The next time you’re at the movies, think twice before you ask someone to turn off their cellphone. At a screening of Mr. Turner on Monday night in Los Angeles, a man was sprayed in the face with mace after asking a woman to turn off her phone. “The American Film Institute screening of the biopic at the TCL Chinese theater in Hollywood had just gotten underway when a man near the back row asked a woman sitting in front of her to turn off her phone, whose screen was visibly glowing,” Mashable reports. The man asked the woman several times to turn off her phone before tapping her on the shoulder. The woman reportedly “flipped out” on him, cursing and accusing the man of hitting her, before turning the phone’s flashlight function on and pointing it directly at him. After a minute’s standoff, she then dug into her bag, produced a can of mace and “without hesitation, she took the cap off the bottle, pointed it directly in his face and sprayed him at point-blank range … The movie was never stopped, and the woman continued to sit and watch for another 20 minutes or so before volunteers and security with flashlights came to escort the woman, who was not immediately identified, out of the theater.”
As Uproxx comments, this sort of thing is common, and some movie theaters handle it better than others. “The Alamo Drafthouse probably has the strictest and best policies for dealing with texters, where theatergoers are encouraged to alert theater staff by writing it on the little order cards they give you, and security has no qualms about removing people. On the other side of the coin, somehow this happened in Los Angeles, the entertainment capital of the world, during a film festival, at one of the most famous theaters in town, where there was a 20-minute altercation in the crowd and they didn’t even stop the movie.” Mind you, it could have been worse. It could have been in Florida, where a man was shot and killed at a screening of Lone Survivor because he texting during the movie. Mr. Turner, by the way, has been receiving rave reviews, and Timothy Spall might be a dark horse contender for the Oscar (he won Best Actor at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.)
