YouSaid · the spoken record

Tim League

lines on the record: 101
first: 2023-05-22
most recent: 2023-05-22
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Yet we had 26 employees when we opened up. And that was still pretty lean for what we were trying to do for a 200-person restaurant. And what we forgot was advertising”
2023-05-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Alamo Drafthouse Cinema: Tim and Karrie League · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But it was better than Bakersfield because we had three people show up on day two. But this time we had a staff and we didn't have any money in the bank. We had enough money for about three payroll cycles and then we're done. We're like done so.”
2023-05-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Alamo Drafthouse Cinema: Tim and Karrie League · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, the problem is that day two wasn't good. So it was, you know, remember Bakersfield, like Citizen Came. Wonderful. Everything was feeling great. And then the next day there were two people. So we showed the Clint Eastwood movie the next day, absolute power because we weren't being an art house. We were kind of a second run movie theater showing Hollywood movies. Okay.”
2023-05-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Alamo Drafthouse Cinema: Tim and Karrie League · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was smoother than I would have thought there were things about it, there's like little granular things that went wrong. We had this idea we'd have these little metal carts that you'd roll down the aisles, but it was a disaster. And after about five minutes, we said, it's the cart, ditch the cart!”
2023-05-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Alamo Drafthouse Cinema: Tim and Karrie League · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Done it, called in the inspection before 6 a.m. And it was funny because the inspector at the time, he's like, you know, Tim, I'm going to pass you for this because technically, it's all good, right? But I just want to show you something about Sheetrock. See these little divots here on the side of the Sheetrock? That's where you can put the little joint compound and you don't get these big bumps that are on all of your walls because you've installed all of these backwards. It's still Sheetrock. It still works. Just don't ever tell anybody about this because it's too embarrassing.”
2023-05-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Alamo Drafthouse Cinema: Tim and Karrie League · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But yeah. So, yeah, I stayed late one night and I was really proud of myself because I sheetrocked the entire kitchen every last bit.”
2023-05-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Alamo Drafthouse Cinema: Tim and Karrie League · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just beer in wine to start, and it was pizza, salads, and sandwiches, and we actually baked our own bread for the sandwiches for the first few years. Wow.”
2023-05-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Alamo Drafthouse Cinema: Tim and Karrie League · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We spent a lot of time at the library learning how to do construction. We took out books from the library about How to build stuff. And in addition, we knew that we wanted pizza to be the sort of the core offering of the restaurant. And so Tim took a job at a pizza place to learn how to make pizza. And I took a job as a waitress to try to learn how to be a waitress, and then I would steal paperwork from the management so that I could try to figure out what the managers were doing.”
2023-05-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Alamo Drafthouse Cinema: Tim and Karrie League · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't know how he did it. I'm going to explain the list of things that $230,000 bought us because we still had like 20 grand left at the end. So we installed the cheapest elevator. We installed both from scratch men's and ladies restrooms. We upgraded the water service to supply those restrooms. We built a commercial kitchen. We built a projection room. We changed the structural of the columns on the building so we'd get five extra feet of ceiling height.”
2023-05-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Alamo Drafthouse Cinema: Tim and Karrie League · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Five or six letters And so we looked at each other and we said, well, we want to be first in the phone book. So it has to start with A. And the top of our original building had that kind of Alamoesque shape to it.”
2023-05-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Alamo Drafthouse Cinema: Tim and Karrie League · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Forty signs. And so we had it narrowed down to two, and I really tried hard to convince Carrie, the one I really was really showy. And it's like, and it already had letters, it's the same price, but we would have had to call our theater chain the taste D with two E's the tasty burger? And it just. It doesn't work. I don't know. It's nothing.”
2023-05-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Alamo Drafthouse Cinema: Tim and Karrie League · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, yeah. So that's his specialty. He does vintage style work on vintage style pieces or makes them from scratch, but those are more expensive.”
2023-05-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Alamo Drafthouse Cinema: Tim and Karrie League · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Tony, given that you're called Alamofouse. You don't have a time machine or something there at the office, too, because it's really, so the story of the name is... I loved this neon artist in town, Evan Voyles, and so I sought him out. It's like, I want you to make a sign for us. We have $5,000. Can you do it? It's like, well, that's pretty low, but maybe you asked me to do more signs down the road. And so let's look. The only way we can make it at this price is you get a rusty old can and I'll put some fresh neon on it.”
2023-05-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Alamo Drafthouse Cinema: Tim and Karrie League · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a common transition And then the Bank of America had to invest in America loan. It was like a one page form. And so we got, I think, $50,000 from Bank of America, which we paid back within a year, and we had a long term, still have a relationship with Bank of America. And they said, Waya, you guys were probably in the 1% that paid that back. We're no longer investing in America on those terms.”
