It's a wrap!

May 14 2008 by David Whetstone , The Journal

Many people will welcome the Tyneside Cinema back next week like an old friend. David Whetstone tours the revamped building.

HERE is my prediction – that the Tyneside Cinema is going to be like the Gateshead Millennium Bridge. That’s to say, everyone is going to love it and no one will have a bad word to say about it.

OK, maybe that’s a little presumptuous. Anyone who has worked in a box office will tell you that the odd grumble comes with the territory.

But I reckon everyone involved in the intricate £7m makeover of the much loved building has achieved the rare trick of marrying the best of the past with the most exciting aspects of the future.

When the building reopens to the public on May 22, all its fans – young and old – will find something to be nostalgic about.

Cinema-goers with longer memories will step into the restored foyer and see that the mosaic floor, with its tulip pattern, has re-emerged after more than 18 years, since it was covered over during an earlier refurbishment.

“Fortunately the people who covered it up realised there might be something worth restoring here, so they were careful not to damage it,” says Tyneside chief executive Mark Dobson.

Paint experts from Northumbria University analysed samples from walls and ceilings to establish what colours featured when the building – designed by the flamboyant Dixon Scott, great-uncle of film-makers Ridley and Tony – first opened as a newsreel cinema in 1937.

These colours now reappear on the foyer’s spectacular ceiling rose and on the three pillars supporting the box office, one of which is a cunning recreation of the original which was destroyed during that last revamp.

Youngsters will be pleased to see the return of Intermezzo, the cool ground-floor coffee bar. Older visitors will recall queuing there before the space was filled in and became a shop and then the cafe we see today.

The biggest auditorium, the Classic, has comfortable red seats in the stalls and a slightly larger stage to accommodate live performances. The pink and grey marbled effect on the walls has given way to a more muted colour scheme and the intricate plaster work framing the screen, badly damaged in a burglary just before the building closed in 2006, has been restored.

The circle of the Classic is a revelation. Here, for a slightly higher ticket price (£10 as opposed to £6.85), you can sit on a lovely leather chair or sofa specially designed for the Tyneside by Italian furniture designer Lara Mazzoni.

The sofas will prove popular with couples and – get this for a luxurious touch – there’s a wine cooler beside each one.

Buy a bottle at the bar and tipple as you watch.

Laughing, Mark recalls that the seats were delivered to the Tyneside by two young Italian workmen, both clad in Prada.

The old Cinema Two has become the Roxy with 100 bright green seats (all the Tyneside’s new seating is extraordinarily comfortable, with lots of leg room).

Right at the top of the building, where the Tyneside has been extended to reach the sky, is the new auditorium, the Electra, with a big screen and 150 blue seats. A blockbuster would sit happily in the new space, as would something more intimate.

The extra top floor also accommodates the new Tyneside Bar, separated from the outside world by a wall through which natural light floods, helping to turn what was rather a dark building into a pleasingly airy space.

As the Tyneside is the country’s only purpose-built newsreel cinema still in operation, it makes sense for its history to be acknowledged in the building.

On one of the upper levels you will be confronted by a formidable army of trilby-clad men, their heavy duty cameras pointing straight at you.

These movie “stills” depict what were then the pioneers of new media filming at Royal Ascot in 1935.

The story of the cinema itself and newsreel in general will be told on the walls and there will be various artefacts on show, including the camera of British Movietone News legend Paul Wyand, who filmed the liberation of Belsen concentration camp in 1945.

There will be free newsreel screenings at the Tyneside in the mornings, beginning with the famous footage of the Hindenberg disaster when the explosion of the airship spelled the end of this particular mode of transport.

Ben Greener, the Tyneside’s new heritage engagement officer (22 new staff have been recruited recently, bringing the total workforce to 50 plus) has been working in schools, introducing a keen new generation to movie-making.

Easily overlooked in the reopening euphoria is the role the Tyneside will play in nurturing talent.

The Mike Figgis Digital Lounge, effectively the Tyneside’s fourth screen, has been enhanced with more up-to-date technology. Digital projectors (very much the future) sit alongside their 35mm film equivalents in all the Tyneside auditoriums.

A suite of wood-panelled rooms is dedicated to the increasingly popular film courses run by the Tyneside.

The biggest of these rooms was formerly a centre for Buddhism and, back in the 1930s, the American Consulate.

“When we left here we’d grown audiences a lot,” says Mark Dobson.

“We were selling up to 90,000 tickets a year, which we were very proud of with just two screens. The target now is 120,000 a year. One way of looking at it is that it’s a huge jump, but on the other hand it’s just below the average for a UK charitable cinema with three screens.”

With three big screens instead of two, Mark has more scope for maximising the revenue from Tyneside releases, maybe moving a film from the Classic to the Electra rather than having to let it go.

Fans of the famous Tyneside Coffee Rooms will be relieved to hear that John Oswell’s atmospheric eaterie has lost none of its charm, even though it became a corridor for rubble during the makeover.

Evidence of this can be seen in Sally Ann Norman’s photographs which adorn the walls.

Everyone should be heartened by the fact that the new building has a lift and other facilities to make it accessible to disabled people.

David Burdus, a wheelchair user and accessibility consultant, made Mark and his colleagues walk around wearing spectacles covered in sticky tape to give them an idea of the daily challenges faced by the partially sighted in negotiating public buildings.

All across the North East, cinemas have suffered a range of indignities, from unsuitable change of use to demolition.

The old Odeon in Pilgrim Street is a sad legacy of cinema’s golden age.

But in the new Tyneside Cinema you will see heartening evidence that all is very far from lost. On Sunday the Tyneside will host an open afternoon (noon until 5pm) which all are invited to attend. There will be plenty to see and hear and the bars and cafes will be open.

At 8pm a band called The Week That Was will make its public debut.

The first programme in the old News Theatre in 1937 was a 75-minute mixture of news, travel, sport and cartoons.

On Thursday, May 22, when the Tyneside officially reopens, the programme will begin with Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (certificate 12A) at 11.30am, with subsequent screenings throughout the day.

Also showing will be Honeydripper (PG), Joy Division (15), Persepolis (12A) and You, The Living (15).

For full details of all events and screenings, visit the Tyneside website on www.tynecine.org