Kansas City Strip
Trivial pursuits: Dickinson Theaters has had a tough year. What remains of the company’s showcase Glenwood Theater (after its more interesting bits were sold off in October) continues to be demolished, and the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in October. But just as celebrity deaths come in threes (see December obits of Billy Barty, Victor Borge, and Jason Robards), a third embarrassment recently befell Dickinson — this one on its screens.
Those ubiquitous pre-movie slide shows at the multiplexes feature a sprinkling of trivia questions as anesthesia to keep patrons from raging against the bombardment of ads for home spas and Realtors. But at a December 23 Dickinson Great Mall 16 showing of Cast Away, the “Fun Facts” and “Incredible Truisms” weren’t so factual and true.
References to “Mel brooks” and “Ronald Regan” could have been written off as typos, as could the trifecta of misspellings — “Liza Minelli,” “Joel Gray,” and “Caberet” — in a slide about the movie Cabaret. A blurb about The Piano described it as a “New England love story” directed by “Jane Champion” rather than a film set in New Zealand and helmed by Jane Campion. But the topper was this lulu: “Winona Ryder won 20 Oscars before she was 30.” Ryder has never won an Oscar.
Brett Miller, Dickinson’s theaters operations director, did not return numerous phone messages we left for him. “We don’t have anything to do with (making) them,” a WestGlen 18 manager says about the slides.
That task falls to Kansas City-based Paladino Productions Inc. “We were aware of the problems,” is all Joe Paladino, paterfamilias of PPI and brother of überpublicist Kathy Hanis, will say. “We had about two weeks to get them together, (and) we’ve got a new program coming out in January.”
PPI did correctly spell such proper names as King Kong, Spiderman, and Shakespeare. And, hey, when you’re busy filling every square inch of a space with advertising — PPI promotional material brags that it can plaster a client’s message “on the movie screen, in the lobby, and restroom,” where it will be “seen by over 5 million moviegoers in 191 theaters” in Kansas, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Texas — who has time to check those “fun facts” anyway?
“It’s been an interesting year,” says a good-humored staffer at Dickinson’s Mission headquarters.
