That headline for Sharon Waxman‘s N.Y. Times story about negative responses to Universal’s United 93 trailer is, I feel, pretty unfair. It reads “Universal Will Not Pull United 93 Trailer, Despite Criticism.” This implies that some kind of heated consensus has taken shape against the showing of the trailer, and that angry crowds are massed outside Universal’s gates. There’s resistance to the trailer, granted, or rather to the idea of seeing the film. I’ve received more than a few letters from different U.S. cities and regions since the trailer was first shown a week ago last Friday (on 3.31), and a lot of people are apparently saying “too soon!” Fine. But nobody’s carrying picket signs and no one is pressuring, much less asking, Universal to pull the trailer, and that’s why it’s unfair to try to make an issue out of Universal’s refusal to do something that nobody’s asked them to do. The notion that people are complaining about the showing of the trailer came from a currently-running Newsweek story about a manager at an AMC Loews theater in Manhattan “taking the rare step of pulling the trailer from its screens after several complaints.” The story quotes one of the theater’s managers, Kevin Adjodha, as saying “‘one lady was crying’ [and that] we shouldn’t have [played the trailer]…that this was wrong…I don’t think people are ready for this.'” Waxman reports that theatre managers at this same theatre decided to show the trailer only before R-rated films or “grown-up” PG-13 ones. A Universal spokesperson told me this afternoon “there were two [trailer] complaints reported to us.” Waxman also talks to people whose mates or family members were killed in the planes on 9/11 — David Berry, Tom Roger and Sandra Felt. Two said they were disturbed or somewhat disturbed by the trailer; Felt said “she was surprised that the trailer had disturbed some moviegoers” and that “9/11 is a fact…it happened…running away from the movie isn’t going to resolve underlying factors of why we’re upset by it.”
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