2023-05-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Alamo Drafthouse Cinema: Tim and Karrie League · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so there's the 100 grand from Carrie's folks. My dad and my folks put in 50. We did some really silly proposal to our friends and we got maybe $10,000 from friends as an investment. We did a series of credit card, you know, take out the credit cards, max them out. So we got probably 25,000 from that. So I came into the Tejon, you know, putting 50 grand in, probably still had $20,000 in the bank, and then we left with $20,000 in the bank. So it was neutral.”
2023-05-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Alamo Drafthouse Cinema: Tim and Karrie League · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. So I had told you that my parents were incredibly ambivalent about everything that had happened up to that point. And they didn't have a whole lot more faith in this project, but I just want to give a shout out to my parents whom I adore. Mortgaged their house In order to lend us $100,000.”
2023-05-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Alamo Drafthouse Cinema: Tim and Karrie League · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we wanted to be in where the action was. And so we found a real estate broker and they were touring us on sites and we would put in an offer and we rejected. It's like, no, we're looking for somebody that has more than a heroically failed business and actually a little bit of money to do this.”
2023-05-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Alamo Drafthouse Cinema: Tim and Karrie League · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, we had been talking before that incident. We had been talking about trying again in a better location. We knew of the existence of other theaters that served food and drinks during a movie. So we strongly felt that if we could Do something like that, and if we did it in a place that could support it, that it could be successful. We weren't ready to give up.”
2023-05-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Alamo Drafthouse Cinema: Tim and Karrie League · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. And so that was it. We were already, I mean, the neighborhood was really cool because that street was an old street and there was a lot of really fun, interesting business trying to make a go of it, but the crime was just high. And so the Arthouse crowd never wanted to come. And with that press, We just knew that's it, and we were gone 30 days later.”
2023-05-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Alamo Drafthouse Cinema: Tim and Karrie League · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. So there was some sort of a quoral, we think it was sort of a love triangle dispute. And as somebody was driving away, somebody else pulled a gun out and shot and ended up shooting the person who was driving away in the head. And that person wrecked his car into our box office, basically, and died.”
2023-05-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Alamo Drafthouse Cinema: Tim and Karrie League · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“20s? Oh, wow. We kind of workshop some fun ideas and said, oh man, this is a great crowd. Too bad they're just drinking water out of the water fountain.”
2023-05-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Alamo Drafthouse Cinema: Tim and Karrie League · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The bank corn. So that coincides, right? So, we had the Westwood One radio network corn reunion show at the theater. Wow. So it was a big deal. And so this was a special show for them.”
2023-05-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Alamo Drafthouse Cinema: Tim and Karrie League · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I think my parents were more disappointed in me because of throwing away the career. And we explained this also to our parents, and I think this probably takes a little bit of the edge off of it, is that we had come to peace before we started with the idea of total and complete abject failure So we knew that that was a high probability given the nature of the business that we were going into. And so we had no obligations, nobody counting on us other than ourselves. And so why not give it a shot? It could be fun. It could be changing. It could change everything. And if we fail, we'll put our tail between our legs. We'll not talk about it again, and we'll go become engineers and researchers again. And so they knew that and weren't devastated by that. They were supportive.”
2023-05-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Alamo Drafthouse Cinema: Tim and Karrie League · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we're still in love, and we're still enjoying our time together. So, you know, after, what, eight years of being together, I finally realized that it's time to propose. So we got married in the middle of all that.”
2023-05-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Alamo Drafthouse Cinema: Tim and Karrie League · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well we wanted to. That was the original plan and during that three or four month period of construction I had finished a pretty heavy day of construction so I'm wearing a dirty t-shirt and cut off shorts and I was twenty four I think 23 at the time. But I looked I think about 14 and so I just strolled into the alcoholic beverage commission office and said I'd like one of those alcohol licenses please. And we were turned down. So that was one of the main reasons. I think if we could have gotten that alcohol license we might have actually been able to sneak through and make it work. But I will say at this time about a year into it you do the math on it. We've been under the most high stress environment of a failing business living together 24-7 without a break from each other for a year.”
2023-05-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Alamo Drafthouse Cinema: Tim and Karrie League · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we started partnering with local restaurants. When we worked really hard and we put together special events that were thoughtful and creative, then people would come. And so we would do these events where we would show Il Postino and have an Italian feast associated with it and have an elevated ticket price and we'd split the profit with the restaurant.”
2023-05-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Alamo Drafthouse Cinema: Tim and Karrie League · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We didn't even process that's not normal. We were the only ones coming to National Screen Service and the popcorn depot to pick it up in our car and drive it back to Bakersfield. But it did save us upwards of probably $150 a week on shipping that we just didn't have.”
