In the frame

If you come into our foyer this week to pick up some tickets from the box office, you may notice the new additions now adorning the walls!

 

It was customary for cinemas in the 1930s and 40s to display black and white headshots of the actors and actresses which you might have expected to see on the screen inside. We've updated this tradition, including actors and actresses from the last 100 years of cinema.

Next time you pop in, see if you can name them all! Some are more difficult than others...

Quotability!

If you've been up the stairs to our exhibition space recently, you'll have noticed a new addition on the staircase. These fantastic wall quotes were chosen and voted for by our fabulous facebook fans, and they're a brilliant mixture from the classics like the Wizard of Oz all the way to modern words of wisdom from The Hunger Games.

 

We've still got some more space left on the walls and we'd love to fill it with more of your favourite words from the world of film. Do you have a favourite film quote you'd like us to put up alongside 'There's no place like home' and 'Frankly my dear, I don't give damn'?

Let us know!

Happy New Year!

Welcome back to the blog in 2013. It's going to be an exciting year, I can tell!

Firstly, we wanted to share the answers from the Scrooge quiz with you. We had people playing along over on twitter, facebook and here in the cinema, and we were very impressed with how many you all knew! Top marks to everyone, but especially to @CheltCinema over on twitter, who got all ten correct!

So, here goes, the Scrooges were;

1. Jim Carrey
2. Michael Caine
3. Alistair Sim
4. Patrick Stewart
5. Bill Murray
6. Albert Finney
7. George C Scott
8. Kelsey Grammar
9. Tim Curry
10. Ross Kemp

We hope you enjoyed that exciting whirlwind of Dickens to round of 2012!

Now, it is of course a new year, so we'll be back soon with a new quiz to test your film knowledge. If you've got a request for a topic for one of our quizzes, do let us know and we'll do our best to oblige.

See you soon!

In focus: The Projection Room

We've been taking some pictures in the projection room this morning of our 35mm projector, and thought you might like to see some of them! We've just picked some of our favourites, inside and outside!

the front of the projector    ~     the projector from underneath

 

inside the projector

 

the path of the film, from tower towards projector

 

 

There are more photographs over on our Facebook page here if you're interested. Do show your appreciation for your favourites by pressing the like button! 

What a Glorious Feeling...

We're very excited to announce that we're going to be rounding off our launch season with a free showing of the very excellent film 'Singin' in the Rain'! We're even throwing in a short cartoon before the main feature, because we're nice like that.

The showing is on Saturday 25th August, doors open at 2.30pm and the show starts at 3pm. You'll need to pick up some tickets in advance but they are free! Just get in touch with us (email hao@tenburytown.org.uk or call 01584 810118) or drop into the Pump Rooms in Tenbury (or the Regal on a Tuesday 10am - 12pm or Wednesday 11.30am - 12.30pm) and we'll be happy to give you some tickets.

What a glorious feeling, we're happpppppy again!

Memories of the Projection Room

A local resident who used to work in the Regal as a projectionist brought this fantastic picture in to us and we wanted to share it with you.

It's a photograph of the projection room at the Regal in its early years. The two projectors in the picture are the original Kalee 11s which were in place at the cinema's opening in July 1937.

Some of those original features are still in the projection room today, most notably the fire shutters on the far wall. We've even still got one of those tall chairs, especially tall so that the projectionist could see down into the auditorium through the high portal you can see next to where the projectionist is standing in the photograph.

We've been recording the memories of people who have worked in and visited the Regal over the years. These audio recordings will be available on our interactive website soon at www.regaltenbury.org.uk and we're also in the process of transcribing some of them as well. A few of the people we've interviewed so far have been those who used to work as projectionists, and we thought this blog post would be a great place to share some of those little snippets about life in the projection room.

Once the films arrived, usually Monday or Tuesday, you'd go down to the cinema, and you had to take the films out of the transport cans and put them onto the spools, the projection spools, and what you were doing was to check them over to make sure that they were alright. Because the distributor would send a running sheet down with the films telling you that they'd checked them and they were all satisfactory... but you never took their word for it.

- David Griffiths

The projectors in the photograph were 'carbon arc' projectors, which meant that instead of having a bulb in them to generator light as more modern projectors do, they actually burnt carbon inside them which gave off a bright light. This is one of the reasons that projection was such a dangerous occupation - that, and the very flammable nitrate film that was used, which has been known to spontaneously combust from only the friction of moving through the projector!

Tom Dallow tells us a little about the carbon arc projectors that he worked with at the Regal;

The thing with carbons... if you let them burn too far apart, they'd go out. But if they burn too close together, the picture would go brown! So, then there used to be some fun and games if you hadn't put enough carbon in there because you'd got to get your hands in the archouse, open it up, tap them up a little bit more with something so that it'd last... they've been out many a night.

