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Paying for the ads

Sound the alarm and call out the guards! The local neighborhood theater may soon be showing commercials between features. Indeed, may already be. For the past month Screenvision, the U.S. subsidiary of a French company, has flashed 30-sec. ads, for Seiko watches and Chanel perfumes, on 1,800 screens across the country. Twelve hundred other theaters are now under contract, and Screenvision plans to expand the time slot for commercials to three minutes. A U.S. company, Cinemavision, claims to have signed up another 4,200 theaters for next year. If all 16,000 theaters in the country accept the idea of three minutes of ads, the two firms figure they have potential sales of well over $50 million a year, based on a charge of $17 to $24 for each minute seen by 1,000 people. Europeans, they note, scarcely blink at ten minutes of commercials between flicks; some U.S. theaters, they add, already run local ads.

Hollywood is loudly hostile to the whole concept. It thinks ads will turn the public off movies in general and crowd out their own trailers for upcoming films. But theater owners, who have been hurt by rising costs, say the ads will hold down ticket prices. They stand to get up to three-quarters of the loot, and they say they will happily accept commercials--if the public does not protest. "No audience reaction would be favorable audience reaction," says Larry Gleason, executive vice president of the Mann chain, which has 300 houses in 26 states. It sounds like an invitation, doesn't it?

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