Posts numberd 8 , 9, 10, 11 contained the main cinemas that both entertained and educated me for nearly ten years, while posts 12, 13 & 14 show my early excursions, but there were others… The ABCs Stourbridge, Edgbaston, Bristol Road and New Street Birmingahm. Odeons Stourbridge, Dudley, Walsall, Worcester, Queensway and New Street Birmingham. The Clifton, Sedgley. Alexandra Lower Gornal, The Kings West Bromwich. The Gaumont Birmingham and others. However once I began my new career at Derann I just never seemed to have the time to get to the cinema. quite as frequently, as I was either showing films at working mens clubs, editing films with Derek or occasionally by myself or simply watching one of the numerous films loaned from the 8 or 16mm libraries at Derann. That doesn’t mean to say I missed many new cinema releases, no Derek and myself often made visits to local cinemas, sometimes by ourselves or with Anne and the two lads if the films were suitable. ‘Earthquake’, ‘The Towering Inferno’, ‘Logan’s Run’, ‘King Kong’, ‘Star Trek: The Motion Picture’, ‘Airport 75’, ‘Superman’ and new 007 movies are just a few that saw us all sitting in the audience. Anne wasn’t a fan of horror, so Derek and myself would often sit through them by ourselves… ‘Rabid’, ‘Squirm’, ‘Mutations’ and ‘To The Devil A Daughter’ spring to mind. However time permiting, Derek would always insist that when we were in London overnight that we should make time to see a film. So the West End became something to look forward to as I’d only ever seen one film in London previously.That had been in 1969 when I had travelled down to the Casino Cinerama to see ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’. In fact I travelled to London twice to this cinema, once to see ‘2001’ and a few years later to see ‘Silent Running’. As I learned from our visits together Derek enjoyed horror films, but not gore, never the less this never stopped our visits as the there were so many cinemas in the West End. The Empire Leicester Square: we saw ‘E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial’, ‘Dracula’, ‘Raiders Of The Lost Ark’, ‘Poltergeist’ and many more. The Odeon Leicester Square: where we enjoyed ‘The Black Hole’ and ‘Moonraker’ among others. The Leicester Square Cinema: Where we caught ‘Raise The Titanic’, ‘The Boys from Brazil, ‘Murder By Death’, ‘Saturn 3’ and others. The Dominion gave us ‘Star Wars’, ‘The Spy Who Loved Me’ and others. The Rialto: ‘The Fog’, ‘Terror Train’. Elsewhere in London we saw ‘The Thing’, ‘The Exorcist II’, ‘Invasion Of The Body Snatchers’, ‘Dressed To Kill’, ‘The Manitou’, ‘Blow Out’, and so many many others. Our business trips to the USA were no different. In New York we saw ‘Alien’ at a cinema in Times Square, I think it was the Astor Plaza, all I can remember is that it was large and almost deserted, as it had been running for some time, while in the UK it had only just opened. The floor was sticky with butter from the damn popcorn. We saw ‘Airplane’ in a packed cinema just off Times Square where the audience was loud and enthusiastic, to say the least. The following year it was ‘Airplane 2’, a smaller cinema with a smaller and much quieter audience, but then it wasn’t a very good sequel.
While in L.A. on Hollywood Boulevard we saw ‘The Amityville Horror’ at the Pacific Hollywood Theatre, it had just been tripled but judging by the seating must have been large, because even after being tripled it had large auditoriums. We saw ‘One Dark Night at a cinema just a few hundred yards from our hotel, ‘The Hollywood Roosevelt’, which I think was The Paramount. ‘Dawn Of The Dead’ (an unrated cut that disturbed my boss, Derek so much, he asked if could leave the cinema as the lights went up, and we didn’t stop to see the second feature, ‘Blue Sunshine’), this cinema usually only projected porn. While on holiday in 1980, I took Mom to see a film at Graumans’ Chinese. The film was ‘The Shining’, she didn’t mind all the blood, but thought the bad language in very poor taste.
Leave a Reply