Regal lets you play hall monitor at the movies
One of the main reasons problems in movie theaters don’t get fixed is that audience members are reluctant to leave the auditorium to report them. The picture goes out of focus, and everyone notices it, but you figure it will get fixed the second you leave, and then you’ll have missed some of the movie for nothing. And so it stays out of focus for much longer than it should, because no one wants to go tell someone. Sound familiar?
Now Regal Entertainment, the largest movie-theater chain in America, is launching a way to alleviate this problem. Starting last week, certain audience members in 114 theaters (up from 13 in the test run last year) are being given a little device that looks like a walkie-talkie with four buttons on it: “Picture,” “Sound,” “Piracy,” and “Other Disturbance.” If there’s a problem in the theater, you push the corresponding button and it alerts the manager, who then probably ignores it. But hey, at least you told someone, and you didn’t have to miss any of the film to do it.
It’s not clear how they choose who gets to be in charge of the device at each screening. I guess you have to hope it’s someone responsible and conscientious. Will it turn into “Lord of the Flies” in there, with chaos and alliances and people being crushed under rocks? We can only hope.
The whole thing is a great idea, at least in theory, and I hope it does some good. But there are a few elements that will need to be addressed.
1. The “Piracy” button will never, ever be pressed, at least not in seriousness. (New York Magazine suggested that while watching “Pirates of the Caribbean,” you could push it over and over again. “Look! More piracy!”) A 2003 study by AT&T Laboratories and the University of Pennsylvania confirmed what common sense already suggested: that the vast majority of pirated movies come not from people holding camcorders in the theater (that’s so 1990s), but from employees filming the movies from up in the projection booth, or from studio employees who have access to digital copies. So it’s actually pretty hilarious that Regal has “Piracy” as one of only FOUR buttons on the audience devices. They might just as well have one that says “Fire” or “Hostage Crisis” for as often as it will need to be used.
It’s also worth noting that most audience members, even if they saw someone pirating the movie, wouldn’t care.
2. Regal will need to teach its employees how to actually deal with sound and picture problems.
The most common problem is the way the movie is framed on the screen. Roger Ebert offers the most succinct explanation of why you sometimes see boom mics over the actors’ heads:
When you repeatedly see a boom mike in a movie, 99.9 percent of the time it is NOT the fault of the film’s director, but of the projectionist in your theater, who has framed the film incorrectly. Many films contain additional real estate above and below the frame, to allow the picture to bleed off the edge of the screen. A complaint to the theater manager may do the trick.
Roger is right that talking to the theater manager might do the trick, because most managers are probably familiar enough with the mechanics of movie projection to understand what you’re talking about. But if you just go out and tell the first employee you see that the movie’s not framed properly, and that the characters’ chins are being cut off, and that you can see the microphones dangling above their heads, chances are good that the teenager you’re speaking to will have no idea what you’re talking about — or, worse, will dismiss your complaint as non-actionable because if you can see microphones, well, that must just be the way the director filmed it.
When I saw “Saw III” at a Regal theater last October (one that is now using these audience devices), the film went out of frame at the next-to-last reel change. At first it was the more common, obvious type of out-of-frameness, where the bottom of the picture appears at the top of the screen, then there’s black line, and then there’s the top of the picture underneath it. The projectionist fixed it fairly quickly. Except after he “fixed” it, the movie was out of frame in the other way, with the visible boom mics and characters’ faces being cut off during close-ups. I thought for sure he would notice this, but I guess once the first problem was fixed, he left the booth.
So I went out and told an employee that the movie was out of frame, and she said, “Oh, again?” I said, “Well, it’s a different sort of problem this time, but yeah.” She said she’d tell the manager, and I have no doubt that she did. But the problem was never repaired, and the rest of the film unspooled that way. Which means whichever manager was on duty, if he did go up to the booth and look at the picture, he failed to see anything wrong. Which means Regal needs to educate its employees better on the finer points of film exhibiting. (Actually, that’s not really even a “finer” point. It’s a pretty basic point.)
3. Let’s say you push button #4, “Other Disturbance,” because there’s a gaggle of teenage girls in front of you, chattering and text-messaging and displaying the same level of etiquette one would expect from a duffel bag full of monkeys. Does Regal expect us to believe that a manager is actually going to come in and do something about it? Please.
First of all, “Other Disturbance” is fairly vague, and the manager might enter the theater, look around, and not immediately see what the disturbance is. Often, people are only disruptive to the people sitting near them, not to the whole theater.
But even if he identifies the problem — even if the girls happen to be misbehaving during the 30 seconds he’s in there scanning the crowd — is he really going to tell them to be quiet and stop using their glow-in-the-dark cell phones? I highly doubt it. Most employees in the public sector are nonconfrontational. You’d have to be outrageously disruptive to elicit any kind of official reprimand from a movie theater’s manager. Everyday, run-of-the-mill bad behavior like talking or texting will probably be ignored.
