The Celestial Cinema is a theater like no other. The central venue at the recently concluded Maui Film Festival in Hawai’i is outdoors, and patrons sit on the thick grass of Wailea Golf Club to see films projected on a giant screen under a star-filled sky. Each night’s festival showing is preceded by an authentic hula performance and a quick astronomy lesson.
It’s the perfect place to watch an entertaining comedy like “Little Miss Sunshine,” and for a few days last month, Maui festival organizers planned on doing just that.
But Fox Searchlight, the film’s distributor, pulled the plug.
The very things that make the open-air Celestial Cinema such a special moviegoing setting also expose it to the possibility of piracy — with about 3,000 film buffs carrying lawn chairs and blankets into the evening showings, there’s no sure way for security officers to search everyone and everything. What’s more, the venue is so sprawling that guards can’t really use night-vision goggles to police the audience and monitor any illegal videotaping or illicit use of camera phones.
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