“The
legacy of Butterfield Theatres, Inc, is that it saved itself out of business”
---from The Quotations of Chairman Joe
It
was the early spring of 1982, I had been recently promoted from theatre manager
to District Manager for Concessions with the old W.S. Butterfield Theatres
company. Butterfield had once been the
largest theatre chain in the state of Michigan operating most of the theatres
in outstate lower Michigan. By 1982 the
company had by now shrunk to about 46 screens in two dozen or so major cities. I had been asked to join the head of the
concession department, a Mr. Paul Tazar who was, at 23, already a commanding
figure being the spitting image of Fess Parker and standing in at six foot 4. Joining us was my colleague Mr. Byron Lane, a
veteran of the “Big One”, World War II, having seen action on the Burma Road,
and, by then, having logged over 33 years with the company. I first met Byron back in 1966 when I was
hired in as a concession attendant at the old Starlight Drive-In, a small 500
car-house located between Holland and Saugatuck. My uncle was then managing this establishment
as he worked his way through college. I
was a soda jerk, and met Byron District Manager for Concessions, then to me an aging owlish-faced man, much resembling
I thought in later years the English journalist Alistair Cook. Byron was a good natured, honest conservative
and we would exchange views, as I got to know him. He on the political right, me on the
left. He would introduce me at company
gatherings as having been with the SDS (the radical Students for a Democratic
Society), I would quickly correct him staying the College Democrats. “Same difference” he would snort. Nevertheless the emerging friendship was
real, and he became something of a mentor for me, helping me negotiate the
political currents within the corporation and quietly, unbeknownst at the time
to me, helping to further my career.
On
this particular sunny afternoon Paul, Bryon and I met in a restaurant at
Ypsilanti to discuss some upcoming changes involving our concession
operations. On the agenda was the
dropping of the image of the “Good Ship Butterfield” reduced to use only on the
small popcorn containers then in use. I
saw it as evidence of further decline, giving up something of company
tradition. I wasn’t able to carry the
day, since the small size of the container served as too much a drag on popcorn
sales inasmuch as it moved too many people out of the larger sizes. The idea was to begin limiting the number of
choices so that the lines between movies would move faster and the public would
not be given too many inexpensive choices.
This would serve to help increase our per capita revenues upon which the
concession operation, because concessions don’t attract attendance at movie
houses, depended. I got the point and
acquiesced.
Then
came the matter of smocks, a form of "uniform" to be worn by the attendant in order to make the operation more professional. Paul, with the retirement of Miss Bacon, had taken
over purchasing at the home office. Miss
Bacon had a much deserved reputation for being parsimonious when it came to the
purchase of supplies. Whenever a manager
sent in a requisition, from theatre passes to toilet paper, she would routinely
cut the order in half. In fact the Vice
President of the company once related a story in which he told me of an
incident in Ann Arbor which fully illustrates the point. It was one of the functions, in those days,
of the Vice President to oversee any construction or renovation project that
the company would engage. It so happened
that Butterfield was renovating the old Campus Theatre in Ann Arbor and then
Vice President Lyle Smith was in town overseeing the work. One Friday afternoon, as the project was nearing completion, Smith sat down at the manager’s desk and sent in a requisition
that included 400 “chaser” light bulbs to lamp the new Marquee. These yellow 10
watt bulbs were arrayed in such a way as to go off and on in a circular pattern
so as to attract the attention of the pedestrians passing by. Like neon on a Ferris wheel, lights on a
Marquee are there to attract attention.
No Matter, Miss Bacon summarily cut the order in half, leaving the
operation with enough resources to lamp half the Marquee. The next Monday morning, according to the
account, Mr. Smith was in Miss Bacon’s office pounding his fist on her desk,
mad as hell “Ellen”, he said, “when I send in a requisition for 400 light bulbs
I mean 400 light bulbs. Don’t ever do
that to me again.” I understood. As with
any of the other manager’s in the circuit old circuit, she had done that to me
many times. I played hell trying to
light my Marquee (I had two of them at the old Vista Drive-In in Grand Rapids)
as well as enough toilet paper and cleaning supplies. Such became standard business practice
permeating the organization in which a game of sorts would play itself
out. Manager’s routinely ordered twice
as much as they needed; Miss Bacon would cut the order. She could then report to her superiors that
she had, in the course of events, saved the company many thousands of dollars
in any given year.
