Disabled Challenge Tiered-Seating Trend

For any moviegoer who has felt that sinking feeling when someone 6-foot-5 plops down one row ahead, the recent arrival of stadium-style seating has been nothing short of revolutionary.

Despite the popularity of the new theaters, not everyone’s view has improved. For people in wheelchairs, the tiered-seating design has been an invitation to stay home--and a reason to go to court.

“To the disabled community, this was an enormously depressing development, and it came totally out of left field,” said Andrew D. Levy, a disabled Baltimore lawyer who sued the Hoyts theater chain, which has opened stadium theaters in Maryland and Virginia. “The opportunity for someone in a wheelchair to go out and enjoy a movie is vanishing.”

Since the stadium design came into vogue in 1995, the growth of the new-style theaters has been quickly followed by a wave of legal challenges from disabled patrons who complain they must strain for a clear view. Attorneys for these filmgoers have labeled the entry aisle space “the wheelchair ghetto.”

Unlike traditional sloped theaters, the new cinemas typically reserve space for wheelchairs at the bottom of the risers, or alongside the handful of rows in the front of the theater, the seats closest to the screen.

“I saw ‘Titanic’ [from those seats] and thought I was drowning,” said James C. Harrington, an Austin attorney for the Texas Civil Rights Project, a nonprofit group that filed one of the first suits in 1997 and lost on appeal. “I could really appreciate what my clients were going through.”

Last year, U.S. Justice Department attorneys got involved in the dispute, filing two federal lawsuits--one in Los Angeles, the second in Cleveland--against two of the largest national theater chains, AMC Entertainment Inc. and Cinemark USA.

In those complaints, the Justice Department argued that the format violates the Americans with Disabilities Act, which it says requires theaters to provide disabled customers a line of sight to the screen that’s comparable to the view offered to the general public. Disabled patrons make up about 1% of the moviegoing public.

Justice Department attorneys hope to obtain a ruling that will force owners to refit stadium theaters to better accommodate viewers who use wheelchairs.

Similar Lawsuits Over Sports Stadium Seating

The Americans with Disabilities Act has proved a powerful tool on a similar issue--handicapped seating in sports stadiums. In 1996, a U.S. District Court judge in Washington forced builders of MCI Center to halt work in mid-construction to add spaces so wheelchair users could see beyond standing spectators and to adequately disperse wheelchair spaces throughout the arena.

That has not been the result in the few court cases involving cinemas that have been resolved so far. In those cases, theater owners have almost always prevailed.

A federal court in Maryland dismissed Levy’s case against Hoyts in September, pending the outcome of negotiations between the chain and the Justice Department. In Harrington’s case, filed against Texas-based Cinemark, a federal appeals court found that wheelchair seating in the first few rows was adequate.

“Some of the suits reflect what plaintiffs believe the law should require, rather than what the courts say in fact the law does require,” said Steven Fellman, a lawyer for the National Assn. of Theater Owners, which has been closely monitoring the suits.

“There is no best seat and no ‘not best’ seat in the theater, and all the seats provide an unobstructed view to the screen,” Fellman said.

But a spokesman for the Justice Department said its disability rights section has received more than 50 complaints from disabled moviegoers, many of whom contend that the new design has, in essence, turned a night at the movies into a decidedly negative experience.

“We used to love to go,” said Crosby King, 41, a Baltimore County, Md., man who has used a wheelchair since he fell off a roof at age 28 and suffered a spinal cord injury. “But the last movie I went to, the whole time I was thinking, ‘I hate this. This is really unfair.’ ”

Lawyers who have fought theaters over wheelchair seating argue that some simple changes in the design of stadium theaters could bring a quick end to the legal wrangling.

Some of the chains already have recognized this, said Carroll County, Md., lawyer Dale Reid, who uses a wheelchair.

“It’s very easy to do when you’re building the theaters,” said Reid, who wrote the Justice Department about seating at a United Artists theater in Columbia, Md. “They just need to bring the ramp into the theater midway up so, if you have a wheelchair, you can stay there. Imax theaters have been doing that for years.”

John Fithian, president of the National Assn. of Theater Owners, said making alterations is not as easy as attorneys for the disabled would suggest.

“You can’t feasibly build a modern theater where it has wheelchair seating at every level--nor does the law require us to do that,” Fithian said. It takes a long ramp to bring wheelchairs to the higher parts of the audience. And “the higher you put the wheelchair seating, the more expensive it is for us to build it.”

Lawyers such as Levy fear that with so few moviegoers in wheelchairs, nothing will prod major theater chains to make improvements unless the courts step in.

“I don’t know why they chose to put us in the least attractive spot in the theater,” Levy said. “It strikes me as absurd. But, then again, I look at the world from a different perspective.”