Page 14 - CinemaRecord Edition 3-2003 #41

Padua management wasn’t
accommodating, because there was a
lot more work involved at the Padua.
So he asked me would I swap, and
there was an uproar from my manager,
“Don’t take it, don’t take it,” but in my
heart I did want it, so I did a swap, and
went to the Padua. Up-to-date, a lovely
projection room, everything you could
want in a projection room. Hoyts kept
the whole theatre up to scratch, looked
after it like one of their babies.
I arrived there in 1947, I think.
These are approximate dates - I haven’t
logged them in years, so can’t quite
The Grand Coburg was a pre-1920 cinema
remember. It was the time of The Best
given a new front at street level, but the
Years of Our Lives, one of the big
interior was indifferent.
movies that came in. And of course
every night of the week they had a live
stage show on a revolving stage. The
normal theatre screen took most of it,
with a setting for the stage and then
another little portion of it, not quite a
third, was taken up with a round slide
screen. The slide presentation was still
done with rectangular slides - the
normal glass slides for advertising - but
the screen was round.
The day cleaner used to come in of
a night and make sure the screen was in
the right position, that is, start with the
round screen for the slides, and as soon
as we closed the electric curtains
(which by the way the Grand didn’t
have, someone had to go down and pull
them by hand), the cleaner would turn
the stage around to accommodate the
standard screen.
There was only one thing wrong
with what he used to do - he used to
revolve the stage the same way all the
time and every few months we had to
go down and check the speaker lines
that ran down from overhead.
Sometimes you could play them like a
harp - twang, twang, twang, they were
stretched so tight - and I would spend
the next half hour unwinding them, by
turning the stage via the winch in the
opposite direction, to get some slack in
them for the next three months. But
they were good times.

The Padua Brunswick (centre), possibly the best of the
Hoyts’ ‘new look’ cinemas, and its revolving stage (above).

14 2008 CINEMARECORD