My initial idea for my investigative paper was to interview a place in Pittsburgh, seeing how I attend school here, and live here. I was thinking of something along the lines of a restaurant that nobody knows about, maybe taking a walk through the south side and picking a random hole-in-the-wall establishment to uncover. I wouldn’t have wanted to do anything in downtown or the strip, seeing how all those places are pretty well known, especially in the strip, where every restaurant gets tons of publicity. However, being true to my roots, I decided against Pittsburgh altogether. I had the idea: who says this paper has to be about something good? Maybe instead of writing about a diamond in the rough, we could write about a shiny-looking lump of coal in the sewer. This is when I had the idea of writing about entertainment cinemas, Fresh Pond. Walking along the bridge from the alewife train station, entertainment cinemas is the first thing your eyes see, a hulking mass of concrete isolated in a sea of asphalt, the railroad tracks running alongside. At first glance, it looks like an okay establishment, if not one that went out of style in 1987. However, my experiences there have taught me otherwise. Watching a movie there, you are almost guaranteed a 1 in 3 shot of your film stopping mid-screening. Once the film stopped while the projector was on, and soon melted. To make a long story short, this place is a hunk of garbage. What’s better, I know someone from my school who works there. He’s told me about his experiences there, but I never really paid much thought to it. Now however, I know I can get me to take me behind the scenes to uncover what really goes on here. From what I have gathered from him, it involves general managers with drug problems, employees that drink on the roof, and ceilings that leak rusty water into the popcorn machines. I can imagine it will be quite a bit more interesting than interviewing some random place in the south side.
