DC Debaters Bumped From Promotional Screening

Marc Fisher, who blogs for the Washington Post, just wrote about a group of debaters from the DC Urban Debate League who were invited to a special screening of The Great Debaters, like the one that I attended on Tuesday and the one that I am attending tonight, but were told the theater was full when the arrived:

“Touhey exchanged a series of emails with Carol Jones of the New York firm Bazan PR in which Jones confirmed that she had allocated 60 seats for the D.C. students. But when Touhey and the students arrived at the theater Monday evening, they were told that the seats were all taken by others who had been sent passes to the movie.

“Despite the fact that a guest list had been demanded and that the students and teachers were in line, the lists were not used to let people into the theater,” says Touhey, a former teacher at Cardozo High School. “When I asked why I had been required to provide a list, I was told that this was to justify the numbers [of seats] that I had been offered. When I protested that the students had done what they were supposed to do and that Bazan was not living up to its obligation, Ms Jones said that she would try to get some passes for the opening day.””

I first heard about this not long after it happened. Since their screening was Monday night, the day before ours, I had the opportunity to speak by phone with my contact from Allied Publicity (not the same company with whom Colin Touhey was dealing) and confirm that we did indeed have VIP seats reserved for our organization.

I don’t know the details of the arrangement that DC had, but the BDL got both some reserved seats and some general admission passes. Thankfully the theater didn’t fill up, because our VIP seats were ‘reserved’ by nothing more than sheets of paper sitting on the chair at the end of each row, and from what I could tell they were easily ignored. Still, all the Allied Publicity people I dealt with were very helpful, and in fact they were initially not letting anyone except members of our group into the theater. We ended up seating about 70 people even though only 40 seats were specifically reserved for us.

The one issue that did come up in Boston was that the whole thing was very last minute. The location wasn’t confirmed until four days before the screening, and up until they day of I wasn’t clear on the logistics of what we needed to do to claim our VIP and other seats when we arrived at the theater. I can easily see how similar last-minute planning combined with a larger crowd and less helpful staff could have led to DC’s situation.

It’s hard to say whether the publicity company is really at fault there, but I can definitely see why Colin went to the media with this when the PR woman didn’t respond to his complaint, and I’m glad to see that Marc Fisher chose to cover it.