Screen Two - with the curtains.

Periodically around here we have a heated debate about tabs. Tabs are what we professional cinema types call the curtains that close in front of the screen.

Do we really need them? They’re pretty rare in other cinemas, no multiplex outside the West End has them as far as I know. Whole generations have grown up without them being part of the cinema experience.

Don’t get me wrong, I think they’re lovely and have always felt it’s not a proper cinema without them, but they’re another thing to go wrong and require vigilant maintenance if they are to continue operating smoothly. There’s motors and keeping cables greased and bobbins running freely and when they go wrong, boy they can make a mess as the snagged cable tries to pull everything off the wall.

As the bunching of the material takes up quite a lot of space in the proscenium, if we did ditch them we would be able to increase the size of the screens, something that rather appeals to me.

In the end that’s why we’re all there isn’t it? To watch the screen, not the nice drapes. I programme quite tightly so quite often only one person sees them anyway.

I’m sure customers don’t storm the foyer of the multiplex in Brighton demanding some kind of fabric covering to protect the screen’s modesty. People still go there regardless.

On the other hand I’m pretty sure it has a positive subliminal effect, adding a patina of comfort and familiarity that’s quite relaxing.

I like to think we aren’t another cookie cutter cinema and things like screen tabs are what set us apart. After all, without exception all the few remaining flagship cinemas we have in the West End retain screen tabs. I love watching the elegant swish of the tabs at the Odeon Leicester Square and the Empire. Is that a bit weird?

Our original vision way back in the 70’s was not to make the orange painted boxes I mentioned in my previous post but to simply make smaller versions of a proper cinema. Perhaps, now more than ever, we need to hold on to that ideal.

That doesn’t mean we’ll be having a cinema organ anytime soon though.

I was thinking about why people still go to the cinema, and how as I was growing up it very nearly all went horribly wrong.

It seems obvious to me you should go to the cinema but I’m probably a little bit biased having four hungry mouths to feed. Children I mean, not actual mouths on my face.

We hear a lot about how the arts in general need to be subsidised and kept alive because they’re culturally important. Whether you agree or not you have to admit it’s pretty impossible to replicate the theatre in your front room, there’s no wings, no lighting and nowhere to put the actors, the Italians aren’t going to come and hang all those priceless da Vinci’s around your living room for an evening let’s face it.

A cinema however, as I keep reading, is perfectly capable of being set up in even the smallest two up two down.  The phrase “home cinema” has now entered the lexicon, making me wince  every time I hear it. The industry should have nipped that one in the bud, trade marked it or something because a 36″ television and cheap all in one surround system is categorically not a cinema.

Now, the sarcastic among you are already saying to yourself, no it isn’t because there aren’t kids on mobile phones and someone chewing popcorn in my ear. I can also pause the film to make a cup of tea and sit in my pants scratching myself. If all this is true, why do 170 million people a year still go to the cinema?

Mind you, at the peak in 1946 1,635 million people went to the pictures. That is an incredible number, approximately 30 visits per person each year. If things were like that today we’d be having around 2.5m admissions annually in Uckfield. We simply wouldn’t get them all in and I’d be Uckfield’s richest man, dictating this to my flunky whilst lighting cigars with £20 notes. Of course they also had war and rickets, but come on, it must have been the sweet life to be a cinema owner in the late 40’s.

And maybe that’s why cinema exhibition got in the terrible state it did by the 1970’s. They’d all had it too good. I distinctly remember a breed of independent cinema owner I came across as a kid. Big cars, swaggering attitude, I think I remember fur collared overcoats but that may be fanciful. What I do remember though, is when my dad took me to one of their cinemas, they were almost without exception shit holes. Not a penny had been spent on them since the first week of Gone With The Wind, old-fashioned, cold and uncomfortable.

There’s a not so fine line between traditional and neglected. A very large number of cinemas were simply neglected which must have contributed to the decline in admissions, it wasn’t all the fault of television. In 1946 the cinema was probably warmer and more comfortable than your house, a situation that changed rapidly after the war. The big swaggering exhibitor though, he just continued to suck his sites dry and not reinvest. As long as he could make the payments on the Wolseley all was fine.

