Movie theatre magic

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0:52Welcome to the Forum from the BBC World Service. I am Izzy Lawrence. Today we look at the history of the buildings where so many dreams were born. Well, home from the movies at last. Looks like it, Aunt Maddie. What, Aunt? Hello, son. Well, daughter, how was the moving picture tonight? Mmm, lovely. Movie theatres, or cinemas, existed long before that original version of A Star Is Born was screened in 1937. They now come in all shapes and sizes, from tiny independents to huge multiplexes. But how relevant are cinemas now in an era of on-demand streaming, where you can watch films just about anywhere, at any time?

1:41One answer comes from forum listener Gina from California, who has formed a strong bond with her local movie theatre. It's an historic cinema building that had previously fallen into disrepair, but was then restored to its former glory and is now run by a small local company. This theatre, the way it looks, the way it's inviting you in, the way that the people who are in charge of it are actually thinking about the audience. Who is going to go see these movies? What do they actually want? And that's one of the main differences is that this thing is run by such a small company that they really understand us.

2:23And they give us a lot of treats. And I'm so glad that it got saved because they didn't subdivide the space. And it's all one big space. You feel like you're in a really special location. You're in a special room. You're in a special building. and half of it is regular theater seating, regular old-timey theater seating, not the big stuff that they have nowadays in the multiplexes. And then they also have a bunch of couches, couches and tables. I remember sitting on the couches one time when they had a special event that was presenting the Academy Awards. And because it's an old theater, it even has a little stage.

3:06And so they've got like the best of all worlds because they can actually walk up on stage and say, hey, everybody, thanks for coming. Now we're going to give away prizes. So it's a really neat place. Listener Gina, I imagine that my three expert guests in today's programme also have a favourite cinema that means a lot to them. So what is it that makes yours special, Ross? Well, if I think back to the theatre that I enjoy the most sometimes, it's Arlington Theatre in Santa Barbara, California. It's one of the largest first-run single-screen theatres in the United States, almost 2 ,000 seats. And it's an atmospheric and it's where I had my first date with my wife.

3:45Oh, that's Ross Melnick, professor of film and media studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and author of several books on the history of the American movie theatre. What about you, Daniela? What's your favourite cinema? Well, my favourite cinema is Cinema di Piccoli in Rome, seating only 63 people. It's nestled in the Villa Burghese Park and it's got a real sort of unique and intimate movie watching experience. It's got a sort of a quaint wooden structure and a sort of dedication to children's room programming. So it makes it a real special venue for everyone, really. That's Daniela Treveri-Ginari, Professor of Cinema Studies at Oxford Brookes University, whose research and publications focus on cinema going in Europe.

4:34and what's your favourite cinema, Heyment? Well, I studied in South Bombay. I went to college in South Bombay and South Bombay is very famous for its Art Deco cinemas and I had three favourites, Regal, Metro and Eros. Since those are the places we could actually bunk college from and walk across, watch a movie and come back before the next class. Regal still runs as a single screen cinema, just about. Metro turned into seven screens, but since it was a heritage building, they managed to preserve the facade in the lobbies. Eros, unfortunately, again exists as a facade, but they turned it into an IMAX with a shopping mall.

5:14So these are my three favourite cinemas in Bombay. That's Heyman Chattuverdi, acclaimed Indian cinematographer who has spent the last decade documenting cinema buildings all across India.

5:31Let's look at the earliest cinemas. During the first decade of the 20th century, entrepreneurs in the United States and elsewhere started building dedicated spaces where people could view films. They were often called Nickelodeons. I find the speed of their arrival quite remarkable, given that this was only ten years or so after the very first public commercial film screenings in Germany and France. What were these Nickelodeons like, Ross? Nickelodeons were often developed out of storefronts in urban areas. So you could take just any kind of store, a retail store, a cafe, and you could turn it into a Nickelodeon.

6:11It was a sheet, a projectionist, and a series of chairs. Often one violinist, a pianist, to accompany the films. They were fairly bare bones. They were often attractive for lower class audiences, immigrant audiences. And in rural areas, they were the connection for audiences in those areas to entertainment in places where there wasn't a Carnegie Hall, a symphony, an opera house. This cheaper entertainment provided the opportunity for short films and later feature films to be accessible to people from all walks of life. And they showed not just films. Sometimes they also had vaudeville performances and traveling entertainers.

