I love silent movies; ie no popcorn, no crisps, no drinks and turn your b***** phone off!

Film etiquette: phones, popcorn and crisps can ruin a trip to the cinema
Shutterstock / Tyler Olson
Tim Cooper21 April 2017

You’re at the cinema. You’ve just sat through 20 minutes of ads, including that annoying one with the trendy dad dropping his teenage daughter off at school with hip-hop blaring from his VW, where he tries to high-five her in front of her friends and she rolls her eyes at him; and a few trailers for forthcoming films. All through these unwanted attempts to sell us something there was a respectful silence in the auditorium, rarely rising beyond a gentle murmur, even during the bit with all the bleeps and ringtones reminding us to turn our phones off and not to leave them on silent, followed by dozens of people fiddling around with their brightly-lit screens as they check a few final messages before turning them off for an intolerable two hours without social media.

Then the lights go down, the screen goes black, and a hush descends on the audience as the moody opening scene begins...

“CRINKLE CRINKLE”

The man on your right has waited 20 minutes for this moment to open his enormous crinkly plastic bag of popcorn. The tension of the opening scene is destroyed in an instant of thoughtless activity. But don’t worry, you haven’t missed any dialogue yet. And the camera has just moved in close on one of the characters, who is about to speak. He approaches another character and says...

“CRUNCH CRUNCH CRUNCH”

Popcorn man shovels a fistful of food into his mouth and starts to chew. It sounds as if his mouth is wide open. You have no idea what the guy on screen said to the woman on screen who is about to reply. She says...

“PFFT... CLINK... SLURP... BELCH”

The couple in front have started drinking. One of them has a can of beer that he’s just opened, spraying the people in front. The other has a bucket-sized fizzy drink full of ice with a straw, so that every sip sounds like the water draining out of a bath. Followed by a barely-stifled burp. And then...

“RIP... TEAR... RUSTLE... SPILL... GROAN...”

Food and films: rarely a good combination
Chris Ratcliffe/Getty Images

Emboldened by the noise all around, someone on your left has felt confident enough to open their own bag of snacks but, after struggling in the dark to find the right way to open it, the bag has split and the contents have flown all over the place. You can still hear a Malteser rolling down towards the front row.

Now the woman responsible has squirmed out of her seat to look for the rest of them. And – no, please no! – she’s turned on the torch on her phone to get a better view. And of course you’re so distracted that you weren’t even watching the screen. And now, three minutes into the film, you have no idea who the guy speaking is, or what he’s so annoyed about, or why the girl he’s talking to is crying. Because you didn’t see it and you couldn’t hear it. And it could all have been avoided if they just banned food from the cinema. Or just packaged it in something sensible... something QUIET.

It’s even worse in the theatre, where we’ve already had controversies about audience members taking photographs during shows. Now they’re talking and taking phone calls. But most of all they’re eating and drinking. And, unlike in the cinema, the actors can actually hear the crinkling and crunching for themselves. Earlier this year a group of theatregoers at the Duke of York’s theatre, perhaps taking the theme of making a pact with the devil too literally, began eating fast food – Chicken McNuggets to be precise – during a performance of “Doctor Faustus.” Others ate crisps and and popcorn, talked to one another during the performance, and took photographs on their phone. The producer, Richard Jordan, was dumfounded. “What amazed me most was this audience...could see nothing wrong in talking, eating and taking pictures throughout the show - or complaining when asked to stop,” he said.

I’m pleased to say that the fightback has begun, in the small but sturdy shape of Imelda Staunton, who spoke for us all – by which I mean me – when she called the other day for food and drink to be banned from the theatre. “I don’t understand this obsession with having to eat or drink something at every moment of the day,” Imelda said. “I don’t know why people can’t just engage in one thing.” Her wish has now come true, at least at the Harold Pinter Theatre where she is performing in “Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf?

