Lotfillers

Blockbuster is one of the words coming out of movies that is most embedded in our everyday language. It refers, of course, to a product that is so widely popular that it results in enormous sales (a blockbuster drug) or, perhaps, information or an event that is so important or newsworthy that it becomes ubiquitous in conversation. Living above an old movie theater helps me appreciate what the term means. When movies are popular enough, people arrive in numbers and early enough to they can be assured of tickets. The line that forms extends past the theater and around the block. Blockbuster lines stop traffic, disrupt neighboring businesses, and become events in themselves. While the Art Theater (the one I live above) doesn't generally book the kinds of movies that become blockbusters, the Virginia Theater just a block away does, and the crowds that have come there for blockbusters are certainly memorable. It's something I like about my neighborhood.

Downtown Champaign is an exception, however. The very movies that made blockbuster common parlance also pushed it beyond its literal meaning. Blockbuster movies like Jaws and Star Wars helped fund the last great round of theater building. The multiplexes they helped birth, with Dolby surround sound and stadium seating, have been located in suburban locales - first on the outlots of shopping malls and now as stand-alones in power centers. These venues are no longer sited on blocks. Because the facilities are separated from neighboring uses and the surrounding community the disruptive effect of blockbuster movies has become, well, less disruptive, and blockbusters lose the 'big event' kind of excitement that they used to generate. At least locally.

A more appropriate word might be lotfiller. Opening weekends for the big movies now help fill the multiplex parking lots that are often mostly empty for all but the peak times. The significant experience in a lotfiller is not the wait but also comraderie of standing in line but rather the anxious tedium of driving down aisles looking for a parking spot. The effect most notable on its surrounding environs is the concentrated traffic loading that happens when the movie lets out. There are three differences between blockbuster and lotfiller. The experience changes from pedestrian to auto-oriented, and the impact and excitement of the crowds are isolated and minimized. More subtly, the term connotes a feeling of 'filling up' rather than 'overflowing', a nuance that may have value in a world of systems built for redunancy and excessive capacity.

Lotfiller: it's a new term. Let's put it to use.