peace,” he says. “Whatever.”
No peace for movie ushers who want quiet
June 26, 1991
AMC Theaters has announced a crackdown on customers who yak during movies: Violators will be ejected after one warning.
This ought to be fun, especially in South Florida. We’ve got the loudest, surliest, burliest, most well-armed movie audiences in the hemisphere. A verbal warning might only provoke them.
What prompted AMC’s new policy was a national survey in which 71 percent of those interviewed named “disruptive behavior” as the reason they don’t go to the movies more often. Like AMC, Wometco and General Cinema are attempting to discourage talkers by showing on-screen warnings before every film. The test will be trying to back up those threats with serious muscle.
AMC says it will order its ushers to patrol the aisles vigilantly. I didn’t even know they still employed ushers! They’ve got plenty of uniformed young men whose job is guarding the uniformed young women who make the buttered popcorn, but these fellows are under strict orders never to leave the refreshment stand. You seldom catch them inside the theaters.
Say you scrounge up some ushers crazy enough to take on a South Florida movie audience. Training them will cost a fortune. Start with a basic martial-arts course, then six weeks on the firing range, nightscope training, wilderness survival school, hostage negotiations, and so on. Those who don’t wash out of the program still won’t be prepared for the teeming hellpit that is your average early-bird matinee in, say, West Broward. There’s one sure way to see if an usher is combat-ready. Put him in the aisles during a Woody Allen movie.
Allen is a literate and witty screenwriter. His movies are full of clever lines, exquisitely timed. Enjoying the dialogue, unfortunately, requires that one be able to hear it. That’s simply not possible in many local theaters.
The problem is chronic and insurmountable. Woody Allen sets most of his pictures in New York. Many South Florida moviegoers are from New York, or have relatives there, or once visited there on vacation. Thus they cannot restrain from exclaiming, at the most crucial moment of the movie:
“Look, there’s the Chrysler Building! We were there with your cousin, remember? Back when she had that terrible gout!”
At which point, the wife is likely to say (in a voice like a diesel): “That wasn’t the Chrysler Building, it was the World Trade Center! And it wasn’t gout, it was gallstones!”
Other Manhattan landmarks that send moviegoers into clamorous eruptions are Radio City, the Empire State Building, Macy’s, the Plaza Hotel, any Broadway marquee, and of course Central Park. Whenever there’s a scene in Central Park, you might as well go buy some Raisinets and relax in the lobby, because you won’t be able to hear a word of the movie. Audience members will be trading moldy Central Park anecdotes for 15, 20 minutes easy. Another perilous situation for ushers is Terminator-type films, which rely on spectacular methods of incineration, dismemberment and organ removal. In other parts of the country, such scenes evoke normal shrieking and groans of disgust. Here in South Florida, though, they inspire long esoteric debates about techniquefor example, is a grain thresher more effective than a circular saw? How long do human body parts keep in the refrigerator?
Only the boldest of ushers would interrupt such a conversation with a “Sssshhhh.”
Once a customer defies the warning, the challenge is subduing the noisy culprit and removing him or her from the movie. Many of these babblers are quite huge, much bigger than your average usher. Nothing short of a flash fire is going to budge them from their seats.
AMC’s solution is to offer a refund if they’ll get up and leave peacefully. That’ll probably work fine in Tulsa, but extra coaxing may be required here in Miami.
We’re talking stun guns and grappling hooks.
Miami