So we as a group went to Westwood Cinema, because we heard it was a very interesting place to visit with an interesting historical background. Westwood Cinema is situated in the middle of Westwood Village and is one of the best known places and institutions in Westwood. But we do not want to say too much before you actually listened to the recording...About background, visiting the place, meeting the employees, and espacially the problems we were facing in visiting Westwood Cinema.
Listen to our podcast at http://soundcloud.com/community56/westwoodcinema
Peter Ollig exploring the community assignment, Script’s topic: Difficulties we were facing and reasons for this
We met as a group on Saturday, August 14 to do the “Exploring the community” assignment. As we met in front of Westwood Cinema we were looking forward to do a good presentation, but everything came very different than we expected. In my part of the script I am trying to explain what, and additionally why we were facing this trouble.
So as I already indicated we met in front of the building and after doing some photos of the exterior architecture and the entrance we entered the building. Without knowing about the consequences I took some photos of the place and after the first 3 or 4 photos of the entrance hall I introduced the group to the employee. He was very friendly but told as that we were not allowed to do what we intended to do (taking photos especially and walking around the cinema, too) without a permission. He told us we could obtain this permission from the director of the 2 cinemas belonging to the Regency Movies Corp. group. I was surprised when facing the fact that the 2 movie theatres were linked in a certain why and did not compete. The director was in the other cinema than Westwood Theatre and so we crossed the street. Again we were not able to see the director and so (again) we asked an employee how we could contact her. He took out his walkie talkie (after we had explained our intension again) and contacted the director. She replied she could not give us the requested permission instantly and that we had to write an e-mail to the address linked on www.regencymovies.com. After a short conversation we as a group decided at least tried to have an interview with the friendly employee of the Westwood Cinema we intended to explore. So we asked him whether he was willing to answer some questions about his job, the cinema and so on. To our surprise he replied he was not allowed to do that unless we had the permission we had to request online, but he further explained that if we had a permission we would have a guided tour leading us to nearly every part of the building and that the tour guides knew a lot more about the interesting historical background of the building than he did. So basically seen we did not have anything recordable, but if we were granted the required permission we were able to explore the building I a very special way. After arriving in my apartment I instantly wrote an e-mail to the given e-mail address, explaining our intension again and asking for the permission to take photos and explore the building etc…Before I wrote the mail I was told we would receive an answer on Monday latest and that we would be able to finish our project on Tuesday (or at least before Wednesday). To sum it up: I did not receive an answer yet and so we did not receive the permission.
Why?Well I don’t know why nobody replied, but after searching for reasons for this (in my opinion unreasonable) permission I found something interesting: Big movie companies and cinema operators do not allow taking photos and unguided explorations in their buildings anymore because of the huge increase of illegal film piracy and the consequences of people using electronic devices to record movies illegally. The damage for the movie industry in the U.S is recorded to be higher than 6.1 billion $ a year, which is 75% more than they expected (according to the MPAA, the Motion Picture Association of America). So as a result I want to apologize for the leak of information we can provide but I am still looking forward to creating a good presentation.
