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Kim Voynar

By Kim Voynar Voynar@moviecitynews.com

Off With His Head?

When I wake up in the morning, I usually check on Facebook to see what my East Coast friends are up to. This morning, I woke up to a bunch of people sharing this story about a cell phone alarm in the front row at the New York Philharmonic that was so distracting the conductor actually stopped the concert — a performance of Mahler’s Symphony #9 — to berate the audience member. “Are you done?” he asked the gentleman, who was sitting in the front row. A couple people shouted out some ugly things toward the gentleman in question, but things mostly stayed calm in the sedate concert hall. Then the conductor resumed the performance, and life moved on, other than the flurry of tweets about the incident, among which “Concertus Interruptus” was perhaps the funniest.

Naturally, people were responding to this story with outrage and anger. Off with his head! was the universal shout across the internets. People who usually oppose the death penalty were calling for it (I sincerely hope tongue-in-cheek) in this case. Consensus on the internet? The guy was an asshole, clearly, who deserved to be publicly humiliated for his transgression.

However, the New York Times follow-up piece sheds a little light on what really happened that makes the older man whose phone went off — he’s between 60 and 70, according to the NYT piece — a bit more sympathetic. He’s an enormous supporter of the New York Philharmonic, a 20-year subscriber. His business phone had been switched from a Blackberry to an iPhone the day before, and an assistant had apparently set the alarm for him. He had silenced the phone before the concert started, but didn’t know the alarm was set, much less that it would go off even with the phone on silent. He didn’t even realize it was his phone at first, but just in case he pulled it out and started pushing buttons and then it turned off. He was embarrassed and humiliated, and told the NYT he hadn’t slept in two nights, he was so upset about what happened.

So look. I get as irritated as the next guy when it comes to cell phones going off in movies, and it’s certainly understandable that the audience at the Philharmonic, and the conductor, were irate about the cell phone alarm going off — especially during that particular piece, at the unfortunately particular time it went off. But the greater lesson learned here, I think, is the way in which people were so quick to rush to judgment against the perceived offender. A $1000 fine? Off with his head? String him up in the public square and let small children throw rotten tomatoes at him?

The age of internet etiquette, such as it is, is training a generation to be overly hasty in judgement, to call out others on anything seen as a fault before there’s actual evidence in as to what the full circumstances are. People engage in the most vicious fights over Twitter or in blog comments, saying things that (one hopes) they would never actually say to someone in a face-to-face discussion. Honestly, it’s appalling. We need some perspective. Is it necessary to call someone names, to pick a playground fight because someone disagrees with you about which film should win the Oscar, or whether this or that trailer sucks, or if a director is the best thing ever or a total hack? Or to publicly call for “off with his head” on the unfortunate guy whose cell phone went off at the Philharmonic? In the wake of that NYT interview making it pretty clear this was an unfortunate case of technology gone awry rather than a patron deliberately being rude, perhaps folks have changed their tune a little on their rush to judgement.

But probably not. On to the next thing to get irate about. Someone out there on the internet must be doing something wrong. And it’s up to the mob to find them and let them know just how wrong they are, post haste.

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3 Responses to “Off With His Head?”

  1. Deirdre Newcomb says:

    Exactly! Well Said! and AMEN!

  2. I love your perspective, Kim. It’s nice to see something human on the internets as contrasted against the hateful urgency of the meme world. Bravo!

  3. John Wildman says:

    You know, if it wasn’t too hard to type AND hold this pitchfork AND this torch, I’d totally tell you off right now! Anyway, I gotta get going – someone just double parked in the handicap spot in front of Frankenstein’s castle!

Quote Unquotesee all »

It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon