wide ones, and that makes for a more intimate kind of movie experience that appeals to many adults, he said.

“I think being inundated by images is great when you’re watching ‘Star Wars’ or ‘2001--A Space Odyssey,’ ” Guastavino said. “But when you’re watching ‘Tender Mercies’ you don’t want Robert Duvall breathing down your throat.”

‘Sleepers’ and ‘Turkeys’

Every theater manager seems to have a favorite “sleeper” story and a favorite “turkey” story, often combined as one anecdote. Guastavino recalled Christmas, 1982. The movie business has two “green” seasons--summer and Christmas vacation--during which a theater often takes in half its yearly gross. That Christmas, Guastavino was convinced he had a sure thing.

“We had a picture we were sure was going to be the movie: ‘Six Weeks.’ How could it miss? Mary Tyler Moore was coming off ‘Ordinary People,’ and Dudley Moore had never had a bomb to that point.”

It missed.

The movie that season was a picture called “Tootsie.”

Even if Guastavino could predict the cinematic future, he wouldn’t necessarily cash in at the box office. He has no control over the movies he shows. Woodland Hills is a General Cinema Corp. theater. Like most chain theaters, it shows what the company’s film buyer tells it to show. Film-buying in California is a poker game in which you can’t see your own hand. Most films here are bought unseen by the buyers, a practice known as blind bidding.

Guastavino recalled being told, “ ‘You’re getting such and such at Christmas. So and so is in it.’ And that’s all you know about it.”

This summer it was apparently the UA Warner Center’s turn to get lucky. UA is the largest and busiest theater complex in the area. It is so busy that it channels customers waiting to get in through crowd-control lanes like those at Disneyland. Its island snack bar floats in the middle of the lobby, encouraging customers to converge from every direction in pursuit of Junior Mints.

Season’s Grosses Are Down

According to Variety and other sources, this season’s grosses nationwide may be as much as 30% less than last summer’s. Not at United Artists’ Warner Center.

“We’re up 30% over last summer,” manager George Gerrard said as he stood in the lobby with his wife, Kathy, who also has managed the theater.

Business may be booming at UA so far, but every Friday, when the bill changes, it’s a new card game. Three unknown quantities opened on Warner Center screens a week ago. They were an R-rated horror film, a G-rated movie starring Sesame Street’s Big Bird, and “Weird Science,” a new PG-13 feature directed by John Hughes, who made “The Breakfast Club.”

Two features that had been playing separately and had begun to fall off--”The Man With One Red Shoe” and “The Heavenly Kid”--were combined into a PG-or-purer double bill. “Back to the Future,” which promises to have legs like crazy, was held over.

On Friday, UA shuffled the cards once again. The sluggish double bill was dropped and two new features opened--”Pee-wee’s Big Adventure” and “Real Genius,” both rated PG. Unlikely roommates working different shifts, the Sesame Street-based “Follow That Bird,” shown in matinees only, and “Fright Night” were moved into the same auditorium, with separate admissions.

100% Occupancy Sought

Warner Center has about 2,000 seats in six auditoriums of varying size. Gerrard thinks of his theater seats as the equivalent of motel rooms. He wants a 100% occupancy rate without overcrowding and shifts movies accordingly.

Last summer’s “The Karate Kid,” for instance, was promoted from a small theater to a big one when it became a hit.

Sometimes managers are contractually denied such flexibility. Warner Center booked “Cocoon” with the promise that it would stay in the largest theater. An attempted shift would not go unnoticed. As Gerrard pointed out, “Ron Howard, the director, and his wife come in here all the time.”

“The idea in a plex is you have something for everyone,” explained Dan Chernow, spokesman for Pacific Theaters Corp., which owns the 1,200-seat Topanga Twin managed by Marion Laubmayer. Theaters want to attract everyone old enough to put money through the ticket window and therefore try for a mix of films, rated G through R.

As Chernow said: “Kids are wonderful at the snack bar, and that’s nice. Adults are the ones who pay the admissions, and that’s nice. Young people in between are the ones who go all the time, and that’s nice, too.”

Bias Toward Children

Topanga’s current fare is skewed toward the childish end of the spectrum, but nobody in management is complaining. Until Friday, the theater had the reissued “E.T.” and the new animated Disney film, “The Black Cauldron.”

