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

[Famous Mortimer]

The Winding Wheel, now the place where tribute acts and Daniel O'Donnell perform when they're in town (Wentworth Smith will know this, just giving the rest of you some local flavour), used to be a cinema; as, I think, was the place that's now the local museum?

I miss the Regal. I think some of it still exists in that building, just sealed off from however much the nightclub took over. I'd love to see a classic film / arthouse cinema in town.

[bomb_dog]

The ABC, then CANNON cinema at the Regal, now a Wetherspoons in Gloucester:

Ah, The Living Daylights, Fox and The Hound, Ghostbusters 2, Indy + Last Crusade, Back to the Future 2 & 3, 101 Dalmatians, Empire of the Sun, Robin Hood, Batman, Gremlins 2... little booklet with local adverts, knight in armour advertising popcorn/nuts, Kia Ora, Pearl and Dean, etc.

and this

[NurseNugent]

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).

I grew up in Rainhill, so this was my local too. I think the last film I saw there was Jurassic Park which would have been the year it closed too I think. Other memories include watching Return to Oz on my 9th birthday then having my first ever MacDonalds, and being kicked out for being disruptive during Doc Hollywood.

[Ian Benson]

The ABC, then CANNON cinema at the Regal, now a Wetherspoons in Gloucester:

I think I watched Vice Versa there.

[Hank Venture]

These are my two. Yep.

[Replies From View]

I was born and raised within 5 minutes walk of the place, and lived near it nearly all my life.

Are you now dead?

[Sony Walkman Prophecies]

I used to go to this beautiful 1930s art deco cinema because I grew up in the beautiful city of York which is full of nice things like that.




My fondest memory though is going to see Pulp Fiction at the Warner Bros complex at Acomb Moor.

Since I was only 13 at the time, I had to pretend I wanted to see Priscilla Queen of the Desert (which was the only other film showing) and suffer being laughed at by the rough cashier girl who probably thought I was a queer.

I managed to sneak into the showing of Tarantino's greatest film ever made in the end though so it all worked out.

[Gulftastic]

Are you now dead?

Yes.

Inside counts, right?

[Thomas]

Mentions of Derby? Nottingham? Chesterfield? Zanzibar?

I must surely have walked past some of you people.

[Clatty McCutcheon]

Ah, I remember when you could see Sleepless in Seattle for £1.76 on a Monday.  1993 it was, at the Odeon in Hamilton.  Nowadays that gets you about 1.76 hours of parking in the pay and display car park on the site.   

[castro diaz]

I really enjoyed reading this thread.  That is, until the morose thoughts surrounding our abandoned past and collective childhood became too dense and I had to stop reading.  Nostalgia's light shone too brightly and it can sometimes make your eyes run.  Because, irrefutably, those buildings and those days and gone and that's that.  We didn't lose something.  When you lose something there's a chance you might find it again in an old box.  What we did was throw it away. 

Like replacing an idiosyncratic and threadbare cabinet your nan might have hid behind as a small girl with a sleek, catalogued lounge set with modern lines that every other cunt in the land owns.  Objectively superior, utterly charmless.  Within every facet of British life has this happened.  An inevitable and chundering move towards homogenisation and the uniform.  Multiplex Britain.  It doesn't matter if you're born in Plymouth or Aberdeen anymore.  Because you live not in a town, in a region, but in the 21st century, and everything is the fucking same everywhere.  Brash regulation came and ate up our cinemas just as it is eating us.

My favourite pub in the world was demolished last year, nicotined brick by brick.  They didn't even ask.  Not even a campaign led by John Cale could save it.  It was opposite a prison and had toilets outside so you could see the heat of your piss.  There was an old guy at the bar who would tell anyone who came in that he knew their father and to say hello.  I once put a number on the jukebox, Otis Redding I think, and had a dance with a girl I liked, but who I could never be with.  Everyone shut up, the landlady switched off all the lights bar the one above the dart board and we twirled around in the sawdust.  It's a car park now.  They rebuilt the pub in a heritage to museum to show tourists how a real pub used to be.  Rather than have it run as an actual pub to show them how it still can be.  We now have an inaccurate manikin with a disembodied actor's voice sing-songing about the romance of the docks standing where there should be an real, alive person talking bollocks into liquid.  We have, dear Joni, dug up a tree and put it in a tree museum.

But cinemas.  They've gone that way too.  I loved how they immediately failed to live up to the grandeur of their Olympian names within 5 seconds of stepping on the sticky floor in the lobby.  They used to get their carpets from the same company that does bus seats.  The Ritz, The Auditorium, The Playhouse.  Now showing Street Fighter The Movie for 2 quid, or £1.50 on a Thursday with a voucher from The Echo.  Yes we can get sweets but by them outside before, we're not made of money.  Our own portal to Hollywood was called The Theatre Royal, and was as unglamorous as it has to be with a name a thousand feet up above its station.  My mate used to work there on Friday and Saturday night and it is, apparently, the only cinema in Britain to have some fireworks let off in the middle of a performance.  The lucky film in question was American Pie 2 and nobody got chucked out because of cinema-goer solidarity.

It's not there anymore, and nor is my childhood.  Flats, obviously.  Instead everyone goes into the city to the multiplex and I haven't got the energy to complain about their apparent fucking awfulness.  I know, you know, we all know how inhumane they are but there they go, beacons of comfortable banality, next to a bowling alley and a fucking Nandos, showcasing bland anonymity and big comfy seats.  I don't have the strength.  Maybe it's the change in the weather (or something like that), or the fact I've just drank a jugfull of gravy, but I'm bereft.

