I loved this pre-screening message. I too went to many New York pre-screenings at this same time (1980-81) and believe it's the best way to see films. Like Jeff Apfel, I very much miss it. I was attending NYU while writing part-time for an out-of-town magazine. And I was also at the famous Tuesday afternoon HEAVEN'S GATE screening. I remember hearing really non-committal comments at intermission--e.g., "Love that Western scenery, don't you?"--that seemed quite hilarious in retrospect. I've also never forgotten that during the opening credits, when we were all innocent of being part of cinema infamy, the audience applauded David Mansfield's music score. Little did the audience know that this would be the last time an element of the badly mixed soundtrack would be clearly audible. Oddly, my feeling at the end of the three-and-a-half hours-plus was that I had seen a confused failure, but not one without a certain grandeur. I didn't even think it was anywhere near the worst film I'd seen in '80. So I was a little taken aback by the ferosity of Vincent Canby's NYT review the next morning. Incidentally, I thought 1941, which I had called in a review, IT'S A MAD, MAD, MAD, MAD WORLD WAR II, was far worse. Spielberg can do irony of a sort (the Indiana Jones movies) and whimsical humor (E.T.), but not slapstick farce. My experience with pre-screenings often taught me how far from the mainstream reviewers and audiences my impressions were. I thought the following to be dismal duds: KRAMER VS. KRAMER, PRIVATE BENJAMIN, and ATLANTIC CITY, ARTHUR, and SUPERMAN II. They were of course smashes. I thought ALTERED STATES and the remake of THE POSTMAN RINGS TWICE would be great successes (They weren't). But undoubtedly seeing films free of prejudice is a way of letting the film speak for itself, and I still try to go to special screenings and sneak previews whenever I can, since having returned from the fleshpots to my heartland roots. Dennis Bingham Indiana University-Indianapolis ---- To signoff SCREEN-L, e-mail [log in to unmask] and put SIGNOFF SCREEN-L in the message. Problems? Contact [log in to unmask]