When they finally woke up and smelled the popcorn it was probably too late, but that didn’t stop them knocking the cinemas about and converting them to multiple screens, usually in the most appalling and cheap way possible. It wasn’t only independents who were guilty, circuits too constructed tiny orange painted boxes with postage stamp screens in the cavernous old stalls and continued on as though nothing had happened.

To compound the issue films got worse and worse. By the 1970’s, while Hollywood was experiencing the flowering of Martin Scorsese, Bob Rafelson and Francis Coppola turning out seminal films like Taxi Driver, Five Easy Pieces and The Conversation we were busy making  Adventures of a Plumbers Mate and a never ending torrent of  lifeless TV sit-com spin offs. Take out Kubrick (who was American) the genius of Nic Roeg and Monty Python, all you’re left with is a few arty films no-one saw and Get Carter. Don’t believe me? Here is Time Out’s 100 greatest British films.

No wonder my dad was stressed all through the 1970’s. He had started in the heyday as a rewind boy and had eventually realised the dream of owning his own cinema. Instead of packed houses coming to see British talent like Stewart Granger, Anna Neagle and Michael Wilding we were struggling with Man About The House and, I kid you not, Can You Keep it up for a Week? Yes, there was Star Wars and Jaws, but there are 52 weeks a year to fill.

With shit cinemas and shit films, is it any wonder people stayed away in their millions? Dad put everything on the line in the mid seventies to refurbish, convert to two screens and stem the tide, still believing as he did that things must get better. His foresight saved us and thankfully we’re still here, rather incongruously given how many big towns lost their cinema. The fact we lost all our “bars”* had a lot to do with it, but that’s a story for another day. We’ve also reinvested heavily over the years and never let the place get rundown. Simple really.

The opening, by an American company, of The Point in Milton Keynes in 1984 is seen as the turning point that brought people back to the cinema. Clean, comfortable cinemas with good sound and projection? What a novel idea. Fortunately this gave British exhibition the kick in the pants it needed.

Although it still took large operators like Odeon, years to catch up as they held on to outdated practices for far too long. Having been cock of the walk for so long, these new fangled multiplexes confused the old boys still holding the reins.

I’m convinced that period of lazy cinema owners and lazy film makers is still having an effect today, in many ways the habit of cinema going was not passed on to the next generation the way it should have been. Clearly new and ever more dazzling ways to “consume” movies has an effect but the cultural habit was lost and it was entirely of the industry’s own making.

Yet, we’ve just had our biggest weekend of all time (and I have the records to prove it) so clearly there’s still an appetite for cinema in large numbers if you give people what they want.

Is there a good reason to go to the cinema? Absolutely. Last Monday night I watched Apocalypse Now! in screen one, with a sparkling new digital print and uncompressed six channel sound. I know that film inside out and back to front, I can tediously quote you every line, I know every cut and every sound on Walter Murch’s amazing sound mix. Yet, I hadn’t seen it in the cinema for probably 20 years and to my surprise  I saw things in it I hadn’t noticed before, simply because it was on the big screen.

Since I was a kid I’ve had the privilege of watching audiences up close, often night after night with the same film and I can tell you that nothing compares to the palpable frisson an audience  enjoying themselves gives off.

The noise coming from Bridesmaids as the ladies in the cinema wet themselves is almost as deafening as the dumb ass robots hitting each other in Transformers. E.T and Elliot escaping, Michael Dorsey revealing himself in Tootsie, the farting cowboys in Blazing Saddles, the entire audience leaping back as one at the end of Fatal Attraction, the almost inconsolable sniffling at the end of Titanic, and the dancing in the aisles over the credits of Mamma Mia.

You can do all that at home, sure. But it’s not as much fun. And to think we nearly screwed all that up for a cheap knob gag.

*Barring was an old boy network created pecking order that kept cinemas from playing films until the bigger boys had finished with them.

Following my post on Monday I had a dig around the local cinemas and the multis have gone completely mad. Is this the most number of screens showing a film ever?

T Wells is showing HP 29 times on Sat & Sun, I worked out it’s on seven out of nine screens. That’s insane. It can only be as I surmised, sod the film, it’s just a siren song to get you in to buy more carbonated beverages. Rather like the way we let Tesco sell $150m blockbusters for £8.97 as a loss leader for bananas.

Don’t you think we are rather undervaluing our key product?