The weekend before last, the two movies were the third- and fourth-biggest nationwide, with combined grosses of $9.2 million. Rated PG and G, respectively, they also are what managers refer to as “good candy pictures,” which means they move a lot of dollar boxes of Milk Duds.

On Friday, the bill changed and two more movies sure to move Milk Duds opened--”Summer Rental” and “My Science Project,” both rated PG.

The concession stand is a theater’s license to print money. Local managers won’t talk dollars and cents, but, Chernow said, “It’s true today that for many theaters the difference between being in the red and being in the black is your concessions.”

Sought Red Vines

In chain operations, the goodies are often regulated as rigidly as the movies. Guastavino, for example, had a tough time booking Red Vines, a native California confection. Boston-based General Cinema didn’t know from Red Vines.

“It took us a couple of years to convince them that everybody who goes to the movies in the West wanted Red Vines,” he said. “They said, ‘If you want to stock licorice, buy Switzer’s,’ which is a national brand.”

“The markup on candy is only 100%,” Guastavino said, which means that many theaters stock it almost as a courtesy to their patrons with a sweet tooth.

The markup on popcorn is obscene. Guastavino won’t reveal what it is. He joked that he fears being sued. In some theaters popcorn is said to account for a quarter of the profit. Soft drinks also are hugely profitable.

Popcorn Strategy

At Woodland Hills the big bucket of popcorn costs $3. Ounce for ounce it is a better buy than the smaller sizes, Guastavino insisted. “You may argue, ‘Who the hell needs 168 ounces of popcorn?’ But, as I jokingly say when some guy tells me, ‘I can’t eat all this’: ‘You can always take it home, and nobody says you can’t leave it in your will.’ ”

Real butter, he said, has vanished at theaters. The last time he checked, butter was selling for $3.70 a pound. And that is without the added cost of special processing required to remove water that would otherwise make for soggy popcorn.

The theater does pop its own corn, however. “Nobody believes that, because we do it in a room on the second floor, not at the counter,” said Guastavino, who occasionally escorts skeptics upstairs.

Lance Alspaugh, who manages the modest Boulevard Cinema, doesn’t really compete with the big boys on the east side of Topanga. If some high-tech theater complexes feel like the inside of a video game, the Boulevard feels like the inside of a classic movie house, the sort of dark, cool place you went to every Saturday when you were a kid and every Saturday night once you discovered that holding hands was even better than a double feature.

Playing in the Minors

As the only second-run theater in the neighborhood, the Boulevard plays in the minors against the West Valley’s two other sub-run houses, the Holiday and Mann’s Fox, both in Canoga Park.

Alspaugh opened the theater, which had been vacant for seven months, in June. He leases it from an out-of-state owner, and spent $10,000 installing a Dolby sound system, 450 new seats and a new marquee.

Like everyone else, he charges a small fortune for popcorn--$2.50 for 170 ounces.

On the other hand, a double feature at the Boulevard costs 99 cents, down from an initial $2.50, because audiences “weren’t buying the theater at that price.”

Alspaugh has a clear sense that he isn’t selling any one film so much as customer satisfaction in getting a bargain. “A family of five can go to a double feature here for the price of a regular admission ticket at a first-run theater,” he said. He recently distributed 2,000 two-for-one coupons in the area, making the same deal available to families of 10.

Leftovers Do Well

Until Friday, the theater was showing the latest James Bond movie, “A View to a Kill,” and “Explorers.” The latter died at the first-run houses across the country but has done well at the Boulevard, where it has been held over. At a reduced price, in combination with the Bond movie, “Explorers” is apparently perceived as a good deal if not a good picture.

“We got this picture by default,” he said of “Explorers.” Mann’s Fox has corporate clout and skims off the movies it wants as soon as the first-run theaters let go of them. Alspaugh then arm-wrestles for what’s left with the Holiday, an independent theater with a $2 admission and a track record attractive to film distributors.

“The Holiday got ‘The Goonies’ and ‘Fletch,’ which we would have been happy to get, and the Topanga Twin let go of this picture,” Alspaugh said.

This Friday, he got “The Goonies” as well as “The Man With One Red Shoe,” which the UA Warner Center had released.

Like the heavy hitters in their multiplexes, Alspaugh said, he prays that the air conditioning holds up. He’s got to make his money while the summer sun shines.

“The 90 days from Labor Day to Dec. 1 are the most brutal for a theater,” he said. “You try to do as well as you can in the summer in order to survive the fall.”

Fortunately, popcorn has legs.