Hollywood Movies & Your Bladder: App Alerts You When You Can Go

Here’s an app for iPhones, iPads, Androids, or any mobile browser that links the seemingly disparate worlds of urology and Hollywood. It’s like something out of a Rosanne Roseannadanna rant:

I just got a letter from a Mr. Richard Feder in Fort Lee, New Jersey, and Mr. Feder writes, “Dear Roseanne Rosannadanna, I feel real uncomfortable at the movies. I always gotta take a leak but I never wanna miss a big scene.

“I pay a lotta money for my movie tickets. And the whole time I’m thinking I gotta take a leak. What should I do? I can’t have any fun at the movies. You know why? You wanna guess?”

Mr. Feder, for a guy from Fort Lee, New Jersey, you sure sound like a great movie date. But I, Roseanne Roseannadanna, know exactly how you feel. I never wanna miss a big scene and I always gotta pee.

Cut to Jane Curtin glowering at Gilda.

Now, through the genius of a high-tech inventor, there’s a free app for that. It’s called, with no beating around the bush, runpee. That’s right. Run Pee. This is the app for the bladder-challenged who love to go to the movies.

You click on the movie currently playing at a theater near you and…you learn the exact cues in the script that will signal the ideal moment to head to the back of the theater and hit the rest room. And it will give you several opportunities per film.

Who would ever think up such an app? Dan Florio, aka polygeek. As he tells the tale:

It came to me after watching the movie King Kong, which was 3ish hours long. My wife and I were thinking how nice it would be to have a website that listed movie times we could easily miss and run to the bathroom to empty our poor bladders, and not miss any crucial scenes.

I sat on the idea for about 2 years while working at XBox in Seattle. I am a Flash Platform developer and as my skills set grew, I started to learn to make Flash/database driven website – Spring ’08. The RunPee idea seemed like a good project to practice, on so I started building it. By August of ’08 it was up and running.RunPee.com debuted at the 360Flex conference in San Jose to much fanfare – watch the video at youTube.

Members of the Writers Guild of America West may be offended that any scene they wrote with such care– and, of course, such genius — could be deemed missable, but millions of antsy movie-goers will be glad they have this marvel.

Mr. Richard Feder of Fort Lee, New Jersey would have appreciated it, too.