2026/04/02
You're not gonna believe this, but I think I just got a job for being a loser cinephile.
Well, not really a job. It's volunteer work and I'm not getting paid for it, but it's a pretty massive position. I approached one of the people running my local theater for a volunteer job, and told her about how I'm a film school graduate. Just from that (and telling her that I have a Letterboxd account with over a thousand films logged), she offered me the position of their movie manager, aka the person who chooses what films they show. Not only that, I'm manging their Facebook page and handling their email for when they're offered local sponsorships. And best of all, they told me that if I had anything written, whether it be a play or a feature film script, they would help bring it to reality.
Being given all this responsibility is honestly making my headwhirl. I'm excited, but I'm also a bit stressed out. Our theater is incredibly low budget. So much so that we don't have the money to get new releases when they first come out, and we only have one screen. They've been struggling a lot recently, and a lot of it is because they don't know how to get people to come out and buy tickets. We did a reshowing of an older movie (since nothing new was available to us at the moment) and when I went, it was only me and four other people. Nobody came to the kid friendly matinee earlier that day either.
To say I'm overwhelmed is a bit of an understatement. I really don't know what I'm going to do if the quality of the movies themselves doesn't matter in the long run. I've been told recently that most people in this town (especially the younger people) don't like to leave their homes very much, and that hasn't helped my anxiety much either. It could be from the movie tickets being too expensive, our advertising being poor, or the fact that all our updates are through Facebook, but this hasn't helped with my resentment towards my own generation. I hate that all they want to do is lie in their house and scroll through their phone. I hate it. I can't imagine a worse way to waste your life away, especially with how worse the internet's been becoming. If you spent all your time sitting in your house doing nothing and contributing nothing to the community back in the day, you'd get called a loser. Now it seems like everyone these days wants to be a loser, and we're perfectly content with that.
I already have to deal with the news telling me over and over again about how movie theaters (or movies in general) are gonna be dead within the next years, so trying to deal with all of this first hand has made me feel tempted to quit.
But the lady who hired me is really so nice. She really seems to believe me and thinks I can bring them out of the rut. I've been called an "asset" by her and she's gone around to everyone telling everyone that I've seen "every movie ever made". Can't say that's entirely right but in comparison to the average person, I guess it's true.
I don't know. I just want to do a good job. I want to succeed at something and make any sort of an impact. Even though this place is supposedly an uneventful shithole, I want to make it better. I couldn't do that in the place I lived before, so maybe I can make it happen here.