My Hollywood Career

My first job was at a movie theater concession stand. The second I turned 15, I got my worker’s permit and applied to the first place that appealed to me. I was hired on the spot. I thought life was always going to be this easy.

An actual crone in the actual ticket booth
of the actual Pitt Theatre

The Pitt Theatre had been my social life since I was 11. We moved to a small North Carolina college town from the outskirts of New York City, and I might as well have landed on another planet. With my coarse, dark hair and harsh accent, I was immediately ostracized by a population of school girls who looked like cheerleaders and blonde boys with Mercury astronaut buzzcuts. So I spent the weekends in the two movie theaters in town, the State and the Pitt, one across the street from the other. My mother would drop me off. I’d see the 1 p.m. show; cross the street and see the 3 p.m. show. Then I would walk a block to the library and wait for my ride home. It was easy to do. A child’s ticket was 25 cents back then. I saw everything, and if the movie at the second theater was not to my taste, I saw the first movie twice. This was a time when you could spend the entire day in a theater. No ushers ushered you out.

The Pitt was the nicer of the two, so I went there first and asked to see the manager. I did not have to answer 20 questions posed by a panel of three. We came to terms immediately. I would report after school every day and work until 6 p.m. On weekends, I would arrive in time for the first show. I would sell candy, popcorn, soda, and snowcones. Snowcones were tricky to make, so I was glad they were seldom ordered. I was thrilled.

The elderly theater owner was also the daytime projectionist, and his elderly wife opened the concession stand each day, stocked the cash drawer and supplies. Another elderly woman sat in the ticket box. By hiring me, the owner’s wife could now leave as soon as I arrived and have the rest of her day free. I worked until the nightshift came on, another husband and wife team who worked as projectionist and concessions and closed the theater after the last show. Another old woman was in the ticket booth at night.

There was seldom anything going on during the 3-6 p.m. shift. I would serve less than a half dozen customers. The theater did inventory by cups, so if I bought a cup at the beginning of my shift, I could refill it several times for free. Candy was carefully counted at the end of the night and had to match the cash drawer, so you couldn’t stuff your face without paying. But there was a nice assortment of 2 cent candies, including Tootsie Roll Pops. A chocolate Tootsie Roll Pop, sucked slow, could last a long time.

From the concession stand, I could hear the movie, and if I opened the door in the back, I could see it. The 3 p.m. show would be underway by the time I had squared away my few customers, and my shift was over halfway through the 5 p.m. show, so I heard all the movies backward those years, the ending first, then the beginning. To this day, I prefer to watch films that way. And I like Tootsie Roll Pops.

Weekends were busier, but less fun because the other woman was there all day, too. I had to share my private little candy world. But I also got to work the much busier evening shift, sometimes as late as 9:30 when the audience for the last movie of the night had settled in.

I worked there for almost two years, until we moved. Whenever someone paid with a Kennedy half dollar, I covered it with my own money and took the Kennedys home. It was a flawed savings plan because my hefty bank deposits of Kennedy halves were exciting to look at, but when you withdrew your money, you didn’t get Kennedy halves back. I guess I could have asked for them, but in the end, my treasure trove didn’t matter. It all went to buy my incredibly bad boyfriend his first car, a Ford Falcon stick shift I couldn’t even drive.

My fondest memories:

The movies changed every week, but “Sound of Music” was so popular, it played for an entire month, and we even added weekend shows. There was a lot of overtime. People dressed up to come see it. I heard the soundtrack so many times, for years afterward I could sing (badly) the entire score.

I lived in a college town, and the Clint Eastwood spaghetti westerns would actually bring in business during my slow day shifts. College boys came to the matinees. They seemed exotic and dangerous and laughed at the over-the-top gun slinging.

On weekends, if there was a kid movie playing, too many parents would drop their kids off unattended. Sometimes they did it for horror movies, too (which looking back, were not that horrible compared to now). The scared kids would hang out at the concession stand with me rather than go inside the theater, all full of fake bluster and bravery.

Once in a rare while, the crones who sat in the ticket booth took time off. Usually the nightshift concession woman took over the tickets and I was called in to work night concessions, but if it was a really big movie, everyone thought she could handle concessions alone better than me, so I got the ticket booth. This was the most exciting thing, to be in the box, the face of the theater, distributing the magic tickets. It was even more heady when kids I knew from school, the cheerleaders and Mercury astronauts, had to stand on line for me to sell them a ticket. Somehow I felt vindicated.

Even though it was released in 1962, the film “Phaedra” with Anthony Perkins and Melina Mercouri played during my concession years. It was a racy movie and something of a local sensation. People almost wore hoods and masks when they came to see it, as if they were in an adult bookstore. The plot was the wife of a Greek shipping tycoon seduces his son from a previous marriage. It was adults-only, but no one thought to ban the 15-year-old girl working the concession stand. Even so, the film seemed so erotically steamy to me, I could only bear to open the back door of the concession booth briefly to see what was going on. Recently I watched it on Netflix and couldn't even sit through it, it was so tedious.

When we moved, this job was the only thing I missed about living in that town. I could have gone far in the movie business.