Thanks for the namecheck CF100 :–) I stand corrected. Those (rather distressing!) urban explorer videos show a full Cinerama set-up in Screen 1. Five screen channels each with an Altec A4 Voice of the Theatre speaker system, with side wings. Japanese audiophiles would go nuts for this. Powered by Cinemeccanica C65 amplifiers with ‘transistors’. 30 watts per channel of pure Class B. I didn’t miss a zero! Classic road show rig and state of the art in 1969… Same video shows Gaumont 2: Vitavox centre channel still there…because when it opened it was mono.
Lavish ‘for the time?’ This was the uk’s biggest post war cinema and technically highly advanced in design and construction. True, it didn’t have any fake Roman urns and other chintzy set dressing…instead it bore a striking resemblance to the Bauhaus building!
Happened to visit ‘Odeon 6’ (or Gaumont 2 as was) recently and I concur with Jeff. It’s good to see some improvements and the bigger screen is definately one of them – it used to be demoralising enough to have that old postage stamp sized one, only for it to get smaller for Cinemascope films! Funnily enough, I also happened to be passing outside on the day of the cinema’s 40th anniversary (since its twinning, which had a gala re-opening on 15th July 1969, the day before Apollo). Funny old thing really, but there were queues right down the street; I thought ‘happy birthday’ to the old place, ‘good on you’. I bet no one in the queue realised that up in Odeon 1 they were visiting the UK’s last surviving, intact, purpose designed Cinerama theatre. In the states they might have restored it and had it as a centrpiece to a multiplex (as in the Arclight/CineramaDome in Hollywood). That’s just a bit of fanciful thinking on my part…
Went to the ABC recently. How the mighty have fallen. It looks very tatty and down at heel. Up in Screen 1 the famous Pullman Seats had been removed (probably long worn out to be fair) but crudely replaced with regular modern seats, leaving bits of bare wooden floorboard showing. The heating wasn’t working properly, the cleaning lights appeared to be on and the curtains weren’t used. All around were the vestiges of a super seventies cinemascope theatre…relegated to little more than a flea pit. Shame really. Can’t be long before the new multiplex comes along and puts it out of its misery.
Will we bemoan the demolition of another piece of history? Depends if the definition of ‘history’ extends beyond fibrous plaster and mock classical facades. When this was built it was modern, and like all modern buildings was not designed to last much longer than a generation (i.e. thirty odd years). How many music halls and live theatres went out of business when this gaudy monstrosity was built I wonder? How many people bemoaned the loss of history then? Except its not history is it – its nostalgia, which is selective, subjective and fails to recognise the most important thing about history which is ‘context’.
If we’re being nostalgic then I bemoan the loss of the modernist sixties conversion, the one with the Cinerama screen…how could they, it doesn’t make sense, they should be ashamed of themselves, outrageous they got rid of it, etc etc etc…
Quite an emotional tone to this one! Isn’t it funny, but Paramount in the 1930’s were also ‘greedy, faceless, selfish, 'b***ards’, and they were American imposters too. At the time there were quite a few people (notably architectural critics like the ones everyone seems to aspire to be on this website) who thought it crass, gaudy, preposterous, vulger etc etc etc. One thing everyone could agree on, though, was that the Paramount was modern. And all around, the the old music halls and live-theatres died a death – imagine if web forums existed in the 30’s!!!
The opening description – like all such descriptions on this site – gives disproportionate emphasis to the 30’s. What the two sentences devoted to the 1969 twinning neglect to mention are: the huge cost, the above-average design and technical content, the Quigley Award for Cinema Design, the huge Cinerama installation in Gaumont 1, the fact that this was the first Rank cinema outside of London to have a bar, that the gala re-opening involved everything from the town mayor to a hovercraft and that, above all, audiences absolutely loved it! No wonder, Ice Station Zebra opened in 70mm on on a 75 foot deep curve screen with 6 channel sound, this in 1969. That sort of experience hasn’t been bettered since!!
‘Destroyed’? What is it with this veneration for interior design and architecture which even in the 1930’s was viewed by architects as out-of-date and gaudy! No doubt the whole look and feel of theatres like this is fun to recall and interesting, but alternative styles and remodellings that came afterwards were every bit as designed as the original. For some reason the 1930’s seems to have been raised up to the cardinal point about which the whole edifice of cinema history revolves, yet very few people these days ever experienced it – on the contrary, the developments that came after are much more meaningful and equally interesting. This continual running down of anything that didn’t happen in the 30’s (and god forbid took place in the 60’s) is a real turn off. Cinema history itself will be heading the same way as the cinemas if the custodians of this history are not careful…rant over! P.S. When the theatre was being twinned, workmen sat astride the steel roof girders and smashed the ornate plasterwork out with sledgehammers – good riddance: the super-modern sixties replacement was brilliant!
