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More than you need to know about the Tropic schedule
But we thought it might be timely to fill you in on the complexities of putting together the Tropic's weekly schedule. It's a well choreographed process that involves the entire staff. Running a four-screen movie theater which struggles to get the best new movies as soon as possible is not like setting up a Netflix queue and watching your mailbox. Scot and Jeffrey decide the best films to screen at the Tropic, but going after them is always an adventure. They have too few prints. We have too few seats in too small a market. Distributors want guaranteed run terms and huge percentages of ticket sales. While the Tropic Cinema doesn't get every film it wants because of market pressures, Scot and Jeff do a near miraculous job of programming independent film for a small-town movie house. As soon as our weekly group of films is locked in, Scot sends out a special alert to let all members know What's Coming, What's Staying, What's Going. This alert is a modest membership perk. If you're not getting it, just join up and give us your email address. At the same time, Scot gets the word to our Chief Projectionist Dan Schwab. It's Dan's job to build the schedule of projection times. He has to make sure the start times are well-staggered and that the ending times are also staggered so as to manage the flow of people leaving the theater. This schedule of times is also reviewed with the Theater Manager, Lori Reid, who is always concerned about potential congestion at the concessions stand and in the bathrooms. Once the times are set, it's the job of Scot, working with our aid in all things, Patricia Bollinger, to get the word out. Tropic showtimes are listed on all the online services, from Fandango.com to Moviefone.com, and with all the iPhone apps like Showtimes and Now Playing. For this, we subscribe to csXpress, a movie database service that feeds these websites and apps. Scot logs on to csXpress, and programs in our schedule, which is automatically disseminated to the world. Did you ever wonder how our showtimes information is all over the web? Well, now you know. That takes care of online sources, but Scot still has to get the information to the local print media that carry the Tropic schedule, like Paradise, Conch Color, L'Attitudes and others. For this purpose, he prepares a weekly press release that contains a detailed description of all films and special events, as well as the schedule. That goes out to about seventy media outlets. By Tuesday, he's finished this part of the job and must turn to in-house notifications. Our box office computers use a specialized program called Splyce that lists all films and showtimes on a point-of-sales touchscreen interface. When you arrive at the theater and ask for two member tickets to Crazy Heart, the volunteer working the station need only tap a few on-screen buttons. (This system also compiles statistics on attendance, etc., but that's another story.) All in all, there are nine or ten separate documents that need to be prepared, and eight of them have a full listing of movie showtimes. With four theaters and an average of four shows in each per day that's 112 separate showtimes that must be entered on eight documents, a total of almost 900 entries. We had developed a careful proof-reading program to minimize error, but since each of these documents had a slightly different format, mistakes still crept in every once in a while. And we hated it as much as you did when you showed up for a movie at 7:00 that actually started at 6:30. That's why we've moved to a new system that standardizes the data entry, and minimizes the chance for error. Under our new system, the data need only be entered twice, once for csXpress and once for our local box office Splyce system. From then on, all the other documents can be filled in automatically. The only real drawback to this new system is that the data is in the form of a linear listing of each movie and its showtimes, e.g., "Crazy Heart- Daily at 1:30, 3:30, 5:30 and 8:30, except no 5:30 show on Monday." It does not lend itself to creating a tabular grid of showtimes. Creating that would involve retyping all 112 movie times each week, with all that risk of error. So we've modified our weekly schedule to accommodate the linear format. The info is also available online at: Phew! See you at the Tropic. On time. Matthew Helmerich,
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