the screening of be cool, part 2
Book-to-movie and movie-to-book comparisons aside, let me tell you about the world of advance film screenings. This much I know:
There are agencies that promote films being released. They have a relationship with the movie studios and they screen films for both critics and general audiences alike. Often, in the bowels of your local weekly newspaper, between advertisements for tattoo parlors "legitimate" masseuses and sperm donation centers, you'll find an ad telling you that if you go and stand in line for hours one Saturday morning at the cigar shop on the corner of racial epithet and stab wound, they'll (maybe) give you a pass for two to see an advance screening of a film. These screenings are often cross-promoted by one or two or even three local radio stations, often of differing formats, but all with one thing in common: they were all given the same number of passes to distribute, and that number always exceeds the number of seats in a given theater. Thus the use of the phrase "Seating Limited" on the passes. Oh, and my own personal favorite: "First Come, First Serve Basis".
So you get all kinds at these screenings, but what you get most is a legion of folks who seem not so fanatical about seeing movies but seeing them for free. And therein lies the tragedy of the average screening.
When 600 people are gathered for a film in a theater that seats 300, and from that 300 you must subtract the 50 seats reserved for press and special guests, you ultimately have a large number of people who don't get to see the show. Some take it well. Some do not.
I have witnessed normal-looking, middle-class suburban individuals spout venomous tirades with wild eyes and bared fangs when someone slips into line ahead of them. I have heard ugly derision and contempt blurted out at people seated in the press section. I have had conversations with individuals who feel that since they received a pass, they should get in without issue, even if they arrive five minutes before a feature is scheduled to begin, every nook of the theater long-since jammed with people who waited for hours. Ultimately, it is the agency rep who must handle these complaints, though they really can't help the complainants' bad timing. The rep can only smile, shrug, and say they're sorry. But that is frequently not enough for the angry and forlorn.
I see some of the same people at screenings now that I saw almost ten years ago. They have aged, and not always well, and they were older to begin with. They appear to be holding onto their free films as a sort of life-support system. And some of them don't look like they're going to make the summer releases.
At the Be Cool screening I attended last night, the first indication that things would not go well was the burgeoning line of hundreds of folks who I wagered would not make it through the theater door. About fifteen minutes before the show was to begin, we marched ourselves in and saw that the theater, maybe a 300 seater, was already filled with close to 75 people in little clusters, and several rows were still reserved for press, and when you did the math, it equaled ugly.
We did not sit in the press section because we wanted to be on the aisle and no aisle seats were available in the roped-off rows. We sat one row below the press section on the far end, where we knew that a) we could make a quick exit when the end credits started to roll, and b) our respective flu-weakened stomachs might call upon us for a speedy departure during, say, a key action sequence or good joke. We wanted to be as unhindered as possible for that gastronomic possibility.
Once the auditorium was filled, I found myself immediately surrounded by a large number of individuals who, by my most careful calculations, would be termed filthy and mentally unstable. These were ragged people that I joked might have been given passes as they exited a downtown asylum, then realized they had to come uptown to see the free show, and walked all the way, never missing a gutter to stomp through as they sang flat renditions of "Don't Worry, Be Happy" or some Christina Aguilera tune that was popular three years ago. Some of them walked and ate simultaneously. Some of them ate more than others. Some of them, I wagered, ate the others. There were an alarming number of golem-like pears waddling about, looking for better seats, hoping to get free memorabilia from the radio deejays standing down front, teasing t-shirts and coozies. Some just waited for the last-minute release of press seats, and others just wandered aimlessly, looking dirty and confused. This would have been a cruel joke, but I was only being observant.
One of the more alarming was a rail-thin woman in an ill-fitting windbreaker and Swifty Lazar glasses. During an ill-conceived freebie distribution game where the deejays asked for anyone with a stain on their clothing to wave their arms so they could be given one of the aforementioned tchotchkes, this lady was so distressed at the prospect of being overlooked that her speech seemed to break down to guttural yelps, pathetic wookie dipthongs that were actually the word "stain" being repeated, again and again. "Stain...stain...STAIN!" This display was just painful to watch, as she clutched at the spot on her sweatshirt where, indeed, there was a small smear.
This is an extreme example, but the veneer of wanting, the ugly, proprietary greed you find in some screening audience members really does seem to convert normal people into grabbing, selfish dogs, and when they have the barest scraps of meat in their teeth, they will shake their jaws until their eyes water before they let go.
You can't control any of these things. You can only go, take your seat, and hope the film doesn't completely fail your sensibilities. You can't control who sits beside you, or people's attitudes, or the madness that is someone who has paid nothing for something they grasp to their chest as though it cost them a king's ransom in gold.
