Brandon Vezmar and Crystal Cruz met on the dating app Bumble. They arranged to meet on Saturday, May 6, 2017, for pizza plus a movie, first sharing a meal that totaled about four dollars before going to see “Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2” in 3-D at the Barton Creek Square Mall theater in Austin.
The ticket for their lunchtime matinee, which Brandon paid for, came to $17.31 — a sum that would prove far more important than either bargained for that day.
At least at first, there was nothing unusual about what sounds like a standard-issue first date: two young people using an online dating app to meet, a reasonably priced meal, and a pop culture blockbuster to follow. What happened next, however, made this particular first date infamous — and not just locally.
About fifteen minutes into “Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2,” Crystal pulled out her phone to text a friend who was upset over breaking up with her boyfriend. By her own account, she sent only two or three texts and kept her phone low so as not to disturb anyone, but Vezmar apparently had stronger feelings about texting during a movie.
“It was kind of a first date from h***,” he told the Austin American-Statesman, noting that texting during movies was “like one of my biggest pet peeves.” He asked her to stop, and when she did not, he suggested she take her phone outside to the lobby.
She left the theater and never came back, driving home and leaving him stranded at the theater without a ride, since they had driven together in her car.
A Texting Argument Turns Into a Lawsuit
A few days later, he texted her to ask for the money back. She refused, saying he had “took me out on a date.” Cruz called the request insane, which prompted Vezmar to escalate.
He began by contacting her little sister on Facebook, presumably attempting to locate her via her family, and then officially filed a petition in Travis County small claims court against her for $17.31 on May 11, citing the theater’s stated policy regarding cell phone usage.
It is worth noting that Texas formally abolished small claims courts in 2013, merging their jurisdiction with the local Justice of the Peace courts, but the media still commonly refers to these proceedings as small claims cases.
Vezmar’s petition to recover the $17.31 was predicated on the argument that Crystal’s texting during the movie violated the theater’s cell phone rules and spoiled the movie for him (and potentially for other people nearby). It went even further, portraying her behavior as a breach of basic social etiquette.
Anyone who has ever had to pay a filing fee knows that they can be prohibitively expensive. In this case, the cost to file the lawsuit was $121 — nearly seven times the amount Vezmar stood to recover in damages.
Small claims proceedings exist precisely because of people like Vezmar, who want to recover relatively minor amounts of money without the expense and hassle of a traditional lawsuit.
Once the defendant has been properly served with the petition, which can often take several weeks, a hearing will typically be held within a couple of months. Either party may request a jury trial, which is always an option but rarely an economically viable one in a small claims case.
In the meantime, this highly publicized legal dispute, which was first reported by local media in Austin, began to generate considerable national press, including coverage by BBC News, ABC, CNN, and NPR.
Crystal, who had initially refused to pay back the $17.31, was surprised by the petition. “Oh my God. This is crazy,” she told the Austin American-Statesman when first contacted. In a later interview with ABC7 Los Angeles, she said she had “cried”, laughed, and been mad, calling the whole situation insane and saying she just could not believe it.
Inside Edition eventually brought both of them back to the Barton Creek Square Mall theater, where their first date gone wrong began. With money in hand, Cruz told Vezmar, “The date just didn’t work out.” Cruz reimbursed Vezmar the price of the ticket, and he counted the cash on the spot before agreeing to withdraw his suit.
Vezmar later referred to the lawsuit as a cultural argument about declining civility: pushing back against people who cut corners in the name of convenience and who, he claimed, were making society “slippery.”
What he hoped she would learn from the whole thing was that people should conduct themselves with courtesy and dignity, and not text during a movie. He asked his social media followers to donate $17.31 to charity, framing it as a gesture of respect — both for what he believed he had done, and for the idea of a phone-free theater experience.
A Cultural Argument About Cell Phones
The reason this particular cultural argument blew up in the national news so soon after the Barton Creek Square Mall incident in mid-May 2017 was that it came on the heels of the most recent round in the long-standing debate between movie theaters and cell phone owners.
In April 2016, AMC’s CEO Adam Aron proposed the idea of designating certain auditoriums where texting would be more tolerated, as a way of attracting younger moviegoers, but the suggestion was roundly criticized on social media. Within two days, AMC publicly backed away from the idea.
National polling data from the same general timeframe seems to confirm why: most people either find texting during a movie totally unacceptable or, at the very least, not ideal.
One large-scale survey found that about a third of moviegoers actually think texting during a movie is fine, while roughly half find it not acceptable. Another survey found that the majority of moviegoers keep their phones on silent anyway, and that most people support theaters banning phone usage completely during a movie.
The Vezmar-Cruz dispute and its accompanying $17.31 lawsuit was yet another chapter in this long-running cultural debate, playing out in a darkened theater and briefly made infamous by the national and international news media before eventually fading from public consciousness, as such things always do.
And it all began with one woman texting during a movie — and one man, who felt his enjoyment was being diminished by her conduct, deciding to try something unusual in court.
While that may seem like an uncharacteristically petty way to end a first date, Brandon Vezmar later claimed that the problem was not so much the $17.31 as it was pushing back against the decline of modern manners and trying to encourage people to conduct themselves with dignity — a goal he achieved, at least in terms of public attention, with this short, inexpensive lawsuit.
A single movie ticket, and the small claims case that it inspired, may have helped prompt this particular cultural argument — about what is appropriate in a movie theater and where cell phones should and should not be used — to erupt yet again, this time at the Barton Creek Square Mall theater in Austin, Texas.