For Love of Movies, Stop Commercials

It was instant. At first sight. It happened in the dark of the Bay Theater in Bay City, Mich., when Grandma took me to see “Bambi.” I fell in love with the movies.

I love movies--good movies, bad movies, old movies, silent and early talkies, comedies, tragedies, musicals or animation. Films in Farsi, Japanese, Czech, Russian, Italian, French, Chinese--give me a subtitle and I’m there, enchanted. I regularly borrow a more reliable car to drive more than an hour to see a foreign or independent film in Santa Monica or West L.A. (They don’t show such in my area.) I once drove more than two hours to a city I never heard of to see a favorite actor stuck in a real stinker. I have walked out on only one film in my entire life. Out of respect, I remain seated through all the closing credits until the screen goes dark and the music ends. I now write screenplays for audiences just like me--people who are happily dotty about movies.

All this explains my outrage at now finding theaters running commercials before my movies! Not the silent card flips before show times, or the film previews, or even those plugs for a certain local newspaper, which at least have to do with making movies. I’m talking about commercials--commercials for cotton, phones, computers, cars. And now they’re running commercials for TV shows, the main competitor of movies! If I cared about watching television, I’d have stayed home!

And don’t even get me started about those Coca-Cola commercials thinly disguised as “Short Film Award Winners” or baseball teams doing shtick while slurping Coke. (Puhlease--with the sole exception of Kevin Costner, baseball players cannot act. Get over it!) You can’t buy anything but Coca-Cola products in most theaters, and most of the silent flip cards bristle with the Coke logo--so why the hell are we still inundated with Coke commercials?

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I believe this is a kind of fraud. I bought an overpriced ticket to see a movie--not commercials.

When I’ve complained in several letters to theater-chain corporate offices, I received that old bromide about “economics.” This is bull pies to the max. The movie theater industry is making more money now than ever--witness the countless multiplexes being built in every mall, the crowds laying siege to every one of them (15 minutes just to get in the door to line up for 15 minutes more to buy my popcorn?!). It is not economics, it is greed. Charging $2.25 for two cups of popcorn isn’t enough? Or the $5 “bargain twilight” ticket?

This is the only country in the world that doesn’t consider movies an art form. If theaters tried this in Paris, the audiences would burn down the building. London audiences would stand up and shout, “What the bloody hell are you playing at?” Third World countries would be convinced it was an insidious American plot and act accordingly.

Running commercials before the films is insulting to this art form. And if we don’t put a stop to it now, trust me, folks, it won’t be long before movie theaters will interrupt the film to insert commercial breaks (they’ll call it “refreshment breaks”). It happened to television; it will happen to movie theaters unless we take a stand.

I call on all of us--studios, agencies, actors, writers, directors, crews and, most of all, ticked-off movie lovers--to make our objections known. Write letters, make phone calls, buttonhole theater managers, picket theaters, bug your representative in Congress--do whatever it takes to stop commercials from invading and spoiling our movies. Do it now. Do it for love.