The Savoy has had a €2 million facelift for its 75th birthday. It's a welcome reinjection of glamour for Ireland's most famous cinema, writes Donald Clarke
Every five years or so, cultural pundits unite to declare that some new phenomenon - television, video games, the DVD - is set to kill off cinema. The public, meanwhile, stubbornly refusing to obey their media betters, continue to tramp to the picture house each weekend. But what has become of the buildings themselves? As recently as 15 years ago, Dublin city centre, and the northside in particular, was crowded with purpose-built cinemas from the golden era. Now only two of any vintage remain: the adorably shabby Screen at D'Olier Street and the newly refurbished Savoy, on O'Connell Street.
Herbie Donnelly joined the Savoy in 1944, as an usher, and remained in the business for a further 45 years. He remembers the 1980s as a particularly grim time for the industry. "About 20 years ago I can remember looking out at O'Connell Street and saying, 'In the next 10 years either the Adelphi or the Carlton will have to go,' " he says, referring to central Dublin's other two showcase cinemas. "It never occurred to me that they would both be gone. But I always knew that the Savoy would survive."
The Savoy, which (slightly belatedly) celebrates its 75th birthday with a gala screening of Mr and Mrs Smith, the new Brad Pitt flick, next month, indeed survived. Newly decked out with a flinty art deco facade, the cinema gives punters - or those who deign to attend a venue without a car park - the chance to experience the movies as they used to be. Mind you, listening to Donnelly, who eventually became a supervisor at the Savoy, reminisce about the early days, it becomes clear that we will never fully recapture the lost opulence.
"When I joined there were 11 ushers, 18 usherettes and six or seven cashiers," he says. "There were three or four male cleaners and 10 or 11 female cleaners, four boiler men, two electricians and six operators. We had cloakroom attendants, male and female, and four pageboys. To tell the truth you were tripping over one another. That was for one cinema that accommodated 2,700 people. When I finished, 15 years ago, there were 35 staff for five cinemas. That is some difference."
The Savoy, whose gorgeously elaborate interior featured a proscenium arch modelled on the Rialto Bridge, in Venice, opened in November 1929 with a screening of the musical On with the Show! (all mild nudity excised by the censor, of course) and immediately found itself on the front line of the cultural war being waged against subversive foreign influences. William T Cosgrave, then president of the Executive Council, was criticised for attending an event launching a subsidiary of Associated British Cinemas.
Worse was to follow. In 1934 the Savoy was the site of a fully fledged art riot when republican activists protested against the screening of a newsreel featuring the marriage of the duke of Kent and Princess Marina. Kevin Rockett, who lectures in film studies at Trinity College in Dublin, vividly describes the events in his recent book Irish Film Censorship. "Rotten eggs and other missiles were thrown at the screen," he writes. "Some of the protesters . . . clambered on to the front of the proscenium and began to tear the screen down. In a few moments the whole lower portion had been destroyed."
Notwithstanding the odd such rampage, cinema came to offer the Irish people a rare source of glamour. For those who could afford a ticket to the Savoy, or one of the country's other top-range movie palaces, the seduction began even before the lights went down. The Venetian ornamentation in the Savoy's auditorium must have been a treat in those bleak times.
"It was interesting that they chose such an un-Irish scene," says Rockett. "Of course that was exactly what the public wanted. But remember that the cinemas away from the O'Connell Street area would have been much less elaborate. They would have had the same sort of lino on the floor that people had in their flats. And then there was the size of the auditorium. You had 3,000 people in cinemas like the Savoy and the Adelphi. You only get that collective experience now in theatres like the Gaiety."
The Savoy also gained renown as the country's prime site for movie premieres, with such glittery luminaries as Elizabeth Taylor, Bob Hope, Julie Christie and Tom Cruise gracing its red carpet. And that status as the flagship of Irish movie exhibition has contributed to its survival.
"Dublin needs a showcase cinema to show major movies, a cinema that people relate to," says Paul Ward, director of Ward Anderson Group, the venue's current owner. "And those premieres give the cinemas its status. Look, do you think that the cinema distributors would have a major premier at a multiplex in Santry or in Dún Laoghaire rather than on the main street in the capital?"
Ward Anderson, the country's most powerful cinema-exhibition company, bought the Savoy in 1984. The Rank Organisation, which had controlled the venue since 1946, had lost more than £100,000 in Ireland the previous year. A decade or so later most of the city's traditional cinemas had closed. So how did the Savoy - by now broken up, somewhat inelegantly, into smaller screens - manage to survive to its 75th birthday? "We realised that cinema was price-conscious," Ward says. "When we took over we introduced a cheaper price in the afternoon, and that really drove our admissions. There is no doubt when you drive your admissions that you can plough that back into investment."
With new movie houses opening all over the country - Omniplexes in Cork and Galway, the 12-screen Movies@Dundrum complex - we appear to be in the midst of an exhibition gold rush. But, when compared with those plush suburban multiplexes, the old Savoy, its Venetian proscenium a distant memory, was beginning to look a bit grubby. The €2 million investment that has brought some glamour back to the foyer, and facilitated the refurbishment of some lumpy seating, is thus very welcome. It is, however, still questionable whether audiences that have become used to driving to remote locations that sell nachos in cartons the size of hatboxes will still be interested in frequenting an old-fashioned urban picture palace. The refurbished site's success may require the establishment of a Campaign for Real Cinema.
"I think the way the city centre is going - with pedestrianisation and the widening of O'Connell Street - it is becoming an area that people expect to travel into by public transport," Ward says optimistically. "I think also people want something different from the multiplexes. In the multiplexes the cinemas all look the same; they are just different sizes. In the Savoy each cinema is different."
Always eager to develop new screens, Ward admits that he has his eyes on the tax office next door to the Savoy; if decentralisation caused the building to close, he would consider expanding in that direction. Nothing wrong with that, but for many cinema purists the Savoy 1, with its flavours of an earlier era, will remain the complex's main attraction.
"If the Savoy ever went it would be confirmation that cinema-going had changed irrevocably," says Rockett. "It may be a dinosaur from an earlier period, but it is one that people from that era will remember with great affection. A degree of grandeur still hangs around it that you will never get from a multiplex."
The Savoy's gala screening of Mr and Mrs Smith, to celebrate the cinema's 75th anniversary, is on June 8th