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Karl: They're squashing the small guy… For example a Pizza Hut - if they move into an area, or Domino's, if there's a couple local people there, they don't have the advertising budget. Before you know it the small guy gets smaller and smaller and disappears. Even though his product may be superior, people hear "Domino's" or they give you a free hat or something… Same thing with the Sony family. Their movies are like Titanic, movies like that cost multi-multi-million dollars to make. You can't compare that to a movie Conrad was in years ago, all the Ed Wood movies.
Steve: All of them on video made umpteen more money on video than they ever could have made in the theaters.
Conrad: On television as well.
Deana: The great thing about video is you get to sit in your home. You can wear anything you want, you can eat any snacks you have in your house. (Laughter)
Jennifer: They don't have that little sign saying "Don't bring in outside food"!
Karl: (to Steve) What you're saying is true about these smaller theaters, and it was a lot of fun. The problem is, today's younger generation don't know what that's like because they never experienced that. You can't miss something you never had. Right now with the average young person, what we've become accustomed to is big corporations taking over your life.
Steve: So you don't even think that if I bought [the Franklin in Nutley] tomorrow, put it back to one theater and started having all-night movie festivals on Friday night, you don't think kids now would even come?
Karl: It will make money, but don't expect kids to go. First of all, kids will not see a black and white movie. They will walk out of the theater.
Jennifer: Will they think the projector broke? (Laughter)
Karl: [With] Ed Wood, one of the problems was, it was black and white. It would have been a bigger success if it was in color. I had some of my family members, kids, in the house. They went upstairs where I had all these videos, 1950s scifi videos and all that. They said, "What's a good scary movie?" I brought out Dracula, some black and whites, some colors. They would take it out, put it in - black and white - pull it out. Put another one - black and white - pull it out. If it was in color they'd watch it a lot longer, and then pull it out and then try another one. And I'm watching them. Then after they finished the movies they started channel surfing. If it was color it stayed on for three, four seconds. If it was black and white it was fast as my finger could hit it. I says, "How come you didn't watch that movie?" They go, "Oh, we don't watch that movie, it's a gray movie." They don't even use the terminology! So I said, "What do you mean, gray movie?" "You know, there's no color in it!" It was almost a vile thing to them.