Shut the Flick Up.

Today I went to see the 1:50 showing of The Conjuring at our local movie theater.  I didn't get out of the building until 4:45.  That's two hours and 55 minutes in the theater (3h15m if you count the pre-show time I spent waiting for concessions, in line and as my order of poppers cooked).  Flixster lists The Conjuring's run time at one hour and 52 minutes.

What happened to my extra hour?  Let's do some quick math.  Are previews running that long?  No - although they were a solid 20 minutes, which makes for about 7 or 8 two- to three-minute trailers (Riddick, You're Next, Getaway, Runner Runner, The Wolf of Wall Street and a couple others).  So 1h52m running time plus 20m previews plus the two minutes in the restroom after the feature makes for about 2h15m, leaving us with a 40-minute gap.  That 40 minutes was spent watching the 20 minutes of previews followed by the first 20 minutes of The Conjuring and deciding that the two people next to me weren't just talking through the previews - they intended to provide a feature-length commentary - so I left the theater and walked into the next showing, at 2:30, and started all over.  Same previews, same first act, new audience - in other words, take two.

Clapboard.  Lights (house lights down), camera (projector rolling), action (actors acting).

When the director calls the classic "Lights, camera, action" on set, that's a not-so-subtle hint to everyone in the vicinity to shut their mouths for a bit to allow a job to be done.  That job that needs to be done is the filming of a movie.  The filming, with the lights up, the camera rolling, the actors acting, is the culmination of several years and a thousand independent elements aligning for a single moment in time and space.  Okay, maybe that's not realistic: it's more like 10,000 independent elements.

It starts with a screenwriter getting an idea for a movie, and guess what?  He or she got that idea likely as an inspiration from another movie, book, TV show, play, video game, comic book, newspaper article, historical event, song or poem that couldn't have happened themselves without a thousand independent elements aligning for a single moment in time and space, in their own special way.  This screenwriter spends weeks, months or even years creating a script, which is a full depiction of everything that happens in a movie - from the words that are spoken to where they take place, including how smoke-filled a bar is and what emotional effect every gunshot should have on an audience.  Then there's a producer, who reads and decides to fund the script to be made.  This producer convinces his/her friends to be in it, direct it, get shooting permits for it, block off city traffic, point a camera at it, light it, make costumes for it, do the make-up, hold boom mics over it, compose an original musical score for it, bring food for the entire cast and crew to eat during shooting and more.  All these things are done with representatives from the production studio present, to ensure that the money invested into the picture isn't being wasted.

When everyone's in place, the director makes the call. Lights, camera, action - everybody who has worked on the film up to this point has waited weeks, months or years for this moment to come.  Everyone in earshot closes their lips and watches in silence as their work - for some, their life's work - comes together like a symphony.

When the shooting's done, someone must send the film stock to be processed, which then comes back to the studio for post-production.  Post involves special effects, editing, light/color correction, and so on.  This process is paralleled by the sound department, who do the same thing with the audio.  In post, they could watch and listen to any one scene from the movie 100 ways before they decide it's finished.  Finally, a marketing team builds posters, commercials, trailers, newspaper ads, billboards, radio clips and more for the movie.  Agents book appearances for actors and directors on daytime and late-night television shows so Kelly Rippa and Jimmy Fallon can gush with the audience over what they've been up to.  There's usually a premiere that principal cast and crew attend, which leads to more magazine spreads and such, and the movie comes out in the theater (and we go to see them, which I'll return to in a moment).  At the beginning of the following calendar year The Oscars and The Golden Globes present awards made of etched metal and dreams to the people who made those special elements play out like a symphony, the result of uncountable elements coming together.  There are DVD and Blu-Ray releases and based on the success of these films, the professional relationships among the cast and crew may strengthen or weaken, and studios will decide if, when and how their future projects will come to fruition.

So out of all those people who worked so hard on that movie, in that several years' process, right up until the moment the end credits roll and not a moment sooner, you may have noticed that at no point is there invited a single word or utterance from your mouth.  There is none.  Zero.  A total, utter and complete lack of your words has been a part of that film.  I know it's a surprise, because every word that comes out of your mouth is so mind-blowingly brilliant that anyone within earshot is a better human being for hearing it, but I'll get to the proof I've conjured in just a minute.  When a movie is on, you aren't supposed to be speaking.

I'll say it again, because it should come as a shock.  When a movie's on, you aren't supposed to be speaking.  You were born with two ears to one mouth for a reason, and this is the time to use the former.  Just pretend you really are a part of the movie, and when the director yelled "Lights, camera, action," and everyone else closed their mouths and didn't say a single word, you're one of them.

