What a glorious thing that would be, not having to pay for the film. I’d be typing this on my gold plated keyboard after having sent another flunky out for battered swan nuggets, just because I could.

Of course I’d soon be forced to show my old holiday slides as the films would eventually dry up. I’m pretty sure you wouldn’t pay to see snaps of me squeezed into a pair of Speedos on some Mediterranean beach. So yes, we pay for the films.

I think there should be an independent cinema owners lottery. Once a year we get a film for free, the title pulled out of a hat. It could actually make a genuine difference if a good one came up. Knowing my luck I’d get The Three Musketeers.

The question that usually follows is how do we pay? My first reaction is through the nose. but I would say that wouldn’t I?

Put simply we pay a percentage of what we take. That percentage varies depending on the film, big titles cost more. Quite a lot more.

In days gone by, until fairly recently actually, films were paid for using an arcane sliding scale system. Cinemas would have what we doctors call a “break figure”, supposedly to reflect running costs. For round numbers sake let’s say that figure was £1000. The cinema pays 25% of the first £1000.  Then 75% of everything over that. Yep, 75%. There were a few other calculations too boring to go into here. This was on a per week basis.

Essentially the more you took the more you paid, hardly an incentive to put on more shows. As an independent we weren’t in a position to negotiate the posh break figures circuits had,  meaning some of the percentages we paid were toe curling.

Fortunately things have changed somewhat and some sanity has made its way into the system. We now pay flat percentages, far more preferable. These can range from 30% to 60%.

It also means putting on more shows doesn’t affect the percentage. Marvelous.

Before you go judging me for complaining about a business that makes between 70% and 40% gross profit, remember that payment is made to the distributor before any of our running costs are accounted for. It’s also worth remembering that our running costs remain the same however well or otherwise the film does.

It costs the same to open whether we have one or a thousand people through the door. A lot of weeks lose money, so we’re quite often playing catch up. Over fifty two weeks it works out, but it can get very hairy at times.

Spare me a thought next summer when you’re all watching the Olympics and the Euro football and waving your poxy Union Jacks at passing Queens, and I don’t mean at gay pride in Brighton.

And yes I know there’s popcorn as well. See previous post for that explanation.

As for keeping the films? In the olden 35mm days certainly not, prints are expensive and are moved around the country to other cinemas. Sometimes to other countries, where the release follows ours. Besides they don’t belong to us, they belong to the renter. The clue is in the name.

If we did nick them, where the hell would we put them? Film is bulky and stored in warehouses. I don’t have a warehouse set aside for illegally procured film prints.

Theoretically we could keep copies of digital films, but they’re no good without the digital key that allows them to play. A key will only allow the film to play over a set time, so all I’d have is gigabytes of data I can’t access.

Let me know if there are any less frequently asked questions you have a burning desire to know the answer to, preferably cinema related, and let’s see if we can’t make some interesting blog posts out of them.

The internet is awash with nerdy lists of favourite films, we really don’t need any more. However, as you can imagine I get asked this one a lot, so forgive me a rare moment of self indulgence and let me tell you.

At the very least it might save some time as I can point interrogators in the direction of this blog.

Of course, given the number of films I’ve seen  it’s impossible to pick an outright favourite, so I have a list in my head that I tend to wheel out when needed. I’m not suggesting for a moment my opinion is particularly important, but people seem curious. The list is not especially difficult and frankly if you’ve lived long enough you really should have seen most of them already.

I’m often surprised by how many of the films people haven’t seen, which means as the list progresses the questioner generally starts to have the look of someone wishing they’d never asked.

That’s not my fault is it? You asked, so I’m telling you.

So in no particular order:

Five Easy Pieces
USA 1970 Dir: Bob Rafelson
Made at the vanguard of that brief shining moment in the seventies when Hollywood gatekeepers let their guard down and allowed new talent to make intelligent , provocative cinema.
A rare American film that deals with class, featuring Jack Nicholson at his best, before he became too showy. All involved operating at the top of their game.

