I rarely, very rarely, go to movie theaters. Partly that is because I don’t want to see many current movies. Once in a while, I will go to see Gladiator or another traditional style film. I saw “300” last year, something quite unusual, but that is also rare. I just got another reason to avoid movie theaters.
Taping three minutes of “Twilight: New Moon” during a visit to a Rosemont movie theater landed Samantha Tumpach in a jail cell for two nights.
Now, the 22-year-old Chicago woman faces up to three years in prison after being charged with a rarely invoked felony designed to prevent movie patrons from recording hot new movies and selling bootleg copies.
Samantha Tumpach, 22, is charged with one count of criminal use of a motion picture exhibition, a Class 4 felony, according to Rosemont police Sgt. Keith Kania.
But Tumpach insisted Wednesday that’s not what she was doing — she was actually taping parts of her sister’s surprise birthday party celebrated at the Muvico Theater in Rosemont.
So, they had a surprise birthday party at a movie theater and the sister who organized the party ended up in jail.
While she acknowledged there are short bits of the movie on her digital camera, there are other images that have nothing to do with the new film — including she and a few other family members singing “Happy Birthday” to her 29-year-old sister at the theater.
She’s lucky she didn’t get charged with copyright violation for “Happy Birthday” as it is still in copyright after 115 years.
“It was a big thing over nothing,” Tumpach said of her Saturday afternoon arrest. “We were just messing around. Everyone is so surprised it got this far.”
She was nabbed when a worker saw her shooting video during the movie, Rosemont police said.
Managers contacted police, who examined the small digital camera, which also records video segments, Cmdr. Frank Siciliano said. Officers found that Tumpach had taped “two very short segments” of the movie — no more than four minutes total, he said.
Tumpach was arrested after theater managers insisted on pressing charges, he said. She was charged with criminal use of a motion picture exhibition. She remained jailed for two nights in Rosemont’s police station until being taken to bond court on Monday, where a Cook County judge ordered her released on a personal recognizance bond that didn’t require her to post any cash.
If I were a family member, I would consider burning that theater to the ground. Of course, I’m in California so, if it should happen to burn to the ground, I had nothing to do with it.
This is disturbing on several levels, including using the police to help run your business and wasting police time on trivial matters. I would think the police could go to the station and issue a “notice to appear” or some such instead of having this person waste a weekend in jail, since they evidently don’t have a night court, or a judge on call to help the citizenry.
I wonder if the theater managers realize they helped alienate this person, her acquaintances, and those reading about it. There’s a business model to copy.
In this day and age, I’m not sure what to get upset about: when one starts, where do you end? Bernanke’s testimony before congress makes me want to burn his sorry ass. When grilled about why he paid AIG’s creditor at 100%, he says, “I had to. They told me, ‘either pay, or we’re bankrupt'”. What a milquetoast! His job was to tell them what they get, not get rolled. Sheesh.
My sister, who lives in Chicago and goes to movies did not know about this story.
AIG may have been a special case. I’m not knowledgeable enough about their business but there were other banks and financial houses that could have been allowed to go BK or, at the least, sell assets at fire sale prices.