In her years in city government, Council Member Gale Brewer has sat through plenty of interminable hearings and tedious debates. When she goes to the movies, though, the Upper West Side Democrat wishes she didn’t have to endure the preliminaries.

That’s why Ms. Brewer introduced a bill yesterday that would require movie theaters to advertise the actual start time of a movie, rather than the time the previews are supposed to begin.

“I go to the theater on 68th and Broadway pretty regularly, and I go to the independent one,” she said when asked about her movie-viewing habits. “I’ve seen all the ads accumulating. We can’t stop the ads, but if people are more aware of the times it could help.”

She decided to introduce legislation, Ms. Brewer said, after receiving more than a dozen complaints from her constituents about having to sit through previews and commercials for 15 minutes or more every time they go to the movies.

A news release that her office circulated yesterday put her view more bluntly, saying theaters deliberately mislead patrons to ensure a “captive audience for unrelated advertising material and previews.”

One expert who tracks theater ticket sales, the president of Exhibitor Relations Co. of Los Angeles, said most of the disgruntled movie buffs he hears from are upset about the commercials.

“I don’t think this is about trailers,” the executive, Paul Dergarabedian, said. “I honestly don’t think you would be seeing this kind of legislation being proposed if it were just trailers.”

But he said that both the movie and advertising industries would surely rail against the idea of changing how they advertise show times because they rely on revenue from the commercials.

“My sense is that if you don’t have an audience there to watch the advertising it sort of defeats the purpose of the advertising. They want as many eyeballs seeing those ads as possible,” Mr. Dergarabedian told The New York Sun yesterday. “This sort of reminds me of TiVo, because you’re giving people the ability to skip over the trailers and all the stuff that comes before the movie.” TiVo is a digital recording device for television sets that, among other things, allows viewers to delete commercials.

Loews Cineplex, which has eight theaters in Manhattan, said in a statement yesterday that the “pre-feature content” was a “longstanding tradition” in the industry.

“We believe that the public understands that the feature film starts some time after the published showtime,” the statement said.

Officials at a trade group that represents movie house operators, the National Association of Theater Owners, declined to comment.

A representative in Connecticut’s state legislature, Andrew Fleischmann, introduced a similar bill in Hartford last month. His bill would require theaters to include two times: one when the trailers begin, and one when the movie starts. He calls it a matter of truth in advertising.

“Right now, many movie theaters are turning customers into captive audiences for endless ads,” Mr. Fleischmann said in a statement posted on his Web site. “It’s unfair, it’s maddening, and it needs to stop.”

He said that no American cities or states have enacted similar laws yet – and that as a result his bill received a flurry of TV, radio, and newspaper attention when it was introduced.

This, however, is not the first time the council has made rules for movie theaters. In 2003, it passed a much-debated measure – and overrode Mayor Bloomberg’s veto – banning cell phones in theaters.

Council Member Brewer said she was open to negotiation on her idea. She conceded that she did not know how much revenues theaters receive from what Loews called the “pre-feature content,” and she said she assumed the theater-owners would cry financial ruin. As written, the proposed law designates fines of between $500 and $1,000 for each violation. It was unclear yesterday exactly how violations would be tallied.

One of Ms. Brewer’s constituents who complained about the trailers was Elizabeth Rashes, who recently saw “Million Dollar Baby” on the Upper West Side. She told the Sun she would rather show up a few minutes after the trailers begin and have the film start immediately.

“Look,” Mr. Fleischmann said yesterday during a brief phone interview, “I’m the chair of the education committee and there are far weightier issues that come before government. But I have never introduced a bill that has touched such a nerve. People go to the movies for a few hours of escapism and they are annoyed.”

A spokesman for the mayor, Jordan Barowitz, said that because of the volume of bills in the council, the administration reviews only those proposals that have had hearings and started moving through the legislative process.