A fracas at the premiere screening of The Woman in Black
It goes like this: I find out, at around 4:30 on Thursday afternoon, that I’m going to the Woman in Black screening (screening time is 7:00), Daniel Radcliffe in attendance. The screening, hosted by Alliance-Atlantis and held at the Scotiabank theatre, is besieged upon my arrival by Radcliffe fangirls, but I encounter no trouble entering the theatre, proceeding to Alliance’s ticket desk, and exchanging my voucher for my ticket. I proceed upstairs to the theatre, text Sasha that I’m going inside, and - with my cell phone in the same hand as my ticket, mind you - hand an Intercon security guard my ticket and take my seat in the theatre.
Hours pass as Daniel Radcliffe is magically teleported from Hogwarts to the Scotiabank theatre, and he ends up taking the stage at around 7:35, preceded by Richard Crouse, who at that moment musta felt like Albert Brooks when he had to face a slathering crowd who were waiting for Richie Havens. “Richie! Richie! Richie!” “Oh, they gonna kill you.”
I’m on the aisle, second or third row of the ETX theatre, when another Intercon security guard charges into my space and demands that Corey Atad - sitting three seats over from me - get up and come to him immediately. Corey’s already wise to what’s gone wrong; he’s taken a picture, and cameras aren’t allowed. He gets up, apologizes to the guard and hands over his phone, and says “I’m going to get it back, right?”
The guard pulls the high-school-principal routine and says “If I feel like it” and begins to deal with another fellow with a camera. Corey tries to get the guard to verbally acknowledge that he’s not stealing a $700 phone for his own shits and giggles, and get some instruction on how he’s to retrieve the phone at the end of the screening. Corey gathers his stuff and pursues the guard away from the seats, at which point another Intercon thug puts hands on Corey and forcibly removes him from the theatre.
I leave the theatre, as Intercon’s behaviour has now tipped over from mean-spirited bullying to genuinely illegal activity, and find Corey in the downstairs lobby, arguing with the original Intercon guard about what’s happened. I tell the guard that at no time was I made aware that phones or cameras were not permitted in the screening, and that there had been no attempt made to collect my phone upon my arrival. The guard asks me if I have a phone. I say yes. He informs me that I am also now being asked to leave.
That’s more than enough for me; I collect my things and me and Corey go and chat it up over a table at Tim Horton’s, joined by Matt Price (who likes fires). Daniel Radcliffe, for the eight seconds I was in his presence, seemed genuine and charming; Alliance-Atlantis, who threw the screening and presumably hired Intercon Security, normally run a better class of party than this. This was out of character.
I’m not the head film critic for The Globe and Mail, so who cares what I do or do not cover, but my only real interest in attending the screening in the first place was to throw Hammer - a production company whose renewed existence pleases me - some coverage on The Substream next week, which, of course, I’ll now not do. I’ll also now not bother bringing my phone or my bag to future preview screenings, which feels like a defeat to me, because I don’t think the studios have any more right to force us into this corner than they do to shut down the internet - i.e. none at all, and stop being bullies. But we are at such the tail end of the thing - the tail end of theatrical moviegoing as a viable, mass-market enterprise - that with only a few years left on the clock anyway, fighting about it no longer seems worthwhile.
