[Dixielandjazz] What Business Are We In? - Entertainment

[Steve barbone]

CAVEAT - LONG POST - NOT OKOM - HOWEVER, A CUTTING EDGE ENTERTAINMENT VIEW

Like it or not, bands and Festivals are in the Entertainment Business. Our
main competition? "Home Entertainment".

It is no longer enough to just present Music Festivals. Attendance is
declining all over the place. What to do? Re-Invent! Think outside the box.
Here is what someone else in the ENTERTAINMENT BUSINESS is doing about it.

They refused to accept the premise that people were no longer interested in
going to the movies. They changed the total experience. We (band leaders and
promoters) can do that to with a great chance of success also.

Will we? Depends upon "management" and that's another subject.

Cheers,
Steve


Liked the Movie, Loved the Megaplex

By BRUCE WEBER August 17, 2005 NY Times

BOCA RATON, Fla. - It was Saturday night at the Palace 20, a huge megaplex
here designed in an ornate, Mediterranean style and suggesting the ambience
of a Las Vegas hotel. Moviegoers by the hundreds were keeping the valet
parkers busy, pulling into the porte-cochere beneath the enormous chandelier
style lamps. Entering the capacious lobby, some of them dropped off their
small children in a supervised playroom and proceeded to a vast concession
stand for a quick meal of pizza or popcorn shrimp before the show.

Others, who had arrived early for their screening of, "Wedding Crashers" or
"The Dukes of Hazzard" - their reserved-seat tickets, ordered online and
printed out at home, in hand - entered through a separate door. They paid
$18, twice the regular ticket price (though it included free popcorn and
valet service) and took an escalator upstairs to the bar and restaurant,
where the monkfish was excellent and no one under 21 was allowed.

Those who didn't want a whole dinner, or arrived too late for a sit-down
meal, lined up at the special concession stand, where the menu included
shrimp cocktail and sushi and half bottles of white zinfandel and pinot
noir. As it got close to curtain time, they took their food and drink into
one of the adjoining six theater balconies, all with plush wide seats and
small tables with sunken cup holders. During the film, the most irritating
sound was the clink of ice in real glasses.

Not your image of moviegoing? Pretty soon it might be. At a time when movie
attendance is flagging, when home entertainment is offering increasing
competition and when the largest theater chains - Regal Entertainment, AMC
Entertainment (which has recently announced a merger with Loews Cineplex)
and Cinemark - are focused on shifting from film to digital projection, a
handful of smaller companies with names like Muvico Theaters, Rave Motion
Pictures and National Amusements are busy rethinking what it means to go to
the movie theater.

The Palace, which was opened five years ago by Muvico, a chain of
distinctive megaplex theaters based in South Florida, remains pretty close
to the gold standard, in terms of customer amenities in first-run theaters.
But the competition is growing. In the age of the megaplex, after all, said
Hamid Hashemi, Muvico's president, everyone gets pretty much the same movies
and pretty much the same quality prints. "So what makes someone pass up one
location and go to another one?" he added. "It's how you package the
experience." 

In other words, you have to offer more than a movie.

"It's the folks who create a compelling value proposition for consumers who
will be the survivors in our business," said Paul Glantz, whose company,
Emagine Entertainment, runs three megaplex theaters in Michigan, all
featuring full bars and allowing customers to take their drinks to their
seats. 

"In my book, the Muvicos and Raves of the world represent the future of
moviegoing in this country," said Mr. Glantz, who added unabashedly that the
liquor license saved his business. "They're giving people a real reason to
leave their home and be entertained."

Certainly, movie theaters have been experimenting with amenities since the
advent of air-conditioning. ("It's cool inside!") But since 1995, when AMC
opened the first megaplex, the 24-screen Grand in Dallas, the movie
landscape has been reconfigured. And for the larger chains, the sheer size
of the enterprise - Regal now has nearly 600 theaters in 40 states housing
more than 6,600 screens - mitigates against chainwide service innovations.
Some conveniences have been tried and kept: rewards programs for frequent
moviegoers, for example. But experiments with restaurants and lounges have
been largely discarded as inconsistent with what Dick Westerling, a Regal
spokesman, calls "the core business," meaning the showing of movies.

Thus, the improvements Regal and AMC and the other behemoths have
concentrated on involve the viewing experience: digital sound, stadium
seating and armrest cup holders. And though most of them have tried
regional, luxury and specialty items at the concession stands, too, as John
Fithian, president of the National Association of Theater Owners, put it,
"We've experimented and experimented, and people basically want popcorn and
soda and candy."

"They go to the movies to escape their houses," Mr. Fithian continued, "and
they like to escape their healthy diets, too."

So the tinkering in terms of customer service has been mostly in the hands
of small theater owners.