- Tom Dallow

We hope you've enjoyed this brief journey into the projection room of years gone by! We'll share some more memories of the Regal over the summer. If you've got any photographs of the Regal that we could feature here, please do let us know!

Bringing a little cinema to you - our 8mm projector

We've had a bit of interest about that 8mm projector that we mentioned in our talks and presentations post last week, so we thought we'd tell you a little more about it.

You may remember a time when VHS video tapes were the method of watching films at home, in the days before DVDs. In the days before that, the home projector ruled the territory of at-home film-watching. There were various types of projectors that you could buy, which took different sizes and types of film.

By far the most common home film projectors showed a type of film called Super 8. This was one of a few different types of 8mm film (that's film which is 8mm wide - film in cinemas is usually 35mm, or 35mm wide). Our projector is one of those; it'll also show Single 8 film too, another type of 8mm film that preceded Super 8.

Many home films were black and white and silent, however some would be in colour and have sound. The film you can see projecting here, which is a celebration of 50 years of Mickey Mouse (recognise the Sorceror's Apprentice?) is in colour with sound.

We've collected a few titles that we can show to demonstrate how these home projectors worked to school and educational groups. They're a mixture of sound, silent, black and white and colour. These include cartoon favourites such as Mickey Mouse, Winnie the Pooh and the Flintstones, as well as a short film of one of Laurel and Hardy's adventures.

Feature-length films were impractical to show on small projectors like these and would have been very expensive, so instead film manufacturers would sell short clips of their feature films on 8mm film. We've collected examples from Disney's Pinocchio and Bambi.

If you're interested in having us demonstrate the 8mm projector for your group, let us know! We're happy to include a short talk about the Regal, film and projectors, the history of British cinemas or any combination thereof to give the projector some context. Some showings can even be provided for free, depending on the titles you wish to view, what type of group you are and how far away from us you're located.

For details of the films we can show, the types of groups we can show them to, distances we'll travel, dates we're free, costs involved and so on, get in touch. We're happy to chat about your requirements and see what we can do for you.

Talks and presentations: bringing the Regal to you

As well as keeping you in touch with the Regal's history and restoration online, the HLF project has also allowed for the creation of some talks and presentations which our staff and volunteers can bring out to you. If you're a community group, school, or similar then we'll be pleased to come along to your meetings and deliver a talk about the Regal and/or the restoration project.

Talks last approximately 45min for either Regal history or Regal restoration, or we can just about squeeze the highlights of both into an hour (if we talk really fast!). We'll provide a laptop and a projector for the presentation, we just ask that you make sure there's a screen or blank white wall to project onto, and a couple of plug sockets somewhere nearby (cups of tea are very much appreciated also!). We can adapt our talks for groups of any age, ability or prior knowledge, just let us know the requirements of your group and we'll do what we can.

We're also in the process of developing some digital resources for educational groups which will be launching in September 2012, as well as special activity sessions and projects about film, cinema and the Regal. We even have an 8mm projector and some short films, silent and sound, which we can demonstrate for your group. Ever wanted to see Mickey Mouse or Winnie the Pooh on Super 8 film? Now's your chance!

If you're interested in having us come and chat to you, even if it's something a bit different to the talks described above, just get in touch by email letting us know what you need and we'll do what we can to help you out.

We're looking forward to hearing from you soon!

A Short History of the Regal Tenbury Wells - now available through Amazon Kinde store!

We're very pleased to announce that a short booklet on the history of the cinema is now available via Amazon Kindle store. A shorter, paper version will also be available later in the year, and a more comprehensive hard copy version will be available to buy in mid-2013.

From the opening night of the cinema in 1937, through the golden years of cinema in the UK to the decline of cinema and the rise of the multiplexes, the short e-booklet follows the fortunes of the Regal over the years. Interested in knowing how many cinemas there were around Tenbury in 1942 compared to today, or in what year UK cinema audiences reached their peak? Then you need to read this booklet!

The booklet is available on Amazon here, where you can view a free sample of the beginning of the book. Supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund, the e-booklet is provided to you at the lowest price Amazon will allow. All profits from the sale of the e-booklet go towards future learning and engagement work at the Regal.

Also, a reminder; if you're a writer and you'd like to be involved in any of our literary projects, check out our call-for-writers blog post here where you can find out more about adding your written works to our future fiction and non-fiction publications. 

Introducing... the virtual Regal!

The time has come at last when we can pull back the curtains and reveal the start of our exciting web project; the virtual Regal!

Clicking over to the Regal online will take you straight to the opening page of our new website. The virtual Regal is an online representation of the cinema which, when complete, will contain photographs, written memories and oral histories of the Regal, all as told by real people.

