Air Sex Preliminaries Start Tonight at the Drafthouse

You're absolutely correct.

I guess I just miss the old Alamo on Colorado. It seemed like it was a lot less about the money and more about interesting cinema. Tickets were cheap. They used to have these competitions where you could bring your own film footage and they'd show it and if you didn't get gonged, the audience voted at the end and the winner would get a grand (presumably generated by the tickets to attend). That's what I was really going off about. Now they have the audience entertain itself and they just pocket the ticket money.

Seth

Scoobs,

I don't really scrutinize every restaurant I patronize other than for cleanliness. But when a restaurant charges an admission fee on top of the tab for food and drinks, it makes me wonder why they can't cover their expenses with the mark-up on food and drinks. If there is some form of extra entertainment at the restaurant or bar such as a live band, I can appreciate a cover charge to pay the performers.

At the Alamo Drafthouse restaurant, it's assumed the cover charge (ticket price) is required to pay the film distrubutor for the use of the film, plus a bit of mark-up to cover "rent, utility bills, [and] employees." When the entertainment consists of audience members performing onstage, I wonder why there is still a cover charge when the entertainers aren't getting paid. Apparently, these 'open-mic' nights at the Alamo Drafthouse are especially profitable in that there is no film distributor to split the door charge with.

The patrons actually pay for the privilege to entertain themselves. That is an impressive business model, indeed.

It's a restaurant with a cover charge and entertainment? I thought it was a theater, usually showing feature films, but occasionally featuring live entertainment (sometimes including audience participation), which also serves food and beverages.

I guess I just wasn't putting it in the right box to inspire sufficient rage. Now that I see it where you're coming from, I still don't give much of a flying fuck. Maybe I just haven't had my Hatorade for the morning.

It's a restaurant with a cover charge and entertainment? I thought it was a theater

That's a common misconception. The lion's share of the Alamo's revenue comes from food and alcohol sales. The ticket price is just icing on the cake. The Alamo Drafthouse chain is a group of restaurants that screen movies.

Actually, the ticket sales are responsible for a much smaller fraction of the Alamo's profits. That's why it's an egregious abuse of the patrons to charge the same ticket price for DIY entertainment when the expenses to the theater are reduced (i.e. no screening fees paid to distributor or even the 'talent').

I'm not enraged at the Alamo. Just trying to clarify that this chain is in need of some competition. In Portland, Oregon, it's the norm to serve food and beer at the theater. There are multiple chains of arthouse theaters in Portland which provide far more diverse programming than the Alamo (see: Living Room Theaters) and frequently at a cheaper price (see: McMenamins Theaters).

It would be nice if other restaurant owners in Austin would wake up to the opportunity and start screening movies for a cheaper price than the Alamo. Most of what the Alamo shows is typical Hollywood garbage, so it's not even like such a start-up would need to be clued-in to arthouse programming, either.

Seth

The lion's share of the profit from any theater comes from concession sales. For the Alamo, they serve higher quality, higher cost (but lower margin) foods and beverages, so not only is the profit higher than from any other source, but so is the revenue.

Of course, don't let the actual reason for your factoid get in the way of your regularly scheduled Alamo hate-a-thon. Yeah, they don't have any competition in their niche of the market. Don't like it? Don't go. Or open your own theater. Or just bitch, as usual. Whatever floats your boat.

It costs seven bucks to get in. Does this go towards the prize pot or into the Leagues' pockets? Just curious since there's no movie and none of the talent is getting paid...

Seth

I hear it gets used to buy gold coins and jewels, which the Leagues pile up and dive into, like Scrooge McDuck.

Or, it goes to pay the rent, utility bills, to the employees, etc. Do you demand a public accounting of all admittance charges everywhere, or only the places you have a hard-on for?

Thanks Austinist! If you want to compete you can sign up through me!

i would, but it would be too boring. no one wants to see me sitting on an invisible recliner while i watch "videos" on an invisible computer and delight myself with an invisible vibrator. my musical clip would be the carpenters "rainy days and mondays always get me down"