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Topic: Alabama Drive-In Cancells Beauty And The Beast Over Gay Character

Frank Cox
Film God

Posts: 2234
From: Melville Saskatchewan Canada
Registered: Apr 2011

posted 03-10-2017 04:24 PM

Probably The Nativity Story.

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Louis Bornwasser
Film God

Posts: 4441
From: prospect ky usa
Registered: Mar 2005

posted 03-10-2017 04:32 PM

Run "bad" film. Provide signs, tables, chairs, and tents for protestors. Call TV news guys. Get the free press. Wait 5 days. Have "friend" tell protestors that they have been used.

I saw it on "Marjoe"

I saw it on "Best Little Whorehouse. . ."

Never fails.

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Mark Ogden
Jedi Master Film Handler

Posts: 943
From: Little Falls, N.J.
Registered: Jun 99

posted 03-10-2017 04:34 PM

This kind of thing happens on occasion. Before The Last Temptation of Christ there was Godard's Hail Mary, about a French girl on a high school basketball team who finds herself pregnant while still a virgin. I remember the furious Catholics lined up in front of the 57th Street Playhouse reciting the rosary and picketing. While the picture was clearly a religious allegory, for some reason they all had gotten the idea (without the benefit of actually seeing it) that the film portrayed the actual Virgin Mary as a prostitute, which was no where near the actual content. As always, Hell hath no fury like that of the misinformed.

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Justin Hamaker
Film God

Posts: 2253
From: Lakeport, CA USA
Registered: Jan 2004

posted 03-10-2017 05:19 PM

Scott, I think that might have been The Da Vinci Code. I remember having a former employee's mother ask if she could protest outside the theatre.

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Mike Blakesley
Film God

Posts: 12767
From: Forsyth, Montana
Registered: Jun 99

posted 03-10-2017 08:28 PM

I don't know if people here are just more laid-back, or they trust us to not show anything too outrageous, or they're just too busy to give a crap, but we almost never get any kind of blow-back on what we show.

I had one lady send me a Facebook message saying she "sure hoped" we weren't going to show "50 Shades of Grey," and I had a nice exchange with her explaining the economics of the business and she agreed that we weren't forcing anybody to buy a ticket. So we showed it without incident.

I had a few people email and stop me on the street asking me not to play "The Last Temptation of Christ," and we didn't play that film, but mostly because it didn't do much business in small towns, not because of those comments.

With "Brokeback Mountain" we planned to play it if it won Best Picture, and we even had onesheets displayed....no complaints at all. It lost the Oscar, we took the poster down and that was that.

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Frank Cox
Film God

Posts: 2234
From: Melville Saskatchewan Canada
Registered: Apr 2011

posted 03-10-2017 08:54 PM

I played The Birdcage here and that was a mistake. Good crowds for it, but most of the people were coming to see a Robin Williams movie.

There were a lot of people offended that week. If I played a movie like that today, I don't think there would be the same level of that sort of reaction, though.

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Martin McCaffery
Film God

Posts: 2481
From: Montgomery, AL
Registered: Jun 99

posted 03-10-2017 09:29 PM

Once you stand up to protestors they never bother you again.

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Frank Cox
Film God

Posts: 2234
From: Melville Saskatchewan Canada
Registered: Apr 2011

posted 03-10-2017 10:31 PM

I didn't get any actual protesters for The Birdcage. Just a lot of comments on the way out saying what a terrible thing it was.

But I did sell a lot of tickets, so I guess it wasn't that terrible from that point of view. [Smile]

I didn't even consider playing Brokeback Mountain.

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Martin McCaffery
Film God

Posts: 2481
From: Montgomery, AL
Registered: Jun 99

posted 03-11-2017 09:07 AM

I got a letter calling me a racist and a homophobe for NOT playing Brokeback Mountain (it played for many weeks in the multiplexes here).
Sometimes, you just can't win [Wink]

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Paul Mayer
Oh get out of it Melvin, before it pulls you under!

Posts: 3836
From: Albuquerque, NM
Registered: Feb 2000

posted 03-11-2017 11:43 AM

I take it they don't use a booker... [Smile]

quote:

Alabama Theater Bans ‘Beauty and the Beast’, Accidentally Replaces It With Drag Queen Documentary

March 9, 2017

By Daniela Costa

Oh, how sweet it is. After refusing to screen Beauty and the Beast because of its newly revealed gay character, an Alabama theater accidentally scheduled a film about drag queens in its place.

The Henagar Drive-In mistakenly scheduled Fierce, a film about the International Drag Festival in Texas. “When life drags you down, drag it up” reads the film’s tagline.

Well the theater’s owner, Carol Laney, has been dragged. Drag-oned that is – she’s said she thought the film was a Game of Thrones-style movie about dragons!

Apparently Laney was confused because the poster for Fierce shows a woman with dragons around her.

