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The sidewalk outside Century shopping mall at Clark and Diversey, home to Landmark’s Century Centre theaters, seems way too narrow to accommodate angry swarms of Bill O’Reilly supporters, carpooling in from Naperville and Buffalo Grove and points beyond the Fox (the river, not the TV network), who promise to descend this afternoon and evening (though maybe not—snark, snark) to protest the Chicago release of Brian De Palma‘s new Mark Cuban-produced anti-Iraq war film Redacted. Not to mention less angry swarms of “counterprotesters”—of which I may be one, I’m not sure yet—who, whether by accident or design, will brave the O’Reillyites’ taunts and jeers to buy tickets on opening night (with reduced rates for seniors, hot damn!). But hey, we’re all seasoned pros, right?—picket-line crashers from the get-go (well, maybe not quite), from Godard’s Hail Mary through Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will to Kevin Smith’s Dogma and beyond …
But then the harassment started: first organized phone blitzes—”it’s a racist film, it’s racist!”—then promises of picket lines to come. Well, why shouldn’t they harass us, they’re all just royally pissed! Except now the idea dawned that we might actually—a shameful thought, depending on your tolerance for cynical marketing ploys—sell a few extra tickets, raise a couple of shekels. So from zero-degrees visibility to instant notoriety … and nobody’d even bothered to raise a finger. At which point I probably should have torched the popcorn, since that’s usually what I did, and—poof!—there’d go all our talk about marginal profitability in a carbonaceous haze.