In an anomalous glint of positivity, my local cinema now is great.  The entrance is €2, €1 for student twats like me, or free if you're under 18/it's a documentary.  They show the classics via a projector with an actual man in an actual booth, and they play a nice tune on the piano before each film.  It's not all great though, as it's somehow deemed socially acceptable to talk during the film's entirety and as a consequence nobody shuts the fuck up.  It was the location of the first ever laugh I got from the Spanish public.  Spoilers follow. 

Watching Citizen Kane with my parents there a few years ago, some old dears decided to watch 3 hours of the epic morality tale (very much the Citizen Kane of movies) and leave before the very final scene.  They had literally sat through 98% of it and only the final reveal, very much the key to the man and the film, awaited us.  But they paid this no mind and started doddering up the side of the theatre and towards the doors, muttering amongst themselves, the bright fire burning away on the screen behind their unknowing perms as the credits ran.  I leaned over towards them and said 'Era un tobogán.'  Admittedly not hilarious but the audience around me laughed and I realised I had finally made it here and immediately burnt my passport.

[Hank Venture]

Blinder Data: how do you know my cinemas are still open? Ever been?

[Blinder Data]

I spent the first few years of my life in Heaton Chapel, Stockport. While we occasionally visited the local cuntyplex that Subtle Mocking has already described, the Savoy in Heaton Moor was my local cinema, and amazingly it's still going:



Single screen, tickets still under a fiver. My most memorable film here was Babe 2: Pig in the City, because usually their choice was pretty crap, and it seems that has remained: one crowd-pleaser, one kids film. I guess they can't do much about that. It certainly wasn't as grand or clean as most cinemas I visited, and as a child I much preferred the bright lights and bowling alleys and cardboard cut-outs that the mutliplexes offered. But if I brought up a kid now and I lived in Stockport, I would take that child all the flipping time to the Savoy, and they'd better bloody love it. Suburb cinemas are a dying breed, and we must artificially inseminate them as much as possible.

I like their pleasingly shit website, and the first line that comes up under their name in a Google search: 'Savoy does NOT participate with "Orange Wednesday"'. How haughty.

_______________________________

On the subject of cinemas lying inexplicably vacant, it seems it's bloody hard to make money with a picturehouse nowadays. According to my mate who works there, the Odeon in Manchester, which will in about five years time be the only cinema in the city centre, is operating at a loss of half a million pounds a year due to high rent rates, staffing costs and an impractically large building.

There might be a little cinema opening up near me, but it'll be run by a horrible big nightclub and restaurant chain who have already opened up a sort of arthouse in the trendy part of the city. It's a nice idea but their existing one is pretty charmless and last time I was there sounds from the film next door were coming through the wall into the auditorium I was in. What a shambles.

And Hank, I assumed they were open due to how recent the pictures looked. If I assumed wrong I am deeply sorry. I stand by the regrettable lack of nostalgia in your post though.

[Hank Venture]

You were bang on, they are open. But they've been open for ages, since I was a toddler.

[Replies From View]

When I moved to London in 2004 I was delighted to find this cinema so close to where I lived:



Still there, too.  I haven't found out if it is owned by Odeon or one of the other big ones, but I like to think that it's an independent venture that's managed to retain the ground normally taken nowadays by the multiplexes.

On one occasion I had been shopping before the film, and had a bag filled with food that they told me I couldn't take in, lest I felt peckish and started tucking into my broccoli and big block of Cathedral City, depriving them of funds I might otherwise spend on their popcorn.  So I had to leave that bag of groceries with the bloody staff there until I came back out.  So fuck 'em.

Some nice history here:  http://genesiscinema.com/about.php

[oilywater]

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.

Not always the case that old cinemas are turned into bingo halls for old people, sometimes they're turned into sheltered accomodation.......for old people. Fucking Herne Bay.



This is where I had my first cinema experience as a 5 year old watching ET and the home of many treasured childhood memories of classics such as Ghostbusters, The Jungle Book, and, errrrr, The Care Bears Movie.

I had barely reached double figures before it was torn down by a giant middle-aged man wearing glasses



and turned into this:



I bet they even play bingo in there. THE CUNTS.

[olliebean]

I bet they even play bingo in there. THE CUNTS.

Is it wrong to be disappointed that they put windows in?

[DukeDeMondo]

Edit: No need for it.

[Replies From View]

Edit: No need for it.

Did you make the observation that the footprint of the building looks faintly coffin-shaped?  No need for that.

[Dusty Substance]

My local cinema in Bexhill, circa early 80s:

First film I remember seeing there was Return Of The Jedi, 30 flipping years ago. Saw many an 80s/90s blockbuster there before it closed down around 1994, before re-opening again in the late 90s as a slightly more artsy cinema. I remember it being packed for a screening of Cronenberg's Crash.

It opened and closed for about ten years before it turned into a venue for live bands (mostly tribute acts, but the occasional "used to be famous" band would play there too - The Spin Doctors performed there about six years ago).

It's been closed now for about four years and it's a real pity as it's a beautiful building and first showed films 100 years ago: http://bexhillcommunityplayhouse.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/Bexhill-Cinema-1900s-1.png


Former Bexhill citizen Eddie Izzard leant his support to a re-opening of the cinema a while back, but nothing really came of it other than this picture:

There was a committee to get the place re-opened before Izzard was involved but sadly one of those in charge was also some sort of BNP candidate which I just did not understand - How could anyone who claims to be passionate about the arts also affiliate with the BNP. What if there was a season of Polish fims being show? Would he ask to send them back?