FILM: Celebrating the singular experience of working in a movie theater, in print and on film

One of the best cinema publications out there is Cashiers du Cinema.

No, no – not the magazine that gave us Jean-Luc Godard, Francois Truffaut, and the French New Wave. That’s Cahiers du Cinema. But the confusion is understandable, at least at a passing glance.

Both Cashiers and ‘60s-era Cahiers are similar formats and designs, square-shaped with yellow-bordered covers framing a black-and-white photo of someone or something relevant to the content inside. The resemblance is so uncanny, in fact, that cinephiles of a certain age will pick up Cashiers du Cinema, see the photo of Norm MacDonald on the cover, and expect a French tribute to the comedian. (Not crazy. See: Jerry Lewis.)

But rather than long, dogmatic treatises on some unappreciated filmmaker or staking claim to a frontier theory of cinema, what readers find in Cashiers is a black-and-white, DIY zine stuffed with highly personal comics in the underground tradition of Raw and raw essays and interviews, all focused on the mundane absurdity of working in a movie theater.

“The sort of change in expression — especially from older people — when they pick it up and we tell them it’s not what they think it is, they look like they want to kill us,” says Cashiers co-founder and co-editor David Cardoza. “But I love that. I love that there’s a tension to it.”

That tension captures some of what makes a multiplex, rep theater, or art cinema such a specific workplace. There are customers and employees, bound together by some love of movies, but the former expects to be entertained while the latter expects to not have to do more than the meager salary requires. There’s a chasm between those poles, and in it is where the tedium of service industry jobs transmute into the kinds of insane stories you can tell for a lifetime. Like the lengths people go to to get into a movie without paying. Or the creative ways movie workers steal back their time (and dignity). Or catching moviegoers having sex during a screening of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

Typically, these misadventures are swapped over beers, fries, or, most often, during the long periods of downtime between a movie beginning and ending. What makes Cashiers so vital is that it captures and preserves this subcultural experience. If you work — or have worked — at a theater, the magazine is a celebration and validation. If you don’t — or haven’t — it’s a kind of pop cultural ethnography (that, hopefully, inspires more empathy for the movie workers you meet the next time you go to the movies)

“For years and years, every movie theater I worked at, the staff was like, I want to make a staff zine, and nobody ever did it,” says Cashiers co-founder and co-editor Dan Welch. “And then finally I just had nothing going on. I own a risograph that I got during COVID, so I was like, ‘I guess I’ll print it if somebody else edits it.’ And then I was like, ‘I guess I’ll edit it.’ And then eventually, I knew David and we both know a ton of people who work in movie theaters,” and the magazine took shape.

Cashiers du Cinema launched in August 2023. (The title — so perfect in its irony and parody — came from another movie worker Welch knew.) As Welch puts it in a recent comic, “The magazine’s never been about ‘celebrating a movie usher identity’ to me. It’s about taking a look at the circumstance of having to have a job and realizing way bigger things are going on in the background. And that even if a lotta people don’t respect the uniform, you’re doing something important. By doing……nothing.”

Welch and Cardoza met while working at Film at Lincoln Center, “shoveling popcorn and selling movie tickets,” as Welch describes. He’s still at Lincoln Center; Cardoza eventually moved to BAM and is now a freelance filmmaker. “Initially, we were like, ‘OK, this is going to be a weirdo, scummy, confrontational thing,” Welch says. “And then somebody submitted this essay” — about how in the ‘90s you could work retail without work being your life — ”that was really genuine and heartfelt about how much they appreciated this lifestyle.” That piece refocused the magazine. There’s now almost a 50-50 split between comics and prose, and its “cynical balanced with sincerity” tone has made it an underground success.

The first issue of Cashiers was 32 pages with an initial print run of 200; the most recent issue, released in December 2025, is nearly triple the length with a run of 1000 copies. The zine is released every nine months and is sold in independent bookstores and comic shops across the city, with Welch and Cardoza using their connections to get the publication in stores.

“One thing the magazine has benefitted from is more and more people are crawling out of the woodwork,” Welch says. “All these cartoonists whose comics I used to read as a fan, I randomly find out they used to work at a movie theater. These people are everywhere.”

Success, though, brings demands neither Welch nor Cardoza expected. They sift through more submissions than they can publish. Both also draw comics, and their work is central to the zine. Welch’s mainstay is a Troma-like movie worker named Tam or Tate, depending, who only likes “movies frum before I was ever borned.” Cardoza takes dead aim, Mad Magazine-style, at nostalgia and the types of characters you find haunting NYC film joints; his “Cinephilez” feature in the first issue showcases grotesqueries like “Q+A Snob,” “Patron of the Arts,” and “Sean Price Williams.” (If you know, you know.) That work is on top of the comics and films they create on their own now suddenly have to take a backseat to getting the magazine made and out. Welch prints the magazine in his Ridgewood apartment using that pandemic-purchase risograph — an outside printer handles the covers — then staples everything together as five or six bad movies play in front of him on his laptop.

And now they can add to that Cinéma Du Cashiers, a film series they programmed for BAM, which runs February 13–19 and includes not only film screenings but live events, too, like in-theater, post-screening comics readings.

After pitching a master list that included the Welsh film Coming Up Roses, which was unattainable, and Lovers are Wet, a Japanese pink film that was “a little too softcore for BAM,” Cardoza says, they got to a 10-film offering that’s an eclectic mix of American and international movies, features and shorts, exploring in some way “the lives and mundane thrills of those very ticket takers, popcorn scoopers, and clean-up crews who keep the fire burning within the walls of movie theaters around the world.” Titles in the series include ones you might expect, like Cinema Paradiso, Goodbye, Dragon Inn, and Variety — celebrated films about life in movie theaters — but also others prime for rediscovery, like The Projectionist (1970), Blood Theatre (1984), Murmur of Youth (1997), and The Good Fairy (1935).

“One hope I have for this series is I really want more moviegoers to read comics because I think they kind of solve an equation,” Welch says. “So many movies now are just awful. But there’s a huge audience. And comics, right now, there are these amazing things happening but the audience is limited. I want to close the circuit.”

“That’s an idea that’s bigger than the magazine,” he continues. “Maybe it’s a pipe dream, but it would be nice to accomplish something like that.”

When it comes to Cashiers du Cinema, never say never. What began as a creative indie comics anthology has grown to something of a cult brand, with a zine, merch, and now institutional validation. And, Welch and Cardoza agree, they couldn’t have anticipated any of it.

“We definitely had hopes that it would grow in some sense, and this series is a really major step,” Cardoza says. “I hope this can lead into us branching into our own stuff, but I think the series itself is really telling for what people want, which is a more personal experience going to the movies. And I think that that’s what this magazine has given them.”

Cinéma Du Cashiers runs February 13–19 at BAM, 30 Lafayette Ave. in Brooklyn. Same subway stop as for the Barclay’s Center. For more information and showtimes, visit bam.org/film/2026/cinema-du-cashiers. Cashiers du Cinema will be available for purchase during the series. It can also be found in select bookstores and purchased online at obviousfakepress.bigcartel.com.