There are agencies that promote films being released. They have a relationship with the movie studios and they screen films for both critics and general audiences alike. Often, in the bowels of your local weekly newspaper, between advertisements for tattoo parlors "legitimate" masseuses and sperm donation centers, you'll find an ad telling you that if you go and stand in line for hours one Saturday morning at the cigar shop on the corner of racial epithet and stab wound, they'll (maybe) give you a pass for two to see an advance screening of a film. These screenings are often cross-promoted by one or two or even three local radio stations, often of differing formats, but all with one thing in common: they were all given the same number of passes to distribute, and that number always exceeds the number of seats in a given theater. Thus the use of the phrase "Seating Limited" on the passes. Oh, and my own personal favorite: "First Come, First Serve Basis".
So you get all kinds at these screenings, but what you get most is a legion of folks who seem not so fanatical about seeing movies but seeing them for free. And therein lies the tragedy of the average screening.
When 600 people are gathered for a film in a theater that seats 300, and from that 300 you must subtract the 50 seats reserved for press and special guests, you ultimately have a large number of people who don't get to see the show. Some take it well. Some do not.
I have witnessed normal-looking, middle-class suburban individuals spout venomous tirades with wild eyes and bared fangs when someone slips into line ahead of them. I have heard ugly derision and contempt blurted out at people seated in the press section. I have had conversations with individuals who feel that since they received a pass, they should get in without issue, even if they arrive five minutes before a feature is scheduled to begin, every nook of the theater long-since jammed with people who waited for hours. Ultimately, it is the agency rep who must handle these complaints, though they really can't help the complainants' bad timing. The rep can only smile, shrug, and say they're sorry. But that is frequently not enough for the angry and forlorn.
I see some of the same people at screenings now that I saw almost ten years ago. They have aged, and not always well, and they were older to begin with. They appear to be holding onto their free films as a sort of life-support system. And some of them don't look like they're going to make the summer releases.
At the Be Cool screening I attended last night, the first indication that things would not go well was the burgeoning line of hundreds of folks who I wagered would not make it through the theater door. About fifteen minutes before the show was to begin, we marched ourselves in and saw that the theater, maybe a 300 seater, was already filled with close to 75 people in little clusters, and several rows were still reserved for press, and when you did the math, it equaled ugly.
We did not sit in the press section because we wanted to be on the aisle and no aisle seats were available in the roped-off rows. We sat one row below the press section on the far end, where we knew that a) we could make a quick exit when the end credits started to roll, and b) our respective flu-weakened stomachs might call upon us for a speedy departure during, say, a key action sequence or good joke. We wanted to be as unhindered as possible for that gastronomic possibility.
Once the auditorium was filled, I found myself immediately surrounded by a large number of individuals who, by my most careful calculations, would be termed filthy and mentally unstable. These were ragged people that I joked might have been given passes as they exited a downtown asylum, then realized they had to come uptown to see the free show, and walked all the way, never missing a gutter to stomp through as they sang flat renditions of "Don't Worry, Be Happy" or some Christina Aguilera tune that was popular three years ago. Some of them walked and ate simultaneously. Some of them ate more than others. Some of them, I wagered, ate the others. There were an alarming number of golem-like pears waddling about, looking for better seats, hoping to get free memorabilia from the radio deejays standing down front, teasing t-shirts and coozies. Some just waited for the last-minute release of press seats, and others just wandered aimlessly, looking dirty and confused. This would have been a cruel joke, but I was only being observant.
One of the more alarming was a rail-thin woman in an ill-fitting windbreaker and Swifty Lazar glasses. During an ill-conceived freebie distribution game where the deejays asked for anyone with a stain on their clothing to wave their arms so they could be given one of the aforementioned tchotchkes, this lady was so distressed at the prospect of being overlooked that her speech seemed to break down to guttural yelps, pathetic wookie dipthongs that were actually the word "stain" being repeated, again and again. "Stain...stain...STAIN!" This display was just painful to watch, as she clutched at the spot on her sweatshirt where, indeed, there was a small smear.
This is an extreme example, but the veneer of wanting, the ugly, proprietary greed you find in some screening audience members really does seem to convert normal people into grabbing, selfish dogs, and when they have the barest scraps of meat in their teeth, they will shake their jaws until their eyes water before they let go.
You can't control any of these things. You can only go, take your seat, and hope the film doesn't completely fail your sensibilities. You can't control who sits beside you, or people's attitudes, or the madness that is someone who has paid nothing for something they grasp to their chest as though it cost them a king's ransom in gold.
posted by scn at 5:50 PM
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