The Film Nazis

It's like a Seinfeld episode, except less funny:

Film previews in Hollywood have long been a police-state affair: turn up at the movies, get frisked, have your valuable phone (which in turn contains your very, very valuable identity) confiscated and entrusted to a teenager earning minimum wage, and then be overtly surveilled through the course of the film.

Now the Hollywood police-state experience has come to Toronto, as James Reid discovered at last week's preview of Derailed. Viewers were wanded with metal-detectors, frisked, had their property confiscated, and so on. The thing is, these measures are becoming more common in regular screenings, too. A ticket-taker at Toronto's Paramount cinema tried to confiscate my still camera last year when he saw me taking pics of my friends in the lobby with it. Sorry, no. You can't have my $500 camera to keep until your $5 matinee is over.

This is what confuses me - the are people who are showing up, paying customers. It's worth noting that the music industry has (more or less) given up on it's practice of trying to keep CDs from being ripped - they've recognized that paying customers have an expectation that they should be able to rip music to their mp3 players.

Of course, the music industry's war on piracy continues unabated. As much as I think it's lunatic, I can at least understand their motives. But by making movies an unpleasant place to be, studios are just hanging themselves.

This, on the other hand, seems to me like it would be much more effective:

To add further insult to the debacle at the gate, near the exits at stage right and left were two uniformed security guards at each door, all four with video cameras scanning the crowd and making themselves very conspicuous.

This was not just a bit of pre-show MPAA theatre, they stood there for the entirety of the movie, red LED's glowing, scanning the crowd to remind us that we were under close surveillance and our actions were being recorded.

Unpleasant, sure, but people watch you in a Gap changeroom too. So get over it. I'm sure future movie studios will have night-vision cameras built in to the theatres. At the very least, I'd get used to seeing signs reading "this theatre is under surveillance" often.