2001: A Space Odyssey
UK/USA 1968 Dir: Stanley Kubrick
2001 is an enormous film, taking man from ape to beyond human.  There’s a theory this film had it’s most profound impact on children simply because they weren’t fighting Kubrick’s refusal to make concessions to the audience and actually explain what was going on.  Much has been written but if you’re feeling hardcore, this analysis by the then 15 year old Margaret Stackhouse which Kubrick himself considered among the most intelligent remarks about his film is very much worth reading.

Apocalypse Now
USA 1979 Dir: Francis Ford Coppola
A film whose process of creation was as insane as the war it portrays. Produced on a scale both large and small that would be inconceivable in today’s Hollywood.

Magnolia
USA 1999 Dir: Paul Thomas Anderson
A precocious dazzling piece of showing off from Anderson. A film that fires on all cylinders from the start and becomes an utterly irresistible force. Inferior copies of its multi layered story lines now abound.

Hable con Ella (Talk to Her)
Spanish director Almodovar’s film is more controlled than those that came before. Full of longing and humanity.

The Producers
USA 1968 Dir: Mel Brooks
This just shades Blazing Saddles for sheer delightful absurdity. The opening exchange between Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder remains one of the funniest sequences ever filmed, driven by its own twisted internal logic the characters come to life brilliantly. Still has the power to make you marvel at it’s glorious lack of taste.

Performance
UK  1970 Dir: Donald Cammell Nicholas Roeg
Mind bending, free wheeling and completely bonkers. Somehow its meaning always feels just out of reach and each time you see it more of it’s layers are revealed. Only cinema could come up with something like this.

Annie Hall
USA  1977 Dir: Woody Allen
The perfect balance between funny Woody and intellectual Woody. It’s shifting narrative line is a joy and the comedy is still painfully true.

All About Eve
USA 1950 Dir: Joseph L Mankiewicz
We can only dream of seeing something this sharp and acidic today. A perfect script performed by a perfect cast.

All That Jazz
USA 1979 Dir: Bob Fosse
Probably narcissistic, but a thrilling  insight into Fosse’s mind. Plays like a self fulfilling prophecy.

Brazil
UK  1985 Dir: Terry Gilliam
For years it held the record for the lowest take in a week at Uckfield. Shame on you all. Gilliam’s imagination given free reign is a wonder to behold.

The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp
UK 1943 Dir: Michael Powell Emeric Pressburger
Towering film from a golden age of British cinema. Roger Livesey is brilliant as the eponymous Colonel, but Anton Walbrook steals the film from under him as the German whose world is turned upside down. A film about the whole of life.

The Sheltering Sky
UK/Italy 1990
Not everyone’s cup of tea I know, but it’s my list after all. Never tire of watching the marvelous Debra Winger and Vittorio Storaro’s breathtaking images. Characters adrift in an alien landscape.

Trois Couleurs: Bleu (Three Colours: Blue)
France 1993 Dir: Krzysztof Kieslowski
Heartbreaking and honest film about grief. Full of Kieslowski’s trademark moments that you may not notice the first time.

The Ice Storm
US 1997 Dir: Ang Lee
Beautifully paced and ultimately very moving tale of desperate suburban lives. Sigourney Weaver stands out and Mychael Danna’s haunting score stays with you long after it finishes.

Harold and Maude
US 1971 Dir: Hal Ashby
Pretty much any Hal Ashby is fine by me, but I come back to this one most often. A film about life and death and great songs by Cat Stevens.

To be honest, I hated writing this list because I left so many out. Proving what a daft idea the notion of a favourite film is.

Mind you the list of bad films would be even longer.

What were we showing in October 1938 and did people tear themselves away from the wireless to come? We'll never know.

On the face of it it’s very simple, I tell you what films we’re showing and you buy tickets. Result, happiness. For films everyone wants to see it really is as simple as that.

We fret and worry about how best to market a film locally but the truth is, if it’s the right film people will come. There is very little I can do to significantly alter a movies box office fate.

While we were playing the appalling rom com Something Borrowed I could have spent hundreds of pounds on full colour spreads in the local paper or danced down the high street dressed as an elephant handing out leaflets,  it wouldn’t have made a sodding bit of difference. No one wanted to see it, full stop.