6:49And so these are not dedicated spaces? Well, the problem when you deal with early movie going in the United States is that there isn't one size fits all. So in some cases, yes, they were dedicated to movies only. In some cases, they were dedicated to a mixture of vaudeville and film. It really depends on the year, on the location and which venue we're talking about. How soon did these types of cinemas take off in Europe, Daniela? Well, Europe adopted the concept of dedicated cinemas remarkably quickly, just a few years after the US Nickelodeon boom. In France, for example, purpose-built venues appeared by 1906, 1907, with Paris obviously leading the shift from these makeshift spaces to dedicated film houses.

7:36And around the same time, UK, Germany, Italy saw a rapid development of cinema spaces from travelling exhibitors and music hall on to dedicated cinema venue, often driven by the booming film industry. So by 1910, permanent cinemas were firmly established across Europe, only two to three years behind the US. And what about the first cinemas in India, Haymant? I've seen a lot of old drama theatres from the 1800s that got converted into cinemas in the 1920s, 1930s. But I have a little anecdote for you. I'd gone to a state called Gujarat on the west of India. And I went to meet this gentleman. He had a 1920s cinema and he took a shine to me for what I was doing.

8:25And after I'd finished photographing his old cinema, which is from the 1920s, he said, look, if you have 10 minutes, I want to take you for a short drive. so we got into my jeep and we drove about a mile i think and he asked me to stop we got off my jeep and he says hey man what do you see so i said i can see this really old big stone wall and this huge giant wooden gate um traditional gujarati wooden gate and he said no hey man what do you see beyond that there was a bit of foliage there there was a bush and i peeped over it and discovered there was an old uh box office window made of wood and i peeped inside it was an empty field There was nothing there.

9:02And he said, look, you know, the oral history of our town is that when the Lumiere brothers came to India in 1896 and showcased their short films in Bombay at this place called the Watson's Hotel, he said the ruler of our princely state happened to be present at that screening. And he was so fascinated by the Lumiere Brothers cinematograph that he pulled out this wad of cash and said, whenever you have a projector for me, please send it back to India. So this booking office apparently was from 1906 and it was the first open-air cinema showing silent films on Lumiere Brothers cinematograph projectors.

9:42Is that the oldest one you've actually photographed? Oldest purpose-built cinema, if you can call it that. It used to apparently show movies only after sunset. Wow. And not on full moon nights. So it was like that. So you brought your little rugs and cushions from home and you sat in the field and you watched a film on a bed sheet stretched between two trees. That was the oral history that I got from the gentleman. Well, going forward a little more from 1906, by the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, London had over 500 cinemas for a population of about 5 million. By that time, the US had a population of about 100 million, which was served by around 10 ,000 cinemas.

10:26Who were the audiences, Ross? The audiences were as diverse as the cinemas. So again, if you're thinking about the cities, let's just take New York as an example, you might have cinemas that appealed to Italian-Americans, Jewish-Americans, African-Americans. You have cinemas that are organized by neighborhood. You have cinemas that are organized by class. And you also have cinemas that are beginning to be built much larger by 1913, like the Regent would purpose-built – first purpose-built deluxe cinema in upper Manhattan. And so at that point, you're beginning to have a cross-class audience. You're beginning to draw in a different kind of crowd than one that's more organized for neighborhood cinemas.

11:03If you're thinking about the rural audience, again, you're bringing in those who are location-oriented. So what's interesting about cinemas is that they're tied to transportation. They're tied to streetcar lines. They're tied to proximity. And they're also tied to cost. Now we think a lot about, I'm going to go to this theater because of this movie's playing. A lot of people just knew that they would go to a certain cinema on a certain day or they would have the time to go to a cinema because it was nearby. So the audiences are as varied as the population as you get into the 1910s because the stigma is going away.

11:35The stigma of the movies, especially in the United States, in urban centers was that they were for the lower class, for immigrants. They were for people who are not part of the upper echelon of society was the idea of movies in the zeros and the early teens. That begins to change in places like New York as you get The Regent and then The Strand in 1914. And suddenly movies are now attracting people who come in costly furs and come by car. And now you have difference in price that allow you to have a cross-class audience, which is how you get that whole conversation about the rich rubbing elbows with the poor.

12:08and that everyone is treated like a king and queen because you now have ushers wearing gloves and tuxedos and you have all of the trappings of what we would now think of as the kind of deluxe movie-going experience.

