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| This time to American theater owners (caution, auto start) |
As previously blogged, back in the 1920s and '30s, theater owners had guts. Chicago's independent movie houses, 150 strong, continued to show movies without knuckling under to the Kim Jong-un of their day, Thomas E. Maloy. Maloy was the boss of the Chicago projectionist union, which had rule that all theaters would hire only their union members and two of them were required in the projection booth. That requirement was enforced with dynamite, i.e., if a theater did not follow Maloy's union rules, their theater blew up.
For some odd reason, most owners of the theaters and projectors did not see the need for two projectionists, nor did they find enough added value in the union card carrying projectionists to hire them. At least 13 of their theaters were blown up in 1931 alone, ordered by a disgruntled union boss.
Rather than closing, the theater owners demanded that the police actually protect the property that the citizens were paying them to protect. And in large part the police did just that.
Fast forward a few decades to the present and we have either a group of disgruntled employees of Japanese owned Sony, a pissy little nation boss, or a combination of both, who threatened to blow up movie theaters in the USA if they showed the film The Interview. Movie theater chain after movie theater chain cancelled scheduled showings of the movie, without so much as a match lit in the vicinity of their movie houses.
In response to all of this, especially the chicken shit theater owners, Sony decided not to release the movie at all.
It seems like a few things have changed over the decades. The terrorizing thugs don't even need to bother buying dynamite anymore.
On a lighter note, here is the opening of my work in progress documentary for the book Time Bomber:
Ⓐ Steve Ⓐ
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