The price of corn

W hen David Holton and his wife, Bernese Holton, arrived at the Regal Bell Tower 20 Cinemas in south Fort Myers one evening

last week, they paid $9.50 each to

get in the door.

The cool weeknight was pleasantly free of crowds, so once they established toeholds in the cavernous lobby they could smell the popcorn from 100 feet away, with no distractions.

"Sometimes you can smell colognes and perfumes and sweat and stuff too, but the popcorn's always there, and it always smells good," he said. "It reminds me of going (to the movies) as a kid."

Modern American (and Canadian) cinema, corporate-style, depends nowadays on people like the Holtons, who will buy popcorn at prices that guarantee movie houses a 90-cent profit or more on every dollar of popcorn sold, analysts say.

The Holtons didn't disappoint. They moved up the steps, handing their tickets to a grinning, sallow-skinned youth of indeterminate pimple evolution dressed in a burgundy jacket, like a carnival monkey, the kind who has worked theaters for at least 40 years.

They listened to him say, "Enjoy the show," and then they did what makes the movies the movies, for many: they hotfooted it straight to the concessions counter, ignoring the fact that they were already 10 minutes late for a film called Michael Clayton.

The George Clooney flick really begins to roll when his Mercedes blows up in Westchester County, New York at dawn, while he stands in a nearby field admiring horses, a few minutes into the action. And the movie industry really begins to roll when it sells popcorn, before the action ever starts.

Behind the counter at Bell Tower, a single double-barreled popcorn machine had pumped out the white kernels like culinary snow, laying in a corn drift that filled the glass tank about half way.

The Holtons are visitors from the Midwest, where the corn was grown. They ignored the candy counters completely; ditto, the $4 hotdogs and pretzels.

But they wasted no time buying the mainstay of modern cinema's concession business - popcorn. And they did not complain about the price, at least not until they were asked by a reporter if it bothered them.

"It's ridiculous," she said, giggling.

Her husband didn't bother to comment; he just forked over the cash, ordering the medium size for $6 without butter for her, and picking up the large $7 bucket with butter for himself. Drinks were another $8 between the two of them.

Their $40 investment brought the Holtons two tickets, two tubs of popcorn and two drinks. And what they carried in their popcorn tubs probably amounted to only a couple of ounces apiece of the real thing, fresh out of the fields of Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio and a few other states where the weather is hot in summer, the freezes come late in fall, and the farmers can grow corn with enough moisture, but not too much. Popcorn requires about 13-percent moisture in the kernels, ideally. Less and it won't pop well; more and the corn can mold while sitting in the grain silo, waiting to travel, eventually, to the Bell Tower.

That's modern cinema in a nutshell or a corn kernel. And since teenagers are especially ardent popcorn aficionados, the powerful movie-theater industry exerts great pressure on producers in Hollywood to create action flicks that keep people eating, explains Edward Jay Epstein, a Hollywood economist and author of the book, "The Big Picture: The New Logic of Money and Power in Hollywood."

After the U.S. Justice Department used Sherman anti-trust laws to bust their monopoly, and force movie studios to quit the movie theater business in 1948, everything changed, Epstein said.

"Theater chains, in fact, are (now) in three different businesses," he writes in Slate Magazine. "First, they are in the fast food business, selling popcorn, soda, and other snacks. This is an extremely profitable operation in which the theaters do not split the proceeds with the studios, as they do with ticket sales (that amounts to roughly a 50-50 split). Popcorn, for example, because of the immense amount of popped bulk produced from a relatively small amount of kernels - the ratio is as high as 60:1 - yields more than 90 cents of profit on every dollar of popcorn sold. It also serves to make customers thirsty for sodas, another high-margin product (supplied to most theater chains by Coca-Cola, which makes lucrative deals with theater owners in return for their exclusive "pouring" of its products)."

Extra salt added to the popcorn makes people thirstier, and in the eat-drink-eat business, "theater owners don't benefit from movies with a gripping or complex plot, since that would keep potential popcorn customers in their seat," Epstein concluded.

The price is right

In such a popcorn economy, the farmers may be doing OK, especially since a demand for ethanol is pushing up corn prices. But the owners of movie theaters, especially corporate ones that control many screens and wield great buying power, are getting rich.

Contacted in Hollywood last week and asked why farmers can't get rich, since they're the ones who grow the corn and deliver it to the middle men, Epstein replied, "Farmers are not a monopoly and do not set price."

The movie theater owners set the price, and the price is right - for them.

"Regal sold 22 million pounds of popcorn last year," said Karen Lane, a marketing manager and spokeswoman for Regal Entertainment Group, based in Knoxville. "That's at 539 locations in 40 states, with 6,386 screens." (Local theater managers for Regal are not supposed to talk to reporters, said a Bell Tower manager named Nancy, who referred Florida Weekly to company headquarters.)