12:29What was the atmosphere in these cinemas like? There were often piano players improvising to accompany the pictures, but what else was there? The atmosphere of the movie house really depends, again, on the size and scale. You have movie theaters that had just one pianist, one violinist. Others had large orchestras. You were also treated at that point to often a travelogue, a newsreel, a short film, and also increasingly, especially in opulent theaters, even stage shows. And so really what you had was what people referred to as an evenings entertainment. Now we think that we go for the movie. But back then, people went for the overall experience.

13:07So you get what people refer to as prologues. Prologues would be small stage shows that would often in thematic or aesthetic relationship to the film presented. So if you were going to have a film that might take place in Brazil, you would have a Brazilian-themed prologue that would be presented before the film. If you were at a smaller theater, you might just have musical accompaniment as well as, again, the newsreel, the short, et cetera. So it really depends so often on the size and scale of the theater. And, you know, when you think about the moviegoing experience in the 1910s and 20s, I'd love to give you some very pat answer about how everyone went to see it like this.

13:44No one, virtually no one saw the same any film as the theater nearby. And also because of the way films were distributed, it also mattered when you saw the film. If you saw the film on its first leg, you would see possibly a pristine print that had not been projected, you know, 25 or 200 times that had become to get scratched and chewed through the projector. So you had all of these different kinds of temporalities and contingencies on your experience. And when you get into the rural areas, films could be 3, 6, 9, 12 months after people saw it in the larger cities. So the movie going experience in the teens and 20s is truly as varied as the audiences and cities and towns and spaces all around the United States.

14:26But if the film was to be seen clearly on the screen, the lights in the auditorium had to be dimmed. This was both an invitation for audiences to relax, but also a cause of moral panic among more conservative people, wasn't it, Ross? Well, there was a great concern about the actual social structure of movie houses in the United States. And there was a great concern about what darkness might produce. And there was a concern that women would be accosted. Pickpockets would take money from you. You could be accosted or assaulted at a movie theater. One of the things that was developed by a man named Samuel Roxy Rotherfell, who was famously known as Roxy, who would go on to build the Roxy and manage the opening of Radio City Music Hall.

15:07He actually invented something called daylight motion pictures, which was a process in the early to mid-teens, which he tried to innovate, which was going to be movies essentially with the lights on. And that way, people wouldn't have to worry about these things. It was basically just a lot more light going through the projector and obviously the lights on. But it gives us a reminder about the concern about security and safety. And that's been a perennial concern about movie theaters forever.

15:42As cinema audiences grew, so did the size of the new buildings to accommodate them. After the First World War, we see a raft of movie palaces being built all around the world. Some of them seated several thousand and remain architectural landmarks to this day. So would you say that by the 1920s, cinema had become the dominant commercial form of mass entertainment in the US and in Europe, Daniela? Yes, and in a way, movie palaces really revolutionised the cinema going in Europe between 1910s and 1920s, elevating it from what was perhaps a casual pastime to a grand cultural experience. And these venues were massive, they were luxurious, and they often were designed by renowned architects.

16:31Amsterdam Tuschinski Theatre, that opened in 1921, epitomized this era of architectural grandeur with that sort of a real blend of art deco and German design. Some beautiful example existed in Europe, the Gaumont Palace in Paris, opening in 1911, at the time was the largest cinema in the world, and had even equestrian shows in its early days. Oh, wow. Yeah, showcasing that versatility of these spaces. In Rome, we have the Cinemadriano still active today, which blended sort of fascist monumentalism with Art Deco and a theatre that wasn't limited to film screenings. It hosted operas, ballet, political events, and became a real central space for public life.

17:25So palaces that were really much more than just showing films. They really provided an immersive sensory experience with that sort of architecture, with the live orchestras and Grand Foyer that by sort of 1920s had really redefined cinema as a sort of almost a theatrical experience, becoming sort of a cornerstone of urban cultural life. So is it therefore the films that are bringing people in, do you think? Is it the actual cinema that's doing it or is it just that everything's now in one place? I think it was a real mix of sort of social, cultural and technological factors because audiences had really developed a growing appetite for films.

18:12And what had begun as a novelty at Fares became gradually a sort of a demand for cinema as the main attraction. So companies in Europe like Parthé and Gaumont in France were producing sort of a mass level short films so exhibitors could rotate programmes and audiences could go back and see new films again and again. But there were also technological improvements that were really important. So purpose-built venues had darker interiors, as we said before, but also more comfortable seating and better projectors that transform that sort of chaotic fairground strainings into immersive cinematic experiences.

