Regal Gallery Place is a fantastic movie theater—easy parking, plenty of food options in the building, and, sometimes, if you’re lucky, you can buy a child’s admission ticket from one of the machines in the lobby, and the ticket taker won’t notice that you only paid a $5 in admission. Or so I’ve been told.
I recently went to my new favorite movie theater for a late afternoon showing of my new favorite movie, Dreamgirls. I saw a 4:10 show listed in the paper, but it wasn’t up on the big board when I went to buy my ticket. The nice person behind the glass told me that the 4:10 showing wasn’t being advertised because it was an OC/DA show—that’s “Open Caption/Descriptive Audio.” In other words, the movie gets captions for the hearing-impaired and a device that plays narrated descriptions of what’s happening on screen is available, too, for the visually-impaired.
The ticket seller told me that most people who don’t have trouble seeing or hearing don’t want to buy tix for an OC/DA show. I told her I was curious—and didn’t want to wait around for the next Dreamgirls show scheduled for 6-something—so I’d go ahead and check it out.
The verdict: It was good to have the captions. There was a lot of dialogue I would’ve missed if I couldn’t have read what was going on. And I only had to tell the annoying kids sitting behind me to shut their damn mouths a couple of times, since I could read along with the movie even when they were chattering away.
Unfortunately, only a few movies are OC/DA at the Regal Gallery Place. (Currently Because I Said So and Norbit, but they keep an ever-changing list.) I assume that part of the reason that Regal doesn’t advertise the OC/DA films is because they don’t want folks who aren’t seeing-/hearing-impaired selling out these shows so that there are no tix left for the people who need them. So don’t take 20 of your friends to the OC/DA show and take up all of the damn seats.
But, if you’re ever at Regal, and it’s completely dead, and the only showing of the movie you want to see is an OC/DA show, check it out.