AMC Loews Nassau Metroplex 10

Ahhhh, the Lowes Quad. Now that was a great complex. When “Star Wars” expanded it played here at the same time with “Close Encounters”. I got invited to a test screening of “The Rose” starring Bette Midler. Siting infront of me was a guy with a device in his hands and I asked what he was doing. Turns out he was with Dolby Labs and he was testing the sound. I got to meet the director Mark Rydell there and in the audience was Diana Ross who was going to be starring in Mark’s next picture “The Bodyguard”, which was made years later with a whole different production. A few years later I went to a test of “Going South” directed by Jack Nicholson and they kept holding the film announcing Jack was to attend and was late but an hour later he never showed, as well since the film wasn’t very good.

I haven’t been there in years but this theatre was as well run as
one could be. “All That Jazz”, a reissue of “Tommy”, “Foul Play”, Midnight Express, as well as “Close Encounters” & “Star Wars” were only a hint of the films I saw there. Big comfortable theatres, big screens and big sound. Drama, musical, whatever they showed was done first rate. I don’t care what they call it nowadays, I’ll always call it The Lowes Quad though.

This was (and hopefully still is) one of LI’s best theaters. Great parking, nice theaters, etc. I saw too many movies to mention from the early 80’s through the early 90s. Always had a great experience.

As a current employee, I believe that the entire complex needs massive upgrades in audio/visual and lighting. The problems that exist in the aforementioned categories annoy and frustrate everybody – the customers, the employees and management.

For this document, I’m only going to share two simple examples. Theatre #5 in the back, on the left-hand side: The theatre has this extremely annoying buzz that comes out of the speakers when there is no signal flowing to them from the film’s soundtrack. Put simply: When the movie is off, the intermission music, supplied by a CD player in one of the projection booths should be playing – meaning on. The intermission music system in that theatre hasn’t worked for a very long time. It needs to be fixed to get rid of that buzz – period. The fact that the “middle-of-the-road” music supplied by the programming company is just as annoying as the buzz is a subject for another document. That most probably will never be written. Theatre #6, in the back, on the right-hand side: The automation that raises and lowers the light levels hasn’t worked correctly in a real long time. To make one set of lights go on or off, the projectionist has to manually flip a switch in a circuit breaker box. To make another set of lights go on or off, an employee has to manually flip a secret switch, hidden in the theatre. If an employee doesn’t hang around to flip the secret switch, the managers wind up getting complaints about super-bright orange-colored lighting. Again, I do know the technical details about this, I’m just too lazy do do all the typing. It just needs to be fixed – period.

This was one of the few theatres to get involved with the Interfilm experiment in 1995.

KingBiscuits,

About 2006, me and a guy from AMC gutted the entire Interfilm cabinet. It had four (4) Pioneer LD-V8000 laserdisc players inside of it. He took one and I acquired three. Sold two and kept one for myself. At the time I got it, the motor that spins the disc only had 880 hours used of the total 10,000 hour lifespan (Mean Time Between Failures). That’s less than 1% of the total lifespan of the motor. It’s just too bad that I couldn’t get hold of the laserdiscs. They vanished years before we cannibalized the unit. I did manage to acquire the software CD-ROM for Ride for Your Life. I contains a customized install of Win 95 and some of the graphics that were shown at the bottom of the screen. They’re uncompressed Windows BMP’s.

Take good care,
Bill N.
Formerly “Nobody U. Know”