2023-05-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Alamo Drafthouse Cinema: Tim and Karrie League · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we ate meals that I prepared in the crock pot every day using probably a dollar worth of ingredients. And we didn't have any shipping costs because we would drive down to Los Angeles and bring up the film prints ourselves and go to the depot where we got the popcorn and the candy and we would also pick up the posters and the advertising materials that we would need.”
2023-05-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Alamo Drafthouse Cinema: Tim and Karrie League · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A lot of times we would hope and pray that nobody would come, because that means we could go get a cup of coffee somewhere and have a night off. But inevitably, two minutes before Showtime, one elderly couple would come in and they'd watch whatever we're playing, and the show must go on. But it never gained much traction. There was a die-hard group of probably 200 people in Bakersfield that loved what we were doing. That was our community. They go to the movies three or four times a year, and it just wasn't sustainable for us.”
2023-05-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Alamo Drafthouse Cinema: Tim and Karrie League · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and going back to that time, one of my first moves was I bought a copy of Box Office magazine, and it had the names of all the studio and the indie distributor contacts with phone numbers. And so I just ended up calling everybody. It's just saying, hey, we're going to be opening up an Arthouse Theater. I don't know how this works. How does this work? Can you tell me how it works? How do I get movies? And really without fail, they were so kind. It was a novelty, I think. And the way it generally works, there's a minimum of a couple hundred dollars versus 35% of the box office. That's kind of like the standard for second run art house films. And I can tell you that we predominantly paid the minimum because 35% did not equal $200. The accounting was not that challenging.”
2023-05-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Alamo Drafthouse Cinema: Tim and Karrie League · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's literally tracks. Right. Yeah, and there was a payphone attached to the theater, and I got so angry because of the drug traffic out of that payphone that I probably with hedge clippers cut off the receiver at least 15 times, and they just kept on replacing it. Going back to arrogance and ignorance, something that was drilled home to us very strong was that location, location, location mantra that some people that may have paid any attention to running a business, opening a business might have heard. That was news to me.”
2023-05-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Alamo Drafthouse Cinema: Tim and Karrie League · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was amazing. It was a wonderful night. It was pretty full. I think it was maybe 250 people there. And it just felt amazing and great. Everything was working. I was exhausted, but completely fulfilled. And then the next day we showed Christophe Kislowski's blue.”
2023-05-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Alamo Drafthouse Cinema: Tim and Karrie League · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not at ours. We were just in nighttime. Okay. But I should probably take this opportunity to apologize to the Shell Oil Company for being here.”
2023-05-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Alamo Drafthouse Cinema: Tim and Karrie League · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so I lived very, very frugally because I was planning to do something. So I saved every nickel that I made. I was probably making close to 50 grand a year in the mid-90s. I had accumulated $50,000 in two years at Shell. And so that's what I used to open up the first one, that nest egg.”
2023-05-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Alamo Drafthouse Cinema: Tim and Karrie League · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it was around three or four months. We didn't have any projectors, so there was a friend of ours that ran a punk club, and he had stripped out some projectors from a dollar theater, and I bought those from him for $2,500. Part of the deal that he had to show me how they worked, like how to take them apart and how to operate them.”
2023-05-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Alamo Drafthouse Cinema: Tim and Karrie League · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Carrie reopholstered 90% of the 500 seats of the first theater. And I would spray paint the bases and backs, and then Carrie would take the raw materials and watch movies through the week and then meet me the next weekend.”
2023-05-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Alamo Drafthouse Cinema: Tim and Karrie League · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so I mean, I know I talked to Carrie immediately and was super excited about the idea. And then probably the next conversation was that we're going to do this. We're going to make this happen. I got some business books at the library. This is not going to be that hard at all. We can totally do this. I don't know. I say often my two greatest strengths at the time were arrogance and ignorance that just drove me forward because I should have thought it through maybe a little bit more.”
2023-05-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Alamo Drafthouse Cinema: Tim and Karrie League · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think the amount of time we're talking about from turning left on Baker Street and seeing that Furley sign to signing the lease I think was about eight days.”
2023-05-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Alamo Drafthouse Cinema: Tim and Karrie League · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I just want to clarify some of your language. This seems to imply some sort of thoughtful approach to decision-making. Some methodicals.”
2023-05-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Alamo Drafthouse Cinema: Tim and Karrie League · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. So on my way to work was this abandoned theater, and it had always been there, so I'd passed it a hundred times. But one morning it was different. It had the red marquee letters on it said For Lis. And it was those red letters that was really the stereotypical light bulb moment. I just drove in in the morning, couldn't stop thinking about it all day. It was Thursday or Friday, and I went out to a bar that night and just was waxing poetic about this great idea about opening up a cool venue showing really amazing art house and classic movies in a classic old theater. I just got obsessed with it”
2023-05-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Alamo Drafthouse Cinema: Tim and Karrie League · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All right, so the two of you are in different parts of California, presumably trying to see each other as often as possible on the weekends, maybe driving up Tim to Davis. And you're at Shell, I think, for maybe a year or maybe less. I don't know how long you actually work there. When you come across a movie theater in Bakersfield that is available for lease. Yeah.”
