BETHEL – Grumbling over ticket prices at the premiere of “The 12 Dogs of Christmas” two weeks ago is a tempest in a teapot, said Bethel Town Manager Scott Cole.

“It’s water under the bridge,” he said Friday afternoon, saying that there was no wrongdoing.

“I’ve been approached in casual conversation and asked, to the effect of, How did it happen that we all got gouged?'”

Adults attending the Dec. 4 showing paid $15; children, $10. That cost, said co-organizer Julie Park, covered the pre-showing party and the movie itself.

Admission for two showings on Dec. 5 were $5 each. There were 360 tickets sold for the first showing, 340 for the second; for the Dec. 4 event, 446 tickets were sold.

The showings were designated a fund-raising event to be split between SAD 44’s Crescent Park School fifth-grade field trip to Boston, the budding Bethel Youth Football Program, and Bethel Area Trails, a new committee of the Mahoosuc Land Trust.

Park said the three charities were chosen because they had volunteers who willingly made the event a success.

“The fund-raiser netted just over $9,000, which we’ll be splitting evenly so that each of the three get at least $3,000,” Park said Monday night. Checks go out next week.

Park said the few complainers she heard from were either in the movie or had children or dogs in the film.

“They thought that they should have gotten in free. But this was a benefit to the community. It was their choice whether to pay or not,” she said.

Cole agreed, but said, “It seemed to me like an awful lot of people incurred out-of-pocket expense when they should have not had to pay.”

To mollify the grumblers, Park verified with Ken Kragen, executive producer of “12 Dogs,” that everyone who had a role or children or dogs in the movie is to get a DVD of the film when it is released around Christmas 2005.

“By telling them that they’d get a copy, that helped calm some people down,” Park said.