It’s not new to note that attention spans at the movie theater have gotten a lot worse in recent years. Even discounting semi-deliberate phenomena like A Minecraft Movie and its “chicken jockey” chaos, it’s still rare to get out to the multiplex these days and not see at least one person light up the darkness with their phone at some point during a showing. And you might call it harmless—incorrectly, but you might—but have you stopped to consider what this has done to Martin Scorsese? You’ve driven the poor cinephile right out of the theaters for good!
This is per The Guardian, quoting a conversation Scorsese recently had with long-time film writer Peter Travers. (Warning that the following is unavoidably couched in Travers-speak, with all the “1970s Variety headline patter” that implies.) “I asked the maestro why he doesn’t see movies in theatres any more,” Travers wrote on his Travers Take blog, “And he went all raging bull about audiences who babble on phones during the movie, leave to order snacks and vats of soda, and keep up a noise level loud enough to drown out the actors.” When asked if people talking at the movies isn’t just part of the human condition, the 82-year-old Scorsese nevertheless held that there was once more respect for the films themselves: “When we talked it was always about the movie and the fun we had chewing over the details.’” And sure, there’s a bit of “Old cinematic legend yells at cloud” to that, but still: Kind of sad Martin Scorsese can’t just go catch a flick.
After all, Scorsese’s probably too polite to make a big deal out of any of this. (In a separate Marty-adjacent interview this weekend, The Studio‘s Evan Goldberg recalled directing Scorsese in the Apple TV+ show’s first episode, only to find out after the fact that the master had clocked a mistake Goldberg was making immediately, but “didn’t wanna be a backseat director.”) He’ll just retreat to his house, with its multiple screening rooms, where he can watch films without the distraction of other people’s distractions. Maybe that’s why Scorsese, who made his last two movies, The Irishman and Killers Of The Flower Moon, in partnership with streamers, has been less of a purist about the theatrical experience than some of his cinema-boosting contemporaries—although he did beg, back around the Netflix-aimed Irishman, for viewers not to watch his movie on their damn phones.