Lavish ‘for the time’? In terms of technical content it was far superior to the mouldy old Regal it replaced. Just because it’s old doesn’t mean it’s better! On the contrary, the new Odeon Marble Arch was brute force sixties modernism at its best. Quite aside from the huge screen and other presentation facilities (which were impressive), you wouldn’t believe how much effort was put into acoustically isolating the whole place. In fact the purpose of that fibreglass rockface effect in the auditorium was acoustical as well as aesthetic. Yes, the Odeon Marble Arch really was a kind of high water mark in terms of big screen entertainment (to use a Rank Organisation slogan of the time). It even cropped up in contemporary architects journals as an object lesson to others and elements of the design were to copied in Rank’s other big projects at the time. Shame it’s glittering, utopian, deep-curve D-150 moment was so short lived!
The decorative features weren’t ‘destroyed’ in 1968 – they had reached the end of their design life (of about thirty years) and were replaced with something that looked modern and up to date for the 60’s (something that couldn’t be said for the faded and, in 1968, desperately unfashionable art deco interior). Note that the new Liverpool Twins were purpose designed for widescreen presentation (unlike the original), had state of the art projection and sound equipment,opened with a bigger ceremony than in 1934, were featured in Interior Design magazine and won a prestigeous award in the Motion Picture Herald. Now, whether you prefer Art Deco (i.e. decorative modernism) or merely modernism (in the 60’s idiom) is a matter of taste, not fact. The ‘fact’ is, the 1960’s modernisation was just as much ‘designed’ and just as much about ‘quality’ as what it replaced. Indeed, two generations of cinema goers remember this as ‘cinema’ and they rather liked it…what a shame the dominant dialogue in cinema history denies them their nostalgia!!
Odeon 1 is now the last unsubdivided ‘roadshow’ house from the era of Rank’s sixties twinning projects. It’s also the last original un-subdivivided ‘cinerama’ auditorium in the country. The auditorium is almost circular and the end wall is deeply curved with huge gold glass fibre curtains and red/blue/yellow ceiling rim lighting. Completing the authentic sixties experience is the brown and gold painted stippled plaster and, I kid you not, the original Vitavox loudspeakers. If this cinema were a car it would be called ‘a future classic’ – catch it while you can, particularly from the front row where a little bit of the cinerama experience lives on…
Thanks for the namecheck CF100 :–) I stand corrected. Those (rather distressing!) urban explorer videos show a full Cinerama set-up in Screen 1. Five screen channels each with an Altec A4 Voice of the Theatre speaker system, with side wings. Japanese audiophiles would go nuts for this. Powered by Cinemeccanica C65 amplifiers with ‘transistors’. 30 watts per channel of pure Class B. I didn’t miss a zero! Classic road show rig and state of the art in 1969… Same video shows Gaumont 2: Vitavox centre channel still there…because when it opened it was mono.
Lavish ‘for the time?’ This was the uk’s biggest post war cinema and technically highly advanced in design and construction. True, it didn’t have any fake Roman urns and other chintzy set dressing…instead it bore a striking resemblance to the Bauhaus building!
Happened to visit ‘Odeon 6’ (or Gaumont 2 as was) recently and I concur with Jeff. It’s good to see some improvements and the bigger screen is definately one of them – it used to be demoralising enough to have that old postage stamp sized one, only for it to get smaller for Cinemascope films! Funnily enough, I also happened to be passing outside on the day of the cinema’s 40th anniversary (since its twinning, which had a gala re-opening on 15th July 1969, the day before Apollo). Funny old thing really, but there were queues right down the street; I thought ‘happy birthday’ to the old place, ‘good on you’. I bet no one in the queue realised that up in Odeon 1 they were visiting the UK’s last surviving, intact, purpose designed Cinerama theatre. In the states they might have restored it and had it as a centrpiece to a multiplex (as in the Arclight/CineramaDome in Hollywood). That’s just a bit of fanciful thinking on my part…
Went to the ABC recently. How the mighty have fallen. It looks very tatty and down at heel. Up in Screen 1 the famous Pullman Seats had been removed (probably long worn out to be fair) but crudely replaced with regular modern seats, leaving bits of bare wooden floorboard showing. The heating wasn’t working properly, the cleaning lights appeared to be on and the curtains weren’t used. All around were the vestiges of a super seventies cinemascope theatre…relegated to little more than a flea pit. Shame really. Can’t be long before the new multiplex comes along and puts it out of its misery.
