There are some pretty weird things that go down in movie theaters. Some people seem to think a dark room means no one can see and boy are they wrong.
Terrible Parenting
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“Someone left a baby with a note attached saying ‘It’s your problem now.’ It had blonde hair and was wrapped in a towel. It was facing the seat so it looked like a bundle of towels/napkins and when I went to pick him up he started crying. Almost dropped him because of how tightly wrapped he was.
Yeeahhh.
Also found parents that drop off kids and leave them there for hours. Found a 5-year-old crying with a bloody nose. He said his mom told him to stay there.
The security cameras showed his mom dropping him off at 10 am.
It was 7 pm.”
Well, That’s One Way To Get In Trouble
“A guy I work with was an usher at a local theater. While doing his rounds during a daytime showing of the recent re-release of Titanic, he saw a guy and a girl with a camera pointed towards the screen. Apparently, at this chain, this is taken very seriously, and when he tells his manager, the manager called the cops. They go in and bust this guy and take him to the security office of the mall. They can’t really get the guy to admit that he was filming the movie though. After a while, to coax him into cracking, they bring out the camera and start going through the memory. It turns out that they weren’t filming the movie, the guy just had his junk out of his pants and the girl was trying to line up a perfect shot where it looked like the guy was putting his junk into Leonardo DiCaprio’s mouth.
It just really makes me wonder what they were planning on doing with that picture.”
The One Time You WANT To Clean The Theater
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“This happened a while ago.
It’s crazy busy, and teenager me is working concession until theaters started to get out. I was then supposed to clean them (read: pick up the trash people are too lazy to carry to the door), when it suddenly picks up and gets super crazy busy and they need as many people on till as possible.
So, my manager comes over and informs me that he needs me to stay on till, and that he’d clean the theaters. No problem, we do this a lot if stuff like this happens. But this time… This freaking time, he finds a money clip.
Plain, silver, no ornate lettering or anything that would link anyone to an owner. See, people with cheap money clips normally have $20-$60, and we always put things like these in the lost and found for 3 weeks, and as long as someone came in and said ‘Hey I lost my thing in theater,’ we’d always give it back.
Here’s the catch, though. The town I lived in is renowned for its wealth in oil…and substance use. This money clip that my manager found looked like it was Scrooge McFreakingDuck’s. It looked like tweezers trying to hold all this cash together.
The owner never came forth. My manager kept it all, spent it on god knows what. I later discovered that the money clip belonged to one of the dealers in my high school at the time and that he didn’t want to come forth because he didn’t want to get caught picking up anything ‘suspicious.'”
Dinner And A Show
“Oh lord. The strangest/grossest thing I have found was a USED tampon, coupled with various bloody receipts from this woman’s bag that she had used as makeshift toilet paper or something. I can’t remember what movie it was, but it must have been amazing for her to not walk the 20 meters around the corner to get to the toilet.
Other things I / other workers have found:
- A roast chicken: The woman came back 5 hours later demanding we buy her a new chicken… who the heck brings a cooked chicken into an unrefrigerated area for 2 hours, let alone 7 hours then expecting us to have kept it for her?
- Passed out Indian man with his junk hanging out: I was cleaning for about 5 minutes before I noticed him at the back. It’s kind of dark back there and he was rather dark skinned. This guy was out cold, surrounded by 10 empty Coors cans, I couldn’t wake him up after yelling at him and shoving him for a few minutes. Eventually we called security and he woke up, mumbled something and walked out. I don’t think he did up his fly.
- Dirty diapers: WHO DOES THIS???
- A turd: We had a group of special needs people in there, we had a smell complaint and went to check it out. He had hidden it under the chair. A few days later, there was a letter pinned up in the office that looked like a three-year-old wrote it, saying ‘sorry i pood in ur movie’ and a sad face.”
Slow Clap
“One night, I was working the usher shift and our projectionist comes up to me and says, ‘There’s two people banging in the men’s washroom.’
I went to check it out, and sure enough, through the seams around the door, I could make out two figures going at it. After a brief moment of awkwardness, I cleared my throat and grabbed their attention. ‘You can’t be doing that in here.’
