Popping at a Theater Near You

As CEO of Metropolitan Concessions Industries, Allen Gilbert didn’t need to refer to Daily Variety to find out that “Meet Joe Black” was tanking or that “The Waterboy” had begun to reap absurd box office. “Through popcorn sales,” Gilbert says, “we can tell how well a movie is doing without looking at the grosses.”

With shipments of 10 million pounds of popcorn per annum throughout the state, and 200,000 square feet of City of Industry warehouse space, Metropolitan supplies the vast majority of the popcorn now being scarfed down at Southern California movie houses. For the Edwards, Mann, Pacific, United Artists and Century theater concerns, Gilbert also furnishes a “one-stop shop” encompassing popping equipment, tubs and bags, oil, hot dogs and the charming little counter-top carousels to cook them in, candy, napkins, soft drink syrups and so forth.

The Metropolitan mascot is deceptively nostalgic--a stylized clown with a receding hairline, star-shaped eyes and a sun-yellow Elizabethan collar. Its product is anything but, as Gilbert’s three Iowa suppliers avail themselves of computer technology and genetics to minimize popcorn crumbling and ensure uniform size and color. Sifters keep twigs and rocks and other incidental bits of nature from reaching the popper. “Years ago,” Gilbert recalls, “we dealt with an occasional case of a customer chipping a tooth or biting a foreign object. But we haven’t heard of that in several years, and I think that is part of the improvement of the technology.”

When Metropolitan was launched in 1972, mom-and-pop popcorn suppliers still provided a good share of theater popcorn, catering to independents and one-screen palaces.With its economies of scale and volume discounts for gargantuan customers, Metropolitan’s domination of the concession trade has mirrored the growing hegemony of the chains and the multiplexes. As seasonal as the Hollywood blockbuster, it garners 75% of its gross during the summer and a fall-winter stretch bordered by Thanksgiving and Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Children’s movies yield greater popcorn sales than most R-rated films, possibly because the kids’ snack combo offers a rare somewhat-economical loophole in concession pricing. Horror movies also encourage nervous consumption.

While Metropolitan does traffic in pre-popped popcorn, Gilbert contends that most concessionaires wouldn’t dare deprive their patrons of the buttery, oily, Pavlovian stench that only a just-exploded kernel can emit. “There’s something about that fresh-baked popcorn smell,” Gilbert assures, “that people find very attractive.”