Be aware nobody is going to realize how important your work is. The kids who work on the floor don't know what it is that projectionists do, and they will run their mouths about it. They also bring all their high school behaviors and intrigues with them, and if you have to work a shift with them it will frequently feel like babysitting. Problems caused by faulty or badly maintained machines will be blamed on you, even if there is nothing you can do about it, or it's not even your area of work. If the team of projectionists does not take the job seriously, or are too stupid to master rudimentary booth skills, your work experience will suck.
There are a limited number of hours that can be worked in booth, and have to be divided by however many projectionists you have in your team. If there are a lot of them that means you don't get many hours. If there are very few of them, you will be working ALL the time. Booth shifts also run extremely late. If it is the summer season, be prepared not to get out from a closing shift until two or three in the morning, and sometimes later. During the rest of the year you will get out anywhere from 12.30 to two in the morning. If it is the night new films come in to be assembled and screened for errors you will probably not get out until three. Opening shifts on weekends start around 9am, on weekdays around 11 or 12.
No matter how good a job you do, or how seriously you take it, you will never be recognized for that fact. The best you will get is at your yearly review, when your PM may give you positive feedback as a general rule. Learning new skills, including basic booth skills like (if there are multiple types of projector) learning how to build and tear down prints of each type, basic maintenance skills like changing bulbs, etc., can take months or years to learn. After nearly two years at my theatre, and repeatedly asking to learn new skills, I still don't know how to do everything I should. The best you will get is acknowledgment from the other projectionists, and since they are the only ones who actually understand what it is you do that can be the best feedback to receive anyway.
If you are someone who doesn't like being alone for hours at a time this is not the job for you. Projectionists work alone in a loud, dark area. If that doesn't sound like a great time it will be hard for you. Sometimes people will come traipsing through booth like they belong there. They don't, and projectionists frequently get territorial over booth.
For every prospective employee at AMC let me say this: Senior management are idiots. Some of them are nice, some of them are horrible, but almost all of them are total idiots. This is especially true when you consider the fact (at my particular theatre, and I've heard at many others) that the managers of a movie theatre DO NOT understand how the projectors work. You would think that a manager at a movie theatre would be able to run the machines in a pinch, to fix any problems that arise in booth, as a matter of course. It is never the case. Even the ones who are booth trained (few and far between) frequently do not exercise those skills and forget how to do it. And that's the best thing that can be said about their interaction with the staff. If there are issues with performance or morale the best kind of meeting you can expect is having a manager berate you for whatever issues they think are happening unless you personally step up to change the direction of the meeting. And you need to be careful doing that, because they may just write you up for insubordination. It's happened at our theatre a few times.