Although choirs of angels certainly should descend from the heavens, singing songs of praises to you for gracing the theater (or your living room) with the Mensa-quality revelation that the Starship Enterprise's bridge wasn't lit like that in the original series, or that the killer's hiding behind the door, or that Matthew McConaughey is gonna get the girl in the end?  The $10-and-up cost of admission to see the movie, that every single other theater attendee paid too, doesn't actually include your Sherlock Holmes-like detective work.  The $10 ticket doesn't include the salary you've been receiving from Hollywood for pointing out everything you notice for 90 to 180 minutes of every feature film they release that you care to grace with your presence.

If you could still have faith that there's a just and loving God watching over the universe after this devastation, hopefully you can withstand some evidence I've gathered over the years to support this audacious claim.

I was about halfway through The Ring Two in a theater in Valdosta, GA, with my Best Man, when I just lost it.  Call it an insane lapse of judgment and proper societal behavior, call it misplaced aggression from my disappointment with the movie.  Two girls who I presumed went to our college (Valdosta State University - Go Blazers!) had been speaking to each other throughout the movie.  They were across the theater from and well behind us.  Whenever anyone shushed them or asked them to be quiet - of which there were a dozen or so people who expressed that opinion, which is proof in and of itself that the words we're looking for come from the screen, not the seats - these young ladies would shush them right back and laugh and keep talking.  I was angry enough that the movie wasn't going my way, as I said, and finally I just lost my temper.  I stood and whipped around on my heel and shouted at them.

"Jesus Christ, shut the fuck up; nobody wants to hear you two talk!!!"

They - like you - were quite surprised to hear this.  Silence fell over the theater and I started feeling a bit shy, so I sat down.  And that's when it happened - stay with me, this is important.  As I sat, an uproarious round of applause erupted from the theater.  People whooped and hollered and cheered.  My Best Man clapped a hand on my shoulder and laughed with us.  The girls, he said - I was still too embarrassed to look at them - slunk down in their seats and didn't make a peep the rest of the movie.  On the way out of the theater after the fact, people introduced themselves to us and shook my hand.

I get the impression that if those girls' opinion were as important to the crowd as the written, filmed, edited, printed lines of dialogue in the movie were, the audience would've shouted at me and thrown tomatoes and had me ejected from the premises.

Right?  If you should be talking, then people like me who ask you not to talk should probably learn that the rest of the attendees are only too timid to ask to sit next to you so they can hear your every thought in crystal clarity.  This is why I don't hear you talking in a movie and think to myself Oh thank God, someone who can warn me that the guy seeking revenge is gonna kill that guy he's seeking revenge on.  Would it be weird if I'm the only person who hooks a microphone up and bootlegs their opinion for internet release?  I don't.  I don't think that.  And odds are, neither does anybody else.

This information is also intended for the person I saw in a room of people who (like himself) hadn't seen The Green Mile, when he realized and informed them that Percy wasn't going to wet the sponge when they electrocuted that one guy.  I'll tell you the way I paused the movie and told him, that there's a dilemma there.  You have to decide if you're going to release that information to the audience yourself.  If you do, you're negating all that work by all those hundreds of people - all the way from Stephen King, who wrote the original story, to the cashier who sold me the DVD, and everyone in between.  You're dampening the dramatic effect of that moment for anyone who didn't see it coming but was shocked and doubly horrified by the implications of human cruelty and the weight of the death penalty that were intended by all those people who made that movie.  You pull the entire audience out of the experience, doing the same as jumping in front of the screen and saying "This is a fictional story, you shouldn't be involved in it emotionally because I can just tell you what's going to happen instead; now please enjoy the rest of the picture."  Or, if you'd rather not do that to your friends, family and strangers, let alone our friends whose gossip we drool over and whose careers we support, the other option is to not talk during the movie.

This information is also intended for the couple behind me during The Strangers who talked so much during the quiet, tense parts that I turned to ask them to be quiet and missed the best scare in the film.

This information is also intended for the guy in Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers who told his wife in front of me that Gollum was about to betray Frodo and Sam, thus not giving her the chance to think and imagine for herself what was going to happen next in the story.

For the sake of the economy of Hollywood, for you business-savvy individuals; for the sake of the careers and dreams of filmmakers; for the sake of people like me who don't want to hear your opinion but would prefer to enjoy the movie independently; for the sake of anyone who paid their admission to hear the actors speak, instead of you; for the sake of yourselves, lest you wind up next to a nut who will just start punching you, I'm going to ask as nicely as you deserve.

When you're in a movie theater, and the lights go down, and the projector rolls, and the actors start acting?  Please, for all of us, shut your fucking mouth.