Will we bemoan the demolition of another piece of history? Depends if the definition of ‘history’ extends beyond fibrous plaster and mock classical facades. When this was built it was modern, and like all modern buildings was not designed to last much longer than a generation (i.e. thirty odd years). How many music halls and live theatres went out of business when this gaudy monstrosity was built I wonder? How many people bemoaned the loss of history then? Except its not history is it – its nostalgia, which is selective, subjective and fails to recognise the most important thing about history which is ‘context’.
If we’re being nostalgic then I bemoan the loss of the modernist sixties conversion, the one with the Cinerama screen…how could they, it doesn’t make sense, they should be ashamed of themselves, outrageous they got rid of it, etc etc etc…
Quite an emotional tone to this one! Isn’t it funny, but Paramount in the 1930’s were also ‘greedy, faceless, selfish, 'b***ards’, and they were American imposters too. At the time there were quite a few people (notably architectural critics like the ones everyone seems to aspire to be on this website) who thought it crass, gaudy, preposterous, vulger etc etc etc. One thing everyone could agree on, though, was that the Paramount was modern. And all around, the the old music halls and live-theatres died a death – imagine if web forums existed in the 30’s!!!
The opening description – like all such descriptions on this site – gives disproportionate emphasis to the 30’s. What the two sentences devoted to the 1969 twinning neglect to mention are: the huge cost, the above-average design and technical content, the Quigley Award for Cinema Design, the huge Cinerama installation in Gaumont 1, the fact that this was the first Rank cinema outside of London to have a bar, that the gala re-opening involved everything from the town mayor to a hovercraft and that, above all, audiences absolutely loved it! No wonder, Ice Station Zebra opened in 70mm on on a 75 foot deep curve screen with 6 channel sound, this in 1969. That sort of experience hasn’t been bettered since!!
‘Destroyed’? What is it with this veneration for interior design and architecture which even in the 1930’s was viewed by architects as out-of-date and gaudy! No doubt the whole look and feel of theatres like this is fun to recall and interesting, but alternative styles and remodellings that came afterwards were every bit as designed as the original. For some reason the 1930’s seems to have been raised up to the cardinal point about which the whole edifice of cinema history revolves, yet very few people these days ever experienced it – on the contrary, the developments that came after are much more meaningful and equally interesting. This continual running down of anything that didn’t happen in the 30’s (and god forbid took place in the 60’s) is a real turn off. Cinema history itself will be heading the same way as the cinemas if the custodians of this history are not careful…rant over! P.S. When the theatre was being twinned, workmen sat astride the steel roof girders and smashed the ornate plasterwork out with sledgehammers – good riddance: the super-modern sixties replacement was brilliant!
Lavish ‘for the time’? In terms of technical content it was far superior to the mouldy old Regal it replaced. Just because it’s old doesn’t mean it’s better! On the contrary, the new Odeon Marble Arch was brute force sixties modernism at its best. Quite aside from the huge screen and other presentation facilities (which were impressive), you wouldn’t believe how much effort was put into acoustically isolating the whole place. In fact the purpose of that fibreglass rockface effect in the auditorium was acoustical as well as aesthetic. Yes, the Odeon Marble Arch really was a kind of high water mark in terms of big screen entertainment (to use a Rank Organisation slogan of the time). It even cropped up in contemporary architects journals as an object lesson to others and elements of the design were to copied in Rank’s other big projects at the time. Shame it’s glittering, utopian, deep-curve D-150 moment was so short lived!
The decorative features weren’t ‘destroyed’ in 1968 – they had reached the end of their design life (of about thirty years) and were replaced with something that looked modern and up to date for the 60’s (something that couldn’t be said for the faded and, in 1968, desperately unfashionable art deco interior). Note that the new Liverpool Twins were purpose designed for widescreen presentation (unlike the original), had state of the art projection and sound equipment,opened with a bigger ceremony than in 1934, were featured in Interior Design magazine and won a prestigeous award in the Motion Picture Herald. Now, whether you prefer Art Deco (i.e. decorative modernism) or merely modernism (in the 60’s idiom) is a matter of taste, not fact. The ‘fact’ is, the 1960’s modernisation was just as much ‘designed’ and just as much about ‘quality’ as what it replaced. Indeed, two generations of cinema goers remember this as ‘cinema’ and they rather liked it…what a shame the dominant dialogue in cinema history denies them their nostalgia!!
Odeon 1 is now the last unsubdivided ‘roadshow’ house from the era of Rank’s sixties twinning projects. It’s also the last original un-subdivivided ‘cinerama’ auditorium in the country. The auditorium is almost circular and the end wall is deeply curved with huge gold glass fibre curtains and red/blue/yellow ceiling rim lighting. Completing the authentic sixties experience is the brown and gold painted stippled plaster and, I kid you not, the original Vitavox loudspeakers. If this cinema were a car it would be called ‘a future classic’ – catch it while you can, particularly from the front row where a little bit of the cinerama experience lives on…