Martin Scorsese loves the cinema more than just about anyone else in the business. He has championed film preservation, worked tirelessly to save Turner Classic Movies and promotes films of every genre (well, almost…). But that doesn’t mean he’s going to step foot in a cinema on opening night. And you can blame that on modern audience behavior and being too short to see the screen.
Martin Scorsese – who is pegged at standing around 5’3” – told Variety that he not only doesn’t sneak into his own movies to gauge audience reaction but tends to avoid packed cinemas. “I’m short and there’s always a big person in front of me. It’s the same with Broadway — I can’t go to theater. There’s someone in front of me, and I can’t see the stage or hear the show. I really enjoy Imax as I get older. You go in, you can sit up in the back and you’re sort of looking up.”
Scorsese also doesn’t trust that his fellow moviegoers will behave. “Regular screenings, I have found the audiences becoming a bit more raucous than they used to be. But maybe it’s always like in the ’50s when we used to yell back at the screen.” And just imagine how obnoxious these people would be with an intermission thrown in…Still, he added, “But it’s very important to me to support films while they’re on the big screen. I just wait a while.”
OK, it’s kind of adorable to picture Martin Scorsese asking for a booster seat so he can see above peoples’ heads, but he’s relaying what many of us normal movie fans have experienced. We might not have trouble seeing the screen but you just don’t know who in that theater is going to talk or post on TikTok or feed their pocketbook pooch treats for the duration (something that happened to me while seeing David Gordon Green’s Halloween). It’s all enough to push people to just wait for the fourth or fifth week – and at that point they may just wait for streaming.
Have you found yourself shying away from going to the movies due to audience behavior? Share your worst moviegoing experience you’ve had in the comments section below.