By Paige Brazil
We are all familiar with the ambiance surrounding movie theaters — the smell of savory, buttered popcorn, the hallways lined with endless movie posters, the highly-anticipated previews, and the slight squeak of the leather seats. Now, imagine if you were not able to fully enjoy the movie-going experience due to degenerative hearing loss. This was the case for a local Bryan College Station resident until his wife contacted the Star Cinema Grill corporate offices asking if it would be possible to show movies for those with hearing loss.
Lindsay Steichen, manager at Star Cinema Grill, fielded the call from the corporate office and kept her customers updated on their request.
“I’d never seen a theater display open captions before, so I wasn’t sure if it was possible,” says Steichen. “Our corporate offices said we had the capability to do such a thing, so we immediately began planning and updating the woman and her husband on our progress. She told me she and her husband have always loved going to the movies together, but it has become a challenge in recent years with his hearing loss.”
Much like captioning on your television at home, the open captions on the movie screen appear toward the bottom. “We have very large screens so the captions are not intrusive to other viewers,” Steichen says. As a character in a movie speaks or performs an action, the dialogue is presented in white lettering at the bottom of the screen, clearly visible, but not distracting or taking away from the scene at play.
“The first movie we showed with the open captions was the new remake of Stephen King’s Pet Sematary because it is her husband’s favorite classic horror film and it was released around the time of his birthday,” Steichen says. “We were able to have captions on that movie and the new Avenger’s movie. We show one to two movies per month with the open captioning and we try to pick the most popular releases to show.”
To find out which moves are shown with open captions, visit www.starcinemagrill.net or call the theater directly at (979) 431-3800.
Despite the concept still being relatively new, Star Cinema Grill is working to develop a specific program dedicated to open-caption movies. The theater wants to harbor an all-inclusive environment by making each and every movie-going experience welcoming and accommodating to all viewers, says Steichen.
“We have a similar program that accommodates to a different kind of sensory environment,” says Steichen. “Our program called Bright Stars is for people who are autistic or have some sort of other sensory issue. We turn the lights up a little and the volume down so it’s not so overpowering for them. We show movies in this setting every Wednesday and Saturday morning.”
Bright Star showings can be found at www.starcinemagrill.net. The movie is denoted with a red star and red lettering that reads “Bright Star” at the top of the digital movie poster.
The Bright Stars program is widely popular in the B/CS community, and Star Cinema Grill hopes the open-caption screenings become just as much of a staple.
“We typically fill 25 percent of the theater for two showings with captions,” Steichen says. “We hope to grow the program greatly. We want to be able to reach out to the community and provide that service to those who need and want it. Not another theater, to my knowledge, does something like this.”
