Their pickiness was inconvenient, to put it mildly -- they wouldn't release the key that was required to access a movie until five minutes before the first showing, which meant there was no time to make emergency changes if there was a problem (and problems are frequent, as we'll get to in a moment).

Then there was the time Donovan attended a conference for theater managers.

"Part of the event was the breakfast presentations. That let studios show us what they were working on and get us excited and talking about them. We went to Disney's, and these big burly guys in suits were standing at every entrance. We had to remove our cellphone and give it to them, get scanned with a magnetic wand and if it went off, we were given a quick pat down. Once inside, the doors were locked and the security guys continued to wander around to make sure we didn't have anything. It was cool to see early footage of Monsters University and Iron Man 3, but it's kind of hard to really enjoy your eggs and toast when you have a large man eyeballing you to see if you smuggled in a cellphone."

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But there's the stick, and then there's the carrot. Disney has an outstanding bounty on bootleggers -- any theater employee who catches one gets paid $10,000 if the thief goes to jail. So if you were thinking of taking a blurry, incomprehensible cellphone recording of a movie to share with your friends, make sure it's a DreamWorks flick.

Theater patrons are a diverse crowd. We might as well start by addressing the sexy elephant in the room: Yes, some of them are getting down and dirty, and according to Donovan, they're not subtle about it. "Most people are so incredibly dumb when it comes to fooling around at the movies ... they bring a blanket and sit in the back row. Do you really think I won't be suspicious of you being covered up with a blanket?"

You might expect this kind of behavior at 50 Shades of Grey or Whatever the Latest Nicholas Sparks Movie Is, but Olga says that some people get their motors going with the saucy antics of family friendly, animated comedies.

"Any projectionist will tell you they have walked in on some kind weird sex detritus after a movie -- at one point, I found a condom and small vodka bottles while cleaning out Despicable Me."

Universal Studios

There's also lots of your standard drunkenness and highness, but where people get really creative is in arguing for refunds. Shockingly, not liking the movie or being an irresponsible parent is not the fault of the theater, as Donovan explains:

"Remember the slow-motion gore fest that was Dredd with Karl Urban? Here comes the whole family! Then you get parents that want a refund when the kids freak out about seeing a guy's head blown to bits in super slo-mo. We couldn't give them refunds because we would warn them ahead of time, and they would get an attitude with us about it for questioning their parenting. Sometimes they would just drag the kid back in there instead of losing money or not being able to finish the movie."

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But in general, it sounds like a person can learn a lot about humanity doing this job. Our other source, Olga, says the strangest experience she ever had was with a woman who argued that Olga was infringing on her Fifth Amendment rights by not letting her smuggle ice cream into the theater, which suggests a serious misunderstanding of either the Constitution or ice cream.

Meanwhile, Donovan witnessed tough-looking guys going into matinees of romantic comedies and coming out all choked up, while Olga saw little old ladies leaving bloody slasher films and complaining, not about the gore and nudity, but the quality of it that was on display. "I think I saw enough World-Weary Old Ladies Too Jaded for Horror Films to qualify that as a trope."

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Oh, and if you were asking yourself why she was so hard on the person trying to smuggle in outside food ...

A large popcorn is around 1,000 calories (that is, two Big Macs) and that's before you have them squirt on any extra butter. According to Donovan, "The butter-flavored sauce (there is no real butter in popcorn, it's all butter-flavored calories) has 240 calories per extra pump. We had a woman who was a regular and would order her bucket of popcorn (180 ounces) and then get us to add nine pumps of butter to it -- 2,160 calories. When she would come back for refills, she would drink the remaining butter from out of the bucket. I've never put extra butter on my popcorn since then."

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And don't think you're getting clever ordering some hot, fresh food, because as Olga tells us, "We would also leave hot foods out on the grill all day so that we wouldn't have to toss them -- stuff like pretzels, hot dogs, etc., would sit there cooking for up to 12 hours because we put them out at the beginning of the morning shift. If I could give people one piece of advice, I would tell them to never order hot food at a movie theater."

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But the food is far from the most immediate danger in the building ...

When it comes to naming dangerous workplaces, a movie theater isn't going to be the first that comes to mind. But while slinging Twizzlers doesn't generally have you risking life and limb, projection bulbs need to be handled like they're the Ark of the Covenant. They're incredibly specialized pieces of equipment, and in theory you're never supposed to handle them with your bare skin because they can explode at the slightest provocation, like a bottle of freaking nitroglycerin. There are plenty of videos out there, if you're curious:

"Coming soon from Michael Bay ..."

At the theater Donovan worked at, they were supposed to suit up in a welder's mask and heavy-duty coat and gloves before changing a bulb. But you can guess how up to date a theater keeps its safety equipment, considering what we just told you about its razor-thin profit margins. Donovan had to work with rubber gloves, an old sports coat, and a dentist-style face shield, which is great for joining an eccentric warriors gang but not so much for protecting your precious face from glass shrapnel. If/when that thin glass explodes, any shrapnel that gets under your skin is too small to remove completely -- we're talking about tiny little needles of clear glass, often thinner than a hair. It just embeds itself into your skin, and then it will itch. And itch. And itch.

At Olga's theater, employees were technically required to take a safety course, but no one, including management, gave the tiniest sliver of a fuck. Her entire chain had no regulations to handle bulbs safely, and a few actually exploded during films. While that would certainly liven up a screening of Boyhood, you wouldn't want to deal with the clean-up and the angry customers.

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Oh, and remember the anecdote earlier in which Disney wouldn't let them unlock the print of the movie until minutes prior to showtime? Well, the problem is that modern movies are shipped to theaters on hard drives, and sometimes those drives are corrupted or blank. Transferring a copy from another theater can take up to 10 hours. So even a non-Disney movie (which will arrive the day before the showing) might require someone to race across the state in the middle of the night to heroically bring Transformers 6: Something Of The Whatever to the masses. The result, as Donovan explained it, was that "Several times I had to break land-speed records driving to such exotic locales as Harland, Kentucky or Knoxville, Tennessee."

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