NEW YORK - I treat the Internet like public space. While I pretty much accept every Facebook friend request I get (though a few tedious posts will get you hidden from my timeline) so long as it’s not obviously from a wannabe porn star or a phisher, I expect that everything I post, every comment I make, every link I share, can be seen by anyone. I have absolutely no expectation of privacy on the Internet (and you shouldn’t either).So I don’t always publish where I am or what I’m doing. Because I don’t imagine that most of what I get up to is very interesting. And because sometimes that’s none of your business.
But when I’m solo on a business trip like this one, I tend to post more often. Because my business trips involve a lot of sitting and waiting and being more or less bored. I’m only here for a little more than 20 hours. I will see a couple of movies, sleep on the 48th floor of a very nice hotel, attend four short news conferences and head back to the airport. It’s very nice that Summit Entertainment has a reception with an open bar (and some top shelf liquor - Patron tequila and Johnnie Walker Black) before its press screening of Red 2 (which opens July 19 at a theater near you) but the truth is I’d rather just go ahead and see the movie, get some room service and try to sleep. I’m not a good solo traveler - I spend the whole time away trying to get home.
I wouldn’t call it stressful exactly, but I had a hard time getting into Fox’s screening of The Heat earlier this evening. I wasn’t officially invited to this screening because, as I understand it, there really isn’t a contract publicist who handles the Arkansas market for Fox. (Though our newspaper is relatively large - our circulation isn’t much smaller than the Boston Globe - for some reason studios are fixated on market size. And they want to insist that our coverage is limited to the Little Rock market, which is something like 56th, or 100th, depending on what metric you use, not the entire state.)
My admittedly sketchy understanding is that the Kansas City, Mo., office of the public relations giant Allied-THA,which handles publicity for other studios in this market, is the closest thing we have to a Fox rep in Arkansas, and so I contacted them about attending the screening. And while Allied didn’t exactly tell me it was a go, they did tell me they’d alert the Fox folks in New York that I was planning on showing up.
Then I got to the AMC Empire 25 on 42nd Street near Times Square and didn’t see any people from Fox in its ridiculously crowded lobby. So I went up a level to the ticket taker/initial concession stand/customer service and asked a manager where the Fox folks were. And - after a few minutes of walkie-talkie consultation - he directed me to a theater that was two more escalator levels up, where the first people I encountered were some press folks (hereafter known as “ilk”) standing in line. I joined them.
When I got to the front of the line, a security officer asked me for my phone. Since it had recording capabilities, he took it from me and placed it in a plastic bag and gave me a receipt so I could reclaim it after the screening. Then I started to enter the screening, where I was stopped and asked for my ticket by another security guard.
I sort of expected this, so I calmly asked to speak to the Fox publicist, who would no doubt be carrying a clipboard with my name scrawled on it somewhere. And she would check me off her list, and let me in, and all would be well. But the Fox publicist, when he appeared, had no clipboard.
“Didn’t you see the table in the lobby?” he asked.
“No, the theater manager told me to come up here,” I said.
“Well, I’m afraid you’re going to have to go back to the lobby and check in, ” he said.
So I went back down, four escalator flights, two of which had frozen into awkwardly negotiated staircases, past the Dave and Buster’s. I came out half-a-block away from the theater entrance, fought my way through the Times Square crowd and finally found the Fox table at the east end of the lobby. I told them who I was.
“And what is your outlet?” an earnest young man asked.
“The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette,” I told him.
His nose visibly wrinkled. And he did not find me on his list.
“Are you a Razorbacks fan?” his table mate, a perky young woman, asked me.
I said I was. Though I had attended Louisiana State University in the long off far ago, it was kind of difficult to live in Arkansas and not have a least a little affection for them Hogs. She nodded. She had just graduated from Auburn.
“Hmm. Your name’s not here,” the young man said. Then he asked me who my publicist was. I gave him some names. They seemed not to make an impression.
“Can you show me an e-mail or something from them?” he asked.
No, I explained, though I could have had my phone not been confiscated by their security people four escalators up.
I could tell he was assessing me, as the perky young woman shouted unintelligibly into her cell phone (it was very loud in the lobby). I looked him in the eye and thought of the time when I’d shown up for a screening of The Departed in a very posh room in the Time-Warner building. The woman with the clipboard guarding the entrance had asked me for my name and media outlet, and when I’d told her, she actually said, “Arkansas? What the hell are you doing here?”
But that time I was on the list, so she couldn’t very well keep me out of the screening room. I sat on a leather couch and threw spitballs at the back of Martin Scorsese’s head. (Exactly half of that statement is true.)
I obviously wasn’t on Fox’s list. But I could produce a business card that identified me as ilk, as well as a laminated ID card that identified me as an employee of this fine newspaper. I told him he could look me up on Rotten Tomatoes. And so, after consulting with Miss Auburn, he grudgingly handed over a couple of slips of paper - one that entitled me to admittance to the press screening (and more importantly, an unobstructed seat in the section of the theater reserved for the ilk), the other good for a small popcorn and medium soft drink from the concession stand.
Back up the escalators I went. I gave the concession coupon to a kid waiting in the line of real people who would fill up the theater after the ilk were seated and settled in to watch the comedy stylings of Melissa McCarthy and Sandra Bullock in The Heat. Between some guy who blogs for examiner.com and (true story) that Univision presenter who got into it with Jesse Eisenberg on the Internet recently.
So friend me on Facebook if you want, but don’t hate on my rock ’n’ roll timeline.
E-mail: [email protected] blooddirtangels.com
MovieStyle, Pages 31 on 06/28/2013