The first first-run theater to offer alcohol was the Commodore, a one-screen
palace in Portsmouth, Va. And according to In Focus, a trade magazine
published by the theater owners association, by 1997 only 14 theaters
allowed patrons to drink, either in the lobby or their seats. At the
beginning of this year, the magazine said, the number was 270, most operated
by independent owners or small chains. Places like the Alamo Drafthouse in
Austin, Tex., and two small chains in northern New England, Chunky's and
Smitty's, seat customers at tables and offer different versions of dinner
and a movie. 

The megaplexes run by Rave, the Texas-based chain, feature state-of-the-art
video arcades. Pacific Theaters in California is especially proud of the
ArcLight in Hollywood, a state-of-the-art multiplex with reserved seating, a
cafe bar and screenings restricted to adults 21 and older, not to mention
high-end concessions and ushers who will actually urge chatterbox patrons to
pipe down.

The Massachusetts-based National Amusements, which runs 86 theaters in the
United States, mostly in the East, has built two new theaters under a new
brand name, the Bridge. Located in Philadelphia and Los Angeles, they
include a bar and lounge and a limited-menu restaurant (though the theaters
are not yet licensed for customers to bring alcohol into the auditoriums),
as well as other amenities like a reading room, a concierge desk to help
with post-movie dinner reservations and taxis, and live entertainment in the
lobby.

"They create what I call an upscale moviegoing experience for the masses,"
said Shari Redstone, the president of National Amusements. Some of these
amenities, including the bar and a lobby pianist, are included at many of
the company's other theaters, in a package called Cinema De Lux, which will
be offered, Ms. Redstone said, in every theater the company builds from now
on. 

Like most chains, National Amusements is tinkering with its concessions
menu; Ms. Redstone seemed especially excited about a new item on the menu,
baby carrots, to be served with ranch dressing for patrons who aren't so
interested in the tub-of-popcorn, tureen-of-Coke convention.

She has also started special programs, like classic old movies for seniors,
and alternative entertainment, like live comedy and sporting events, for
instance, showing Red Sox games on the big screen in their New England
theaters, and serving beer and hot dogs.

"What I'm really trying to become is a community center," Ms. Redstone said.
"The exciting part is that we're reinventing our business by giving people
more reasons to go to our buildings."

But Muvico may be the most ambitious of them all. Muvico theaters are huge
and, melding the throwback idea of the glamorous movie palace to the
contemporary fixation on theme parks, all designed according to grandiose
themes; the 1950's, for example, or ancient Egypt. Between 50,000 and 60,000
moviegoers a week pass through the 4,600-seat Paradise 24, visible from I-75
in Davie, Fla., which was constructed to look like an ancient Egyptian
temple, columns and decorative hieroglyphics included. The Palace is a
homage to the faux-Mediterranean designs of the architect Addison Mizner,
who more or less built Boca Raton.

But what is even more distinct about them is that they do not disdain an
audience that many theaters already seem to have dismissed - adults who have
adult predilections. Muvico theaters offer ways - for a price, of course -
for moviegoers to escape the crying babies, giggling teenagers, rude
patrons, cellphones and inferior food that keep many people from venturing
to the theater. 

"Even without the popcorn, it's definitely worth the money," said David
Raphael , a salesman from Boca Raton who, with his wife, Judy, was enjoying
a glass of wine at the upstairs bar at the Palace before a screening of
"Wedding Crashers." "We pretty much go here whenever we go to the movies.
And we pass other theaters to get here."

None of this, of course, changes the fact that Hollywood movies seem to skew
younger and younger every year.

"We're a product-driven business, and we don't have any control over the
product, unfortunately," Mr. Hashemi said. "But in all our customer surveys,
the unifying factor is: 'Get us away from the kids.' It's the exact opposite
of what we're led to believe in this business."

There are 12 Muvico megaplexes now, in Tennessee and Maryland as well as
Florida, all with expanded concessions and professional child supervision,
some with full bars. Six other theaters are in varying stages of
construction, including a 26-screen mega-megaplex reprising the Egyptian
theme that is scheduled to open in 2006 or 2007 adjacent to the Meadowlands
Sports Complex in New Jersey and will include a 400-seat bar and restaurant,
a rooftop terrace, complete with an outdoor screen, and a helipad to
facilitate V.I.P. access.

Asked if he had ambitions to go nationwide with Muvico theaters, Mr. Hashemi
did everything but say yes. The company is negotiating in Chicago, he said,
and exploring in Los Angeles.

And Manhattan? "If the real estate is there, we'll be there," he predicted.
In the meantime, he said, they believe they can be profitable in markets
with populations of 600,000 or more within a 20-minute drive of the theater.
"We can build two buildings in each of the top 50 markets in the country,"
he said.

After a pause, Mr. Hashemi was asked if the spread of theaters with adult
luxuries might eventually result in more movies aimed at adults. He laughed.
"I don't think we could ever build them fast enough," he said.