Charles Petzold

When Nicole Kidman strides into an AMC cineplex and begins extolling the joys of seeing movies on the big screen, I believe every word she says. That is exactly the way that I too like to see movies, and AMC has done a lot to improve the theater experience, such as reclining seats comfortable enough for a nap. But with these improvements, blatant missteps become all the more painful and inexcusable.

On the big screen is how Deirdre and I saw Killers of the Flower Moon at 11:15 on the morning of Saturday, October 21, in Auditorium 14 of AMC Crystal Run 16 in Middletown, New York. Before the movie began, Martin Scorsese himself appeared on the screen, thanking us for seeing his new film in a theater the way it was intended.

However, while Martin Scorsese was praising the theater experience, the house lights were still on, and they remained on as the movie began.

We’ve all been there, right? Everybody in the theater knows that one of us must make a sacrifice for the good of the others: One of us must voluntarily leave the theater and miss the first few minutes of the movie while hunting down someone who has the authority to turn off the house lights. The courageous woman who made this sacrifice returned a few minutes later and announced to us that the manager would be turning off the lights. We thanked her and several long minutes later, the house lights finally went off.

It wasn’t until some time later that another problem revealed itself: Someone was singing, someone not in the movie we were watching, and someone not in the theater. The singing was coming from somewhere behind the back wall. The voice was familiar. It was… yes, that is definitely Taylor Swift.

Song after song, and stage banter after stage banter, Taylor Swift became an incessant secondary soundtrack to Killers of the Flower Moon.

If we were watching an action movie with car chases, explosions, and headbanging music, we might easily have ignored Taylor Swift. But Killers of the Flower Moon is a relatively quiet movie, and Taylor Swift was a definite contender in the battle of the soundtracks.

It was also quite obvious that there was nothing we could do about it. What were we going to do? Ask the manager to turn down the volume on the Taylor Swift movie?

After Killers of the Flower Moon had concluded, we did indeed talk to someone who seemed to be a manager. She told us that AMC required the Taylor Swift movie to be played at a certain volume — “Make sure it penetrates the other theaters,” I imagined the edict reading — and there was nothing the individual multiplex could do about it.

I then tried to get in touch with someone higher up at AMC. Their website was no help at all so I went to their Facebook page, which was adorned with this banner photo:

There’s your problem right there! Who do you think is louder? The couple shyly flirting with each other, or the lady with the microphone?

Apparently one of the few ways to register complaints of this sort to AMC is through Facebook Messenger. They responded quite positively: “Thank you for bringing this to our attention,” they wrote back. “We have initiated construction projects to greatly improve the soundproofing in our theaters.”

Yeah, right.

In reality, the responses were as vacuous as we’ve come to expect from corporations like AMC: “I’m very sorry to learn your visit was anything less than amazing” and “I certainly do not want this to be the lasting impression you have of AMC Theatres” and then, of course, they made the mistake of offering me “two (2) ticket vouchers to come back to see a movie on us.”

A voucher is the last thing I want. A voucher doesn’t fix the problem. A voucher only allows them to ignore the problem.

I don’t want their stinking vouchers. I want AMC to respect Martin Scorsese.