And in Southwest Florida, that means 84 Regal screens in five locations: Bell Tower, plus the Bonita Springs Stadium 12, the Gulf Coast Stadium 16, the Hollywood Stadium 20 in Naples, and the Towne Center Stadium 16 in Port Charlotte.

But the business is defined by its practitioner more precisely than simply by number of locations or number of screens.

"Within the Fort Myers-Naples (region), Regal has a total of 22 popcorn poppers," Lane said. "Fun fact: If all of these poppers were to run for one hour, they would produce enough popcorn, if stacked end to end, to cross a football field 245 times."

In case you weren't sure, than means the popcorn produced in an hour by Regal's poppers here would stretch about 17 miles.

Earlier this year, when some movie theater chains raised the price of popcorn and blamed it on farmers increasing prices, corn-industry proponents in Iowa gathered $5 worth of popping corn. And then they popped it, which amounted to about 38 pounds of popped corn, according to a report in the Sioux City Journal. That's probably enough to fill a large truck, once popped.

If a movie theater can sell a couple of ounces of popcorn for $5, therefore, and there are roughly eight such servings in a single pound - or $40 in gross profits in a pound of popcorn - then 38 pounds of popcorn is worth $1,520 to the movie theater.

And based on those figures, 22 million pounds of popcorn could be worth $880 million, of which farmers might receive 5 percent, or less.

Craig Floss, chief executive of the Iowa Corn Promotion Board, told the Toronto Star last month that in a tub of popcorn that costs a consumer $5 - which means popcorn sold mostly in movie theaters here or in Canada - the value of the corn itself (not the packaging or shipping and popping costs, or the cost of the venue), is about 2 cents.

Such economies of outrageous scale, if you will, never occurred to Ken Hawk, he says. A 51-year-old resident of Southwest Florida who grew up farming with his dad outside of Marion, Ohio, Hawk can clearly recall the advent of popcorn as a lucrative crop, about 35 years ago.

"My dad started out with normal field corn, and with soybeans and alfalfa, but then he found out about popcorn and started with 50 acres as a test run," he said. "After the first year it yielded pretty good, and he made some pretty decent money on it, so he bumped up the acreage to 75, then he bumped it up to 100 acres after the third year."

Thus, a popcorn farmer was born. "At first, when dad started picking it, we used a corn picker, and the whole crop would end up in gravity wagons that the picker would feed into," Hawk said. "Then dad got a regular combine. He found out the combine would shell the popcorn off the ear, and that added more space as far as transporting it to the grain elevator."

Popcorn, said Hawk, is a little different than field corn. "Your regular field corn (kernel) is about an eighth of an inch thick, and almost like old-style police badges: straight on the sides, and both curved and flat at the top, with a half triangle at the bottom.

"But regular popcorn is tear-dropped and round. It's similar in shape to an air balloon."

Popcorn was then a marvel to an Ohio farm boy. "It was sort of amazing to me," he said. "I was still a kid, and being able to take the crop somewhere and then buy popcorn … We'd buy it in 50 pound containers. We'd open it with old triangle can openers and put a piece of tape over the top, and get whatever popcorn we wanted from there, and then put it in the freezer to make it keep."

All for less than about $10. Now, if you buy 30 ounces of Orville Redenbacher's unpopped popcorn at a Publix, it'll cost you almost $5.

And Orville Redenbacher's owner, ConAgra, has taken over in Ken Hawk's hometown of Marion, Ohio, and probably a lot of other places. There, the Wyandotte Grain Elevator that he and his dad used when they harvested their corn still stands, but it's gone out of the popcorn business, said a woman who answered the phone at Wyandotte.

Popcorn fun facts

>> Americans consume 73 quarts of popcorn per person every year, and 1 out of every 10 people are popcorn fanatics.

>> January 30th is National Popcorn Day!

>> Popcorn is high in carbohydrates, and has more protein and iron than potato chips, ice cream cones, pretzels and soda crackers, according to The Popcorn Institute.

>> By the time Europeans began to settle in America, popcorn had spread to almost all Native American tribes. The English colonists were introduced to popcorn at the first Thanksgiving feast in Plymouth, Massachusetts, where one of the chief's brothers arrived with a goodwill gift of popped corn in a deerskin bag.

>> Colonial housewives served popcorn with sugar and cream for breakfast -- the first "puffed" breakfast cereal eaten by Europeans, and so was born the breakfast cereal! Some colonists popped corn using a cylinder of thin sheet-iron that revolved on an axle in front of the fireplace like a squirrel cage. At this point there were more than 700 varieties of popcorn.