21st Century Dodos: A Collection of Endangered Objects (and Other Stuff)
Page 11
Remarkably, newsreels continued to be shown in some cinemas throughout the 1960s, and the last company producing them, mainly for overseas screens, closed its doors in 1979.
Subsequently, the newsreel archives have become important historical documents for scholars, and are often plundered for footage by documentary makers. Pathé news issued ‘best of’ collections taken from every year of broadcasts, as video cassettes, and later DVDs and even multimedia greetings cards, to be given as gifts marking a person’s year of birth. So, although you don’t see newsreels at the cinema any more, they are still available to view and learn from, for, as we know, history has a habit of repeating itself.
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Smoking Sections
Smoking sections in the cinema used to be on the right-hand side.
Or perhaps that was on the left?
Either way, one half of your local Odeon would permit nicotine addicts to spark up to their heart’s content (or until their hearts packed in, whichever came sooner). This was fairly common practice up until the mid-’80s, when most cinema chains phased out smoking areas which, to give them some credit, was about 20 years before the UK government managed to do likewise in other public places.
Those of us who can remember these pro-smoking days recall a strange wall of fog covering 50% of the screen. If you were a nonsmoker sitting with a smoker, or had the misfortune to turn up late and find no seats in your half of the theatre, then you had to watch the whole thing through a mist.
This may well have been fine for some films – I am sure that Howard the Duck was enhanced by not being able to see much of the actual film – but cinema-goers watching The Fog must have been doubly blinded.
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Intermissions
Intermissions – a break of five to ten minutes in the middle of a film – were pretty standard cinema practice until the early 1980s, but are an extremely rare thing nowadays.
The intermission served many a purpose. It was a chance for the projectionist to change reels without having to rush around like billy-o to make it appear as seamless as possible. It gave those in the seats time to nip out for a quick wee – these were the days before pelvic floor exercises, you understand. But, most important of all, it offered cinema staff the opportunity to flog you more food and drink – hot dogs, popcorn, some nuts from that Crusader who was always being asked if he had any, or a refreshing Kia-Ora, unless you were a crow as it was, apparently, too orangey for you.
Oh, and let’s not forget that films in the old days were looooong. Very long.
Consider this. Some of the most popular children’s films of the past 20 years or so have been Toy Story 1, 2, and 3. They run for 80, 92, and 103 minutes respectively.
Mary Poppins, on the other hand, lasts for 2 hours and 20 minutes. Can you imagine keeping a kid in a cinema seat for that long without the need for a widdle? It was nigh on impossible without an intermission.
Films for grown-ups were, of course, even longer. Gone with the Wind clocks in at just under four hours. Lawrence of Arabia is not much shorter. I remember going to see Gandhi with my school in 1982 and that definitely had an interval. At 3 hours and 11 minutes, it needed one.
So where did the intermission go – assuming, of course, that a period of nothingness can go anywhere at all – and why don’t we have them any more? Films are often still long enough – Avatar is pushing three hours and the splendid Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford is pretty much the same length (and worth every second, if you ask me) – but we seem to be credited with the ability to sit through them without the need to top up on food or get rid of excess fluids.
There are a number of reasons, and the truth is probably a combination of the lot of them. Very few cinemas actually project film any more, the films being screened digitally or from a DVD, so there is no need to change the reel. The multiplexes that sit next door to multi-storey car parks in out-of-town shopping centres like to show a film a number of times in each screen every day, so the lack of intermission speeds up their turnaround time. And the gigantic portions of food served these days can easily last us three hours, if we pace ourselves.
Intermissions are now very rare and often only used for novelty effect. Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez’s two-part film Grindhouse was shown in US cinemas with an intermission between the two, as a homage to the film genre they ripped off – sorry – paid tribute to.
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Waiting Ages for American Films to Come out
There were very practical reasons for this, but it was bloody annoying nonetheless. You see, from the early days of cinema right up to the late 1990s, it was common for UK audiences to have to wait months, sometimes over a year, to see the big new Hollywood films. It was not uncommon in the ’70s and ’80s for the Oscars to be full of films that no one in the UK had had the chance to see at all. It used to drive film buffs mad.
It was all down to the cost of film stock. In the days of film reels and projectors it cost a lot of money to make each copy, and studios and distributors tended to produce a certain amount for the US markets and then ship out the same stock to their overseas market once the Yanks were finished with them. We were basically getting America’s hand-me-downs. It made commercial sense, but it also meant that us lot in Blighty were twiddling our thumbs for months on end waiting for a film to finish its run in the US before we got to see it.
There were other benefits for the film companies from this strategy. If a film absolutely tanked in the US, they could decide not to release it elsewhere at all, thereby saving the cost of distribution and marketing. They could also spread out the promotional campaigns, and not have to squeeze the press junkets into one or two days when the film stars were available.
This practice has pretty much fallen by the wayside now that multiplexes show most films digitally, and there is no need to ship loads of film stock overseas. You do still see a bit of a delay, often to allow actors to travel to the various locations for promotional purposes, but we are now only talking a few weeks at most.
