Random pause in multiple movie clips

Hey. I have 1000 identical movie clips that I’m having trouble dealing with. Ultimately I need them to ‘disappear’ one at a time with a little animation but I’m having trouble coming up with a method which doesn’t involve doing things 1000s of times.

Inside the movie clip I have animated the ‘disappearance’ over a few frames. What i imagine doing is including some code in the MC before the animation starts that pauses the playhead for a random amount of time (say between 3 and 20 seconds). This should have the effect of having all 1000 movie clips on screen for 3 seconds and then each one animated away over the remaining 17 seconds.

If this is at all possible, can somebody please point me in the right direction of what code i need to include? Any alternative suggestions are welcome!

Thanks in advance