Movie audience behaviour has descended into anarchy

[Frank Angel]

The FCC doesn't even allow cell phone jamming in prisons.

There is a good reason why every landline telephone call in prison is monitored and recorded, so unless they are able to monitor and record cellphone calls as well and for the same valid reasons, the FCC reg that prevents jamming in prison is absurd on its face, although the simpler solution in prison would be to just forbid the use of cellphones altogether. The landline (monitored and recorded) phones are still available. Much easier for a prison to enforce a No Cellphones rule than to get the FCC to amend theirs. IMHO, not allowing jamming in prison is just the FCC flexing its regulatory power. Doesn't it seem like the FCC is overly concerned with making sure the telcom carriers are guaranteed that EVERY subscriber has access to using their service all the time, everywhere, 24/7? Sounds to me like those commissioners want to get very lucrative jobs with the telcom carriers once they retire from the FCC.

[Frank Cox]

They do forbid the possession of cellphones by inmates. It works just as well as the rule that says no street drugs are allowed.

[Kyle Mikolajczyk]

I like Alamo's stance on "being annoying" in the theater. If you use your phone, talk etc. they will just kick you out. Problem is the multiplex cinemas don't care to have a minimum wage employee give the boot. Heck you wouldn't even need to enforce it much, just telling people that there might be an employee looking for disruptive people in the audience and could kick them out would reduce a lot of the annoying people.

[Bobby Henderson]

Commercial cinemas are having to deal with so many challenges these days. The ever shrinking theatrical release windows are threatening the very existence of theaters. The on-going WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes could lead to a bunch more theater locations closing permanently if the conflict drags on well into Fall. Audience members behaving badly just makes the problems so much worse. The crap that some people pull in a theater auditorium is enough to convince so many others to only watch movies at home. The physical assaults and other violence is very destructive in that regard.

Here's the funny thing. As commercial cinemas disappear and even leave a growing number of towns and cities without a theater these same people who are behaving badly will very likely be bitching about the theaters closing. They'll be griping as if they're entitled to have a theater in their town. No. They don't. And they really don't deserve it when they behave like rude, filthy pigs.

If our lone multiplex in my town shuts down, I'm not going to have any of it when I hear any locals whining about it. If the theater leaves we sort of deserve what we get for tearing up the place and acting like selfish assholes while we're there.

[Frank Cox]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifes...ovie-behavior/

Bad behavior at ‘Barbenheimer’ reflects a worrying trend

Drunken outbursts, public nudity and nonstop cellphone use disrupt packed theaters. Have people forgotten how to go the movies?

Ryan Gosling was having a big moment onscreen bro’ing up the Barbie Dreamhouse as Ken when Tess Connolly, 22, first spotted something amiss.

It was a 9:30 p.m. showing of “Barbie” at the Regal Cinema in downtown Denver, and the theater’s manager had begun pleading with a man seated a few rows in front of Connolly and her younger brother. The man, the manager said, needed to leave. But the moviegoer wouldn’t budge. That’s when five security guards showed up and Connolly truly took in the spectacle in front of her — and, unfortunately, it wasn’t Ken shouting “Sublime!”

“One of the security guards was saying to the guy, ‘Dude, you cannot be naked in here,’” she recalled. “The guy was all confused and upset that he couldn’t be naked in the theater … he was getting all worked up.” The security guard proceeded to ask the audience to assist in 86′ing the man. According to Connolly, many responded by yelling things like: “Get this freak out of here!” and “My teenage girls are here!” Meanwhile, “Barbie” kept playing in the background.

Though the man was eventually removed from the packed theater, Connolly worries she may have missed the funniest part of Greta Gerwig’s long-anticipated film.

“It was the moment that we all were going to start dying laughing. And the security guard was totally ruining our moment, being like, ‘Everybody start yelling.’ And we were like, ‘No, we’re trying to watch the movie,’” Connolly said.

“Barbenheimer” — the twin release of blockbusters “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer” — may have broken box office records and brought people out to the theaters in droves, but it also highlighted a very real problem: Some people seem to have forgotten how to go to the movies, with widespread reports of drunken outbursts, rampant cellphone use and exhibitionism.

