What Were Cinemas Like When You Were A Child, Grandparent?

[Olarrio]

Eeeeee, this is where I had my first cinematic experience. And some truly memorable other experiences besides...

Ones that spring to mind include:

Waiting for my first date outside. Checking my watch. Julia's not here... Checking my watch again. *Where is she?* Fuck, i'm nervous. Still not here... Shit. Ok, screw it, I want to see this film and she's not here, i'm going.
So I go in. Take my seat. It's dark and i'm embarrassed by being stood up by my first ever date.
Five minutes later Julia arrives and the usher shines his torch in my direction.... "Is that him?"
Fuck. Yes it is. It is me.

Also:

A most wonderul fingering of my second date whilst watching Intolerable Cruelty. [nb]Soon to be my wife. Thanks Coen Brothers![/nb]

Also:

Watching The Lone Ranger with my sister a few weeks ago, who I see a maximum of once a year due to her living in Africa[nb]It's now a Reel cinema[/nb]

[Olarrio]

Whoops, sorry for the bold overload at the end there.

[Replies From View]

Here's something you may have noticed:  old cinemas usually get turned into fucking bingo halls.

Something you haven't thought of before:  It's old people who play fucking bingo.  Clearly they don't want their childhood cinemas enjoyed by future generations so get them turned into fucking bingo halls for them to continue enjoying alone THE CUNTS.

[Gavin M]

To be fair, my dad did have the best intentions when he took me here to see Free Willy.

[Brundle-Fly]

East Grinstead Classic cinema. The only pic I can find in all its glory. 1936. Right at the end of the road there.



Fave earliest cinema memory 1972



It closed down in 1990.



Saw this film in its final week. Crap, but the usherette gave the small audience free tubs of mint choc chip ice cream



Today? The Atrium. Nightclub, bowling alley and cinema. Never been to see a film there but apparently you can hear through the floor when anyone gets a strike.



Cue: Ennio Morricone's Cinema Paradiso theme.

[Replies From View]

I had a handful of childhood cinemas in Bath but the main one I went to was the Robins Cinema because they had a thing they did on Saturdays of showing slightly older films really cheaply for kids.  Thus in the early 90s I saw the Back to the Future and Bill and Ted films, ET, Flight of the Navigator and loads of others.  It was a bloody exciting time for the 12 year old me to be sneaking off once a week to see a film on my own.



It closed in 2004 and has a somewhat dated memorial website:  http://www.auat24.dsl.pipex.com/website/index2.htm


The other cinema I mainly went to was the Canon, which later became known as the ABC and was an Odeon before the Odeon multiplex was built and this building became (tragedy!) a comedy club: 


 

That was for all the big blockbuster films like Mrs. Doubtfire while they were still new.  My Mum and younger brother and I queued around the block to see Honey I Shrunk The Kids there.  It had a pleasingly sickly 1970s feel to the inside of it (seats and decor), despite obviously being a much older building that was used as a cinema from the first decades of the twentieth century.  Its projection equipment was ancient.  I loved that about cinemas before multiplexes properly kicked in - some of them felt like proper museums.  You'd go to experience the cinema, not just the film.



My other favourite was the Little Theatre for smaller, more independent films.  It still exists now as a Picturehouse:

[The Region Legion]

The ABC in Ewell, Surrey was my local:



Memorable viewings include Star Trek: Generations in 1994 (I was 9) and the Spawn movie in 1995. I think I may have even seen Men In Black there too just before it shut it doors for the last time in 1998 and became - what else - a block of flats. It was entirely knocked down, sadly. Lovely, old school cinema-come-theatre.

[Serge]

Derby in the '70s, it would either have been the ABC in East Street:



or the Odeon on London Road:



The ABC is long gone, knocked down in the 80s to make way for some more shitty modern buildings on the eyesore which is East Street. The lovely Art Deco building that housed the Odeon (built as the Gaumont Palace in the '30s) is still there, but currently houses a club called Zanzibar with a bizarre figure outside that always makes me think of a grumpy Bryan Ferry in a turban:



The Odeon stopped being a cinema in the mid-80s too, and for over two decades, the only cinemas in Derby were out-of-town Multiplexes (where, to be sure, I saw a lot of films.) Now there is an Odeon in the centre of town again, which on the minus side is in the bloody awful Westfield, but on the plus side, is within walking distance of my parents' house.

