Flash Fiction: G.I. Joe

We do like this week's piece, a humorous accompaniment to the action packed G.I. Joe: Retaliation. It's called Synchronised, and it's by Garrie Fletcher. Enjoy!

Synchronised

‘Synchronise watches.’
‘What's that mean? Is that like those swimmers? I ain't wearing no pink hat. I’m no girl.’
‘It just means set watches to the same time.’
‘Oh. I haven't got a watch.’
‘No, neither have I.’
‘So?’
‘Count down from a hundred and then do it.’
‘Do what?’
‘The plan. You are clear on the plan?’
‘Yep.’
‘Go on then.’
‘I'm clear on the plan.’
‘Do you know what the plan is?’
‘I've forgot.’
‘God.  A long breath. I distract mum, you sneak into the fridge...’
‘I ain't getting in the fridge...’
‘Just open the fridge door.’
‘Oh.’
‘Open the door and grab mum's chocolate.’
‘Gotcha. Then what?’
‘Just hide it. Hide it until we get to the cinema.’
‘Cool.’
‘Yes, somewhere cool.’
‘You boys are quiet, what are you up to?’
‘Nothin.'
‘Shall I make some popcorn for the cinema?’
‘Ok.’
‘You don't sound bothered.’
‘Well, it’s boring with nothing on it.’
‘Yes, but its healthy, too much sugar...’
‘We know.’

At the cinema
‘Do you need the toilet?’
‘No.’
‘Then stop walking like a cowboy. Wait here, I won’t be long.’

‘Give me some chocolate.’
‘I’m not sure you should.’
‘Give us some.’
‘I don’t think that’s a good idea.’
‘Shut up and give. Where is it? Where’d you stash it?’
‘In my pants.’

Flash Fiction: Sleeping in the Cinema

This week's Flash Fiction piece is by Anna Lawrence Pietroni. If you have trouble with nodding off in the middle of a blockbuster, then you'll identify with it, we're sure!


Do you fall asleep in films? It’s hard not to. It’s warm and dark. The seat is deep.

It doesn’t mean the movie’s bad or boring.

I’ve slept through great films even when I strained to stay awake.

Take TRUE GRIT, the Coen brothers' Western.

Jeff Bridges' low-throat rumble and the horses' hooves? I was clopped and mumbled into sleep and woke only for gunshots and the credits.

Do you fall asleep in films?

Do you get angry with yourself? Does your companion elbow you and scowl? Do you worry that you dribble, that you snore?

“Why pay good money to fall asleep in someone else’s dark when you could switch the lights off in the living room and sleep for free?”

They should institute a Standing Cinema for sleepyheads like you and me. Ushers, crouching, running between rows to pinch the nodders or spray us with cold water.

If you’d rather stay awake today and see the film, do this before it starts, before you get too settled in the dark:

Place your palms on your belly. Feel how it swells with every breath. There is a space between the in-breath and the out.

There. You’ve had your rest. You will not fall asleep here. Not today.

Flash Fiction: Cloud Atlas

This week's flash fiction comes from Garrie Fletcher, and accompanies the film 'Cloud Atlas'.

 A symphony of lives,
each one a note, each vibration
 echoing, rippling through time,
entropy’s melody linking
them together.

Unknowing
they breathe in, breathe out,
lives loved, lives lost, lives taken.

The tempo picks up, drops off
picks up, drops off
from ocean to ocean,
from diary to transcript
to manuscript.

Each moment
recorded upon the staves,
waiting to be played.

Flash Fiction: Hyde Park on Hudson

Stewart Derry provides this week's Flash Fiction; a piece which goes with the period drama Hyde Park on Hudson.

To be, or not to be: that is the question.

After his surprise Oscar winning turn in The King’s Speech, King George VI returns in the movie, Hyde Park on Hudson. Hoorah! This time our beloved Bertie shares the billing with the President of the United States, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

With the war clouds gathering over Europe, the stage is set for a diplomatic meeting with Bertie’s American cousins. They meet at the presidential home - Hyde Park on Hudson (Dutchess County, New York). Over a long weekend they swop stories, sip cocktails, sample hot dogs and attempt to forge a very special relationship between the two nations.