Conversely a single lineage ad in the local free sheet stating the new James Bond starts Friday would be more than enough. We’d still be packed.

I learnt many years ago you literally can’t give tickets away for a stinker. Trust me, I’ve tried. I also learnt some kind of weird jungle drums effect takes hold as soon as Judi Dench dons Victoria’s widow’s weeds. How do they know? How do they sniff them out?

Before half of Soho drowns itself in its own skinny latte, I’m not suggesting that a good marketing campaign can’t do wonders for the bottom line and there have been some masterful examples of making a little go a long way over the years. Obviously the live stuff requires local marketing, but for mainstream films were pretty impotent.

We rely almost entirely on the national campaign to generate the most crucial part of movie marketing, word of mouth.

The strongest local marketing tool we have these days is the website. For such a small place we do get a very large number of hits and online booking now accounts for over 50% of our ticket sales.

Which is where I run into trouble.

Because I do all of the online elements of The Picture House myself and because I can passionately hate a film as much as I love it, it’s really difficult sometimes not to let that come across.

For films I love it can obviously be a bonus. I like to think my opinion counts for something, although in truth it seems to make little difference. I virtually wet myself over Let The Right One In and almost said as much on the website.

No bugger turned up to watch it though.

In the end I want you to come and buy a ticket whatever I think of the film and I’m not the final arbiter on whether you may or may not enjoy it. If you liked Eat Pray Love, that’s your problem and you should probably seek help.

The worst ones are those you know are crap and you know no one is going to come and see. I can put up with tosh if it’s taking money, but trying to galvanise myself to set up web pages, write synopses, programme the computer, do the press, for a 24 carat turd like Extraordinary Measures is soul-destroying.

I really had my head up my backside when I booked that one.

My intention is not to mislead you, but I’m hardly going to put “avoid this like the plague” on the website am I? Perhaps I worry too much, the world is full of people selling you rubbish, to a large degree it’s up to you to weed it out.

People often say to me how good the films we always show are. Which makes me feel really guilty, because it’s not true. They just came for the good ones.

In my experience there are three important things we need to do. Firstly when people do decide there’s a film out there they want to see make the programme information readily available , on the web, in the press or front of house.

Make buying tickets as easy as humanly possible and most importantly make your cinema as good as you possibly can so that when making a decision where to see a film the punters choose you.

Then all I have to do is book the right film. Easy.

Lewes loses its cinema. Oh well... from Sussex Express.

The opening line of the L.P Hartley’s novel The Go Between has become as familiar as any motivational poster, “The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there.”

Appropriately one of the movies that kept turning up when I was a kid was Losey’s film of The Go Between. This was in the days when cinemas could bring back popular films endlessly.

We had a sort of rota that changed little over the fifteen years between 1964 and 1979. Titles would get added or fall away as they became rather too long in the tooth.

At various times the list included, Tom Jones, The Italian Job, Blazing Saddles, Freebie and the Bean, The Sound of Music, any James Bond, any Clint Eastwood, Ring of Bright Water, Born Free and quite a few others.

This was a time before video and when movies on television were old or not very good. It’s difficult to imagine now, but the whole country stopped for the first UK television screening of Jaws in 1981. I remember it very well, nobody turned up at all that evening and we all went home early.

Rather than see something new, millions of people stayed home to watch a six-year-old film, with commercial breaks and half the picture missing. Jaws is in ‘Scope, and in those bygone 4:3 TV days you only saw half the frame of a film shot in that format.

There was a fabulous moment of schadenfreude when our local station TVS lost sound for a full fifteen minutes at the start. That’ll learn ’em.

This all sounds rather wonderful and a world in which we have the films all to ourselves would obviously please cinema owners, but there were bigger problems in those days for independent cinemas and even for some circuit cinemas outside really major towns.

This was the heyday of the tyrannical sales manager, every distributor had one,  and they had a bunch of rules and “gentleman’s” agreements in place that kept a tight reign on who could show what film and when.