18:56I've lived and I've loved and I've lost

19:10Molly you're all right you certainly saved these kids the big change in the late 1920s and early 30s was the arrival of film sound What you heard there was an extract from Lights of New York, often credited as the first American feature film that had both recorded music and dialogue throughout the whole film. Sound proved very popular with audiences, but required a relatively big new investment from cinema owners who wanted to switch to the new technology. But I wonder if, with the arrival of sound, all those people who used to provide accompaniment to silent films, pianists, organists and other performers, lost their jobs en masse.

19:59What happened to them, Ross? Between 1926 and 1929, thousands of pianists, violinists, and huge orchestras, organists, they all do begin to lose their jobs. This is a process that goes into the 1930s. And the wholesale transformation of the film business from a silent film business that is accompanied by live performance becomes one of synchronized sound. And in the process of that, we lose something and gain something else. But what's lost is the liveness of moviegoing. Not just the musicians, but also those stage shows fade out, partly because we don't have the orchestras anymore. That's one part of it.

20:38And the other part of it is the depression comes. So there's a massive change that takes place in the late 1920s into 1930s in which most of the musicians are lost. And many of those stage performers and movies, as we think about them now, become something closer to what our experience is now, where you go to the movie theater. you hear the exact same score as intended by the composer and as recorded by musicians, not in your local movie house, but in Hollywood. In the interwar years, Art Deco became one of the leading stars in the visual arts and architecture. Indian architects came up with a very distinctive take on Western ideas, and some of the cinemas built in India between the 1930s and 60s are real visual feasts.

21:23Aren't they, Heyman? Yes, they are. And I think the first Art Deco purpose-built cinema in Bombay was The Regal in 1933. And then it was followed by Metro and Eros, the ones I mentioned earlier. I want to get an idea of what these buildings look like. I've not been to an Indian cinema, so I don't really have a good idea. Right. So the first three actual Art Deco cinemas, as is the term and as is the visual familiar to an American or an European, They were these tall soaring structures with the metal and the gold work and the motifs of sunrises and frozen fountains and so on and so forth. A lot of concealed lighting, a lot of layers on the walls which had lighting inside that would create these really shadowless, beautiful ambiences.

22:12And very often you'd have this fairly elaborate facade, but you may not have anything art deque inside. You might have some terrazzo flooring, you might have, you know, a lovely stone staircase, but the auditorium itself would just be a tin shed with seats. So what kind of audiences did these picture palaces cater for? Well, Indian cinemas have always catered to an entirely, you know, a disparate class. You could buy a five rupee ticket or you could buy a 50 rupee ticket, but you're all there for the same experience. and in India the cinemas used to have 999 seats or less or a thousand seats or more because of the tax and excise structure so you paid less taxes on something that was less than a thousand and different taxes for cinemas that were bigger and I mean I'm just going off track a little bit but what I find really interesting what I've realized over this journey of mine is that when you go from a 1 ,000-seat cinema to a 150-seat multiplex screen auditorium, the 850 people used to actually make up the bulk of the audience and were the reason a movie was successful have now been denied the pleasure of watching a film in a collective space.

23:22So with the advent of the multiplex, we've lost an entire social strata, rather an entire social strata has lost its space of entertainment. We've now come to an intermission in today's brief survey of movie theatre history, but we'll be back for the second half of The Forum from the BBC World Service in a couple of minutes.

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24:44Welcome back to The Forum from the BBC World Service. I am Izzy Lawrence and I hope you have settled down and switched your phones to silent as we continue our discussion of the history of movie theatres with cinematographer Haymant Czatroverdi, film historian Professor Ross Melnick and Professor of Cinema Studies Daniela Treveri-Gennari. Daniela, I think that in your childhood some Italian cinemas would still screen films continually throughout the day. So what exactly did a cinema ticket buy you at that time? And when did specific showtimes become the norm? Well, by the 1950s, the practice of specific showtimes had become the norm in most cinemas, especially the larger ones.

25:32Cinema tickets typically brought you an entry to a schedule screenings with general seating, and that was a system that would help cinema managers managing a more diverse audience efficiently, but also providing a shared communal viewing. Neighbourhood cinema still operated with a more flexible schedule or continued screenings, especially for popular films. I do remember in the 1980s still being able to enter a cinema halfway through the second part and then being able to carry on watching it repeat and repeat for many times. Oh, wow. Yes, it was incredible. So the narrative was all distorted in a way.