that time we all watched that movie in that hotel room
So, this happened months ago but I think it’s still a worthy tale.
I was going to a conference this summer that I knew a bunch of my friends from all over the country who are also Fury Road fans would all be at. It’s not a film-related conference, but we kept half-joking that we should organize a MMFR screening because so many of us liked the movie. Except it was one of those situations where everybody was saying “yeah, we should do that,” with nobody doing it, so I was like Okay mofos, you all are talking about it but I will actually do it.
Because of the location of the conference and the fact that it was a number of weeks after Fury Road had come out, it was determined that going out to a movie theater was not practical. But most of us were staying in the conference hotel, and it turned out someone who was a fan who lived in the host city of the conference had a projector, and someone else had speakers, and someone else who maybe had learned how to schmorrent exclusively for this purpose got a copy of the movie. And then it turned out that all of the people I’d be sharing my hotel room with weren’t getting in until the second night of the conference, which meant that on the first night I’d have a hotel room all to myself, and that just seemed like fate. So I Facebook messaged maybe a dozen people who I knew were fans to say that we were all watching MMFR in my hotel room that night after the last event of the conference, and I expected maybe half of them to show up.
Except…somehow the word spread and people kept asking me about it. And of course I was like, yeah, invite anyone you want, cause it’s not like I was going to tell people to not watch Fury Road. Except, clearly I now had an obligation to deliver.
So another superfan and I spent the dinner break figuring out the best angle to project from and painstakingly taping a hotel bedsheet to the ceiling of the room to use as a screen, and then worrying that it would fall down because it was a much nicer sheet than any I own and therefore heavy. (It stayed up.) And it turned out that another fan solved the problem with the projector I couldn’t figure out, and the person who was doing the conference A/V for us had a cable we were missing, and I found a workaround for the speakers initially not hooking up to the projector.
And then people started showing up and they…kept showing up. People were sitting on the beds and on the chair and on the floor and on each other’s laps, and at one point there were at least two people sitting on a bench in the corner watching the movie through the opposite side of the sheet from everybody else. And in case you’re wondering how many people you can cram into a hotel room to watch a movie on a sheet, the answer is somewhere between 22 and 25, and the reason I don’t know the exact number is that some people showed up after we started the movie and it was dark, and some of them were friends of friends so I still don’t know who they were.
And among the audience were people who had seen the movie multiple times in the theater like me, and people who were watching it for the very first time, and while I would not say that a hotel bedsheet is the ideal virgin viewing experience for MMFR, if that’s how I got you to watch the movie, then so be it. And people who had seen the movie cheered at the Doof Warrior reveal, and everybody cheered when Max handed Furiosa the rifle, and it was generally awesome. And I am still meeting people I don’t know who were like “Oh yeah, I was at that screening! Thanks for organizing that!”
The next morning the rest of my roommates showed up before housekeeping had made the rounds and were like, “…What happened in our room last night?”
FURY ROAD HAPPENED, THAT’S WHAT.
Reposted from http://ift.tt/1kv8b60.