The full website will continue to grow over the coming months as we unlock doors into the cinema itself and start to reveal to you some of the fascinating stories that we've captured so far. If you'd like to contribute to our collection of memories then you'll find an easy link to do so in the website's memory reel. We'd love to hear from you, whether you remember the Regal on its opening day or six months ago, or anything in between! Stories and memories from its life as a cinema, a theatre or any other function (yoga classes in the community centre? a visit to the hairdressers or cake shop at the front?) are all very welcome!

We hope you enjoy exploring the website. We'll keep you up to date through the blog as we upload new content.

Write for the Regal!

Are you a writer, or would you like to be?

We'll be publishing various collections of fact and fiction on the themes of film and cinema, centering on the Regal, in the next year. From poetry and stories to factual accounts of the cinema's history, we're looking for authors to be involved in these exciting community-sourced projects. Our first publication, an e-booklet on the history of the cinema, is already available through Amazon Kindle store now.

There are no restrictions on age or experience to be involved, just enthusiasm for the subject! We'll select our favourite submissions to be included in final publications, some of which will be produced in digital form and some in hard copy.

If you're interested in joining in and writing something, get in touch by email, letting us know whether you'd like to write poems, stories or factual pieces, with details of any writing experience you've got and a short sample of your work (no more than 2500 words total, please, though less is fine). If you'd like more information you can write to us at the same address and we'll get back to you as soon as we can.

We're looking forward to hearing from you soon!

A Facebook timeline of Regal history

If you're following us on facebook you'll probably have noticed that the page has swapped over to the new "timeline" style at the beginning of the month. As well as giving us a chance to show off some of our lovely pictures of the cinema in the 'cover' photo at the top of the page, the new style also has a timeline feature which allows us to create a facebook-based history of the cinema's lifetime.

From the opening day in 1937 right up to the present day, we'll be adding milestone events and interesting happenings from the cinema's history to the page, complete where possible with clippings from the local newspaper the Tenbury Wells Advertiser and photographs if we have them.

We're excited about this new way of sharing the Regal's history with you. If you know of something that you think should be featured in the timeline, just let us know and we'll be happy to add it for you.

If you're not following us on facebook yet, you can find the page at: http://www.facebook.com/RegalTenburyHLF

Intermission

If you've been to the cinema recently you'll most likely remember that you're generally expected to sit from the opening titles to the final credits without a break. It wasn't always that way; most films used to have a break in the middle of them, just like theatre shows would have an interval.

At the Regal, intermissions were not a thing of the past as in many other cinemas, even up to the closure for the restoration work to start in 2011. The limitations of the projection equipment meant that they couldn't show long films in one go and still needed an intermission to swap over to the second half of the film, from one giant reel to the next.

Film studios knew that some cinemas had to have an intermission so would provide specially designed film reels to use as intermissions between the first and second half of the film, where they specified would fit best with the flow of the film.

This is a photograph of the letter and three sections from the intermission reel for the film 'Superman Returns'. In it, the word 'INTERMISSION' fades in from black, then explodes into a starburst to reveal the classic Superman 'S'.

 

We have a few special intermission reels in our collection of film at the Regal, from various different films. Each is styled differently to match the film that it ran with, and each comes with a letter explaining which reel to put the intermission reel after.

Can you remember seeing an intermission reel, at the Regal or another cinema? Do you think they should be brought back into modern films everywhere, or do you prefer to watch your film in one uninterrupted run? We'd love to know your thoughts! 

A commercial break

This afternoon, why don't you take a break for a moment... a commercial break, perhaps?

Amongst the collection of bits and pieces of film that the Regal has collected over the years there are lots of short reels which are adverts and trailers. Advertising has always been a big part of cinema; advertising agencies can sell the prime spots before major films for huge sums of money.

Over the years, there have been many different companies who deal with advertising in cinemas; some of the more famous include Rank Screen Advertising, Carlton Screen Advertising and Pearl and Dean. These agencies would have their own adverts that would screen before a film as well, to let you know who had provided the advertisements for the film. Advertising companies still do this today; look out for it next time you visit the cinema.

In our collection we have a couple of reels of the Rank Screen Advertising trailer. This particular one was used in the 1970s and 1980s. We've included a couple of photographs and a film below. Do you remember seeing this in a cinema?

Some iconic adverts have been shown in the cinema over the years. We have adverts from the 1970s, 80s, 90s and 2000s. Can you have a guess at what these might be advertising?

Perhaps if we start singing "Just one cornetto...?"

The next advert is more recent one. Can you tell what it is advertising?

The text says "Out in Paperback from 10th July" - it's a trailer for the release of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix in paperback!

We've got quite a few advertisements from over the years, so if you'd like us to play a game of "guess the advert from the film strip" then do let us know. That's definitely a feature we can set up for you if you're interested!

Our film archive contains more than just adverts; in upcoming posts we'll be exploring intermission reels, cinema idents and public service announcements! Hope you're looking forward to it...