The several hundred moviegoers who endured the recent Civil War epic Gods and Generals have organized in an effort to demand reparations from Warner Bros, which distributed the film. The group, which calls itself People Who Suffered Through Gods and Generals, is asking for unspecified financial compensation. "How can you put a price on 3 hours of a human being's life? We don't know, but we think we can sure try," said Don Beekman, the President of the group.

"We have people who may never be able to sit through a movie again," Beekman continued. "Shouldn't they receive something for their agony?" He said others have been traumatized by any civil war references they have encountered since then, fearing a return of the horribly dull images they saw in the theater. "A few can't even look at Lincoln's face on a penny," he said.

There has been discussion of asking for some sort of pro-rated reparation payments to be made for people that only sat through an hour or so. "We can't penalize people who couldn't endure the whole movie," said Beekman. "They suffered as we did."

If Warner Brothers were to agree to some kind of payment, it would be relatively simple to calculate ticket prices and concession costs that could be reimbursed. It might be worthwhile to the company to just "pay them off" and avoid bad publicity since so few actually saw the film. The difficulty, experts agree, would be in putting a dollar amount on the time lost by viewers as well as the pain and suffering.

"It's tricky," said Steve Rosenweil of Box Office Data. "You could say someone lost nearly four hours of their life, but maybe they would have seen another movie almost as bad-should they then be only compensated for two hours of lost time? Or what if someone sees a movie and hates the ending?

You could have had a host of people suing Spielberg for the 30 minutes they wasted watching the end of Minority Report."

Any kind of organized reparation payments for a movie audience would be unprecedented. A similar movement started after the release of The Thin Red Line but quickly petered out when it was suggested that it was actually a masterpiece and the reparation seekers "just didn't get it."

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