Foremost in this system of control was barring, a quite arcane set of rules that determined where a cinema sat in the pecking order.

It worked like a hierarchy, and Uckfield was quite a few branches down the tree. If your cinema was barred by another it meant you couldn’t play a film until the “barrer” had finished with it.

Around here, Brighton and Tunbridge Wells were the kingpins. Which put Uckfield in a kind of barring sandwich.

Brighton barred Lewes, which had an Odeon at the time. Lewes in turn barred Uckfield. It didn’t end there, Tunbridge Wells barred The Regent in Crowborough which barred Uckfield.

So that meant Uckfield couldn’t date a film until all of the above towns had finished with it. Oddly, Uckfield barred Edenbridge.

The big towns like Brighton also had to wait until the West End of London had finished their exclusive run. Sometimes that would be a few months.

There were also more cinemas in those towns, where there was a micro pecking order. Second and third run halls also had to play. The upshot of this was films that played in Uckfield were already rather knackered.

It was not unusual for it to take a year for film to arrive in Uckfield. Can you imagine? We’d just be getting around to The Social Network about now.

Now the world was a different place then, people didn’t travel between towns in quite the cavalier fashion they do today and there was an element of captive audience about the local population. But that population was quite small.

It’s amazing we’re still here.

To add to the confusion there were also something called a concurrency.

Eastbourne’s status was concurrent with Brighton, which meant if Brighton decided to wait for a film, Eastbourne had to as well because they couldn’t play before.

All over the country this network of restricted practice spread out from London like a nasty weed. My dad was an expert on barring for some reason. His geographical knowledge of Britain was defined by it. Name any town and he could tell you which other towns barred the local cinema.  It kept him amused.

Incredibly a report published by the UK board of trade in August 1950 entitled Distribution and exhibition of cinematograph films decided  “… that more competition is needed, but that free competition is unrealistic. Monopoly situations should be investigated but exhibition monopolies should not necessarily be broken up. Barring is an acceptable practice, supervised by a joint trade committee.”

The practice of barring continued in one form or another until as late as 1983 when the Monopolies and Mergers commission finally grabbed the industry by the scruff of the neck and concluded that “overall there was a ‘complex monopoly’ created by the combined activities of these distributors and exhibitors, and in particular the ‘barring’ arrangements, whereby certain cinemas gain exclusive territorial rights to screening films. This latter practice caused delays in other exhibitors gaining access to films and the MMC recommended that the practice should cease.”

Hurrah!

In a strange twist of fate, one of the reasons we are still here, aside from a pig-headed tenacity, is precisely because those rules were strictly enforced.

If you’ve been paying attention you will have noticed we were not officially barred by Brighton or Tunbridge Wells. These were indirect bars, via Crowborough and Lewes.

When both Crowborough and Lewes lost their cinemas in the early seventies, voila, no bar on Uckfield.

Suddenly we were able to show films much closer to their London release dates and the opposition was much further away. Business shot up and here we are today, still trying to make sense of it all.

It’s an ill wind.

Our rather lovely NEC2000C in Box Three.

I’m a big fan of the good doctor and a regular listener to Wittertainment. We’re of a similar age and have similar formative cinema experiences. Sometimes we even sound alike, we both say “I say it here, it comes out there” a lot. Some of you may even know where that comes from.

As an independent cinema owner his current multiplex bashing crusade, with particular reference to the death of the cinema projectionist,  is obviously music to my ears.

Broadly I agree with everything he says, obviously I’m more than a tad biased, but I’ve rarely had a good experience at a multiplex in 20 years, however, I believe he’s wrong to blame the advent of digital projection.

The multiplex projectionist was an endangered species long before digital arrived.

Here is Dr Kermode’s recent online article from The Radio Times. And here is his piece to camera for Kermode Uncut on the BBC website.

I think it’s wrong to blame digital, multiplexes have simply swapped 35mm cock ups for digital cock ups. To suggest everything was fine with multiplex 35mm projection is erroneous.

Because multiplexes have always skimped on having properly trained technical staff, 35mm presentations often had problems, they were just different problems.