‘Okay,’ said a girl’s voice, ‘We’ll be right out.’
I walked outside the washroom to give them a second to clean themselves up only to find that the projectionist has told the rest of the theater staff. There were like ten of us standing along the bathroom exit hallway, all being silent when suddenly the door opens. The man walked out and stopped, looked at all of us, and then started walking to his theater door. The projectionist started slow clapping, and we all followed. A second later, the door opened a second time, and this time the girl walked out. She did not stop to look at us, and instead, staring at her feet, darted towards the first set of auditorium doors.
‘Wrong theater,’ I said, ‘The guy went in the other one.’
We stood there waiting for another minute, and sure enough, the doors open, and the girl darts out and beelines it towards the other theater.
‘You’re dripping.’ Yelled out the projectionist.
The door slammed behind her, and we all thought it was hilarious.
This happened like ten years ago. I found it funnier at the time. Still, it was a strange moment in my work life.”
That Escalated Quickly
“I once found a dead body. The man had a heart attack while watching Cast Away. Poor guy. He was kind of stiff when they pulled him out on a stretcher.”
WHAT………
“Oh dear lord, you have no idea the things I’ve seen working at a theater. To name a few…
- cups of urine (very common)
- cups of poo
- poo on seats (one was left to dry overnight, we had to get a new seat)
- vomit, not just in one spot but spread over 5 rows (walk and puke?)
- people sleeping behind the curtains at the bottom of the screen (usually homeless)
- needles
- used underwear
- people rubbing one out in a PACKED theater on opening weekend
- butt beads (that was awkward having to explain what they were to the younger/more innocent co-workers)
- jack o lanterns (the lit candle was actually the ‘concerning’ part – yeah it could have burnt the building down, but frankly all the employees would have been pretty ok with it, if not feeding the flames)
- parents coming out of the Hannah Montana movie saying that a guy was turned around in his seat watching their 8-year-old daughter the whole time (we had an actual police officer who was armed show him out and informed him he can’t come back)
- parents leaving their 4 & 6-year-old kids alone in a rated R movie in the middle of the day
I could go on.”
The Lost Child
“I found a little kid once who spoke no English.
I went into a theater to clean it out after a movie and there’s this little kid in the front row just sitting there pointing at the coke bottle on the screen going ‘coke coke coke.’
I tell my buddy to go get the manager as there hasn’t been anyone else in this theater for over half an hour. I walk this little kid out to the concession counter and get her a coke. My manager comes out and tells me I need to walk into all 12 theaters and signal the projectionist to stop the movie and turn on the lights and ask if this is anyone’s kid.
Over half an hour later, with the tedious task of interrupting everyone’s movie over, no one had claimed this kid. At this point, my manager tells me to entertain the kid while he calls mall security and gets them in on it.
This is, of course, my favorite part. At this point, I am getting paid to play with the giant stuffed Monsters Inc. toys with this little kid, and I am having a blast.
After another 45 minutes or so, security located this kid’s parents. They were all the way on the other side of the mall. Somehow this 5-year-old little Asian girl managed to walk all the way across a mall, past our ticket takers, and into a movie theater.
Also, the most disgusting thing I ever had to clean up was any theater that was playing A Walk To Remember. The teenage girls that went to see that movie would all shove their tear-filled tissues into the cup holders. Imagine cleaning out 100+ dirty wet tissues with your hands.”
A Slight Explosion
“I worked at a dingy and dark little mall arcade when I was in high school. The mall was attached to a movie theater, so I’d frequently trade arcade tokens for free movie tickets from the other scummy teenage employees there.
One day I was supposed to meet two girls and another guy for a ‘double date’ to go see a horror movie after work (FearDotCom… obviously a quality choice). I thought it would be funny (and, in my 16-year-old mind, impressive) to steal a big bag of little toys from the arcade and bring them to the movie. So I went in the back office and put a bag of like 250 of these little ping pong ball sized plastic spheres with rings inside of them in my backpack.