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Local Cinema Adverts
EXT.DAY
Two animated chaps, both of whom look a bit like that bloke the Pink Panther spent most of his time pissing off, are running down a sketchily drawn high street.
CLOSE UP
CHAP 1: ’Ere Bert, this is the place.
CUT TO
Dodgy still photograph of an Indian restaurant with shaky text proclaiming the name of said establishment.
VOICEOVER: Just a short walk from this theatre.
Ahh, those were the days. No cinema trip was complete without a flurry of shockingly bad adverts for local shops, businesses, and eateries. They were usually slotted in after the big budget ads for Malibu and Cinzano, and before the Crusader was asked if he had any nuts and the Westlers hot dog appeared from the side of the screen like a giant penis. Perhaps the thinking was that we wouldn’t notice how terrible they were if they were sneaked in between proper commercials.
It never worked.
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Saturday Morning Cinema
You would turn up at your local Odeon or ABC cinema at 10am on a Saturday morning, load up on penny chews, and sit down with your mates for two to three hours of uninterrupted viewing pleasure.
The Saturday morning cinema screenings were for kids’ films only (with begrudging dads often sitting up the back having a snooze or trying to read the paper from the refracted light of the projector), and were made up of cartoons, adventure serials, public information films, and other odds and sods the projectionist found lying around.
The adventure serials were the best. Flash Gordon would zoom across the screen in pursuit of, or escape from, Ming the Merciless, and every episode would end on a cliffhanger, meaning you had to go back the following week to find out what had happened. These serials kept doing the rounds for decades, with kids of the ’70s and early ’80s watching black and white shows from the
’30s and ’40s. No one seemed to mind, but they didn’t have Nintendos and mobile phones back in those days.
I seem to remember a serial from the ’70s that featured a disembodied head (possibly a shrunken one from a South American tribe?) who hung about with a bunch of kids and got up to all sorts of scrapes. There was a particularly peculiar song at the beginning, with the head singing direct to camera. If anyone else can remember this oddity, then do please drop me an email; the address is at the end of this book.
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Projectionists
A typical projectionist’s job description from 10 or 20 years ago:
Working alone, in a windowless room, you will be operating a number of mechanical projectors and ensuring the smooth running of films in each of the cinema’s screens. Heavy lifting may be required to transport reels from one screen to another. You may also be responsible for the physical environment of the auditorium – air conditioning, lighting, curtains, etc.
Other responsibilities will include:
checking film reels as they arrive from distributors
loading reels, in the right order, onto the projectors
ensuring the smooth running of each film while playing
checking sound
maintenance of equipment
hours will include afternoons and evenings.
A typical projectionist’s job description today:
Press play
The rise of the multiplex and digital projection means that the art, and it is an art, of film projection is dying out. Splicing lengths of film together, setting a new reel up for showing, the intricacies of the projector itself are all being replaced through the use of hard drives. One ‘projectionist’ can now manage every screen in a multiplex from a computer at a desk. Next time you go to see a film, the chances are there will be no one in the actual projection room at all.
Ah, but this is progress, I hear some of you cry, and perhaps it is. But it is soulless, heartless, humanless progress and I am not sure I like it.
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B Movies
Or supporting features, to give them their proper name.
These were often, but not always, low-budget films screened before the main attraction or as part of a double-bill. Cinema-goers got more for their money in those days, with several hours of viewing for the price of one ticket. B movies would frequently prove to be the training ground for the stars of tomorrow, with actors such as Robert De Niro, John Wayne, and Jack Nicholson, and also Oscar-winning directors such as Frank Capra, Jonathan Demme, and Francis Ford Coppola, all cutting their millionaire teeth on low-budget supporting features.
Essentially these were films that didn’t cost very much to make, relatively speaking, and didn’t need a ton of marketing money thrown at them for the simple reason that they were being shown before a film that did have a ton of marketing money thrown at it. They gained most of their audience by default.
This is not to say that they didn’t have their fans – far from it. Over the last 60 or 70 years, a massive fanbase for B movies has sprung up, especially the genre films – science fiction, westerns, and particularly horror. Some of the greatest horror films ever made were B movies, or came from B movie beginnings.
B movies started out in the ’20s and ’30s with studios forcing theatres to take the supporting feature if they wanted to show the big blockbuster. The practice continued for many years, and only really died out in the 1980s because of the sheer cost of production; films that had once cost less than $100,000 to make were now closer to millions. Nothing was really ‘low budget’ any more.
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IN THE NEWSAGENT
Where we bought our sweets and comics …
10p Mix-up Bag
In the 1970s, the ten-pence piece was a magical coin. It was, for most kids, the sum total of their pocket money for the week. It was also the shiny silver key that unlocked the wonders of the mix-up bag.
Whatever you called it where you lived – 10p mix, mix bag, ten penny mix-up – it amounted to the same thing: a small paper bag into which you could place an array of sweets until you reached your budget.
