A lively crowd filled the Knight Auditorium inside Spurlock Museum for a special welcome event screening for the Roger Ebert Center on Thursday at 7 p.m.
This event was organized by Julie Turnock, professor in Media and director of the Roger Ebert Center for Film Studies, along with her Ebert Center assistant and Ebert Brandt Fellows.
“For the last couple years, we’ve had a welcome event every September to make, mostly undergraduates, students aware that the Ebert Center exists and is a fun place to watch movies with a big crowd,” Turnock said.
But according to Turnock, a lot of people may not realize the amount of work that goes into a screening and what exactly it entails — including the long, expensive process of licensing, especially when showing movies to a large audience.
Turnock also organized food and drinks to encourage students to come and enjoy themselves at the welcome event, including a taco truck and refreshments like soft drinks, candy and other snacks for people attending.
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Besides helping with planning movie arrangements over the spring and summer, Michael Phillips, former film critic for the Chicago Tribune and mentor for the Ebert Fellows, came to the University to introduce the film and prime the audience for what they could expect.
“I liked how he talked about the movie and that it was a new adaptation … because we’ve been seeing so many repeats of old stuff (in new films),” said Ellison Goss, a freshman in DES.
Goss was encouraged to come to the screening because of her professor.
“I’m in a Constructing Race in America class, and my teacher kept bringing up ‘Sinners’ and how it would apply to our class, so I thought I would check it out,” Goss said.
Goss said she enjoyed watching “Sinners” at the auditorium despite not having watched movies at theaters in quite a while.
“Everyone was really engaging,” Goss said. “I haven’t been in the theater in a long time where it is super packed and everyone’s really into it, but it was really fun to be with the crowd and feel the movie with them.”
Carmen Liu, freshman in Media, is a film enthusiast and enjoys introducing her friends to new films, and she thinks that screenings like these are the perfect way to do that. She and others would attend another event like this in the future, as the combination of engagement and interactivity from the crowd, along with the excitement of the movie, would be too tempting to miss.