She’s right, of course. It’s not just about the theatre; we’ve become a nation of compulsive grazers. Yesterday I travelled into Central London by bus and Tube between 11pm and midday - a time that I would old-fashionedly describe as “between meals” – and it was like being in a herd of grazing animals. The woman next to me on the bus crinkled and crunched her way through a bag of crisps, the man opposite me on the Tube munched his way through a sandwich after wrestling with its plastic packaging, and back on the street half the people walking towards me on the pavement were scoffing food they must surely have bought in a place with seats.

No doubt they were all “too busy” to sit down and eat because being too busy is the mantra of our times. We’ve become a society where people seek gratification whenever and wherever they can find it. An impatient society. I always thought deferred gratification tasted sweeter but then I grew up with parents who always ate lunch at 1 o’clock and always ate dinner at 8 o’clock. They still do, and their strict timetable is deeply ingrained in me. I never snack between meals, though as I get older I’ve acquired an atavistic desire for a cup of tea around 4.30pm, which is exactly the time they always have tea themselves.

None of which explains why anyone needs to eat during a film or a play. And even if you believe in your inalienable right to eat and drink during films and plays, why does the food have to be so damn noisy? Who decided that the food available in cinemas and theatres has to come in noisy packets? Popcorn. Crisps. Sweets. Fizzy drinks with ice and straws. What makes it even stranger is that the most recent survey I can find found that 54 per cent of filmgoers were annoyed by people eating and drinking around them. A third were also embarrassed by their own eating and drinking disturbing those around them, though there’s an easy solution to that.

I’m pleased to see that there is now a company, the aptly-named Silent Snacks, that specialises in non-noisy food and drink for the cinema and theatre. Packaged in soft fabrics and silicone cups, their treats are all hand-picked for their silent qualities. The popcorn is made of ground popcorn (to silence the crunch) with dates and coconut and their chocolates delight in the name of Muffled Truffles, while their “anti-gas” drink, a blend of grapefruit, lime and mint, is supposedly designed to diminish burping. It was launched last year in partnership with a theatre ticket app but I’m struggling to find anywhere you can buy its products any more, which is a big shame because I thought they had a big future.

And then there are the phones; yes, the phones. Only yesterday Damian Lewis, who’s currently appearing in Edward Albee’s “The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?” at Theatre Royal Haymarket, told The Guardian that audience members’ phones ringing during the play were a regular occurrence. The other day, he said, a woman took her phone out of her handbag WHILE IT WAS RINGING and “just let it ring loudly.” Well, obviously the Brody from “Homeland” was not going to stand for that, and I’m pleased to say that he didn’t. “I was so dumbfounded,” he said, “that I did stop performing briefly and ask if they were going to get it.”

I’m guessing they didn’t, though a bloke behind me in the cinema once did. His phone rang, he answered it and began a conversation of: “Hello mate... I’m at the cinema...Yeah... Yeah it just started... Dunno, hasn’t been on that long... sounded all right.” I turned around, Brody-like, convinced that just the sight of my Blue Steel face would be enough to stop him in his tracks. I was wrong. He looked like someone with a tough manual job who keeps his mobile phone in a leather case on his belt and he stared at me with one eyebrow raised and a slight smile as he calmly continued his conversation with his mate about the likelihood of the film we were watching being any good, so I just shrugged and turned around to watch it, while hoping he wouldn’t club me around the ear with his leather-covered phone.

The bloke in front of me at the first UK screening of Quentin Tarantino’s last film, “The Hateful Eight”, a year ago, had a similar cut to his jib. But he could not have been more different. The house lights dimmed, the crinkling began and he rose from his seat, shaking with fury. “STOP F***ING EATING!” he yelled in the direction of the offender. “WE’VE COME TO WATCH A F***ING FILM. NOT TO LISTEN TO YOU F***ING EAT. SO F***ING STOP IT”.

That’s the last time I’ll ever eat popcorn in a cinema.

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