Out of focus was the most common in my experience, followed by an incorrectly framed picture and more often than not, simply not loud enough. Scratched prints would also come up from time to time.

If I went to a multiplex before digital my wife would sit patiently as I banged my head on the seat in front wailing: “Does no one look out the bloody porthole? That’s what it’s there for.”  or “When the feature goes on, check the bloody focus! It’s really as simple as turning a knob on the front of the projector!”

Digital has pretty much eliminated all the aforementioned problems, bar the volume level. You can’t get it out of focus, you can’t rack it incorrectly and you certainly can’t scratch it.

I was always taught to go into the theatre and check sound and picture for myself because you can’t always tell from the box. Something I do to this day. I’ve never seen it done in a ‘plex. Digital and automation makes that process easier so there is no excuse not to do it.

What you have is a set of other potential pitfalls. Digital file and server glitches or automation howlers ensuring the film is projected with the lights up on the wrong size screen.

The mistake is not having anyone technical on the building to sort any problems out, or more importantly noticing them in the first place. In that regard the good doctor is correct.

Now, let he who is without and all that, I’m not suggesting we haven’t had the odd glitch or two since going digital but because we have projectionists they are usually sorted pretty pronto. If it means anything it also really spoils our day.

We’re still learning of course, and in defence of the beleaguered multiplex popcorn monkey trying manfully to get the show back on it’s a steep learning curve.

I have over 30 years experience in a projection box, on 35mm I can keep a show going with duct tape and an elastic band, if the film breaks I can splice it back together. I once manually fed the whole of Schindler’s List through the projector to keep the show on-screen.  That movie is 3 hours long.

With digital if it really goes wrong the only thing I can do is turn it off and turn it on again. You know, like your crappy windows computer at home. Only my digital projectors were £50,000 each. Which pretty much puts me on a par with the popcorn monkey.

It’s a bit more complex than that of course. My tech department and I have leant a lot in the last year but digital can make you feel pretty impotent at times because there is so much to learn and so many more things that can go wrong. Film was mechanical so you can see with your own eyes what’s going on. A bunch of circuit boards is not so easy to interrogate.

So having said all of that, sacking your projectionists seems like stupidity. Worse, it reveals contempt for your audience. The reason we are here is to show you the film in the best way possible and we have a duty to make that priority number one.

This is where I urge the good doctor to continue his crusade, because I’m petrified this bottom line attitude is going to take us all down. I’m here to make a living like everybody and much of what I do is driven by the need to make a profit, but like most independents that are left I really do care passionately about what we do. We really are “fanatical about film”, it’s not just a corporate slogan.

People’s perception of cinemas overall is pretty crummy, which upsets me deeply. But I’m only one man, doing the best I can on a limited budget.

I was struck by what Mark Cousins said in the introduction to his brilliant Story of Film series on More 4 (which you really should be watching), it’s not box office that drives cinema, it’s  passion and innovation.

In the exhibition business if we don’t regain some of that passion were finished. There are too many other ways to see films, too many other things to do for cinemas to be purely popcorn dispensing stations. And actually if you make the presentation perfect more people will come and you will sell more popcorn.

Apologies if this all sounds a bit pompus. I know we’re not perfect. But, you know…

Not sure what you do about idiots on mobile phones though. Anyone?

It seems the eye of Sauron that is BBC Watchdog is turning our way this week. Apparently there’s going to be a piece on how cinemas are ripping off the world when it comes to popcorn prices.

So I thought I’d make few short points before the torch bearing crowds storm the box office and dunk their local cinema owner in the village pond.

I have a love/hate relationship with popcorn. Personally I never eat the stuff, but that’s probably because I’ve been surrounded by sackfuls of it my entire life.

It holds no allure for me, but for many millions of people it’s an integral part of the movie going experience. For many millions of others it’s the food of the Devil. Noisy and smelly.

For me popcorn falls into the category of screen advertising, I would happily do without it but the amount of money it generates is vital for the survival of my business.

Without popcorn and adverts the ticket price would have to double. I figure most people would rather put up with fifteen minutes of car ads and the existence of the crunchy yellow peril than pay more for their seat.

