Hot Springs, not named for its weather!!!

The screen­ings at Hot Springs were a suc­cess on many lev­els, and an adven­ture on many oth­ers.  To start — the dates of the screen­ing were plagued by bliz­zards and cold tem­per­a­tures that broke records set in 1932 .  But even in the face of truly treach­er­ous weather, peo­ple came from sur­round­ing towns to see the pic­ture and sup­port the music pro­grams of Edge­mont and Hot Springs SD through their ticket purchases.

Hence the adven­ture — now to the success…

Ticket sales were mag­nif­i­cent and com­pletely sold out for the screen­ings and an extra Sat­ur­day show was added at 9:30 and an addi­tional screen­ing on Sun­day. In total, the event raised nearly 7K for the high school music depart­ments and, by sev­eral accounts, really raised the spir­its of the com­mu­ni­ties through Mid­dle and High School vis­its by Alexa (who BLEW THEIR MINDS with her AWESOMENESS) and Sean (who quickly became de facto secu­rity).  Apart from school vis­its, Alexa and Sean pro­vided intro­duc­tions to each screen­ing of the film, after-screening Q&A’s and auto­graph ses­sions that lasted for hours and involved auto­graph­ing small Bro­ken Hill posters and tick­ets to the event.  Mixed into all this were hun­dreds of cell phone pics, and the auto­graph­ing of every­thing from arti­cles of cloth­ing, SPY KIDS movies, to — lit­er­ally — people’s faces.  Alexa was a trooper!

Local media cov­er­age was great, though the excite­ment of hav­ing the film in the area with its star caused jour­nal­ists to almost uni­formly toss out the facts and call the pre­view screen­ings the World Pre­mier.  Local jour­nal­ists, it seems, are not immune to the exag­ger­a­tion the hype of hol­ly­wood can cause!

In most cases Bro­ken Hill and its vis­it­ing stars were front page news. There was also great cov­er­age on local radio and tele­vi­sion stations.

All in all, the event was a suc­cess and texts/emails con­tinue to flow in about how much peo­ple enjoyed the film and how spe­cial they feel to have been a part of an early screening.