My home town of Gosport, Hampshire has been in demand recently
as a filming location: its 17th Century Village attraction was used
for a recent episode of “Doctor Who;” some of the science fiction horror film “It
Lives,” also known as “Twenty Twenty-Four,” was filmed at the Royal Naval
Submarine Museum, while the Cold War submarine HMS Alliance, based at the
museum, was used in “Transformers: The Last Knight.” Reports included pictures people
took of themselves with Jodie Whittaker, Sir Antony Hopkins, Mark Wahlberg, and
Bumblebee...
What was not picked up in this reporting is how Gosport has no
cinema. 11th April 2019 will mark twenty years since its last
cinema, the Ritz, showed its final film, “LA Confidential.” Rescue attempts
came and went, and the Ritz was demolished in August 2001. I began my degree in
Film Studies the following month. How can someone like me, steeped in the
history of film, come from a town with no cinema.
The Ritz had only ten years to make its mark on me. The
first film I remember seeing was seen there, and it was “Who Framed Roger
Rabbit?” in 1988. Five years later, I joined people queuing around the block to
see “Jurassic Park”, and its sequel four years later. I saw “Titanic” there
with my mother’s mother, who once worked there, and had an ice cream during the
intermission that had, thankfully, been preserved by the cinema – we rejoined
at the scene where the ship hit the iceberg. The final film I saw there, in
1997, was “Starship Troopers,” which made very good use of the sound system, as
“Independence Day” and “Batman & Robin” had previously done.
With every single visit, overtures of film soundtrack music
played as you found your seat, up to when the curtain opened – the Ritz
promised you a special experience every time you visited, even if your film was
to be prefaced with the same animated fairground advert for Cadbury’s Chrunchie
bar every time, which they just about did. The Ritz also once accidentally ran
the title of their matinee and evening performances together above the front
door, creating “The Fox and the Hound Die Hard With a Vengeance.”
This period of time charted the evolution of blockbuster films
into “tentpole” productions, as studios banked more money, and their success,
on fewer key films. The first multiplex cinema opened in the UK in 1985,
supplanting the single screen picture palace found in town centres. However,
the Ritz, which seated around 1,200 people in its stalls and balcony, promoted
itself as the biggest single screen on the South Coast, approaching the 48-foot
screen found at the Odeon Leicester Square. The cinema could have been converted
into two screens, across the balcony, and a dividing wall could have made it
four, but by the time that sort of thing was considered, you could already get
that experience out of town.
This is all right me saying this now, but I was still only
fourteen years old when I saw “Starship Troopers” – the films were big, the
sound was loud, and to this day, I have never sat before a bigger screen. It is
difficult for that sort of experience to not have an effect on you, and for it
to be so accessible – within half an hour’s walk from my house – I have been
spoiled for every cinema experience I’ve had since, with every single visit to
every single multiplex having been judged against it. I may have to move closer
to Leicester Square.
However, my experience at the Ritz is tempered by how it became
more and more run down over time. If it was ever renovated, it was before 1982,
and the red carpets were sticky. The toilets were one level below the public
toilets found outside, and if a seat was broken, it was removed, and never
replaced. Some of the remaining seats felt like the foam had to be bolstered
with cardboard, because they were. Eventually, the balcony closed. For this
decline to happen, there had to be a chance of replacing the cinema altogether,
and indeed there was.
For me, the only cinema in Gosport has been the Ritz, but when
it opened on 11th March 1935 - with a showing of the MGM film “What
Every Woman Knows” (based on the play by J.M. Barrie – yes, that one) - it was
competing with three other cinemas: the Gosport Theatre in the High Street, the
Olympia Picture House in Stoke Road, and the Criterion Cinema in Forton Road.
All of these were opened between 1910 and 1912, when films only reached one or
two reels in length, but were now shown in places with more comfortable seats
than the old nickelodeons. Both the Gosport Theatre and the Olympia closed in
1938, but another new cinema, the Forum, opened just across from the Olympia in
the following year. So, when the Ritz was bombed on 10th January
1941, there was no great clamour to reopen it straight away, as audiences went
elsewhere.
When the Ritz reopened in 1958, trading its original restaurant
for a Cinemascope screen (but kept the bar open), the success of television,
which reached the South of England in 1954, ultimately closed the Forum, making
way for a car showroom and petrol station, before being demolished to make way
for a supermarket. The Criterion also closed in 1968, but remains open to this
day as a bingo hall. Even when it stood alone, the Ritz closed for a time between
1982 and 1985, around the point when home video caused cinema audiences in the
UK to reach an all-time low, and was sold to Gosport Borough Council, which
later leased it to new operators. Applications were made to the council in 1991
and 1998 to replace the building with a new five-screen multiplex – the last of
these was approved, but never built. When the Ritz was demolished, the
application to build there was made by another supermarket, with a Job Centre
built next door.
Today, the only cinema of any sort in Gosport is “The Ritz
Cinema @ St Vincent,” a volunteer-run effort based out of a sixth-form college,
running fortnightly screenings of recent films. The last attempt to open a permanent
cinema was a rejected 2004-05 plan to convert a slaughterhouse in a former
Royal Navy yard – yes, I did type that. The Ritz cinema is an experience not
really done anymore, but here is the thing with that: from the all-time low of
1984, the number of admissions to UK cinemas in 2018 are around twenty per cent
more than in 1999, reaching levels not seen since the early 1970s. People want
to have an experience, and it may be time for someone to build a big, red,
opulent picture palace once again, and if I ever win the lottery, I know just where
I’ll build mine.
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