In fact I doubt people would turn up at all should we increase ticket prices to that extent.

Running a cinema, believe it or not is an expensive business. More crucially, it costs the same to run however well or badly the films are doing.

Big films generate a lot of cash which is marvelous. Although the film hire is usually more, so we are left with less.

But when business hits the floor, and boy can it hit the floor, my costs remain the same. There is still the same amount of staff, the same amount of electricity, rates, advertising and so on.

As you can imagine, the money tank empties really quickly.  So when the sun comes out and you’re all in the garden cooking in up turned rusty cans, never giving going to the pictures a moments thought, or the films are so bad giving away free gold ingots wouldn’t entice you in, I’m still shelling out thousands of pounds to keep the place open on the off-chance one day you might return.

I’m not asking for any sympathy, that’s the nature of being in business. Just pointing out how things work.

Of course the profit on popcorn is high, I thought everyone knew that. But it needs to be as part of the overall survival plan.

Consider the ticket price. After the Chancellor has taken his 20%, the distributor has taken their (on average) 50% of what’s left, we have to pay all the running costs out of the remainder. And that’s a long list of things, before I even think about feeding the family.

It means that profit on cinema tickets is actually quite low. We need the sales to make up the shortfall. Sorry.

There are two other important points. Firstly, and I mean this in the nicest possible way, nobody is forcing you to buy popcorn, it’s an extra. I’m glad you do and thank you very much for doing so, but it’s not compulsory.

I do try to be as fair as possible, and our prices certainly don’t reach the levels seen at circuit cinemas. It could be argued more fool me as they seem to sell vat loads more than us, but I can’t bring myself to go quite that high.

Secondly, have you seen the mess it makes? After a full house of Harry Potter it looks like a ten ton bomb made entirely of popcorn and sweet wrappers has gone off.

It all has to be cleaned up and it all causes extraordinary wear and tear on the carpet and seats. Seats and carpet are expensive items. A good seat is getting on for £200 each, which is why I can’t afford to replace them as often as I’d like.

So like most things in business dear Watchdog, it’s not as simple as me twirling my evil mustache and laughing insanely as I fool you into parting with your hard-earned cash.

I’m just trying to make an honest living. Like most of us.

At least Dick Turpin had the good grace to wear a mask...

It’s often said in this life, you only get what you pay for. When it comes to film music cinema owners get what they paid for and then have to pay for it again.

I’m talking about the unadulterated naked banditry that is The Performing Rights Society “Tariff C”. Put simply we’re paying extra for the music in the film, which is ridiculous.

We do have the choice between being shafted or rogered. Either 1% of our turnover or 4.84 pence per admission. That’s right, the P.R.S have a finger in all the cinema tills in the land to the tune of 1% of the net turnover!

That’s over £8 million a year.

For nothing.

I don’t want to use this blog to rant , OK I do, but few things make me as wild as the P.R.S . When the time comes to submit my payments I become more unstable than usual, punching walls and howling at the injustice of it all.

For years now I’ve been trying to get someone to explain how this chicanery is legal, but apparently it is. Protected in stone by both UK and European law.

Only the last remaining  one legged Siberian Rhinotiger is more protected it seems than film composers.

We already pay for the film, shouldn’t that include the music? It’s not like I’m given the option of a print without the music, which would be silly of course, but it means I’m forced to pay out thousands of pounds whether I like it or not.

For nothing.

The scriptwriter doesn’t get extra payments, the special effects guy doesn’t get a nice cheque in the post once a month, so why the hell should the music department?

After buying a telly imagine if a bill dropped through your letterbox a year later that read: Music Royalty for Eastenders x 65 BBC News Jingle x 350 Open University Ident x 32 etc. Pretty much the same thing.

So, anyone? Convince me this is fair. I bet you can’t.

Any business transaction should be mutually beneficial, but I’m struggling to see what we get out of this one.  The industry seem rather scared of standing up to the P.R.S in case the deal we strike makes us worse off.

Personally I’m all for chaining myself to John Williams until we get these payments eradicated.