Unfortunately the president is pre-occupied with a number of other pressing matters, including that of his charming and very attractive cousin, Margaret “Daisy” Suckley.

Can Bertie summon all his royal patience, charm and powers of persuasion to win the day? Will the weekend end with a bang or a whimper? One thing is for sure: the summer of 1939 will be their happiest season for many years to come.

Make yourself comfortable; have your tissues to hand; enjoy one of the things we Brits do best - a great costume drama!

Flash Fiction: Broken City

This week's flash fiction is a slice of film noire in the form of the written word. It's by Stewart Derry, and it accompanied the film 'Broken City'.


It’s not just the city that is broken, its people are too. Their many hopes and dreams are compromised and degraded by lies, power and corruption. Even the hero’s purest sense of right and wrong is blighted by the grim reality of life and death in Broken City.

Broken City contains many of the classic elements of film noir. The Maltese Falcon, Chinatown and L.A. Confidential all inhabit similar worlds to Broken City. Witness the stylised imagery, the archetypal characters, the mysterious crime that draws everyone together, and how each character is possessed with an overreaching passion that gives heat and substance to the drama.

People are rarely what they seem to be in this genre. The outward show of status, wealth or respectability is a thin veneer that hides a troubled inner world. Our pleasure comes in seeing these fatal flaws exposed and the ways in which the protagonists respond to the choices that confront them. The outcomes are rarely happy, often leading to ruin or redemption.

The ancient Greeks, who knew a thing or two about drama, followed a tragedy with a short comedy in order to lift the spirits. I wonder what your choice of film dessert would be after Broken City?

Flash Fiction: Zero Dark Thirty

This week's flash fiction was written by Stewart Derry to accompany the tense drama Zero Dark Thirty. Here it is!


Hollywood loves the epic. It is a place where everything is supersized and on a grander scale than real life could ever be. And the stage is set fair with an impressive title.

Numbers are always a good choice, especially with a rousing adjective in tow -
 The Magnificent Seven
 The Dirty Dozen
 The Roaring Twenties

More recently the numbers alone have done all the talking -
 Se7en - Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman as detectives on the trail of serial killer.
 300 - The legendary last stand of the Spartans at the battle of Thermopylae.

The title of this film, Zero Dark Thirty, raises the bar even higher -
 Zero – a number, the number, simply oozing with tragic foreboding.
 Dark – a brooding and troubled adjective, suggesting an epic encounter between the forces of good and evil.
 Thirty – here the badass showdown doesn’t just happen at midnight; it’s a whole thirty
   minutes afterwards! Gulp!! Or, viewed another way, thirty = zero + dark magnified to the power of thirty. Woah! Seriously badass!

My friends strap yourselves into your seats and enjoy the ride.
This is no ordinary place. It is Hollywood. Will you not be entertained?

Flash Fiction: A Good Day to Die Hard

This week's Flash Fiction piece ran alongside the new Bruce Willis action film, 'A Good Day to Die Hard'. It was written by Garrie Fletcher.

Two friends enter a cinema, much like the one you’re in now, sit down and wait for the film to start.

Andy: So, he's saving the world again then?

Brian: No, he doesn't save the world, he does what needs to be done, you know, things the average person can't do, stuff we can only dream of.

Andy: Huh? You think I want to go round indiscriminately killing people?

Brian: No, not at all. Look, our lives are pretty dull...

Andy: Speak for yourself.

Brian: In comparison to McClane, Mr Willis.

Andy: Yes?

Brian: Well, we all need a bit of excitement, something fantastical...

Andy: Ridiculous.

Brian: If you like, but something we can lose ourselves in and forget about all this...

Andy: What? This cinema?

Brian: No. Life, the day to day.

Andy: So you're saying  that whilst I'm going about life, working like a nutter, stressing over this , that and the other I don't really want to be thinking about my job or how to be a good dad, what I really want to be doing is blowing up skyscrapers, aeroplanes and assorted European bad guys?

Brian: Well, aren't you?

Andy: Hell yeah!

Flash Fiction: Hitchcock

The second of our flash fiction pieces is also written by Stewart Derry, and accompanied the thriller 'Hitchcock', a film about the making of the famous film 'Psycho'.

Good evening ladies and gentlemen. My name is Alfred Hitchcock. The film you are about to see is based on actual events in my life.

