Film Studies 101: George Spielburton
She should have hired more staff, she thought, and turned to gaze beyond the glass towards the gathered figures fashioned from clay and mud in their barely concealed costumes, and thought she should have hired human staff. That, however, would have required effort, a greater amount of planning, more consideration of what it would take to appear authentically human, to be a credible reflection of human society, and Yodonna, dark hair falling past her shoulders, a pair of narrow, red glasses upon the bridge of her nose, did not have time for the considerations of human society.
Still, she thought, looking out through the open door and the queue that had formed around the block, it would have made sense to employ humans to do the business of administrating such an enterprise, she hadn't exactly thought that part of her plan through. It had been enough, she assumed, to just fake it, to just make it up as she went along; she had Movie Jamen, she had those Minusaurs the mushroom creature made whenever she stamped her foot upon it, the shape of them actualised from the fluid that seeped out in its excitement, but she hadn't thought to consider how to engage with humans, how to draw an audience.
The movie theatre had been open a full day before she had finally stomped outside, seized hold of the first passer-by, and twisted their arm until they had released their grasp on their smartphone. She had spent the next five minutes prodding at it until she had finally found a name: George Spielburton.
There, she had thought, that was the name, that was what would get people interested, and lashing out with her crop, had ordered the Bechats that constituted Yodonheim's creative marketing team to draft art for a new Spielburton production to entice the interests of the public.
Thus it was that Yodonna, dressed in a smart suit and paisley tie, her name listed as Frīja on what little paperwork she had made to the effort to file, had found herself the manager of a brand new movie theatre, home to the latest Spielburton blockbuster, a move that, in the space of a day, had excited as many phone calls from the proprietors of other theatre chains and distribution channels as it had prospective customers who might be a source of dark energy for her liege, Emperor Yodon.
Glancing down at the stolen smartphone, when not interrupted by irritating customers wishing to be issued with free tickets for their premiere screening, she had been amused to learn of the divergence between distribution of entertainment in Japan and the rest of the world. Not that it mattered to her, she would had told anyone who might have asked, but it was curious how the studios still owned the theatres in Japan, where, elsewhere, following some nebulous bust up over cocaine and corruption, laws had been enforced to separate the two.
Cocaine and corruption, she had thought, pushing her glasses back up her nose, that was definitely the kind of energy Yodonheim could have benefited from.
Ah, but what was cinema, she considered, jabbing at the screen of the phone once more. What was cinema but a means of documenting a specific view of the world, not the world as it was. As was so often the case with such things in human society, it was always the loudest who entered their views into the canon, creating a tapestry of imaginings masquerading as fact; no different from the plan she had set in motion with Movie Jamen and the excited, writhing, mushroom-thing at her behest.
There was a polite cough, the irritatingly polite tap of knuckles on glass, and she looked up from the small reception area she had sat in to find yet another human inquiring about free tickets.
More staff, she thought again. She should have hired more human staff.