At a “Barbie” showing at an AMC theater in Washington on Sunday, a man wearing a pink tank top and body glitter loudly identified with the Kens onscreen. Throughout the film — and despite multiple shushes — he would cheer, sing or stand up and pump his fist from his front-section seat whenever the Kens rallied against the Barbies. He apologized to the audience at one point, explaining that he was “wasted” but nevertheless continued disrupting the show until the film’s climax, at which point he got into a slap fight with an acquaintance sitting beside him. (A representative for AMC did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

Online, stories of unruly or otherwise disrespectful guests at screenings over the past few weeks have gone viral. In one particularly memorable video from what appears to be a “Barbie” screening in Brazil, a woman violently pushes another woman to the floor. The ensuing fight plays out as Billie Eilish’s “Barbie” song (“I used to float, now I just fall down”) plays in the background.

The bad behavior wasn’t limited to energized “Barbie” audiences, either: “Saw ‘Oppenheimer’ last night in one of the worst behaved crowds I’ve ever been in, multiple camera flashes throughout, people in front of us scrolling TikTok half way thru the film,” user @silvergelpen wrote this weekend on Twitter, which has recently been renamed X. “If you don’t have the attention span for a 3 hour movie don’t leave the house to attend one.”

Others soon chimed in with their own experiences: loud talking, disruptive entering-and-exiting the theater, bursts of laughter at inappropriate moments and videos taken with flash of scenes with the potential for TikTok virality.

The mayhem isn’t limited to movie theaters. The past year has seen a disturbing trend of audience members throwing objects at musicians onstage. Over on Broadway, an unruly woman halted a performance of “Death of a Salesman”back in December, while a controversial Playbill exposé from the spring detailed aggression toward ushers and other theater workers, who reported being spat on and screamed at regularly. Not even the skies are safe: This week, an American Airlines pilot went viral for lecturing “selfish and rude” passengers on airplane behavior (“Nobody wants to hear your video”).

Nobody’s quite figured out where everyone’s good manners have gone — and what is exactly causing the current collapse in civility.

Roxane Cohen Silver, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Irvine, and an expert on stress and personal trauma, says this behavior could be linked to a string of recent events.

“It is clear that the past three years have been challenging for many people in our country. We have experienced a series of collective traumas, cascading one to the next, which for many has been almost too much to bear. The combination of the pandemic, inflation, mass shootings, climate-related disasters, political polarization and so on, has taxed our capacity to cope,” Cohen Silver said in an email. “It is important to recognize this reality as we examine behavior this summer.”

Others are calling out cellphone culture and a constant, self-centered need for stimulation. “For the entire history of theaters people were able to pay attention. The only difference now is the phones,” tweeted NBC news tech and culture reporter Kat Tenbarge.

When Brandon Thint, 24, went to see “Barbie” at a Cinemark in Austin, Tex., the last 20 minutes of the movie were spoiled for him by younger kids watching YouTube videos near the front of the theater at full volume during “the emotional climax of the movie.”

Viviana Freyer, 21, had a similar experience at her opening night “Oppenheimer” screening in Miami. While she was excited to see the new Christopher Nolan epic on 70mm film, the experience quickly soured when a group of “really rowdy teenagers” talked through the entire movie, having loud reactions to “moments where you were not supposed to be that loud.”

“I do understand that ‘Barbenheimer’ is the first sort of big movie event in a very long time, and people are excited about the movies, and a lot of these people who are causing this ruckus are young and are participating in the ‘Barbenheimer’ trend,” Freyer said. “But … I do think the recent trend of super-interactive superhero movies combined with the internet and TikTok has kind of made this cocktail for rowdy behavior at the movies.”

The behavior she witnessed, she said, is encouraged by blockbuster Marvel movies, for example, where time for audience reactions to plot twists and surprise characters is built into the film itself. “‘Oppenheimer’ of all movies is not meant to be a spectator sport kind of experience,” she said.

Movie theater policies, in the meantime, are serving as a final line of defense for film fans frustrated by their seat neighbors’ outbursts.

At Alamo Drafthouse Cinema, a dine-in theater chain known for its strictly enforced “no talking, no texting” policy, guests can discreetly flag unruly behavior by raising an order card to alert staff.

“We’re not going to see every single thing that happens and how disruptive it is to you and your guest, so we do rely on that kind of communication,” said Michael Pieri, an executive general manager who oversees two Alamo locations in the D.C. area.

He says the system has been working well. “The only times that I’ve really seen hesitation is when it’s somebody who’s breaking the rules right next to you,” Pieri said, explaining that some guests might feel uncomfortable reporting the behavior in front of the person. The most common violations he notices at his locations pertain to Alamo’s late policy, which prohibits guests from arriving 15 minutes after the posted showtime.