 

‘What?’ I hear you say. ‘Hitch, as the leading man?’

 

Yes! I was due a part after so many cameo appearances. You will also be introduced to a new leading lady - Alma Reville. She will, quite literally, take your breath away. She hasn’t a blonde hair on her head!

Surprised, are we? Choking on your popcorn? The master of suspense . . . losing his touch? We seem to have some film buffs in the audience. When you have made as many films as I have, it can sometimes be frightfully delicious to break the rules and confound all expectations.

I haven’t seen the film yet, but I’m sure I’ll follow most of the action. After all, I played the role quite superbly many years ago.

There will, of course, be a MacGuffin. I won’t spoil your pleasure by revealing it.

By the way, if you happen to be sitting next to a pain in the asterix, be careful not to annoy them too much. They may have murder on their mind.

Enjoy!

Flash Fiction: Sammy's Great Escape

Welcome to the first of our specially written pieces from the flash fiction film project. This piece accompanied Sammy's Great Escape, one of our family films which was screened during the Easter holiday, and was written by Stewart Derry.

A magic story space can be many things: a Punch and Judy booth; a circus ring; a shadow puppet show; or an intimate theatre setting, such as this glorious cinema in Tenbury Wells.

The Regal is a rare jewel in a rather rough and tumble cinema landscape, managing to survive both a flood and the wrecking ball. Suitable film suggestions on these themes anyone? Perhaps one day someone will make a film about The Regal, with all the tears, heartache and love that have gone into making it such an inspiring setting.

It puts me in mind of the great British classic, The Smallest Show on Earth, where the old projectionist, Percy Quill, played by a heavily made up Peter Sellers, works in a battered ruin of a cinema, longing for the good old days to return. I’m glad to say The Regal has fared much better than the one in the movie.

The film you are about to see is full of fantasy and adventure; 90 minutes of ocean hokum to entertain the whole family. We all have great memories of visiting the cinema. We hope your visit today adds to them. And here’s wishing you many more!

Remember, if you'd like to write a flash fiction yourself, do get in touch, we'd love to hear from you.

Flash Fiction: Introduction

As part of our aims to increase the reach of the work we do at the Regal, we're running a number of projects this year which take film and look at them through other artforms. One of these projects is the Flash Fiction project which we're running in conjunction with the fabulous Writing West Midlands.

To launch the project, three of WWM's upcoming new authors will be writing flash fiction to go with our April, May and June film programme. For those of you who don't know; flash fiction is basically very short stories, usually under 200 words long.

Look out for the works at film showings in April, May and June. You'll usually be able to pick them up as flyers to read before the film starts.

Once the films have aired we'll be sharing the flash fictions with you here on the blog, so that you can enjoy them even if you missed that particular film.

We're also opening up the floor to any aspiring writers out there who'd like to give this a go, so if you'd like to write your own flash fiction introduction for a film then get in touch! There will be lots of openings in our July-August film programme.

Enjoy!

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!

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 Virtual Regal

The Regal will celebrate its 75th birthday in July this year; it's a fantastic building with so many stories to tell. We try to bring you some of the interesting ones of objects and film here on the blog, but some of the most interesting stories are the ones that its visitors remember.

Because of that, we're currently working with Field of Vision, a local web design company, to build a special interactive site that celebrates the stories of the people who have worked in and visited the Regal over the years. This site, a virtual Regal, will contain the words, photographs and voices of people who have visited the cinema over the years.

We're very excited about the site, which will allow you to explore a virtual Regal on the internet, discovering people's stories and memories as you go. Below, we've included a couple of teaser sections from some of the site artwork to whet your appetite...

Who's working late tonight?

Catching the late film?

If you've got any memories of the Regal that you'd like to share with the world then please let us know. Stories of the first film you remember seeing there, the people who you went with... whether it's from five years ago or fifty years ago, we'd love to hear from you. As well as taking your memories and publishing them for all to see on our site, we're also looking for some people to be interviewed about their stories. So if you'd like to be made famous for all time on the world wide web, now's your chance to speak up! If you'd rather remain anonymous that's fine too.

The more stories that we can collect, the more we can tell the world about the Regal.

Have you got a story to share?