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In today's LAT piece on "Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About How a Movie Trailer Gets Shown at Your Local Theater, But Were Afraid To Ask," we were utterly unsurprised to discover that the same system of studio payoffs, favor-trading, and intimidation that marks day-to-day business in Hollywood also effects theater chains' choices in trailers. Most comforting is the revelation that these transactions are not immune from the time-honored industry ritual of a studio executive unleashing profanities at someone with a much smaller salary:

"You become nuts," said Tom Sherak, a partner at Revolution Studios, who for years was a top executive at 20th Century Fox. At Fox, he was known to excoriate exhibitors who didn't run his trailers. "It didn't make me angry. It made me crazy. I would make up words I never heard before. There's a lot of screaming."

And if profane neologisms didn't help Sherak get his way, he'd call up the offending exhibitor and make him listen as he tossed hot coffee in his assistant's face, repeating the process until the trailer was shown. Only the most hard-hearted of theater execs wouldn't cave after hearing those screams of pain.