Now
Butterfield Theatres was once a dominant fixture in Michigan’s entertainment
business. Created by Walter S.
Butterfield in the early decades of the last century, the company began as a vaudeville
circuit with the likes of the Marx Brothers, Danny Kaye, Red Skelton and the
like regularly making their appearances on Butterfield stages whenever they
performed in Michigan. With the advent
of motion pictures, Butterfield built an empire so dominant that you didn’t play
any films outside Detroit unless you came to terms with Butterfield. So dominant, in fact, did the company become
that in conversations I had with front office executives accounts were told of
the company being subject to anti-trust action.
But
with the passing of the “Colonel”, as the old man was called, the company
passed into the hands of his children who, in the 1950’s, put the company into
the hands of an accountant brought over from Paramount Studios. Under the watchful eye of President
Gawthorpe, the company in the succeeding decades managed to disinvest itself to
such an extent that the market position the company once enjoyed began to erode,
in time threatening not only the well-being but the very existence of the
company. Butterfield prided itself on its conservatism. No debt, money on the barrel. The company did not borrow money to build new
theatres. Instead the money came from
operating funds and investments. The
result was that as the industry began to change from the cities to the suburbs,
from the single-screen palace on Main Street to the multiplex in suburban strip
malls, Butterfield couldn’t, without using credit and leverage, keep up with
the changing times. The result was that
there arose competitors, principally Jack Loek’s and Bob Goodrich who made
personal fortunes moving into Butterfield towns and putting multiplex cinemas
up on the edge of town threatening the old Leviathan downtown.
The
flight to the suburbs has other consequences.
With the multi-screen operations it became possible to hold a film for
longer periods of time. The result was
that the cost to exhibitors began to rise.
In the early 80’s Butterfield won a bid for the movie “Muppets Take
Manhattan”. To show this feature
required $4,000,000.00 down and 90% of the box office for the first 16
weeks. When you only have one or two
screens in your house, you clearly have to depend on something besides the box
office to survive, hence the growing importance of the Concession operation—once
treated as an afterthought, now central to the survival of the company. Other companies were building theatres with
sixteen or twenty screens in which you opened in the house seating the greatest
capacity but the longer you held unto a film, and the greater your companies percentage
of the take, you could move the film into a smaller auditorium making it
possible to maximize profits by holding your feature. This meant that if Butterfield lost the bid
for first run, HBO would be playing the flick before the company could get its
hands on a print. Such were the
consequences of playing it close to the vest of, from a business perspective, a
pathological conservatism.
But,
unfortunately, the conservative rot had long since passed the central office of
purchasing and worked its way through the tentacles of the entire company. The company would not benefit from
sitting through Econ 101, and evidence no understanding of the “economy of
scale” by dropping a twin theatre next to an already existing twin theatre
complete with two concession stands, two sets of box offices, two store rooms,
two projection booths, etc. there were other problems. When new theatres, and
there were not many, were built they were no longer the grand palaces of yore
but instead little band box operations.
When Butterfield remodeled, renovated, added screen or built a new
house, old seats torn from a demolished old downtown palace would be
refurbished and put into the new. Old
popcorn machines, some a year or so older than I, would be moved into the new
venue. We had the best used shiny new
houses in the business.
With
the passage of old man Gawthorpe in the mid 70’s the tiller of the Good Ship
Butterfield passed to the Vice President Smith.
