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THE RIDDLE 311
a pattern, their plans, materials, their equipment are all influenced by one set of economic necessities.
" The general recipe for these new picture theatres of perfection is of great interest.
" Take 1,000,000 bricks, 1,000 tons of steel, 4,000 seats, an organ costing ^10,000, a roof garden with tennis and badminton courts, a stage bigger than that at Drury Lane, an automatic restaurant, a series of shops, a nursery, an Italian Garden, and ^250,000, and mix well."1
A nursery. An automatic restaurant. Tennis courts. Italian Garden. A landscape picture theatre which will give the audience " the illusion of sitting in an Italian garden beneath a sky which can present sunrise, noon or night, with or without stars, as and when desired."2 Such slices of Italy dot the London landscape — the Lido at Golder's Green, the Astoria at Brixton, the Regal at the Marble Arch, are three of them.
The mode of construction is determined by commercial speculation, as was the case with His Majesty's Theatre, by getrich-quick competition, by the struggle for monopoly, by the requirements of a small screen measuring approximately 30 feet wide by 25 feet high, by the necessity of attracting and holding big audiences of from 3,000 to 5,000 persons. Actually they are examples of the embodiment of the latest demand for economic planning and cinema equipment and public comfort and convenience without due regard to cinema visual values, and a proper return to the public for the rent paid for seats. Of course, it may be admitted that a " patron " who pays 5/ and receives an Italian garden and a gilded club and a wash and brush up free of charge, is getting quite a lot for his money. If in addition he is allowed to catch fleeting glimpses of the procession on the screen he should consider himself exceedingly lucky.
The enormous size of these illuminated addresses to the
1 Daily Chronicle, July 29, 1929.
2 Ibid.