Unsurprisingly, Fierce has since been pulled from the Henagar Drive-In’s lineup of films.

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Mike Blakesley
Film God

Posts: 12767
From: Forsyth, Montana
Registered: Jun 99

posted 03-11-2017 02:39 PM

I got to wondering, how did all this get started? It started because Disney, or somebody connected to the movie, started promoting the fact that it was Disney's "first gay character" and that there is an "exclusively gay moment" in the film.

So I wonder, if they hadn't done that, would this even have been noticed? Would anybody give a crap about it? Would that drive-in have played the movie not even knowing or noticing it?

And what's Disney up to? Are they trying to get more "gay" business by doing this? Even if that's true, they had to know that they'd rub some people the wrong way. Or, are they taking the opposite tactic -- figuring that any publicity is good publicity, and maybe people who might not have seen the movie will now be tempted to check it out?

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Frank Angel
Film God

Posts: 5305
From: Brooklyn NY USA
Registered: Dec 1999

posted 03-11-2017 02:48 PM

Unfortunately, I was forced to pull LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST because of backlash and protests. It was the only title I was ever forced to drop from the schedule. It was religious groups who protested, set letters of outrage, etc. I would never have caved to that kind of irrational nonsense, but alas, the cinema division operates within a performing arts org and that within a city (i.e., political) entity so it is up to them to make such bad decisions. And this is New York city...you would think the threshold for actually censoring a screening due to a small group of protestors would be pretty high.

Thing is, it was being protested by both Jewish groups AND Catholic groups together. I guess that mix was to strong for the spinless board members and local pusillanimous politicians to ignore. Thing is, I would have pulled it anyway, but not for the perceived "attack" on religious groups (some admitting they hadn't see the film), but because it contained some of the most egregious depictions of gratuitous, persistent, up-close-and-in-your-face violence I've seen on the screen. It should have been given an NR-17 and we don't run NR-17 as policy.

We had a local single screen neighborhood cinema -- like 600 seater that fell on hard times in the 80s and like many in the same untenable situation switched to porn as many did when they were in the death throws. Thing is, unlike probably 99% of those that went to porn only to close, for what ever the economic reasons, this place stayed in business. It was very lowkey, no posters out front...no big neon XXXs on the marquee. The owner ran it for decades with nary an eyebrow raised; neighborhood people never said boo. Then one day some holier than thous showed up (making sure they'd alerted the local media first). I remember the reporter asking the owner why he ran porn instead of the G rated films the protestors were demanding. His answer was classic -- he said because he DID run G and none of these protester ever showed up to buy tickets. He said, if they would like to PRE-PAY, he'd gladly run whatever G rated film they'd like to see. His point being of course, the reason he was running porn was because the we-want-g-rated-films crowd stayed home and didn't patronize the theatre when it DID run non-porn. BTW, the place is still operating...no idea how. He must own the building outright and have practically no overhead.

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Justin Hamaker
Film God

Posts: 2253
From: Lakeport, CA USA
Registered: Jan 2004

posted 03-11-2017 05:20 PM

When we get complaints about movies, it's usually because we are or are not playing some right wing documentary/editorial or because we are or are not playing the newest Michael Moore movie.

People who don't understand the movie business will often get upset about us not playing a popular limited release, but they are usually mollified when I explain the reason why it takes so long to get many of those movie. And why we wind up not playing many of them at all.

Our company is about a year or so from receiving our full recoupment from the VPF agreements. It will be interesting to see if the availability of movies changes once we are not receiving VPFs.

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Mitchell Dvoskin
Phenomenal Film Handler

Posts: 1869
From: West Milford, NJ, USA
Registered: Jan 2001

posted 03-12-2017 12:58 PM

As a college student back in the mid to late 1970's, I was the manager and projectionist for the long gone Town & Country drive-in in Coalton Ohio. We ran main stream films all summer, and between Labor Day and Memorial Day we ran triple X porn on weekends, until there was too much snow on the ground for me to get the company pickup truck into the theatre.

I remember one day the man who handled our local advertising told me that his church was going to picket the theatre because of the porn films. I dutifully pass the information on the the theatre's owner, who called up the church and told them he could help them with their protest by getting regional newspapers and local TV news to cover it (he actually had the contact to do so). For some reason, they decided that widely publicizing that a small rural drive-in was running pornography in their community was not what they had in mind, and abruptly canceled the protest.

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Harold Hallikainen
Jedi Master Film Handler

Posts: 906
From: Denver, CO, USA
Registered: Aug 2009

posted 03-12-2017 01:20 PM

Great story on offering to help the protest! My 90 year old father-in-law is a fan of westerns. He reads a ton of them on his Kindle. He and my mother-in-law went to see Brokeback Mountain, since it was a western. Not quite what they expected. He said it had no plot. My wife explained that it showed some of the difficulties in being gay. My father-in-law thought that was obvious, and they did not really need a movie about that.

He still reads lots of westerns.

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