[Replies From View]

I like the idea of a minus side and a plus side of town.

[Serge]

All towns have a minus side and a plus side when I've finished with them.

[olliebean]

The Gaumont, North Finchley:





I think it was the biggest in North London, with over 2000 seats. (Didn't stop it being sold out the first time I tried to see Star Wars, though.) It was closed in 1980, demolished in 1987, for several years there was an open air market on the site, and now there's this:



with two theatres that between them seat about a quarter as many people as the cinema. Even the local 8-screen multiplex has fewer seats than the Gaumont.

[Hangthebuggers]

EDIT: I'll link instead, cos it's a massive photo

http://www.flickr.com/photos/oldcinemaphotos/2583753009/

It's now a chinese buffet. St Helens.

[boy with no qualities]

Somehow the little town I grew up in had its own single screen cinema till the mid nineties.
Empire Cinema, Kirkham.

[Johnny Townmouse]

This is a great thread.

One of the things about cinemas that I have never been able to qualify in my head, is the sense that they are FAR bigger inside than the seem on the outside. They are fairly large buildings, but some of the really not that big cinemas can have three screens. As a kid, whilst queuing around the building to get in to see Superman, I don't think I ever made the connection that the screening area was on the other side of the wall. It was like it existed out of time and space, like a weird cross between a Tardis and a portal to another dimension.

I imagine if I ever sneaked in through a fire exit I might feel differently, but there is something HUGE about the inside of cinemas that doesn't square with the size of the buildings.

[Chriddof]

The ABC in Ewell, Surrey was my local:

Oh wow. That was my local cinema too! My first film there was Back To The Future in 1986 (I was seven years old), my last one was Twister in 1996 (I stopped regularly going to the cinema at this time due to illness). After this place I could never really take to that soulless Odeon multiplex they built on Epsom High Street a year or so after the ABC was knocked down.

And as it happens, the Ewell ABC was the site where they filmed most of The Comic Strip Presents... episode, "Dirty Movie"!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pueLn06pJM0

[Neville Chamberlain]

This was my local cinema, in Yeovil:



As you can see, in a respectful nod to the building's history, it's now the Cinema Bed & Sofa Store! This wasn't where I had my first cinema experience (that was in a tiny cinema in the tiny nearby town of Crewkerne when my mum took me to see ET), but it was where I had my most memorable when my parents took me to see Santa Claus: The Movie in 1985 and the projector broke down. I cried, apparently :-(

[phes]

First cinema I remember was The Savoy in Northampton, which by then (1985) was a part of the Cannon chain. My friend's mum took us to see The Black Cauldron but it had sold out so we chose Young Sherlock Holmes. The cinema seemed just huge, way, way bigger than I had imagined, and looking at some pictures it does look like it held a couple of thousand so no surprise that we felt like ants in there. The film was terrifying, I mean utterly terrifying, and i'm pretty sure we spent most of the film with our eyes screwed shut. I definitely remember my friend actually bursting into tears, either when the turkey comes to life in the restaurant or the knight in the stained glass window pursues a man until he falls under the wheels of a carriage and is crushed to death. So yeah, big, imposing, utterly fucking terrifying. Actually a horrible experience. Those were the days!

[Lisa Jesusandmarychain]

EDIT: I'll link instead, cos it's a massive photo

http://www.flickr.com/photos/oldcinemaphotos/2583753009/

It's now a chinese buffet. St Helens.

Spooky! See two of the three films advertised on the front of the ABC as was ("Superman" and "Watership Down")? Well, the young Lisa Jesusandmarychain saw both of those films in that very cinema! How d'ya like them celluloid apples? Did you ever go to that cinema yerself Hang-O? Remember the "Man or Woman" dodgy poss transvestite conundrum personage who sold the tickets? I think the last time I was in that cinema was to see "Groundhog Day", that would have been the year it done closed down (there's a new multiplex nowadays,just round the corner from the site of the former cinema, I noticed last time I was in the 'Hel).

Other films I saw at the ABC, St.Helens: Blazing Saddles/ Monty Python And The Holy Grail double bill (got in with me dad, who insisted I was 14 even though I wasnae, "Blazing Saddles" was a AA, y'see), and another underage double-bill I got into (by myself this time, ever so bold, I was), at the tender age of 15 was a double bill of top unerotic film "The Real Cinderella" and "Kentucky Fried Movie" (both "X"s, I only went to it for the latter film, I wasn't really bothered about the softporno, honest).