Smith began his career as a stock boy in the home office and worked his
way through office politics to the pinnacle of power. In the field there was some guarded optimism
with the change of guard, but all hope was soon dashed when the head of the
Advertising Department, a Mr. Henry Capogna retired. Head of advertising for decades he oversaw
the marketing of the firm and since the local manager was responsible for
purchasing local media as well as producing local newspaper ads, the managers
in the field worked with Henry and sought his guidance in order to maintain and
increase attendance. Henry worked to
secure co-op advertising in which the film companies would pay for half the ad
budget on a particular film promotion.
These promos often meant exponential increases in budgets. When I played “White Line Fever” at the Vista
in the 1970’s I composed and ran a full page ad in the Grand Rapids Press. The result was a rare full house in a
single-screen thousand car venue. Sadly,
when Henry retired, they did not replace him deciding instead to save his salary.
In a business often marked by single screen operations in which one
changed product and audiences every week, we then had no one in the home office
primarily focused on marketing. The
result, in succeeding years, was that—true to form—the advertising budget was
cut. The year before they closed the old
Starlight Drive-In in Lansing, the radio advertising budget was pared down to
such an extent that the local manager could purchase one single 30 second radio
spot on only one of Lansing’s many radio stations each week. The results were wholly predictable.
It
was in the vortex of these undercurrents that we were struggling to survive in
the early 1980’s and when we met on that sunny afternoon in Ypsilanti, our
young executive looked at us and said “I want to make some serious changes in
the way we operate. I want people to
know, when they come into one of our theatres that they are in a Butterfield
house.”
"Well Hell", I proclaimed doing my best to channel John Wayne. "They already know it's a Butterfield House pilgrim!"
“How
so?” asked the surprised and bemused Boss as Byron sat silently smiling as he looked down on his shoe laces knowing what was about to come.
“Well
they just gotta look at the place. Hell, half the plexiglass and most of the lights on the Marquee
are missing, broken or cracked. Half the letters have some damage.” I then went
on to describe a scene at the old Lansing Drive-In, a venue I managed the year
before just prior to being put on the road as a supervisor. I was opening the box office one
evening. The sun was still up and a
young couple in a VW had driven up the drive and parked just outside the box
office. I was putting in the tickets and
noticed, after a time, the young lady looking around. She was looking up at the pigeons flying out
of the holes in the back of the screen tower.
The tower had been built after the second world war as the Drive-In
movie craze was in its infancy.
Butterfield didn’t build many drive-in theatres, only two in fact, the
Vista and a sister house in Monroe.
Otherwise they bought up the emerging competition as a means of
monopolizing the market. In this case it
was the Lansing Drive-In built by a man named Blackburn who sold it and the
aforementioned Lansing Drive-In to the company sometime in the 60’s. By now the screen tower, having been built on
the frame of an old bridge truss was beginning to show its age. Serious signs of disrepair had long since
emerged, from the aging slate now falling to the ground to the “wings” that
were added in the ‘50’s”, twenty or so feet on each end to accommodate Cinemascope
technology. These additions, long
exposed to the weather were beginning to move in the wind, flapping a bit like
wings in a breeze, further cracking the façade and making excellent homes for
pigeons and other species of vermin. The
young lady in question looked about and began to grimace. I went into the office to get the cash box
and when I returned I was greeted by the sight of the tail lights of the VW as
the car drove quietly away. Sometime, I
surmised, between putting the tickets in the ticket machine and the cash box
into the cash drawer, it had dawned on the young man that he was not going to
impress the young lady by treating her to a place like this.
“I
get your point”, said the Boss and told us that from now on the manager’s will
get what they order. We put those
changes into effect, improved the profit/loss margins in the operations, began
purchasing new equipment and, in 1984 concessions held the company
together. Word was passed down through
the organization that for the first time the front end of the business was
losing money, concessions made the difference.
It
didn’t matter. Alas the last of the old
Colonel’s children passed away and with the company passing into the hands of
the grandchildren it was put up for sale. The conservative ethos had finally
stood manifest. The Colonel’s heirs
acting through the corporate heads had finally managed to save the company out
of business.
No comments:
Post a Comment