Serenity Now, Insanity Later

An impatient mob nearly turned ugly last night at 1000 Van Ness, thanks to Joss Whedon. His new movie Serenity opens Friday (to confirm the obvious, it's F**KING AWESOME; we'll review it later this week) and last night the TL movie theater held a free sneak peek. Capitalizing on the buzz that "Firefly" (the show on which the movie's based) generated online, Universal let bloggers reserve seats in advance, with the condition that they blog about the movie. It seems to have worked -- Technorati shows 555 posts tagged "serenity" in the last 12 hours, and Google's blog search shows nearly 2,000 posts featuring the word in the last 2 weeks. Great idea! Did anyone get the short end of a stick? Yeah: non-bloggers.

"The screening is overbooked," hollered a media rep to a long line in the lobby. We'd estimate that about 200 people were waiting with free-sneak-peek passes; without blogger credentials, they were made to wait as long as an hour only to be sent packing. Their consolation prizes: a locker-sized Serenity poster, and a pass to see Prime, a romantic comedy with Meryl Streep. They were not amused. And neither was the poor media rep as she scurried around, hiding at times behind a pillar so that the line would stop yelling at her. The promotion was being handled by Grace Hill Media, a PR firm specializing in outreach to faith-based communities. They barely even have a website; who knows why they were assigned to coordinate with bloggers.

As the crowd was undiplomatically shouted at, "you'll have wait until Friday and buy a ticket," things got scary. More shouting; some pushing; some ripping of posters; one excitable gentleman was told that he was now banned. Ultimately things quieted down, but the ill-will generated by Grace Hill Media's tease may have done more harm than good. The punchline to the whole confrontation: after the crowd dispersed and we made our way into the theater with a media rep, we discovered that there were still plenty of empty seats.