Went to the movie. Seating went Me, Girl1, Girl2, Other Guy all in the back row (obviously). The movie started and immediately I started playing the ‘Try to Accidentally Touch Girl1’s Arm’ or ‘Maybe her Thigh’ or ‘Anything Really I’m Not Picky’ game. Not really working, and see Other Guy already has his arm around Girl2. Getting discouraged.
So I bust out the giant bag of plastic rings encased in clear plastic spheres. Surprisingly, Girl1 is not particularly impressed. She asks me why I have hundreds of plastic rings encased in clear plastic spheres, but I hadn’t really thought that far ahead, so I said I didn’t know.
Other Guy suggests we roll them down the slanted floor of the theater to see what happens. Girls giggle and agree. I don’t see the point, but say okay.
So I open this bag of like 250 plastic rings encased in clear plastic spheres like you would a potato chip bag. I grab the sides near the top and pull. I pull very assertively, likely to compensate for my lack of assertiveness in the ‘Please God Let Me Touch Your Arm’ game.
The bag basically explodes, spewing these balls everywhere, at least a hundred of them clang to the ground and begin their slow, rumbling descent to the front of the theater. A hundred more of them shoot in every direction, like angry little plastic meteors in the dark. They bounce off people and seats. They land in popcorns and cup holders.
Of course, it’s not a very loud part of the movie, and suddenly the back half of the theater sounds like one of those rain sticks that are filled with grains of rice. People are shielding themselves from plastic Armageddon.
I don’t know what to do, so I stand up quickly. The last 20 or so balls roll off me for an encore performance just as the first wave makes it to the bottom. People are still processing what is going on, so I take that opportunity to bail. Straight out of the theater, no looking back. I head home and sit in my room and play Everquest. Later, I know I will be inescapably made fun of for an eternity.
I look back now, though, and I just try to imagine what the theater employee must’ve thought when everyone cleared out after the movie, and there, at the front, were rows and rows of like 250 plastic rings encased in clear plastic spheres.”
Coming Back For The Goods
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“I work at a theater and once my manager found a strap-on in one of the theaters. The crazy part is someone picked it up from the lost and found the next day. If you forget that sort of thing…accept that it is gone forever.”
Oh What A Day On The Job
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“After Tyler Perry’s Madea Goes to Jail came out, I got to clean up two buckets of KFC (with the bones strewn all over the floor), twist-off Kool-Aid bottles of grape and orange, and boxes of watermelon Sour Patch Kids. That was the single most stereotypical theater I had ever cleaned out.
I’ve busted people getting it on during Bee Movie, and the guy walked out of the theater (taken out by a police officer) still trying to rub one out.
We had Prosti, a homeless guy with a prosthetic arm and leg, who would come in and watch a movie every day. I still have no idea how he ever could afford that, as tickets were $7.25 at the time. He would also get a hot dog ($4.50) and a large drink ($4.25), then urinate all over the floor and fake a diabetic coma so we would have to call the ambulance. We had a policy where as long as the customer could pay, they would let the customer in. One day, he set his prosthetic leg full of pee towards the top of the theater, overlooking the custodial entrance, and knocked it over on top of me as I was going in to clean up the theater.
Also, my GM was interested in guys around the age of 17, and would often sneak up behind them with nothing in his pockets or even his radio so he could be really quiet. He would then stand about a foot behind you and stare, then if you turned around to do something, he would take you to the back and explain something that you did ‘wrong.’
I don’t miss that job.”
They Weren’t Expecting To See This
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“My brother and I did ‘customer service’ before we became managers. Essentially this meant we got to dress in suits and police the little middle school hoodlums (who were only like 3 years younger than us).
Pretty normal stuff, just ‘turn off your phone and shut up or you get ejected’ mumbo jumbo.
We had one weekend where Trashy Spoof Movie 12 was coming out and the seven o’clock show is just LITTERED with rug rats and riff-raff. Except there’s this one couple in their mid to late thirties, and they’re dressed like they just went out to a steakhouse… Lady friend is in a nice dress and the gentleman is in a stylish sweater.
My first thought – ‘they’re just gonna complain and try and get their money back.’ My brother and I warned them that there was really not much we can do to keep kids behaving. They tell us not to worry – okay, fine.
