Since the beginning of the school year, I’ve been an intern at the Minnesota Film Arts (MFA), a non-profit arts organization that runs two arthouse theaters on the East Bank of Minneapolis, in addition to organizing the Twin Cities International Film Festival every spring. My connections to programming and theater maintenance have been minimal, although I have gained a number of insights from asking my supervisors a lot of questions and by eavesdropping on staff meetings. For the most part, I have settled into the role of an eager if socially-awkward errand boy, much as Jerry Lewis did before me, collecting mail, biking to the copy center and doing a fair amount of Internet research.

On Tuesday I performed a duty that I’d been avoiding for over a week: posting and handing out promotional materials for Runaway Jury, a big-budget John Grisham adaptation that opens in two weeks. Twentieth-Century Fox and CitiBank, a major sponsor, are paying the MFA to run an advance screening of the film at the U Film Society and give away as many free tickets to the screening as possible. This sounds like a win-win situation: Fox generates some word-of-mouth publicity among college students, and a non-profit organization boosts its meager budget—though the gains seem to be less than equal in practice.

For one thing, CitiBank burdened the MFA (and, by extension, me) with a number of tasks that bordered on the ridiculous. To prove that I handed out enough free tickets to U of M students, the company sent a disposable camera along with the rest of the promos so I could take pictures of myself on the job and send the camera back to HQ. It wasn’t especially difficult, though it ended up leaving a bad taste in my mouth anyway. Accosting somebody on the street and asking to take her picture, regardless of whether or not she’ll receive something in return, too closely resembles a lame pick-up routine. Add to the mix that these pictures wouldn’t be viewed by me or my immediate supervisor, but a nameless marketing exec at CitiBank, and the general air of exploitation only expanded.

A number of people I encountered seemed to sense this before I could even give them a sales pitch. “Would you like some free movie passes?” I asked a couple of students walking across the U of M mall. They gave me a “No thanks” as though I was a telemarketer. Still, seeing how many media promotions come through campus (last week, students had a chance to meet the stars of Dorm Daze, a movie that almost everyone realized is a piece of shit from its poster of college freshman stereotypes standing nude behind a giant hot dog), I guess I shouldn’t have been too surprised to end up blending in with the ad-lined kiosks that pop up every block or so.

The job wasn’t that bad when I ran into people actually excited to see Runaway Jury. A few girls saw me putting up posters and asked me where they could get tickets. When I produced a pair from my backpack, they were happy enough to pose for two separate pictures. One guy I met said that the screening would give him something to do with his girlfriend and wished me luck in getting rid of the extra tickets. A man on a bike (almost definitely not a student) rode up to me on the West Bank and just started talking. “Putting up posters, man?” he asked. “That’s cool. I just found this bike last night—my old lady kicked me out of her place, and I had to get home fast, you know? She’s real angry at me.”

I gave him a couple of tickets and told him to take his old lady to the movies; it was the least I could do. Looking over the ticket, he read above the giant CitiBank logo that the movie features John Cusack, Gene Hackman and Dustin Hoffman. “Yeah, it’s got all the bros,” he said. “I’ll come.” Then, like most of the other people who’d accepted tickets, he asked where the U Film Society was.

The U Film Society is located around University and 17th Avenue in the Bell Auditorium on the U of M campus. It was formed about 40 years ago. Along with the Oak Street Cinema (with whom the Society merged a few years ago, forming the current MFA), the theater has been committed to valuing movies as an art and a social record—values that drew me to the organization as a patron and now as an intern. While I recognize the importance of movies as entertainment (and while I don’t fault a non-profit for trying to make an extra buck), I find something especially troubling about the notion of movies as commodity, which is definitely what I was pushing on Tuesday.

Much of the audience who will attend the free screening of Runaway Jury on Oct. 13th will be coming to the U Film Society for the first time; I wonder how many of them will instantly equate the theater with any other multiplex that screens movies like Runaway Jury—Pepsi-Cola jetliners with hype campaigns flying close behind—at the exclusion of most everything else.

This is one of the ongoing concerns of Al Milgrom, who started the Society and still presides over it. Often he asks if many Macalester students go to his theaters, rarely sounding as if he’s speaking on behalf of his own interests. “So many students are graduating without knowing how many options they have,” he said ruefully, and I can sense his trepidation about the future of cinephilia. More than just his organization seems to rest on it.

“Yep, we’re whores,” joked my supervisor Adam when I ribbed him about the advertisement printed on the (literally) hundreds of posters, fliers and tickets that I was responsible for passing out.

The tagline of Runaway Jury reads, “Trials are too important to be decided by juries.” This sounds too much like something that would be espoused on Fox News to go down as smoothly as any old entertainment; to say the least, it has little in common with views I’ve encountered in the internationally-sensitive MFA office. (On the poster promoting the U Film Society’s late-night screening of Terminator 3, Adam came up with the slogan “Arnold is ready for a regime change!”)

The most fun I had during my promo excursion was when I ran into a second promo excursion: An organic, vegan food manufacturer from Stillwater had gotten some U of M environmental sustainability activists to hand out some of the company’s snacks while signing people up for their own e-mail newsletter. Incidentally, they had to take pictures of their activities, too. In no time, we were comparing notes on our whoring and pigging out on vegan snacks. We then helped each other out by taking pictures of one another holding up food and promotional tickets. Just as I strongly doubt that any of them will want to look at meatless jerky by the end of the week, I have no intention of seeing Runaway Jury.