People do weird things in movie theaters
Have you ever been to one of the free pre-screenings? You know where you get passes from a radio station, or video store, or fast food joint and you get to go the pre-screening free as long as you’re in line early enough? Usually they do that when the movie doesn’t have great pre-release buzz – so the movie’s not typically great, but it’s fun sometimes when you’re livin’ on the cheap. Well apparently Portland has a whole community of people who do nothing but go to all of these screenings.
We went to one a little while back and the people that we encountered were the most ‘unique’ Portland sub-culture I’ve seen yet. First of all the radio station that was sponsoring the showing was giving away schwag prior to the movie starting. People were just about trampling one another to get a free t-shirt, sticker or keychain…and if that wasn’t bad enough – when they started dismantling their table with the banner hanging behind it, people start ripping and tug-o-waring to get that down, and one woman is shrieking over the crowd at her boyfriend who is still up front having just scored a pair of radio station logo’d socks or something – “get the tablecloth – grab the TA-BLE-CLOTH!!”
Yes – the plastic tablecloth – you know the kind you get at Target for a buck for when you go camping and then throw away when you’re done using it. For this she’s screaming at the top of her lungs across the crowded theater.
When we stopped laughing at that – and other similar scenes – we listened to the conversations around us. People discussing which Carl’s Jr. you had to go to to get tickets to which next free screening and that the ones hosted by radio station A had way better giveaways than those hosted by radio station B. And these weren’t people sitting together – it was random people walking by, people sitting rows ahead and behind – they all seemed to know each other and go to these things regularly.
So see – not all wacky Portland sub-cultures are hipster and trendy. There’s also the giveaway obsessed free-movie and crappy trinkets people!
Just don’t get me started on the people who dress up in costume to go to movies (I’m not talking Rocky Horror or special event screenings – that’s allowed : ) but like the people in costume waiting in line to see the new Pirates last week….but that’s another rant….
I hadn’t heard about it either, until I read this great Culturepulp comic about the “Screening Rats.”
That’s what I get for not previewing. Link is in my name.
I worked in the promotional department of a radio station (they played both country _and_ western) for about a year, and I’ll tell you what we called them. Prize pigs. You’d show up at an event with a guitar signed by like 80 famous rednecks that you were going to raffle away for charity, and no less than 40 guys would come up and think you were just going to give it to them. If it was a night event at a bar, you would have to call security three times to stop someone from taking it. I had a guy take my pager and my bag lunch, because he “thought it was a giveaway”. They’d show up at the event in the shirt they got from you last time, and think that somehow, you would be more likely to give them more shit because you saw how much of a fan they were.
Yep. I used to work at a place that gave away those passes… our word for them was “passholes”.