[Gulftastic]

This was The Plaze, on Briggate in Leeds.



It showed adult films. It held a fascination when we were young, and it closed before we got old enough to go, but I'm quite glad about that. Looking back, it must have been seedy as fuck. It's now been taken over by the Grand Theatre, which can be seen further down the same row of shopfronts and is something to do with Opera North. I always dreamed of one day re-opening it as an art house cinema, which I think would do great business in Leeds City Centre.

[Swoz_MK]

Wow, that building is incredible. Is it still there?

It is, although there has been talk of knocking it down for at least 15 years.

[Catalogue Trousers]

The Majestic, King's Lynn.



And its - majestic - foyer.



Living in a tiny village just across the Lincolnshire border during my teen years, this place was my real introduction to solo cinema-going. Where I saw: Star Wars, Flash Gordon, Superman II, Raiders Of The Lost Ark, and my first ever X film, on a double bill with Escape From New York. Sadly, the X film was Visiting Hours, a completely pish slasher film which I walked out of halfway through in boredom.

Here's the Odeon cinema in Allerton, Liverpool - about 15 minutes walk from my chosen college and as a result the venue for such essential 80s releases as Wrath Of Khan and The Sword And The Sorcerer...



And here's the sadly-deceased ABC cinema on Prince Of Wales Road, Norwich (hence the anachronistic titles which have been placed on it as a "ghost of cinema" by some clever person). Venue for Search For Spock, Big Trouble In Little China, and an evening where I eagerly dashed from one late-night horror showing to the next. The second was the remake of The Blob: the former, I can't recall, but I do remember enjoying it a lot, which was why I was so stoked to see another film straight away.

[Frazer]

Sunderland's ABC


now The Point - a bunch of bars


I have a vague memory of every show being a double bill, it seemed like every film (in the mid 70s to early 80s) was preceded by either Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger[nb]Minotaur![/nb], a Spiderman film or a James Herriot short... and cartoons too!

[cosmic-hearse]

The Odeon in Croydon:



(someone mentioned above the sometimes baffling spatial dimensions of a cinema - I mean, look at this place, how did they fit a cinema here?)
This place is long gone - it closed in the mid-80s - but I my first visit to the cinema was here (ET), followed by Return Of The Jedi.


Later I would go to the the ABC - here it is, in chronological order:







I saw Indiana Jones & The Last Crusade, Batman (it was rated 12 - I was 11), Ghostbusters II & some other shite. You can see a few glimpses of the place in a few episodes of Peep Show as it's next door to the flat where Mark & Jeremy live.

There are flats there now.

[cosmic-hearse]

The Odeon picture seemed to disappear, here it is again:

[Famous Mortimer]

This was the ABC, then the Regal, now no longer a cinema but a shitty nightclub. Brings a tear to the eye, it does.



was once this:

[Lee Van Cleef]

I saw Jeremy Irons in a Dungeons & Dragons film at the cinema once.

[kngen]

The ABC in Dumfries - saw Star Wars, Close Encounters and many others as a wean:



It's still there, incredibly. It had an unusually long corridor to the actual screen, which always heightened the sense of excitement and anticipation. Well, it didn't seem unusual to me, so subsequent visits to other cinemas always prompted a feeling of 'oh, we're already here?' in comparison.

[Neomod]

My old home town, Worthing's classic Odeon. I saw Star Wars here 4 times in 1977. They even had a Darth Vader and stormtrooper at the first performance.





It was the first Odeon in the uk with a clock tower and even though it was listed was demolished to make way for some crappy shops. Unforgivable.

The Dome (still around) where I saw JAWS[nb]also Adult Fairy Tales[/nb].



Opened in 1911 it's one of the oldest cinemas still in use in the UK.

[thenoise]

The Alexandra Theatre, Newton Abbot


I think the first film I saw there was a rerelease of the Jungle book.  It used to have a nice upper circle and everything then they split it into two screens sometime in the late 90s.  The downstairs screen was better as the upstairs one had a big crack down the centre of the screen (it was actually built like that).

It is still going, despite regularly sitting in an audience of 3-4 throughout my adolescence.

[Catalogue Trousers]

Why not come and enjoy a film at Cinema City, Norwich?



Hot dogs on sale in t'foyer!