A close call in the iMax building: 'It's terrifying'
Sometimes life sends you a message from above...
Just when you think a story might be over, an update falls from the sky. That’s a pretty tragic metaphor for what happened when an Auckland teacher visited the Sky World Entertainment Centre recently. I gave her a call to talk through her experience in the building on Sunday night. Let’s go…
Caitlin Irvine just wanted a curry.
The Auckland-based English teacher had been in the Sky World Entertainment Centre - the iMax building - on Auckland’s Queen Street for just a few minutes when she realised it wasn’t going to happen.
“My husband and I went to the Metro Centre to check it out. I wanted to see if the Indian place was still there,” Caitlin told me during a chat over the phone this week.
She’s talking about 4 Season, the Indian restaurant that shut up shop and moved out of the building’s food court and into a new Hobson Street premises recently.
Right now, no eateries are open in the iMax building’s lower level food court. Just two are operating on the upper level, where vacant spaces have chairs on tables, padlocks on doors and rent demand notices pinned up.
Caitlin and her husband didn’t know this. They’d last been in the building six months ago, so they were shocked to see how many tenants had vacated.
“We were just looking around, seeing the state of the place,” says Caitlin. “There was hardly anyone there … it was such a shame.”
They wandered through the food court, realised nothing was open, and headed to the exit.
All told, they’d been there perhaps five minutes.
Then something unexpected happened.
“I walked around the corner, then came back around, and I suddenly had to stop because something fell from the ceiling and crashed onto the chairs in front of us,” says Caitlin.
This photo was taken shortly afterwards.
That’s a giant cardboard billboard for the next Fast & Furious film featuring Vin Diesel and Michelle Rodriguez that came tumbling from above, crashing onto the tables next to them.
It nearly hit them.
Those yellow stick figures are where Caitlin estimates they were standing when it landed, about a metre away.
“If you look at the photos, it looks like a cardboard cut out. But because it fell from such a height it had a lot of force to it,” she says.
“We were walking in that direction, back towards the toilets. A couple of seconds ahead and it would have hit us.
“It’s pretty terrifying.”
She didn’t know what to do next, so she and her husband just stood there. After a while, a security guard showed up, but he didn’t say anything.
“There was a lone security guard who came along afterwards and he just checked to see what (the billboard) was secured to,” she says. “A couple of people came along to check it out. There was someone else who was almost hit who was coming out of the toilets. She had a good look at it too.”
No one apologised, or checked if they were okay. No one even talked to them. So they left. When she got home, Caitlin jumped on Google. That’s when she came across my story: What’s going on in the iMax building?
Regular readers know I’ve been covering this issue extensively (here’s part one, part two and part three), and there’s more to come, very soon.
Caitlin emailed me because the incident shocked her. “We were one-to-two seconds away from being hit. I believe the place is now a safety hazard,” she wrote.
She wanted to know what was going on there.
I did too. I asked JNJ Management, who own and operate the building, but received no reply.
Caitlin ended up laying a complaint with Event Cinemas.
Eventually, they got back to her.
They had an answer.
“They said they were reviewing surveillance and that someone had thrown it from the fourth floor … They've relocated the stand to the third floor for safety.”
I don’t think I’d want to be standing underneath it no matter what floor it comes from.
While I had her on the phone, I asked Caitlin a tough question: does she know what kind of injuries they might have if she and her husband had been standing directly underneath it?
The couple have spent the past few days wondering the same thing.
“I’ve been trying to work that out. My husband thinks it would have done some pretty severe damage to our heads. I really don’t know. It seems like such a light thing because it’s cardboard (but) it fell with such a force. It’s hard to tell.”
Her story alarmed me. We know the building’s had issues in the past. In 2017, human smoke detectors were placed in the food court and in every cinema because the building’s WOF had expired over fire safety issues.
Surely, there must also now be security concerns. Someone dragged a giant movie billboard over to the balcony, then hurled it over the side. Someone should have been there to stop that from happening.
I had one last question for Caitlin.
Is she a Fast & Furious fan?
“I'm not! (I’m) even less of a fan now after the incident. We've made tons of jokes about how we narrowly escaped death by Vin Diesel.
“Though I'm feeling like I should go and see Fast & Furious 9 now after it almost slapped me in the face.”
UPDATE: Michael Morcos, Group General Manager, Communications for Event Cinemas, says the incident was caused by a group of teens “who caused chaos from floor to floor”. They hid from security but were eventually reprimanded by security.
The iMax series so far…
No Game: An update about a messy rap situation…
A story I’ve been obsessed with for years has some new developments. It involves the un-Google-able rapper The Game. Remember him? He hates it or loves it. He likes to dream big. He’s gonna put you on the game.
Anyway, Los Angeles performer Jayceon Taylor has a chequered New Zealand tour history. He failed to show up at a festival headlined by 50 Cent in 2009. He didn’t turn up for a 2013 show. He went missing from Raggamuffin in 2016. And he also disappeared from his own headlining show in 2017, a tour billed as the rapper’s farewell performance.
All told, he’s only ever performed once in New Zealand, at an incredibly aggressive concert at Spark (then Vector) Arena in 2012.
I went, but, judging by my review at the time, I really wished I hadn’t.
“The 32-year-old spent much of his Vector Arena show scowling, berating the crowd and massaging his own ego by boasting about his achievements,” I wrote at the time.
“At times, the man born Jayceon Taylor downed most of a bottle of spirits, taunted a little person who was dancing on stage, swore at members of his entourage, groped female fans and told the crowd off for talking during a Nate Dogg memorial.”
It was bad! So, as it turns out, The Game does know where we are. He knows how to get here. Here he is discussing how “awkward” things are going to be in Auckland before his 2013 no-show.
This has to be the strangest tour promo video of all time…
The Game’s right - it has been awkward. One appearance out of five attempts must set some kind of record for hip-hop no-shows.
It’s all catching up to him. Complex reports The Game’s recently been fined a whopping US$478,120 over those cancelled 2017 shows, plus $78,508 in interest, as well as court costs.
The court filing says The Game axed his 2017 Australasian tour when promoters refused to pay him $3.21 million for a documentary he was attempting to make at the time. His fees also kept changing, rising from $32,000 to $51,000 per performance.
He also requested he travel with a 15-person entourage at all times.
New Zealand’s borders are still closed, but I’m guessing when they open back up, it’s unlikely any promoters will attempt to bring The Game back to New Zealand.
Judging by that one time in 2012, we’re not missing out on much.
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