On a lighter note someone kindly dropped in this old photograph, which I have never seen, of  The Picture House. It’s around 1947 as far as I can make out although it may be a year or two later as The PH was very behind release in those days. The poster shows Dead Reckoning with Humphrey Bogart and a crappy Old Mother Riley comedy as the main draw that week.

It’s kind of the same but different. Here it is now, it’s a bit like spot the difference. Fascinating stuff. They also left an old programme from 1938 which I shall scan and upload later.

If anybody out there has other pictures or stuff that I can borrow to scan or stories from the “olden” days then I’d love to hear them. It’s only five years to our centenary and our archive is rather empty, I have almost no old pictures and I’d love to have one of the old single screen interior. I can picture it in my head but until they finally release that recording thing from Brainstorm that’s no good to anyone.

Fairly laid back for a Monday. That’s largely because Harry Potter has been a fixed item for some time and we’ve been selling tickets for a few weeks. Lots of them.

It got a bit testy at one point as I came under pressure to hold a couple of the films from this week. There’s not much room for anything else though as I’m running HP across two screens during the week and, for the first time, across all three on Friday Saturday and Sunday.  Given my whining “ooh, let’s go all arty ’cause Hollywood sucks” post from a couple of weeks ago I can understand it may appear I lack the courage of my convictions.

Not quite. HP, whilst being a global phenomenon is also an upmarket posh kind of global phenomenon so it fits right into my demographic. This was seen as rather unfair by one of the Very Big Corporation of America distributors who wanted more shows next week for their film that doesn’t contain any posh wizardry at all.

None of this would have been a problem had the multiplexes not started using films as a loss leader to sell slop bucket sized Coca-Colas. Twenty years ago we really could stretch a film out much longer. If a punter couldn’t get in they would buy a ticket for another day, sometimes up to a week or two in advance. Now they just motor off to Brighton “because it’s on every half an hour down there”.

In the past there would have been one print in each cinema, so in my vicinity that meant Eastbourne, two in Brighton, Tunbridge Wells and sometimes Burgess Hill and East Grinstead. Including us, seven prints in the area. As far as I can make out there are four in T.Wells, eight in Brighton, five in Eastbourne. I’ve got three and the two other independents have one each. Twenty two!

This means business is sucked out of the film very quickly, it’s a hollowed out husk after four weeks.

The expensive part of the film hire, what we pay for the film, is at the front end so it doesn’t benefit us to take all the money up front. As the run continues the percentage we pay starts to go down so surely it would be better to take more of the money later?

This leads me to conclude that multis are luring you in with 46 shows a day simply to sell you sacks of maltesers and vats of Sprite. Which makes them retailers, not exhibitors.

And surely the point of 16 screens was to offer more choice?

Shortening a films life also plays into the hands of those who want to bring forward the DVD windows. Madness.

I have to keep up. I could be all principled and doggedly stick to one print but I’d be the loser.

It used to be so easy you know, the film turned up on a Sunday morning (I’m going back a while) and you showed it, people came to watch and on Saturday night you put it back in the tin and sent it on its way. Sunday morning the cycle would repeat. Happy days, although the prints were terrible. They made a hissing noise when you wound them because of all the oil from the box floors they’d been dragged over. Anyone here remember V cuts? I thought not. It was a way of repairing sprocket holes without having to make a join. Boy is that ever a lost art. In fact film projection is going the way of the steam engine driver, something only a few die-hard part timers do at weekends.

Because now we live in a brave new digital world, which I have embraced wholeheartedly. However, I’m faced with another in a what seems like a long line of dilemmas.

Welcome to the world of VPF’s, and how exhibitors are trying to fund this technological Elysium. Because I’m either a visionary or financially reckless, I went wholly digital just a year ago.

I raised the money and I’m making the repayments myself. At this point anyone from Odeon reading this is probably rolling around on the floor laughing, or ROFLing as the hip kids say, because the studios are largely paying for their new kit through VPF’s.

VPF stands for Virtual Print Fee. It’s a bit complicated, so stay with me. 35mm prints are or were, expensive to make. In theory supplying a simple hard drive is far cheaper, so the studio is quids in. Imagine the difference between supplying 1500 prints of Harry Potter at around £500 – £750 each and putting out 1000 hard drives at £50 each. Warner Bros in the UK alone save about £1m*, multiply that by all the territories in the world and you can see why they are so keen for us to go digital.

Now, exhibitors rightly see this as unfair. Why should we shoulder the cost of all this new technology when the biggest cost benefit goes to the distributor?

Enter the VPF. Digital supplier gives kit to cinema, cinema pays about 30% of the value to the supplier. Finance company, via the supplier, pays the rest. Everything that plays on digital projector attracts a fee paid by the distributor. Fee goes into big pot to pay off finance.

The fee is broadly the cost of a 35mm print which they would have had to supply if the exhibitor was still on film. After eight years or so all the finance is paid off, studio stop paying and all cinemas are magically equipped with spangley new digital projectors.

Marvelous. Or not.

I have the opportunity to “back in” to a VPF scheme brilliantly put together by a consortium acting on behalf of mainly independent exhibitors. If all I ever played were mainstream films from the studios this would be a no brainer, but I don’t.

Non studio and smaller distributors are disadvantaged by the VPF and as such are reluctant to get involved. In the end they will have to if they want their films to play major circuit cinemas but more marginal bookings may well suffer.

To illustrate, I heard a story this week that gave me considerable pause. It could very well be apocryphal and I apologise to those who may know differently. There is a limited release film in the UK at the moment that is doing very well. The distributor, a studio, put it out on a very small number of prints, mostly digital I believe. Some cinemas have had trouble booking this film because the distributor is unwilling to risk the VPF in their situation. No VPF, no problem.

This could well be a new way of keeping cinemas out, instead of the old “we don’t have enough prints” routine or it could be a load of dingo’s kidneys. Either way it worries me.

We’re fortunate in being treated very well by the distributors, I get pretty much everything my own way. However, when there are battles it’s usually over limited release films. I’m not stupid I can see that if there are only 50 prints, Uckfield isn’t exactly in the top 50 must have sites in the UK on release. Unless it has the words King’s and Speech in the title.

Digital has made most of these battles on limited release pictures go away. Consider that I would also have to pay a fee for the live opera and ballet and it seems to me I could be walking into a nightmare.

My independence is the one thing I’ve got and I don’t want to lose it. So on the one hand it seems insane that I wouldn’t want to reduce my monthly payments by around 2.5K per month (!) but on the other hand in three years it will all be over and I can do whatever I want without answering to anyone. Surely that’s important too?

*My numbers may not be super accurate, but the proportions are correct.

Back from LA, and it’s all still here. Saw a few films out there including the much vaunted Super 8 and the much vaunted, in certain circles, Tree of Life. Both seemed to promise more than they deliver, which is not to say they’re bad films by any means. Maybe it’s my age, I sometimes miss the wide-eyed wonder with which I watched films as kid.

The two films I enjoyed the most were Senna, which I hadn’t had a chance to see in the UK and Woody Allen’s latest, Midnight in Paris. The Woody Allen is kind of silly, a sort of intellectual Goodnight Sweetheart and isn’t for everybody but it had enough echos of vintage Woody to be hugely satisfying. It reminded me of being fourteen and thinking how sophisticated I must be for preferring Annie Hall over Star Wars.

I saw Midnight in Paris as well as the rather overdone French-Canadian picture Incendies at the Laemmle cinema in Santa Monica, there are several in Los Angeles and they specialise in art house films that don’t play the mainstream theatres. In truth they’re rather run down and in desperate need of some tender loving care, but as I sat watching trailers for a bunch of interesting looking future attractions I admit to feeling a kind of stabbing envy.

I’d much rather be playing these interesting films than suffering through another week of woeful business on Green Lantern.

Now this is a potentially dangerous line of thought, a lot of people like these films and It’s not for me to look down my nose at people who do.

Cinema was built on mass wide appeal pictures, but the audience I have for this type of stuff is limited or at least exhausts itself very quickly, completely at odds with the national picture.

We seem to be caught in some sort of cinema going parallel universe.  If every film were constructed around monarchy, set during the war or featured ladies of a certain age murdering Abba songs I’d be typing this from my hot tub in the Hollywood hills.  Sadly, or thankfully probably, this isn’t the case.

