Solving a Mystery Midweek--at the Movies

Just before 11 on a weekday morning, a kernel of popcorn--lightly salted--rests in my mouth. I wash it down with a sip from the jumbo-size soda that sits cradled in an armrest holder. In the near-empty theater, I can hear the clicking of the slide projector showing commercials.

The matinee, the first show of the day in the San Fernando Valley, is soon to roll.

A gentleman in an upper row reads a newspaper. An elderly woman with silver hair and the leisurely dress of the long-retired takes an optimum seat in the middle of the theater. Two older ladies chat in mid-range whispers.

The theater holds 154. I make five.

Showtime is a good quarter of an hour away.

How I came to be sitting in a darkened theater on a workday has everything to do with envy and little to do with sloth. Technically, I am here working. I consider that fact with a smile as I watch theater-goers numbers six and seven--a mother and daughter--choose seats on the aisle a few rows down from me.

“How’s this one?” the woman inquires. I make a note of it.

I am getting to the bottom of a mystery that has plagued me ever since I came to work here in the Valley, across the street from a spanking new googleplex that begins to fill with cars mid-morning.

Who the heck are those people who can just idle away the hours at the movies in the middle of a workday?

“Certainly when kids are out of school we have a lot more at the shows,” said Michael Miner of the Fallbrook General Cinema. “That’s one of our mainstays.”

“We get a lot of older people,” said Jennifer Anderson, manager of a sister theater in Sherman Oaks. “We get more people on a rainy day.”

I count 73 cars in the parking lot when I arrive. The sun beats down on the expanse of blacktop, making the jutting pastel architecture of the theater rise like a desert mirage complete with swaying palm trees.

It seems fitting. I am not interested in the mundane. After all, what does a weekday movie trip have to do with most people’s reality?

The first film I can remember seeing in a theater was “Pinocchio.” I’m sure it was a matinee because that’s what we usually went to when I was little.

My father is a high school teacher. My mom stayed at home. In 1976 she had four kids under the age of 6 (eventually there would be six in all). We took vacations by car, shopped at Kmart and went to matinees.

I have a vivid memory of Pinocchio because of what happened in the theater when the great whale appeared on screen.

“Dad, it’s time to go,” screamed a young family friend. “Come on, Dad. Let’s go now.”

This is what I’m thinking about as I sit in the cavernous theater nearly alone. The lights dim and the room suddenly feels like the belly of the great whale. I feel like Geppetto.

A woman I overheard ordering a ticket in a thick Eastern European accent enters. A man wearing polyester shorts and athletic socks pulled high takes a seat. He looks fortyish, with bookish glasses. A professional-looking man in shirt sleeves and a tie makes 10. Another middle-aged man. A young man in a red baseball cap. We are an even dozen.

Matinees, say theater managers and marketing directors, are not really big business for the movie industry. The National Assn. of Theater Owners doesn’t even compile statistics on matinee ticket sales. Some theater chains lump all bargain tickets together--so a student ticket in the evening is counted in the same way as a ticket sold before 5 p.m.

“It just doesn’t really matter,” said Dennis Daniels, vice president of operations for United Artists movie theaters. “There is no real reason to keep track of it because it’s such a small part of our business.”

But for some reason, it matters to me. When I first moved to California several months ago, I had no job and plenty of free time. Hours blended into days into weeks. What was I doing?

Every time I look at cars in the theater lot, I wonder about all the time I’ve wasted. The matinee--it seems to me--would have been the perfect way to spend my afternoons. But maybe having nothing better to do, I couldn’t appreciate it.

By matinee I do not mean the early show on a weekend, the cheap seats, but the true spirit of the word: the dodge from work, the descent into the fantasy world of the motion picture, the reason why the word has become a double entendre.

Did I want butter flavor on my order, the clerk had asked, and I decided that yes, I did. But now comfortably in my seat I reconsider my choice of popcorn. I had turned down the pretzel, the bonbon, the licorice.

I don’t even much like movie popcorn, but it seems to me that you can’t properly go to a matinee without it.

The Pacific Theatres in Chatsworth, where I am seeing my flick, is the newest complex in the Valley. It opened in February, replacing an old drive-in that would have held little temptation in the daylight hours.

At Pacific Theatres they do keep track of matinee-goers. Oscar Balderrama, a theater manager, said matinee business has been growing slightly. The week the theater opened in February, nearly 9,000 souls saw movies there on a weekday. Since then, things have slowed down, to about 4,000 a week. This seems like a lot until you consider that the entire movie complex can hold 5,900 at a showing for 630 shows a week.

In the theater, I decide to get the stories of my fellow movie watchers. I talk to people all the time for my job. I’ve gone up to total strangers on the street and asked about their political views, their thoughts on the weather, recent tragedies. I’ve talked to relatives of accident victims through screen doors, put my foot inside the front door of one of Ted Kaczynski’s childhood neighbors so he’d let me in to talk.

But suddenly in this theater, I feel like maybe it’s none of my business.

I like to think these people have stolen away from their lives, and they don’t seem eager to confess their small sin.

It seems enough to leave it at that.

On my way back to work, I count 162 cars in the parking lot.