My colleague John M. Lynch over at Stranger Fruit recounts in several posts what happened after he signed up to see a screening of Expelled in Tempe AZ.

First he received an e-mail notifying him that the scheduled time for the screening had been changed to start an hour earlier. But promoters screwed up and the e-mail had been sent to him as a CC (carbon copy). This meant that he got a list of all the e-mail addresses to which the message had been sent (“boughtbythecross,” “homeschoolma,” and “covenant-dad.” etc.).

He then received an e-mail saying that the screening had been canceled. However this e-mail was not CCed to “covenant-dad” etc., like the previous one, and this led him to suspect that they might be trying to screen him out, so to speak, and were actually going to hold the screening as re-scheduled.

Turns out his suspicions were well founded. One of his compadres, Ken McKnight, decided to call the theater ahead of time and ask if the film was still to be shown at the re-scheduled time.

I just called the Arizona Mills Harkins theater and said that I had heard that the private screening of Expelled had been moved from 7:00 to 6:00 (I didn’t mention that I had been emailed that the showing was canceled). The person I spoke to confirmed that the movie is showing today at 6:00. Clearly the promoters are somehow screening the attendees and then sending out cancellation notices to the “undesirables.”

Wasn’t there something about not lying in the Intelligent Designer’s book? I guess it was “thou shalt not lie”, except to people who might be critical of your film.

John has all the gory detail on his blog (see links above). There are two accounts of the screening that was, then wasn’t, but then really was after all, from people who attended the “canceled” screening. One from Brad and another from Ken McKnight. Check’em out.