2023-05-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Alamo Drafthouse Cinema: Tim and Karrie League · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it was interesting because I was with this other group of PhD candidates and I'd say, oh, I see that negative land is coming to town. Does anyone want to go see a show? And they tell me, no, I think that the new edition of microbiology today arrives in the mail today. So I can't go anywhere. And that was sort of when I realized that in a competitive field like that, you could have no outside interests and I was doomed. And when we would call each other every night and see each other almost every weekend, a huge part of our conversation revolved around We've made a terrible mistake. What are we going to do? And we would fantasize about opening a small bookshop or, you know, running away to be tour guides in Costa Rica or millions, millions of ideas.”
2023-05-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Alamo Drafthouse Cinema: Tim and Karrie League · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's really, it was day one. I filled out my paperwork. I signed up for my 401k, got my health insurance all sorted, and then the head of HR said, okay, well, all you got to do now is go down to the basement and pick out your art. And I mean, she didn't know, but that left me cold and my tracks are like, what exactly does that mean? And I can't wait to go see what this basement is. And so I went down and you had an office with a window and three walls. And so you went down to choose what paintings would be on your three walls between they had landscapes and oil derricks or a combination of landscape and oil derricks. So you could choose whatever spoke to you and then put it on your wall. It was at that day where it's like, okay, I don't think I'm going to fit in here and I got to now maybe a little bit too late in the game figure out what I want to do with my life.”
2023-05-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Alamo Drafthouse Cinema: Tim and Karrie League · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's kind of the And you're an engineer for Shell. And Carrie, you're up at Davis, UC Davis, which is like, what, five hours apart, but still you're both in the same state. And tell me about that job, Tim. I mean, you get there in 92. I'm sure you're paid pretty well, but it was maybe soon you get there and you realize it's not the right fit?”
2023-05-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Alamo Drafthouse Cinema: Tim and Karrie League · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh yeah, I mean, if you watch the movie, there will be blood. That's kind of the Kern Valley oil epicenter. It's a huge reserve. And so it's all stems from Bakersfield.”
2023-05-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Alamo Drafthouse Cinema: Tim and Karrie League · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He was going to California to go work for Shell. And that job was in Bakersfield. And I've been to Bakersfield many times, and there are oil rigs there. Is that why there's a shell presence there, presumably?”
2023-05-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Alamo Drafthouse Cinema: Tim and Karrie League · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So all of those kids that you knew back then and may still know some of them today, are they surprised that you got, I mean, because they're all, you know, everyone remembers like that couple that meets freshman year of college and maybe stays together for four years or maybe splits up. But here we are. We're talking 35 years later.”
2023-05-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Alamo Drafthouse Cinema: Tim and Karrie League · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The first stage of our courtship was mornings were and still continue to be challenging for me. I'm much more of a night owl late person, and so I had an 8 a.m. calculus class. And so I would wake up, set an alarm, open up the door, and wait for Carrie to walk down the stairs, and then hand her my homework to turn in so I could go back to bed. So that was how we sort of, that was sewing the seeds of the relationship.”
2023-05-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Alamo Drafthouse Cinema: Tim and Karrie League · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Served to you while you watch a first run film. Now running a movie theater is hard enough, but adding in a restaurant on top of it is even harder. Each of them have their own challenges around licensing, labor, logistics, you name it. But Tim and Carey figured out how to make it work by focusing on building a sense of community at each of their theaters, which you will hear about. And as with so many other founders I've talked to on the show, Tim and Carrie didn't have the slightest intention of going into business, or in this case, starting a chain of movie theaters. They both went to Rice University in the late nineteen eighties where Carrie studied microbiology, and Tim Mechanical Engineering and Art, and they first met when they were freshmen.”
2023-05-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Alamo Drafthouse Cinema: Tim and Karrie League · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was trying to turn movie watching into a movie experience. Tim and Carrie League were experimenting with that exact idea. In 1993, with his own savings, Tim rented out an abandoned movie theater with the idea of showing classic films while serving full meals and drinks. He and his wife Carrie refurbished the place themselves and in order to save money, they literally lived behind the screen of the theater. Now that project fizzled out after about two years mainly because the theater was in a rough neighborhood in Bakersfield, California, not exactly a prime spot for sipping a glass of roset while appreciating the finer points of citizen cane. But that shaky experiment in Bakersfield eventually grew into Alamo Draft House Cinema, a chain of now forty movie theaters across the US that was among the first to offer full meals and drinks”
2023-05-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Alamo Drafthouse Cinema: Tim and Karrie League · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT