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?

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.