Rant over.

As if by magic the prophecy in the last post comes true. I care no longer for the missed opportunities from last week, now we’re playing The Inbetweeners Movie!

Reading previous posts I can see I do rather swing from joy to despair, sometimes within a few minutes. This is quite normal for independent exhibitors, who try to build a business on the shifting sands of public taste.

What’s ironic about the great business we’re doing with Inbetweeners is how it makes a mockery of my usual schtick,  namely how we can’t take money with films aimed primarily at a teenage market.

Maybe the film is so huge we’re simply getting our correct proportion or maybe the buses stopped running and all their cars were stolen.

Whilst it’s nice to see you all, where the bloody hell have you been?  What is it about this one that has made you come to us? All the stuff aimed at you I’ve played in the last ten years has fallen flat on its face.

Where were you for The Expendables or The Hangover or Chalet Girl or even Social Network? Did you go somewhere else or simply not go at all? I know that’s not true because everyone else was busy with those films.

I’m not your occasional mistress you know, I expect to see you more often from now on.

Perhaps this is the classic exception that proves the rule thing. Not that I understand what the hell that phrase means.

No-one saw this level of business coming, if they say they did, they’re lying. Everyone thought it would do very nicely thank you very much, not turn into the most successful independent British film of all time in five days.

I don’t actually think it’s going to change things for us at all. It’s just a weird blip, probably.

The blipest thing about it is someone made a mainstream British film that people actually want to see. Which is a whole other debate of course.

However, dipping my toe in the water, I would point out that it’s a film populated by most of us, it isn’t about listless Hoodies wandering around followed by shaky cam, it isn’t full of smug Richard Curtis types or set in a stately home. Just throwing it out there.

Although I don’t mind the smug Richard Curtis types because they take money. Don’t judge me, I have mouths to feed.

It also seems like it might have some legs. Films that skew (as we doctors say) towards the teen market tend to run out of steam very quickly, Twilight films for instance are pretty much dead for us by Monday, having exhausted all the teenage girls in the area. Not the best way of putting it I know.

Here we are nearly a week in and it’s still filling up. One more weekend I reckon and it’ll be done.

We’ll see, but I won’t care because equilibrium and my cockeyed view of how things are will be restored by the appearance of Jane Eyre and more importantly Judi Dench on Sept 9th.

That’s set in a stately home isn’t it? OK, I don’t mind those either.

Look, I’m well aware it’s not coal mining but this job can be incredibly frustrating at times. I have to live in a perpetual sort of Mystic Meg trance.

An important part of my job is knowing what films are coming and furthermore what films are most likely to appeal to the good citizens of Uckfield and the surrounding district.

In the absence of a film with Judi Dench and Colin Firth making a nude calendar while stuttering Abba songs on a sinking boat, I have to make an educated guess at what you all might want to see.

Not only that, I have to guess how long you might want to see it for. Patrons around here can be notoriously slow at getting round to seeing a film sometimes.

I’ve often seen diaries at twenty paces in the foyer. As long as the matinée on Thursday doesn’t clash with Mrs Barrington’s bridge game we might sell a few tickets.

Then consider the large number of films released, particularly at this time of year, add in the distributors reluctance to talk about sharing shows with other films after the first week and you can see how even Nostradamus’ legendary skills might be stretched to the limit.

Of course it’s all dead easy if you’ve got 46 screens. What do multiplex bookers do all day? There can’t be a great deal of skill in just booking everything. I suppose they have to say no to anything with subtitles or a budgets under £2 million, which probably wears them out a bit.

As we only have three screens, during the summer season there are any number of permutations and I’ve not got it entirely right this year.

We missed out this weekend on Rise of the Planet of the Apes and more surprisingly The Smurfs movie. I’ve had more than a few exclamations of surprise and dissapointment we aren’t playing these films so by way of explanation and to give you an insight into how all this works let me explain.

When putting the bookings together some weeks ago I had to consider a number of possibilities, not least that Hary Potter needed a clear run, I also had more faith in Cars 2 than it ultimately deserved.

