Maryland Mulls Ban on Ads at Movies : Movies: Debate starts today over a proposed bill to outlaw commercials on motion-picture screens. State theater owners are challenging the legislation.

The idea of going to the movies without confronting commercials is so appealing to a Maryland state legislator that he has introduced a bill to outlaw ads on theater screens in that state. Beginning today, the proposed law will be debated in the Economic Matters Committee of the Maryland General Assembly House of Delegates.

“The actual experience of being in a movie theater and being intruded upon by Elton John singing Coke commercials, I find inappropriate,” said Delegate Paul Pinsky, who introduced the proposed law. “You pay enough money to go to the movies. I’m not sure you have to cheapen the moviegoing experience by sitting though these horrid commercials.”

Pinsky’s bill, believed to be the first of its kind in the nation, is expected to draw plenty of opposition from theater owners. Pinsky, in a telephone interview from his Maryland office, said that both Walt Disney Studios and Warners Bros., which have policies against ads being shown before their movies, “have been sympathetic, but don’t favor legislation.”

“You have to say no to commercialism at some point,” Pinsky said. “It’s not unheard of to limit advertising. The other side is saying ‘First Amendment,’ ‘freedom of speech,’ etc. But municipalities have the right to limit billboards.

‘I don’t think the private sector has the right to do everything they want to do,” Pinsky continued. “We limited the advertising of cigarettes, for instance.”

Pinsky’s legislation is being challenged by theater owners in Maryland on the grounds that it would be an intrusion into private business.

Scott Cohen, president of the Maryland chapter of the National Assn. of Theater Owners, said that his group is “monitoring the bill very carefully. We feel it’s a certain kind of censorship. Next, they might want to tell us they want us to sell a certain kind of candy.”

The Maryland association’s position is that theaters are the private sector. “If people didn’t like commercials, they would stop coming to theaters,” Cohen said. “It would be foolish for (the owners) to hurt their own business. What we do on our screens is a matter between our customers, our suppliers and us--not the politicians.”

Cohen said he runs commercials in some of his Maryland theaters and doesn’t get much negative feedback. “People complain about everything,” he said. “But I’ve heard complaints that we run too many trailers. That it’s too hot. Some people find the ads entertaining.”

Reflecting a widely held opinion among theater owners, Cohen charged, “Half the movie companies are guilty of advertising. I’d like to see it in the law that (the studios) can’t advertise things like, ‘Visit Disney World or Universal Tours.’ Or put products in their movies.”

It has been just over a year since Disney Studios announced it would no longer book movies into theaters showing commercials. At the time, Disney said its position was backed by a company-sponsored survey showing 90% of filmgoers are against ads in movie theaters. The decision sent waves through the exhibition industry.

Theater owners privately charged Disney with “high-handed” treatment. Days later, Warner Bros. added its name to the opponents of screen ads by publicly taking the same position as Disney--a position that Warners said was merely a restatement of a longstanding policy.

(Other studios may have refrained from joining the advertising ban because of a Federal Trade Commission investigation of Disney and Warners for potential restraint of trade in connection with theater advertising. No report has surfaced to date, however, and the Justice Department refuses any comment.)

In the past year, one theater chain after another has agreed to stop showing commercials before Disney or Warner Bros. movies, two of the industry’s largest suppliers of feature films. However, some of the largest chains, the Cineplex Odeon circuit, among them, are still accepting and exhibiting commercials.

One of the issues is what some theater owners believe is their right to offset their costs through such advertising.

In the meantime, Richard Cook, president of Disney’s Buena Vista distribution arm, called the year-old policy “successful . . . we have had no change of heart.”

Cook admitted some patrons may still see a “sporadic ad or two” when they go to see a Disney movie, but that is the result of contracts some theater chains had before Disney implemented its ban.

Cook said that as time goes by, he expects that all theaters to comply.

“Reaction from consumers continues to be positive,” Cook said. “We have had letters and phone calls backing us in large numbers.”

Cook added that Disney would rather see the advertising issue “handled in the marketplace, rather than take a legislative approach.”

His comments were echoed by Howard Lichtman, executive vice president of marketing and communications for the huge 1,700-screen Cineplex Odeon chain, where on-screen advertising is routine. “From an exhibitor’s perspective, (the legislation is) preposterous,” Lichtman said. “I don’t see them tell the newspapers what to print. Why we should be singled out?”

While Lichtman said that Cineplex will eventually honor the requests by Disney and Warners, the circuit still has existing contracts that it must honor. “We hope to continue to have a dialogue with (Disney) on the issue,” he said. “We believe the caliber of advertising on the screen will be acceptable to them.”

The Maryland legislation will be closely watched by New York-based Screenvision Cinema Network, the nation’s largest supplier of theater ads, with billings of $25 million last year.

Screenvision President Alex Zabo said that he questions “whether the government should enter into that sort of thing.” Zabo said his company has three- and five-year contracts, “so our cinema ads continue to run as a result.”

“All of our advertisers--Toyota, General Motors, Mitsubishi, Dr Pepper, Kodak and ABC-TV--test to make sure that the type of ads on screen are acceptable,” Zabo said, adding, “moviegoers overwhelmingly find them to be acceptable and entertaining. Advertisers do not wish to offend moviegoers.”