I've been going to the movies for close to sixty years. A lot has changed about the movie-going experience in that time.
As a child, most of the sessions we attended were double features.
Two full length movies one either side of an intermission. The first feature would usually be of inferior quality (B-grade) with slightly below top draw stars.
If the session wasn't a double feature then the pre intermission offerings might include newsreels often containing news that was weeks old. There seemed to be two main news providers.
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| Movietone News |
Movietone News seemed mostly screened by the
Hoyts network of cinemas and often came in an Australian edition that featured
Kookaburras emitting their call in the titles.
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| Pathe News |
Pathe News seemed the preserve of the
Metro network of cinemas and was a more refined presentation than it's
Movietone counterparts seemingly reflecting it's European, as distinct from North American, source.
The pre intermission presentations often included a cartoon.
Tom and Jerry was very popular.
A comedy or two would be thrown in for good measure.
The Three Stooges would provide zany, ostensibly violent comic behaviour or there might be
Laurel and Hardy with their comically sad escapades.
By far the most boring featurettes were mini travelogues set almost invariably in the seaside villages of US states like
Maine or
New England which without exception included scenes of fishing trawlers with birds overhead to indicate a catch.
My parents and I laughingly called these featurettes, which one had to endure before seeing the real feature, 'fish stories' even though they generally had little, if anything, to do with fish.
As a child my neighbourhood movie house was the magnificent
Metro Kings Cross. It was a beautiful art deco two level cinema, originally a live theatre venue called the
Minerva, with plush red covered seats and a special glass fronted room where people with hearing difficulties could sit to view the movies. I believe the architectural style of the building is referred to as '
streamline moderne'.
The cinema had a reincarnation as a live theatre venue when
Hair was first staged in Australia in 1970. The
Metro has not operated as cinema or theatre for years. It still stands in
Kings Cross but I think it is used as recording studio nowadays.
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| The Metro today is a heritage listed building |
The behaviour of patrons today is very different from my childhood. When I was young it was thought a great joke to roll
Jaffas down the auditorium and giggle at their sound. Of course this would result in an usher shining their torch at you and threatening your eviction from the cinema. Great fun also was had shouting insults to friends sitting elsewhere in the auditorium.
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| Jaffas |
Mostly though, the patrons would sit in the dark in awed silence watching the miracle of the moving picture with it's accompanying sound to the very end when the curtains closed imperiously. That would trigger an immediate rush for the doors to beat the playing of the National Anthem, otherwise you had to stand there paying respects to the distant monarch whose visage we only ever saw in those newsreels, newspapers or wall photographs.
Nowadays there are no double features, no fish stories, no zany short feature comedies or weeks old news items. Just a seemingly endless stream of advertisements and trailers before the one and only feature begins.
Oh and there is no more sitting with respectful silence to the end either. At yesterday's screening of
Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows there was so much movement of people in and out of the auditorium during the feature that I started to keep count of how many times certain people in the packed cinema made the trek to and from their seats. At least five people went more than four times each. My companion Cs noted the same phenomenon commenting as we left after the movie that he assumed some of them must be drug dealers!
