21st Century Dodos: A Collection of Endangered Objects (and Other Stuff) (22 page)

Bear in mind that in the heyday of usherettes most cinema screenings included a newsreel, a supporting feature, and then the main film, so loads of people would roll up once the house lights had gone down, making the usherette’s role vital. It always paid to be polite and friendly to your appointed usherette, as she was more likely to place you in good seats. Dare to be rude, or make the wrong remark, and you’d be stuck right up the back in the corner with a restricted view.

During the interval (more on these in a moment), the usherettes would take up position at the end of the aisles in front of the screen, or at the edge of the balcony if you were in the upper tier, sporting a tray that hung from their necks, containing ice cream and other delights. These would be sold to patrons whose shambolic queue would snake up the aisles.

As with many of the other cinema jobs mentioned in this book, the role of the usherette fell foul of the multiplex cinemas, allocated seating, and computer ticketing systems. As films got shorter in length and stopped having intervals, their ice cream selling skills were no longer required, and the role has pretty much died out today, except possibly in a few arthouse cinemas.

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Newsreels

The origin of the name was simple: a newsreel was one reel of film containing news. They originally lasted for about five minutes, and were screened before the main feature at cinemas. The first newsreel in the UK was shown in 1910; it was silent and captions introduced each item. Before the days of television, and indeed mass radio broadcasts, they were the only alternative to newspapers for updates on national and world events, and they proved to be very popular. So much so that some screens, and sometimes whole theatres, were given over to rolling newsreel coverage.

As technology developed, so did the newsreels, adding sound and, eventually, colour. There were a number of different studios providing newsreel coverage, the most famous of which were Pathé, Gaumont, and Movietone. They came into their own when reporting from the First World War, but the height of their popularity was during the 1930s, when they were a staple of every screening at the local picture house, and the classic format – a magazine of news, sport, and popular culture narrated by a pitch-perfect posh bloke – took hold.

The Second World War was a watershed moment for newsreels. They were still seen as a vital source of information from the front, and they did their best to avoid government propaganda, but as a result they were often the bearers of bad news. The newsreel images of the liberation of those in the Nazi concentration camps shocked a nation, and many thought the studios had gone too far, although history considers them as performing a vital service during a time of great turmoil.

Even after television entered most homes, audiences still sat through and enjoyed newsreels, but the writing was on the wall when the BBC introduced live daily news in the mid-’50s, and the
cinema version, which only changed twice a week, was seen as dated and out of step.

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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