Posted on 10.22.19: Sometime in early ’79 I worked as a manager or co-manager of the Carnegie Hall Cinema. It was such a fascinating and blessed place to work in that I didn’t mind being paid next to nothing. It was easily my second favorite job of my 20s, the first being a Checker Cab driver in Boston, which yielded intrigue and adventure on near-daily basis.
My employer was the late Sid Geffen, the eccentric, moustachioed real estate hotshot who had launched a not-for-profit repertory cinema company (the Center for Public Cinema), and at the time was running both the Carnegie and Bleecker Street Cinemas.
For a few months Sid was also the publisher of the Thousand Eyes Cinema Guide, for which I served as managing editor.
So I loved the CHC job and worked really at fulfilling my duties, but I was never much for math and accounting. I was eventually canned over this deficiency, although I wouldn’t say I had a cavalier attitude. I just didn’t (and still don’t) have the mentality of an exacting numbers guy.
Back in those days we sold numbered cardboard tickets at the upstairs, street-level booth, and it was my daily responsibility to insert the ticket roll under the booth desk and to note the number of the ticket when the day began, and of course the number at closing time.
Don’t ask me how this happened, but one day I put the ticket roll into the ticket-feeding device with the numbers reversed, starting high and ending low. I realized my error a couple of hours later, but by that time several tickets had been sold. I reasoned that ticket sales would simply have to be calculated in reverse order this one time. Awkward or irksome, but hardly a tragedy.
Sid didn’t see it that way. One accounting mistake would probably beget another, he figured. His exact words: “We’re going to have to terminate our relationship, Jeff.”
Sid fired a lot of people. One time a Carnegie ticket seller (female, 20something) was robbed at gunpoint, and then was hit by the exact same guy two days later. Sid fired her, figuring she was either in on it or a bad-luck Jonah.
I don’t recall Sid ever using conventional phrases like “I’m letting you go.” He had his own phrase-ology.
I recall hearing about a conversation between a fellow employee whom Sid had decided to get rid of, but was loathe to say this in so many words. Guy: “So Sid, you’re firing me, right?” Sid: “No, I’m graduating you. I’m holding you back from your destiny, and now you’re free.”