A Technician Discovers Community Cinema

There are many interesting things I have to do in my current position. Managing a small Arts Centre means that budgets are very tight. Often, all of us have to work very long hours and muck in on jobs that we really don't have the training nor experience to deal with. To be quite honest though, this is the best part of the job - and I love it!
Prior to this job (and still on a sporadic freelance basis), I worked as a theatre technician. When working in technical theatre, there are a few principles that we work on, the main one being that everything must work on the night. I've done some pretty questionable bodges in my time to achieve this. They were all inelegant, but they all worked and, here's another key point, they were completely invisible to the audience. A good bodge should work to the point that no-one can tell it's a bodge.
This brings me onto my latest glance into community cinema. Essentially, community cinema is a weird hybrid between a "proper" cinema and sticking on a Blu-Ray at home. We pay film licensing costs, promote the screening, sell you drinks and concessions on your way into the auditorium, but when it comes down to it, we are just sticking on a Blu-Ray we ordered from amazon (albeit on a very big screen). To that end, we try to make ourselves look as much like a "proper" cinema as we can. Good gosh it's not easy!
Blu-Ray discs have this nasty habit of going back to the menu when you don't want them to. I don't want my patrons to see me clicking through the menus to find the play button. I don't want my patrons to have to see me incompetently navigating through the pre-rolls on a disc with the little "this operation is not permitted" badge appearing on screen! Each disc is different, which doesn't help (is it "top menu"? When can I press "menu"? Can I skip this bit? Which bits can I skip?).
The obvious solution is to set everything up before the audience arrive. Navigate those horrible menus before anyone enters the auditorium (often swearing a fair bit in the process), hit pause, blank the screen, let the audience in, restore the screen and press play. Simple, no?
Of course not.
Consumer blu-ray players detect that you have a film paused for a while (like, say, 15-20 minutes while the audience are coming in) and helpfully go into standby mode. Oh gee Panasonic DMP-BD83, thank-you so much for helpfully saving me 0.5W of power. That'll make a huge difference when behind me I have almost 2kW of lights making the auditorium safe to walk in. Helpful. So I switch the blu-ray player back on and, if I'm lucky, I'll get an ugly "Do you want to resume playing" message in front of 100 eager an judging eyes, to which I can answer yes and we're all hunky dory. Too often though the player kicks me back to the menu, or the annoying-preroll-before-the-menu, or on two occasions, an error message.
There is a disparity between the worlds of technical theatre and the worlds of consumer electronics, and I don't completely understand why. Both worlds want things to work first time with as little chance of failure as possible. The difference I've found is that in technical theatre, we absolutely need things to work first time.
In the arts, we develop and sell aesthetic experiences. Experiences in which people can become lost. If you watch a good play, or hear a good band or see a good film, nothing else matters to you. You become completely and totally engaged in the work. You become alive in the moment and lost in the artist's world. The arts still command a high price because people, and I believe quite rightly, value that.
As a technician, my work is always aiming to enhance the piece or, at the very least, not detract from it. Nothing is more jarring than being brought out of an imaginary world by technical glitch, where a lighting op took a cue too early, or a sound op didn't put a mic live, or when a projectionist has to navigate a tacky Blu-Ray menu. Our work is (or should be) completely invisble.
So what am I going to do about this whole "community cinema" adventure? Well, I'll just have to keep experimenting with workflows until I find something that works. Because I'm a technician. I can bodge most things!