Who's Who in El Cerrito: Alexis Whitham

Name: Alexis Whitham

Age: 30

Occupation: General manager of Rialto Cinemas Cerrito

How long have you been working as the general manager at Rialto Cinemas Cerrito? I started at the beginning of August 2009.

What's a day on the job like for you? A day on the job can be a lot of different things depending on the day. The movie business ebbs and flows. You can have a day where it's really busy and all you do is customer service and make sure you're getting people in the right place at the right time. Then you can have a day where it's just paperwork and inventory and general business things. It doesn't matter what job you have – if you're working at a movie theatre, or a restaurant, or a massage shop, it's all just business stuff.

The business has improved a lot over the last year. We're really into changing things and seeing how things work…based on success and failure. I think that every day it gets a little better. We change things on the menu and we change things in terms of policy. Hopefully people see improvement over time – that we're learning how to run a very unique business.

What would credit for the improvement of the last year? It's definitely a combination of things.  It's just a lot of us on-site, learning. Almost none of our staff had experience at a movie theatre at all in terms of management. The owners had experience at a movie theatre but not a movie theatre combined with, essentially, a restaurant. There's a lot of things we have to learn to do differently over time. It's been sort of on-the-job training and getting the feel of things.

We've had a lot of help from the City of El Cerrito,  Friends of the Cerrito and local people who help us utilize the space the best and make the business the best it can (be).

Some of our most successful events have been ones that we didn't think of, or programs that the Friends of the Cerrito or the City of El Cerrito did. It's really great to know that there's community support that's really keeping the place going (so that) maybe when we're having a slow week we'll have a great night with a Cerrito classic.

What's something exciting that happened this week? This week is really slow. Mostly this week the exciting thing is planning for next week. We have something like five special events next week, so this week is just getting to that place. We're going to do our first midnight movies next week on the 15th and the 16th. Then we have National Theatre productions next Monday and Wednesday.

We go from Monday doing expensive highfalutin kinds of events that people really view as a theatre event (to) on Friday, a $7 midnight showing of Weird Science.

We're really running the gamut and trying to appeal to everyone in the city and in the neighboring cities and areas, so the variety is the fun thing for next week.