And, magically, ten pence worth of sweets was just enough to get the average child through a suburban Saturday.
All newsagents had a selection of penny sweets in front of their counter. They displayed them there so that they could keep their beady eye on schoolchildren who might be, shall we say, a trifle overzealous with their selections, or those for whom the capitalist notion of fair payment for goods was slightly lower down the pecking order than the thrill of hiding a pink shrimp up your sleeve.
There was a variety of selection methods available. These were very much dependent on the layout of the shop, the trusting/gullible nature of the proprietor, and/or the range of sweets available.
Self-service. A stash of paper bags hung from a string next to the cornucopia of tubs and boxes of sweets. You helped yourself to the sweets you wanted before handing over the bag for payment. This was the most common practice.
Deluxe self-service. As above, but with a small pair of tongs.
Assisted service. Where the newsagent himself would handle the bag and selection process, guided by the juvenile customer. ‘I’ll have one of them … and one of them … no, hang on … two of them … how much have I spent so far?’ This was a less common approach, and was normally restricted to the particularly friendly proprietor – ‘Can I tempt you with some Parma Violets?’ Answer: ‘No you can’t’ – or grumpy ones who didn’t trust kids to do it themselves. It tended to be unpopular with the adult customer queuing behind waiting to buy 20 JPS and a copy of Razzle.
But far more important than the selection method was the selection itself. Which combination of sweets would you go for? There was generally a lot to choose from: Black Jacks, Fruit Salad, liquorice pipes, flying saucers, chocolate rainbow drops, cherry lips, pink shrimp, fried eggs, gobstoppers, Hubba Bubba, golf ball chewing gum, Refresher chews, red bootlaces, coconut mushrooms, aniseed balls, fizzy coke bottles, Mojos, milk bottles – I could go on!
The final decision was a combination of impulse purchase and mental arithmetic. You wanted to get as many sweets as possible for your money, but the real gems on the counter were often that little bit more expensive.
For reasons of clarity and modern comparison, we shall assume that we are talking post-decimalisation currency for this next bit.
In the early to mid-’70s we still had the halfpenny piece, and sweets such as Mojos, Black Jacks, and Fruit Salads were priced at ½ pence each (I am sure I can remember these being two for a ha’penny at some point but perhaps I was imagining that). So you could ram your bag full of 20 halfpenny chews and have enough sugar to keep you going for the whole weekend. Which was fine, but lacked a certain variety.
On the other hand, if you went for too many tuppenny sweets, such as Refresher chews or lollipops, then you could be going home with just five items and lots of empty space in your bag.
So, the best strategy was to include a combination of price points, genres (chews, chocolates, sucky sweets, etc.), and sizes. It was not an exact science, but it was often possible to exit the sweet hop with the near-perfect selection.
Here is my suggestion for the ideal 10p mix-up bag:
1 x Black Jack
½p
2 x Fruit Salad
1p
1 x Mojo
½p
1 x Swizzle lolly
2p
1 x Hubba Bubba
1p
1 x large pink shrimp
1p
1 x milk bottle
½p
1 x coke bottle
½p
1 x Refresher chew
2p
1 x flying saucer
1p
You can still find mix-up selections in many corner shops and newsagents, but the prices have really shot up, enough to make your eyes water more than a quick shot of lemon sherbet.
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Look-in
La-la-la-la-la Look-in (as the jingle went) was a weekly magazine for children. It was the kid brother (not kid sister, casual sexism was alive and well in the ’70s) of the TV Times. As such, it only featured ITV shows and the stars of them, but managed to include pretty much every iconic character that appealed to children across the network. It included interviews, features, comic strips, quizzes, competitions, and the ubiquitous letters page.
It ran for 23 years from 1971 and original copies are much sought after by nostalgic 40-and 50-somethings. For many years the magazine would sport a painted cover by Italian artist Arnaldo Putzu. His film poster style illustrations of Richard O’Sullivan, Lee Majors, or the cast of Space 1999 were very much of the time, so as Look-in evolved and became more modern it ditched them in favour of photographic covers of pop and film stars.
A typical issue might include ‘Bionic Woman’, ‘Black Beauty’ and ‘On the Buses’ comic strips alongside interviews with Marc Bolan or Mick Robertson from Magpie. The How? team could show you how to construct a tug boat from bits of old rubbish or there might be a behind-the-scenes feature on Tiswas. Ed ‘Stewpot’ Stewart manned the ‘Newsdesk’ page (which was presumably written by a journo and then had Stewpot’s mug stuck at the top) and a different celebrity would, allegedly, select the letters for the letters page each week.
The magazine was essentially a propaganda rag for ITV, which may seem a bit dodgy now, but this was back in the day when there were only two TV listings magazines – Radio Times for BBC and TV Times for ITV – and neither could list the other’s programmes. So that made it all OK.
Look-in ceased publication in the mid-’90s (I’ll be honest, I am surprised it lasted as long as that), but will be remembered most for being around during the golden age of television in the ’70s and ’80s, and is fondly remembered by many a kid who grew up at the time.