A Tale of Two Cinemas or The Fine Art of Cinema Programming

When I first moved to the West Midlands in 1998, I discovered Birmingham's most famous repertory cinema - The Electric in the heart of Birmingham. Tickets were cheap, especially for double-bills and particularly for the large category of concessions, of which I wasn't one. The seats were slashed, both auditoriums smelt of wee (there were occasional tramps in for the afternoon double-bills, presumably for the warmth), the raking on the ground floor left quite a lot to be desired (leading to largish audiences - of which there were admittedly few - sitting in that weird chequerboard pattern that seems to form quite naturally) and the toilets were pretty horrid. I didn't care a jot of course. I watched all but two of Pedro Almodovar's movies in a huge celebration leading up to the release of his new movie, 'All About My Mother' (still one of my favourites of his). I watched 'Once Upon a Time in The West' on the big screen (and on film at that), an experience that no home viewing experience can ever quite replicate. I saw Marx Brothers movies ('A Night at The Opera' and 'Duck Soup') that I couldn't remember seeing before, although I probably had when I was too young to either remember or appreciate them. The same guy used to sell me my ticket, take a pittance for a fantastically stodgy slice of cake and then tear my ticket. And probably ran upstairs to turn the projector on. For a cinephile, the place was as close to heaven as it got. I loved it.

The then-Virgin chain opened a cinema that was less than ten minutes walk from my flat: twelve screens with perfect air conditioning, THX-certified sound, perfect raking & legroom. The programming included both blockbusters and indie movies from all over the world (Almodovar's newer releases, Susanne Bier, Lars von Trier, Studio Ghibli, you name it). A (then available) four-weekly or eight-weekly pass cost next to nothing. My monthly cinema bill went down from £100-£150 to less than a tenth of that. My visits to the Electric dropped to zero.

A few years later, The Electric closed and the building was left derelict. I felt a slight pang of remorse on my way to air-conditioned luxury and a perfect view as I knew that it was people like me who were responsible, but how could The Electric compete with great facilities and note-perfect programming? Sure, I had to go out and moan occasionally about an out-of-focus picture, missing sound or noisy patrons as opposed to The Electric's silence and rock-solid projection, but this was a small price to pay; a very small price (see above: less than a tenth).

My Cineworld went all digital; the first conversions were pretty obviously funded by European grant money, judging from the first movies shown on those two screens (10 & 12 for detail obsessives). But once whatever contractually-obligated minimum period had expired and as it started to make commercial sense to convert all the other screens, the cinema discovered the commercial benefits of Bollywood movies, a category I have absolutely no interest in. All of a sudden the cinema effectively lost two or three screens to me and the indie movies I loved were nowhere to be found.

The Electric meanwhile reopened as some kind of luxury cinema with leather sofas, stuffed olives and various flavours of gin. Both screens are now digital and look pretty good (the digital vs. film is a topic for another time). But I noticed that one week in 2009, one screen was playing the new 'Star Trek' movie while the other was playing 'Angels & Demons', both of which I'd assumed might be generally pretty accessible elsewhere. On one particularly memorable occasion, I went to see a one-off screening of 'The Spy Who Loved Me' (the first movie I can remember seeing at the cinema) with Richard Kiel who plays Jaws in attendance. My boyfriend was pretty ill and I was fairly drunk, but the main reason I walked out was because after presumably failing to get hold of a print, the cinema was projecting the DVD. The DVD. Not a blu-ray. The DVD. No-one else with their olives, their gin or their sofas seemed to mind. Needless to say I've never been back. And I'm never going to go back. I can't really think of a reason to pay to watch a movie on someone else's home cinema set-up when I have a perfectly good one at, well, home.

As far as repertory cinemas go, "there is... another..." and that would be the Light House in Wolverhampton: well-behaved audiences (well, when there are other people in the audience!), gorgeous projection and sound and - above all - absolutely perfect repertory programming, balanced by the odd, presumably-out-of-commercial-necessity mainstream film. I go whenever I can, which is not that often, but I try; I guess I've learned something.

Do I blame myself for the fact that a lot of my movie-watching nevertheless now has to be done at home, courtesy of LoveFilm? Of course I do; I'm not an idiot. There are many lessons to be learned from this story, lessons about the power of monopoly, the true price of short-term financial gain, that it's better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all, that you get what you pay for. But the main lesson? Never just walk out of a movie and run outside to get a cab, always stop and moan at the staff for projecting a ruddy DVD first; you'll never want to speak to them again after you've left.