It appears our audience has narrowed to the point where ordinary films just don’t drum up enough business. Sure we’ll do huge numbers with Harry Potter and Cars 2 but our weekend take on Bridesmaids for instance was only OK. I’m sure multiplex managers are struggling to cope with the onslaught. For these mainstream films we effectively have the families, or the kids that can’t escape to the bigger towns because they can’t drive. Never fully understood that, we’re cheaper than the circuit opposition, our picture is always in focus and our sound is definitely set at the correct level. The older audience are simply not interested at all.

On the flip side The King’s Speech did business way, way above what would be expected in a town this small, so it’s not as if people aren’t out there and it’s not as if they won’t come if there’s a film they want to see. It’s just the films they want to see fall into a very narrow category. Or maybe I’m playing the wrong films.

Sadly it’s not that simple, basically Bridesmaids was pretty much my only option this week. I could have played Potiche last week, and in fact had it dated but the distributor in their wisdom decided to take it out to protect some of their other bookings.  Being digital there was no excuse for this, but I didn’t put up a huge fight as I couldn’t be sure it was worth it. You have to choose your battles carefully at times.

We’ve sold huge numbers of tickets for the upcoming Met Opera season, which doesn’t start until October. The Cherry Orchard, live from The National has sold out two screens on Thursday. This is all fantastic but too infrequent to bet the farm on. The entire Met season last year grossed what one very big film would, but took eleven months to do it.

So I suppose I’m asking a pretty huge question. Should I eschew the Hollywood mainstream and try going down the art house route? The answer I suspect lies somewhere in between, but  first week mainstream fayre is not something that’s easy to give up.  And let’s face it Mamma Mia and King’s Speech were pretty much as mainstream as it gets.

Another, perhaps more salient question, is my reach exceeding my grasp?

When all is said and done Uckfield is a town of 15,000 people, we punch way above our weight and having all these highfaluting ideas may not be appropriate for what is in effect a small town provincial cinema.  I’ve just spent a fortune on new digital projectors making us capable of screening films to a standard often much higher than the opposition, maybe I overdid it?

However, if I kept at it I might be able to build something quite special. I certainly don’t want to make it sound like things are really bad, they aren’t, but I suspect I could do better.

Maybe this post is too candid but I’m confused and I’d like to hear some opinions, and the idea of this blog is to give an insight into the dark corners of my cinema owner mind. Scary isn’t it?

K

If you’re interested in how it turned out, not too bad. No movement on KFP evening shows, but WB were pretty laid back about Hangover. Fingers crossed Senna brings them in and we get a nice light grey drizzle for the next few weeks, this weather is killing us.

Manic day all round with our Laughter Lounge comedy evening doing very well. Fantastic evening with top comics Phil Kay and Wil Hodgson particularly good. I even did five minutes myself.

Next post will be from Hollywood! Of to LA tomorrow..

The official release date of Kung Fu Panda 2 in the UK is June 10th. However we’ve been playing it since last Wednesday because Paramount decided to add five days of “previews”. These extra performances are not usually subject to the same playing time rules that apply when the film opens officially. In essence, and within reason, we can play the film anytime of day and for as many or as few performances as we see fit.

However, when the film officially opens on June 10th it has to play all day, all shows. This means no other film is allowed to play in that screen, the upshot of which will be a film like Kung Fu Panda plays to empty houses at 8.00pm at night when I could be playing something else that might get an audience.  And there is nothing I can do about it, other than not play the film at all.

Surely, it’s my cinema,  I can play the films when I like? Nope. Not first run films anyway, and I need first run films, so I toe the line.

It’s important to remember the studio has spent many millions of dollars making and promoting this film and they’re entitled to have the best shot at getting their money back. But it can be so frustrating when they know and I know that no bugger is going to come and see this film after 6 O’clock in the evening, and to be fair the 8pm show on cartoons is the first to go, quite often in the second week.

It’s slightly more frustrating with KFP as we’ve already taken a lot out of it and June 10th feels like a second week booking not a first.

People who know about these things, whoever they are, were sure that digital projection would open up a new golden age of cinema with more varied content and flexible playing times. Admittedly it’s still early days and truthfully since going all digital we have found room for more non mainstream product than ever before, but the bulk of the playing time still has to be given over to mainstream movies from mainstream studios, because however nice it is to play minority films the large audience numbers come from studio films. And all the time that is true we have to dance to their tune.