In the weeks since “Barbenheimer” opened in theaters, Pieri said there have certainly been more violations of Alamo’s talking and texting policy, “but that’s because there’s more bodies in the building.”

But Alamo did make some exceptions for the release of “Barbie.” Both of Pieri’s venues hosted “Barbie” slumber party viewings where people were encouraged to show up in pajamas. Those events, he said, are what “we call our ‘rowdy screenings’ [with] relaxed policies where we encourage people to kind of talk a little bit.”

“The biggest issue is you can only be so prepared,” said Pieri, noting how earnings for “Barbie” far exceeded box office expectations. “When it exponentially blows up like that, there’s only so much preparation you can do.”

Asking a disruptive person to stop or raising the issue to theater workers isn’t a foolproof method, either. (And the offending party can react with even more disruption, as appeared to be the case in the Brazil theater.)

When Abby Luca, 19, attended a regular Alamo Drafthouse screening of “Barbie” in Yonkers, N.Y., she said her experience was ruined by a visibly drunk group of women who spent the entirety of the movie dancing, having conversations with the onscreen characters and making other loud noises. Though several in the theater asked the women to be quiet, and “the security went over to them, like maybe four times” to tell them they would be kicked out, they received only warnings.

“It was extremely distracting, honestly,” Luca said, adding that she worries she may have missed crucial parts of the film. “I feel like there were details that we didn’t even get, and stuff that I’ve seen posted that I didn’t catch onto.”

Her experience at the theater was so disrupted that she plans to see “Barbie” again. A spokesperson for Alamo Drafthouse told The Washington Post there was no record of the incident, adding, “We have not seen an uptick in disruptive audience behavior for ‘Barbie’ and ‘Oppenheimer’ screenings.”

Luca said that she didn’t ask for a refund because she “felt bad” for the employees.

“I used to be an avid shusher. Now, I choose my battles because I don’t want to get stabbed in a movie theater,” said Justin Chang, a film critic for the Los Angeles Times and NPR’s Fresh Air. After having to ask moviegoers to wear their masks at the height of the pandemic, distracting phones seemed less pressing: “People’s habits were bad before the pandemic. They were bad [during] the pandemic wave, and they’re bad now … It’s always bad, so I do choose to pick my battles now. I just get desensitized to it.”

Similarly, when someone seated next to Alex West, 28, started browsing through Instagram for much of “Barbie,” he simply chose to ignore them. “At this point it’s just something you get used to … especially in a packed theater,” said West.

In the end, the “Barbenheimer” phenomenon, said Chang, is “an interesting kind of litmus test.” Maybe, he said, the live tweeting, filming and talking during movie screenings — “all these things that are so incredibly disturbing, disrespectful and distracting to moviegoers” — are just the way people engage with films now.

“People acting as if a public space in their living room is a problem that affects all of us,” he said, “not just [in] movie theaters.”

[Mark Lane]

Our theater is a WWII Metal Quonset Hut building.. Cell phone signals don't get through the metal building and I am Not about to fix that.
No need for me to jam the signal, weeker cell service and the metal building does that for us.

[Darin Steffl]

Our theater is a WWII Metal Quonset Hut building.. Cell phone signals don't get through the metal building and I am Not about to fix that.
No need for me to jam the signal, weeker cell service and the metal building does that for us.

There's no requirement that you have to "fix" weak cell signal. You just can't actively block any frequencies with a jammer per FCC. Chicken wire in the walls is not active, it's passive so you would be fine to do that.

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

I have yet to see any issues arise with or via patrons here in Central Tennessee, Regal or AMC's. But then, I don't "live at the movies nearly as much as I used to. Even people at the many concerts I've been to act civil, have not seen any rukus or people being hauled out of them. I've never been to Bonaroo, Tennessee's version of Woodstock, that is a week long event every year. Perhaps it's more to do with location...

[Mike Blakesley]

Our only real issue is the occasional obnoxious junior high kids, or any sub-adults that get bored with the movie. They aren't necessarily talking, they're just fidgety, going to the restroom nonstop, back and forth to the concession stand, etc., and yes occasionally texting. We make them siddown and shuddup as much as possible, but there isn't much cure for fidgety kids that have just downed a 32 ounce Mountain Dew.