Movie starts, I exit and head to another theater. Fast forward about thirty minutes. My brother briskly enters my theater with wide eyes.
‘What’s up?’ ‘Uh, I got some people messing around in Trashy Movie.’ ‘Well, kick them out.’ ‘Just, trust me. Come on.’
Fine. I walk with him, maybe he’s off his game and doesn’t feel like mentally abusing middle schoolers.
We get to the bottom of the steps and he just points….
Yep, the classy gentleman has decided to finger bang his significant other in a room full of pre-teens.
I can’t describe the look on their faces when I asked them nicely to please stop. But they stopped, thank god, and left quietly in shame.
Nothing like getting caught by two 16-year-old kids.”
Real Life Spider-Man
“My two favorites were a birth certificate with the name ‘Pandora Darling Devine’, and a half-full quart sized bottle of Pepto-Bismol. There were also countless used rubbers (especially in children’s movies…), cell phones, iPods/mp3 players, wallets/purses, underwear that had been pooped in and left, and a surprising number of pizza boxes that no one saw enter. We always called home/relatives numbers on the cellphones that got found and left messages, but they were rarely claimed, so I didn’t buy a cell phone for the ~6 years I worked there.
One of the games we played after closing was the I-beam race. In our biggest theater there were I-beams that went from the floor up to the ceiling (~40 ft high) in the front of the theater, and then ran along the ceiling back to the projection booth and we would have races to see who could climb up it and into the projection booth the fastest. One time on a slow night we were bored so I bet I could climb out of the projection booth and along the I-beam to the front without anyone noticing me. Had about 50-60 people in the theater, and as far as I know, I wasn’t noticed but I still wonder if someone saw me and was wondering why the heck there was someone crawling upside down along the ceiling.
Also, before I worked there, they had infrared cameras in a couple of the theaters so they could see people in the dark to make sure there were no troublemakers in the theater. When they saw a couple hooking up in the theater the employees would try to sneak up on them and just sit right behind them and then scare the heck out of them mid-coitus.”
Just Lovely
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“I found quite a few…interesting…items, such as a used rubber (tends to be pretty typical), TONS of little vino bottles, a full dinner from Olive Garden (complete with plate and cutlery) and finally, a half-full bottle of Jack. HALF FULL BOTTLE. Who leaves their Jack behind?
During movies, I typically have the pleasure of throwing out people who are causing a disturbance. I’ve thrown out teenage couples getting it on, kids literally running up and down aisles and people smoking weed during the movie. I had to do a clean once after someone smoked crank in the theatre and the smell almost knocked me down.
Though the biggie was probably when a family literally got broken up during a movie. Lady got wasted in the theatre and was slapping her kid around. Security guards got DCF on board and the kid left with them, while the lady was arrested.
The things that go on in cinemas are just lovely.”
Dude, Where’s My Brother?!
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“In the opening week of the theater, me and my co-workers were clearing up a screen after a movie when they found poop spread all over the walls.
For a crazy experience mid-movie, once I was checking tickets when two men in their 20s approached me shouting, ‘Which screen is my brother in?’ They barged past security, shouting that they had to take their brother out of the cinema. Security followed them into the screen where they claimed their brother was and found them looking up at the punters in their seats. When they were asked politely to leave, one pointed and said, ‘There he is!’ The security guard looked to where he was pointing for a split second, in which time the man flung an egg into the crowd and ran off. It hit a young girl at the movies with her father and the entire film had to be stopped.”
The Strange Notebook
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“My boyfriend and I used to work at a theatre. Once when he was ushering, he found a sketchy looking backpack out by the trash compactor. It was crammed full of crazy things. There were a lot of napkins and stuff, but there was also this notebook.
The notebook was filled with incoherent ramblings. Filled. Every page. There were strings of numbers, coordinates, and just… nonsense. Magazine cutouts. Pictures of like, female celebrities and models. The guy came back for it. We think he was just some random homeless/ traveler dude.
Also, I heard a rumor that there was a guy who was living behind the screen in theater 8 years before I started, but that’s probably just an urban legend.”