10 Craziest Cinema Demands Made By Hollywood
1. Alfred Hitchcock Threatens the Lives of Cinema Managers Everywhere
We've all been there, the film is about to begin when the doors swing open, and a pair of latecomers come clattering up the stairs, knocking over popcorn and treading on toes as they try to make it to their seats in pitch black. That's your immersive cinematic experience ruined.
The director Alfred Hitchcock was well aware of the damaging effects of latecomers and was determined that audiences for his 1960 classic Psycho weren't similarly disrupted. In order to dissuade what, at the time, was a common practice, cinemas were each provided with a cardboard cut-out of Hitchcock to display in their foyer.
The message on the cut-out read "The manager of this theater has been instructed at the risk of his life, not to admit to the theater any persons after the picture starts. Any spurious attempts to enter by side doors, fire escapes or ventilating shafts will be met by force. The entire objective of this extraordinary policy, of course, is to help you enjoy PSYCHO more."
The threat of death was, of course, tongue-in-cheek but the "no latecomers" rule was written into the contracts of each cinema that screened the film and some suggest it led to a more formalised approach to cinema scheduling.