Michael Wolff was leaning on an umbrella outside his East Village apartment and seemed to be apologizing for the lack of SWAT team units responding to his return to Sunshine Cinema after last week's Juicegate debacle. "Ultimately, this was all very inadvertent," he said with the twinge of sadness that a shark must feel after it bites into a tire. Confrontation was averted when Whit Stillman had stopped Wolff at the ticket booth, snatched his $10 juice and crammed it in into his jacket. "Good God, Michael," Stillman said, bristling at his friend's brazenness. Once we sat down the director urged us to enjoy his film, Damsels In Distress. "Michael, you want any rum for your juice?" Stillman produced an airplane bottle of Bacardi. "No thanks, I'll take it straight."
Wolff passed on the rum, opting for vodka instead, which still somehow made his kale juice unpalatable. (Then again, we're not sure kale juice is ever palatable, although surely it is easier to swallow than watching your very own basketball team get skunked in the playoffs.)
But something felt odd—the ticket-takers seemed prepared for us somehow, as if our arrival had been choreographed. "[Stillman] came in and spoke with our manager," a Sunshine Cinema employee told us. "He said he agreed with our policy, and we told him that we wouldn't search him as long as he wouldn't tell us if he was bringing any outside food or drink in. So yeah, we knew you were coming."
Dressed for the theater, Michael Wolff buys a $10 bottle of gross kale juice (Gothamist)
That "No Outside Food Or Drink" policy is clearly marked on the ticket booth and is apparently worthy of enforcement by the NYPD. "It cost the city what, $10,000 to call eight police officers and an ambulance?" Wolff said on the walk home. "Why? So they could enforce this arbitrary corporate policy?"
In his long piece about the incident he wrote for The Guardian, Wolff identifies three personality types in approaching the question of smuggling food into the movies: hungry submissives, happy cheaters, and cranks—or in Wolffese, "polemical recreationalists." We'd humbly submit one more category: the people who could give a damn about polemical recreation and who just want to punch your tickets and go home.
"Most of the people who work here are just doing what we're trained to to," said the employee, who asked not to be identified because they weren't authorized to speak to us. Yes, but what about this idea that the City of New York is protecting Mark Cuban's prerogative to mark up kernels of corn 50,000 times their actual value? What did they think about the idea of a social compact that probably should have prevented Wolff from flipping out, but also kept "Tacy Flick" from calling the fuzz? Did these people know, in the foot-stamping tradition of powerful journalists, who Michael Wolff was?
They shook their head. "I mean, I get all that but we're just all trying to keep our jobs."
They continued: "People bring stuff in here all the time, and it's a rule that we can't really enforce. We're not going to search everyone, but we'll tell them to throw it out." So if the de facto policy is Don't Ask, Don't Tell, why not just let the crank have his juice, maybe take a Polaroid after the movie and put him on the Wall Of Shame? "It's the same rule you learn in kindergarten: everyone is equal, no one is better than anyone else."
The employee also pointed out that Sunshine has coolers and freezers for Whole Foods shoppers and the like to store their goods while they watch a film. At first this seems like a neat "only in New York" amenity until you realize the absurdity of taking the trouble of maintaining and paying for a food-valet system but not allowing someone to bring in an apple, or eat the apple that's temporarily in the theater's climate controlled food jail.
As we were speaking to the employee, a woman approached the booth with a clear container of orange juice that was a third full. "I'm sorry miss, you can't take in any outside beverages," the employee said. "Oh, ok, sure that's fine," the woman replied. "The stuff in here though," she held up a large bag that appeared to contain take-out food, "it's all wrapped up for later." The employee nodded, and the customer finished her juice, tossed the bottle, and walked into the theater.
[Ed: Michael Wolff generously paid for our ticket, continuing our streak of having not given a cent to the blood-sucking, nonpareil swindlers since 2008.]
