MovieGoer blog

Two great blog post discoveries this weekend, about where people sit in movie theatres, and why.  The first one is from Roger Ebert, who surprisingly prefers the back of the theatre.  Roger makes abundant reference to an epic blog post by Professor David Bordwell, written back in November, which resonates strongly with me.  Great saccadic sweeps: tell it like it is, brother!

Bordwell prefers sitting in what he calls the “front zone.”  Testify! It is the only place to be! I’m firmly in the front-zone camp. If it’s a theatre I’ve been to before, I know exactly where the good seats are.  I know exactly where my seat is. (And happily, nobody ever wants to sit there but me!) If it’s a theatre I’ve never been to before, I evaluate how close can I get to the screen without it being painful. It all depends on the theatre.  Most theatres in San Diego are not that great.  They do not accommodate front-row seating very well (unless you’re into neck and back pain), so I evaluate which front-zone row allows the most immersive experience as possible without being a pain in the neck.  One exception is Landmark’s Ken Cinema, for which the very front row, smack-dab in the center, is the perfect seat, especially for foreign films with their barely readable white-on-white subtitles.

This is where I prefer to sit: right smack-dab on the center-line of the screen, as close as possible to the screen.  I pay to see — and hear — a movie.  I want to get as much out of the experience as possible.  And there are other advantages: “Nobody’s head looms in front of you,” says Bordwell. “You’re less disturbed by latecomers. You have more leg room, and it’s easier to stretch out for a snooze.”  Word.

My front-row preference evolved over time.  Partly because I stupidly refused to wear glasses or contacts for the first 25 years of my life, and over time my eyesight got worse and I had to be up close to see things without blur. I’ve seen some memorable films off-center, way, way off-center, and I quickly discovered I hated it.  Probably the one time that comes to mind most readily was the opening night of Raiders of the Lost Ark in June 1981.  We’d stood near the back of a massive line on Wisconsin Avenue in Washington, D.C. for hours outside the cavernous 800-seat KB-Cinema.  When they finally let people in, the seats filled up so fast all we could get was front row, extreme left side, as in the very last seats on the extreme left of the very front row. Nightmare material. That was my first experience of Raiders: head painfully tilted up and to the extreme right, left channel sound dominating my ears; the massive screen seemed close enough to reach out and touch.  I still vividly remember the deep rich bass sounds during the opening title sequence like it happened five minutes ago.  Yes, of course I went back and saw the movie again, in a better seat.

It was experiences like the opening night of Raiders that educated me to aim for the center-line of the screen.  Always puzzles me when I learn others, including Ebert and Bordwell, don’t mind being on the sides.

Werner Herzog apparently prefers it.
 
When I was at the Telluride Film Festival in September, I attended a 3D screening of Wim Wenders’ Pina dance film. In the row behind me was none other than Werner Herzog. I heard him proudly exclaim to his entourage sitting around him that he can never sit in the center, he has to see movies from the left of center, that it’s important and has been his whole life.  Why, he didn’t say.  Someone, please ask him.



The best seat in the house at the Arclight.

More and more theatres are now offering reserved seating.  At a price, of course.  I’m fine with reserved seating except when (a) you enter the auditorium to discover the seats are already taken (a common experience at the Arclight cinemas in LA) and (b) the seat maps on the theatre’s website — or even at the theatre’s box office — do not usually reflect with enough accuracy what is center and what is not.  (It’s important, dammit.)  I find this a lot with the Arclight cinemas in Los Angeles, which I make a pilgrimage to every chance I’m in LA.

You know, someone could probably write a dissertation about the psycho-social motivations and implications inherent in that seating chart depicted above.  Just look how people have chosen their seats.  Think I’m weird?  Why the heck would someone want to sit on the far left or far right?  Bizarre.  I’m glad someone likes sitting there, because it increases the chances that my seat is available.

The great thing about most Arclight auditoriums is that seats in the very front row offer an excellent experience: they’re far enough away from the screen that you don’t find yourself in agony before the trailers are done, but close enough for an immense and immersive experience.  I saw Werner Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams in its 3D glory in the center of the very front row at the Arclight Hollywood and it was a sublime evening.

But no matter how hard you guess from a seat-map which is the center-line seat, it winds up being off sometimes by a seeming mile.  Take Landmark’s The Landmark in West LA, for example.  Recently bought a ticket there for The Artist, told the lady at the box office I wanted the exact center seat up front (box office cashier always gives you a funny look like, “are you sure? you want to sit all the way up front?” to which I think, why pay all this money to go to a movie, to watch the audience watching a movie, or to watch the movie? I’ll take the latter any day).  I got inside the auditorium, only to discover that my reserved seat was nowhere near the center-line.  Then again, it probably was, if you judge the center-line to be center of the room.  I think the screen itself was off. 

Details matter.  Especially when one pays so much money to go to the movies anymore.

One of these days I’ll post a follow-up about details mattering at the movies.  If only more theatres appreciated how much they matter…

Meanwhile, where do you like to sit?

- Brian