Masters move to Wellington cinema

Press, 14 May 1981, Page 14

Masters move to Wellington cinema

By

BRIAR WHITEHEAD

The Christchurch theatre company, Masters Independent Cinemas, hamstrung for years in its attempts to open theatres showing films from film festival centres in Europe and America, has leapt into the gap in the market created by the Cinematograph Films Amendment Bill passed late last year.

The bill abolished cinema licensing. Companies planning new theatres no longer have . to convince the Cinematograph Films Licensing Authority that an area needs a cinemq. This former procedure generally quashed enterprise; entrepreneurs found they were up against powerful theatre chains with convincing objections to their applications. Since the abolition of licensing, the company has branched into Masters Theatres Wellington. Ltd, and for $250,000 has built an intimate theatre for a specialist audience 'in the the busy commercial heart of Wellington.

The managing director of the joint company, Mr Lang Masters, does not plan to stop there. He is aiming at the Auckland market, and eventually for the university cities.

The Wellington theatre is called the Academy; after its namesake in the Arts Centre, Christchurch, the first specialist theatre permitted in Christchurch, and built and owned by Masters. The circuit Lang Masters wants to establish will show 16mm and 35mm films made by small but professional independent film companies overseas.. Already lined up for viewing in the .next few months are films from France, Australia, and America.

The Academy, Wellington, has the only German projector of its kind in New Zealand — a piece of specialist hi-fi cinema equipment built to show 35mm, and with slight modifications 70mm. This $60,000 machine, cap-

able also of drawing curtains, dimming lights, and changing screen size, will be joined soon by another, from Japan, designed exclusively to show 16mm.

Increasing numbers of film producers are manufacturing in 16mm because of' its cheapness. Greatly improved photographic techniques mean that the 16mm film does not blow up in coarse grain when it is projected. Masters has poured labour from its Christchurch workshops’into the Academy, saving a lot of money. It was offered, stripped, an old upstairs permises by a Wellington property developer leasing from a Government company. The restrictions of the old legislation behind him, Lang Masters, and his long-time associate, the company's general manager, Mr P. M. Downer, did not think twice. They took the building on lease, and in six weeks have made a tastefully decorated intimate theatre out of it. The owners constructed access stairs, and supplied an elevator, built it into the rent, and left the company's team to it. The theatre’s 300 seats have come from its Christchurch workshops, reinforced so that back legs are absent, giving audiences more foot room.

The theatre proper is slightly larger than the Academy, Christchurch, but longer and narrower. Theatre and foyer measure 400 sq metres.

The two directors are now at the Cannes Film Festival in France, looking for films of minority interest. They will also accept, where suitable, films rejected by the main distributors in New Zealand.

(Lang Masters’s plans for further expansion in Christchurch are also well underway. With a bit of luck, another theatre is hoped to be opened by Christmas in Hereford Street, opposite the National Mutual Building and with the theatre’s back to the bus depot.)

at the cinema

hans petrovic