Bridesmaids had much stronger legs than anticipated and I also thought that Super 8 was going to do better than it has.

When I looked at Apes a shudder ran down my spine. The Tim Burton film from several years ago absolutely tanked in Uckfield so with the might of my business accumen I assumed it was one less titile to worry about.  Considering The Smurfs I think my age played against me. I remember them the first time round and how much we hated them.

That was stupid. Nobody with any critical faculties whatever would ever defend Alvin & The Chipmunks as a great movie, but those films were huge. The Smurfs movie is very similar and I should have realised that. Daft schoolboy error.

So, Harry Potter aside, we had a rather rough weekend,  I imagine every other cinema in the land was partying all night on the spectacular grosses from the two films I left out.

I’ve been really cross with myself all week.

What makes this business brilliant though, is we constantly change what we’re selling. So however spectacularly I can get it wrong sometimes, something will come along and save me.

We’re already looking forward to great business on The Inbetweeners movie, which I admit I had doubts about but the advance sales are very good indeed.

You truly never can tell. However hard you polish your crystal ball.

Even after a lifetime in the business I still see things I’ve never seen before. This week it was a mother giving her kids ear defenders to wear while watching the film. Really? Why not go the whole hog and give them blindfolds in case there’s something mildly offensive in there as well?

Honestly, despite what some people think, cinema sound cannot damage your hearing. There are too many quiet bits. It would have to be the tornado scene from Twister on repeat for two hours before that were to happen, even then we’d have to run it on 11.

Those of you who followed our old message board will be familiar, or even bored, with this debate, but maybe it’s worth revisiting for new readers. I’m always keen to hear comments as it’s something that confuses the hell out of me.

There’s nothing arbitrary about our sound at The Picture House, I’ve spent a lot of time and money trying to get it right. It’s bloody good, even if I say so myself. Not perfect, but if I won the lottery it would be.

When we do get complaints it’s too loud they tend to come from our older patrons. The popular refrain, and misunderstanding, is that it’s too loud for a small theatre. Unlike most things in life, size has nothing to do with it.

Let me explain. The sound system is carefully calibrated with all manner of microphones and spectrum analysers to give exactly the same sound pressure level from each speaker when you turn the volume knob to 7, as the system  in the dubbing theatre where the film is recorded. Did you get that? In other words, when I turn the volume to 7, it’s exactly at the level the director wants you to hear the film.

As I see it our job is to be as transparent as possible to the film making process. Cinemas have the ability to really spoil everyone’s hard work if they’re not careful. A producer spends millions of pounds on a film, thousands of people have sweated blood to get it finished, the least we can do it show it properly. Those millions of dollars count for nothing if the picture is out of focus and the sound is rubbish. So I feel we have a great responsibility, one that I take rather seriously.

The dynamics of good cinema sound are one of the reasons for coming surely? We can turn it down, but then all the guts fall away, making the sound lifeless and uninvolving. Given the way films are mixed you would also fail to hear the dialogue.

In fact there is a way to tell if the film is at the right level. Don’t come storming straight out to complain that it’s too loud after watching the opening scene where the fleet of spaceships crash lands in the middle of a WW1 artillery bombardment, wait until it’s calmed down and if the speaking is at a comfortable level, that isn’t drowned out by the sound of someone opening their Maltesers, then it’s on the right setting.

It just means the director really wanted you to feel those shells landing.

I certainly don’t want to give the impression we get a great number of complaints about volume levels, but it comes up periodically. I had a phone conversation with a chap last week who was going to “report us to the  health and safety”. What’s difficult to explain to him is maybe he feels that way, but there were a hundred other people in that cinema and the chances are it wasn’t too loud for them. In fact people travel to Uckfield because our sound is so good.

The final conundrum for me, and the crux of it as far as I’m concerned, is I don’t stand in the theatre thinking, boy that’s loud, but I love it, sod you all. To me it sounds spot on.

It feels like someone is complaining that something is too good. Which is weird. Then they think I’m being difficult when I disagree. I’m not, honestly. Well maybe a bit, but it’s my game isn’t it?