Still, as I said, it’s a good idea. I hope Regal can do what it takes to make moviegoing an enjoyable experience for everyone. And they should definitely put me in charge of the buttons, because I will not stand for any shenanigans.
June 5th, 2007 at 3:44 am
I welcome anything that might help with projection problems, because aside from girls with mobile phones that is my most frequent gripe with going to the cinema.
The one I regularly attend isn’t bad. It’s part of a chain, but the staff are reasonably friendly and will actually chat with you about films etc. However, the one thing they always miss is when the screen ‘blockers’ don’t adjust to the proper aspect ratio. For some reason this also changes the way the film is projected, although I don’t quite understand the relationship between the two. Quite often someone will come in after 5 minutes of the film or so, but they usually don’t see the problem. What also worries me is that I’m usually the only person in my showing who gets up to do anything about it, so either other people don’t notice or they just don’t care. They are normally pretty quick about fixing it when I tell them, but it does concern me that so often they can’t see what the problem is. I even had a guy come in with me once to check, and he looked at the screen and declared it was “okay”, even though the characters’ heads were all cut off.
And as far as the projectionists not noticing is concerned, I’m pretty sure that in most multiplexes they have one or two projectionists who go from theatre to theatre on a schedule, to make sure they get there to do the reel changes. So it doesn’t surprise me that problems like this are so often missed.
June 5th, 2007 at 5:35 am
Maybe Regal realizes that the Piracy button will hardly ever be used to report a patron using a camcorder, but they include it as a reminder to patrons that stealing movies is a sin and they should never ever buy a bootleg DVD or share video files or participate in any other sinful activities that hurt the industry’s bottom line.
June 5th, 2007 at 7:14 am
Now it makes sense. I remember seeing “Bring it On” at the dollar theater and during the dream sequence when Dunst is supposed to look naked, those of us in the theater saw she was covered (we saw below her cleavage line, which the regular film doesn’t show). I thought it was weird because commercials showed she was supposed to look naked and on the DVD of course the effect works. Now the mystery has been solved for me.
June 5th, 2007 at 8:26 am
I think Tom’s onto something with the Piracy button, but it likely applies to the Other Disturbance button as well. Regal’s making a big deal about these devices, publicizing them and getting them mentioned in the news. While it’s not likely that the giggling girls will ever be confronted by the manager, they might instead be frightened by the Secret Police in the audience, and try to keep quiet.
Of course, most people who talk in movie theaters live in their own little oblivious world, so it might not work at all.
June 5th, 2007 at 9:49 am
I’ve never seen a boom mike in a movie and so want to see one now.
June 5th, 2007 at 12:58 pm
When I went to see “Knocked Up”, for the first 30 seconds of the film, about half of the upper screen was apparently hitting the ceiling, because all anyone could see was the bottom half of the movie. This problem was almost immediately fixed when people started throwing stuff (I’m not kidding) at the projectionist’s window (and in doing so, even *further* disrupting the screen’s image). It was the first time I had ever seen anything like that.
June 5th, 2007 at 2:01 pm
I worked at a movie theater throughout high school and summers during college (great job–free movies). I can attest that every movie theater I worked at had managers who were more than happy to go in and ask people to be courteous to the other customers and knock off the talking, chair-kicking, sex, whathaveyou. I even worked for one manager who reveled in the opportunity to tell people to shut up (and knock off the sex, but that wasn’t as common). Managers should not be nonconfrontational wimps; they’re going to run into people who are disrupting the system and losing the theater money and they have to make sure it stops. It’s the good customers who are likely to take their business elsewhere if they are unsatisfied with the theater, not the jerks who are the ones making the racket. And if the theater loses money, the manager loses his job. So yes, you should always be willing to ask a manager to deal with your concerns and he/she better respond to it very quickly.
As for the films themselves, the chain I worked for required cerfified projectionists to monitor the films and no one else could touch them–they were set on timers to begin at the specified times and then rewind once the film was over. There are some employees knowledgable enough to adjust the focus, but some of the more technical stuff had to be left to someone more understanding of the projector. To find such a person, particularly during a customer rush when every employee has his/her hands full, is quite the feat. Hence the delay. However, when you see the employees come in with a flashlight every hour and check the temperature of the theater, they are also supposed to be checking the film itself to make sure it doesn’t need to be adjusted in any way (and check for ruckus-makers, too).
And on a side note: concession prices are high because that’s how the theater itself pays its bills; they get almost nothing off of ticket prices (one manager told me only one dollar of a $7 ticket goes back to the theater). Candy and popcorn pay for the electricity, concession bills, janitors, employees, property rent, etc. Interesting, no?
