August 15, 2019 10:29 AM UTC

Cory Gardner: Going The Extra Mile For...Movie Theaters?

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• by: Colorado Pols

Sen. Cory Gardner continued his low-publicity “walking tour” of Colorado towns and cities yesterday with a stop in the conservative mountain town of Buena Vista–seat of red-leaning Chaffee County, which narrowly voted for Donald Trump and Darryl Glenn in the last presidential election. The Mountain Mail newspaper obliged Gardner with the closest we’ve seen to a controversy-free puff piece during this year’s August recess, in which Gardner is basically pretending to engage with the public while minimizing the ability of opponents to organize around these short-notice “public events.”

One particular claim from Gardner during this uncharacteristically sedate walking tour of Buena Vista is worth discussing:

Gardner took a walking tour of East Main Street for about an hour, stopping to answer questions from constituents, discussing topics including energy, affordable housing, bipartisan compromise, cannabis and the Pearl theater.

“One thing we’ve done with rural theaters … we have theaters that are stuck with the choice of digital cameras that cost a quarter of a million dollars more than they have. And this is the other thing I find interesting: For the towns like, say, Akron, Colorado, if they want a first run of a movie, say they want to get the new Spider-Man movie or the new Marvel movie, they’re required to keep those in the theater for three weeks. In a small town, you’ve seen it the first weekend,” Gardner said while standing outside the Pearl.

“So I actually called the CEO of Disney and said, ‘Can you make some kind of exception for rural theaters? I guarantee they’re not making the difference in your quarterly profit. So can you just say you guys don’t have to keep it for three weeks?’”

Got that, voters? If your town movie theater needs a break, Cory Gardner will call the CEO of Disney! That’s amazing news for small-town movie theaters, although the story doesn’t mention if Disney’s CEO, you know, ever said yes. But that’s not really the point: once Gardner starts ringing up CEOs on behalf of some constituents, shouldn’t he do that for all of us? Like constituents getting price gouged by pharmaceutical companies? Screwed by their private insurance? Ripped off by loan sharks? Sickened by neighborhood polluters? We could go on and on.

It’s a lot of CEOs, folks. On the upside, most of them should be easier to get on the phone than Robert Iger.