Sound, Fury Accompany an Airline’s In-Flight Film

What is this, the Twilight Zone?

A lawyer on an airplane is watching the in-flight movie about a lawyer who gets caught in an ominous legal web, and he finds himself caught in an ominous legal web because he’s watching the movie about . . .

You get the drift.

The movie aboard the United Air Lines flight early Friday morning was “Presumed Innocent,” Harrison Ford accused of murder. The passenger was tax attorney Steve Sun, who got the cuffs slapped on him for petty theft, for using his own earphones to listen to the soundtrack of the movie without paying the $4 headphone rental.

“The airport police told me this is the stupidest arrest they had to make,” said Sun. “Actually, they used more colorful language than that.”

Alan B. Wayne, a local United official, remarked, “It’s always interesting that these people are lawyers.”

In the small hours of Friday morning, aboard a not-too-crowded flight, Sun was flying home to Los Angeles from his grandfather’s funeral. For $4, the flight attendant said passengers could rent headphones to listen to “Presumed Innocent.”

Sun had his own. He happened to find them in an airport trash can years ago, but you can buy them in stores, he says, and he has used them often before, no problem.

Just as things start to come undone on film for Harrison Ford’s character, a flight attendant tapped Sun on the shoulder. He could not use those headphones without paying, she said.

Now, Sun was admittedly a little cranky from a red-eye that left Washington an hour late. If the $4 was really to rent a headset, he already had his own, right?

“I know what you can and can’t do on an airplane. I know you can’t cause a scene or you’re in big trouble. I thought if you have your own headset, why do you have to pay to get their headset? And seeing as they’re showing you the picture on the screen anyway . . .”

As he recounts the sotto voce exchange, the flight attendant said Sun should either stop listening or pay the $4. He said no. She relayed the captain’s message: That, “If you don’t stop watching the movie they’ll have to call security when you land. . . . I said OK. I definitely would not have started an argument.”

He kept watching the movie, and “I said to pass the message on to the captain that I’m a lawyer and if anything happened on the ground, I would file a suit.”

Just after midnight, “We got off the plane, and there was the airport police. I actually went up to them and said, ‘I did it, I’m the culprit.’ ”

They said they would have to take him to the station for theft. “I said theft of what? They said the sound of the movie. I kind of laughed and said, ‘You’re kidding.’ ”

“I probably made it into a scene it shouldn’t have been made into, but theirs (the flight crew’s) seemed like an overreaction.”

Airport Police Capt. John Bangs said his officers carried out the captain’s “private person” arrest. They handcuffed Sun, and took him to the Los Angeles Police Department’s Pacific Division. After three hours, police let him go without booking him, referring the case to the city attorney.

Sun admitted later that as he sat handcuffed to a bench, he had a few unsettling visions dancing in his head, “like the grounds for disciplinary proceedings in the (state Bar).”

Now, the big question. Was he making trouble, or making law?

This cracks open all manner of legal worm cans, Sun thinks. Because the audio comes to all the seats, can any passenger who has paid the fare tap in?

Contributing to this story was Times staff writer Nieson Himmel.