June 5th, 2007 at 5:09 pm
“Regal Entertainment Group theaters participating in the Guest Response System invite selected members of the Regal Crown Club loyalty program to carry a paging device with them into the auditorium.”
http://www.colloquy.com/breaking_view.asp?xd=3723
Almost makes me want to join the RCC, except that most films I watch are at AMC or Landmark Theatres.
June 5th, 2007 at 7:53 pm
As a way to address the talking/text messaging/piracy, they should just add a little taser to the walkie-talkie. I guarantee you those guilty of any of the above once will never be guilty of it again.
June 5th, 2007 at 10:19 pm
One thing I’m curious about: do those buttons glow in the dark? If not, it’d be a pain to figure out which button to press. If so, the glow would be just as annoying as a cell phone/PDA/etc. And where are you supposed to put the thing while you’re watching the movie? Does it clip on? Do you really want to be handling something that just spent two hours in someone else’s sweaty pocket?
As for the “piracy” button: I’m guessing it’s all for show - not for the customers, but for the MPAA. Regal can say “look! We’re fighting piracy on the front lines!” even though it’s not doing squat. Makes the out-of-touch honchos happy, then fine, we’ll put a “piracy” button on there.
(Also: my anal retentive design-freak side is flipping out over the design, which leaves “disturbance” as “dis- turbance,” an ugly looking break. Yuck.)
June 6th, 2007 at 6:27 am
The buttons are a yellow-green, which would suggest they are flourescent in some way. If they’ve tested these in the past, I’m sure not being able to find the buttons in the dark would have come up somewhere along the way, if they hadn’t thought about that to begin with.
They do look clunky though.
June 6th, 2007 at 9:24 am
I see a movie in the theater maybe once every two years… but “duffel bag full of monkeys” is a nice phrase.
June 6th, 2007 at 10:49 am
My husband and I are avid movie-goers, and only occasionally experience technical problems at quality theatres… However, during almost every movie we’ve seen this year, we’ve experienced outrageous etiquette offenses during the films, and surprisingly enough- more so from college age and older patrons than from the teens (including those conducting conversations out loud on cell phones, blurting out observations and predictions a la Mystery Science Theatre 3k, parents allowing children to run around, scream, cry, talk, etc, and even one incident where we asked a group of loudly giggling and visiting college students to be quiet during a tense moment in Disturbia only to have them laugh and shout “NO”, and then toss garbage at me during the credits).
Movie tickets are too expensive to have the experience ruined by other patrons so frequently. Even IF I decide to get up and find a manager during the movie, and IF they’re around and willing to say something to the other patrons, and IF the offenders actually behave once the manager is out of sight again, and IF the white trash idiots don’t decide to retaliate afterwards in the parking lot, is it really worth the aggravation? It’s gotten so ridiculous that I am contemplating boycotting theatres all together and using the money I save to set up a nice home theater system and just wait for the DVD… I end up complaining to the manager almost every time I see a movie now and I’m sick of the hassle.
The Regal device sounds like a good start and I hope it leads to an even better solution- but if the theater industry doesn’t step up soon and provide a more effective way of enforcing etiquette, our family won’t be adding to the box office stats anymore…
June 6th, 2007 at 11:06 am
“You’d have to be outrageously disruptive to elicit any kind of official reprimand from a movie theater’s manager.”
Seriously. Wife and I saw Attack of the Clones in a theater in Vegas and, I crap you not, people near us were drinking beer, shouting at the screen and, a couple of times, standing up and dancing in front of the screen. The theater staff did *nothing*. Absolutely nothing. Well, they gave us a refund. I so wanted to smack the bastards. Also, the drunken moviegoers.
June 6th, 2007 at 1:16 pm
I, for one, welcome our new, remote-control wielding overlords.
June 6th, 2007 at 2:31 pm
I finally saw Pirates this weekend, and for some reason the girl sitting in front of me decided to start filming the last 30 minutes on her cell phone. I don’t know if she was bored with the movie and just testing it out, or if she actually knew someone in the film that she wanted to capture. Whatever her reasoning, it was very distracting to see the bright light of the screen in the corner of my eye, much like text messaging. I tried throwing candy at her, but I have terrible aim. Finally my husband blocked her screen from my view with his knee.
Anyway, I would have really liked that “piracy” button then.
June 8th, 2007 at 3:29 pm
I went to see Spider-Man 3 last week and had to have 8 people thrown out. The manager was more than happy to do it. The 5yr. old they brought in started screaming before the movie even started and I had to yell at them to get him out! They just sat there and let him scream! When the 5 and 3yr. old started screaming in unicin (sp?) later during the movie that was the last straw. I can’t believe people. That’s why I don’t really go to the theaters anymore.