THE LITTLEST SHOW AROUND

Press, 1 August 1989, Page 25

THE LITTLEST SHOW AROUND

PENNY CHAMBERS

visits Invercargill where a man obsessed with film since childhood has built a 52-seat

cinema in his backyard

Everyone settles in their seats and the show begins. The overture plays, coloured lights flit across the frilled curtain which swishes up to screen advertisements: “For straight-out value buy a Ford Eight for just £249” — “Keep your figure youthful and skate at the New Glide Rink.”

Forthcoming attractions include Rita Hayworth in “You Excite Me.”

Then comes the main feature, “A Daughter of Invercargill.” "That’s always a popular film, it was made in 1928 and folk just love to see Invercargill as it was in the old days,” Warren Sparkes, creator of Invercargill’s Little Theatre — one of New Zealand’s smallest movie theatres — had commented earlier in the day. This extraordinary man has always been obsessed by film — as an eight-year-old he showed slides to his friends using a magic lantern.

Then silent movies were pushed into obscurity by the advent of sound, and his father brought him an obsolete silent movie projector plus 50,000 feet of film for just £5.

From thereon there was no looking back; he set up a theatre in his father’s garage with seats, footlights, even a ticket seller and usher, and charged a penny a seat Years later he married the unsuspecting Elsa, who with an attitude of “if you can’t beat him, join him,” helped him run their own public movie theatres at Bluff and Arrowtown. He was also a lay preacher at the time, covering half of Southland. "He always had his dream to build his own picture theatre in our back yard,” says Elsa, “but foolishly I took no notice, until one day I looked out of the upstairs window and saw a huge pole towering in the air, with Warren calling out, ‘This is the height I want to build my picture theatre — do you think it’s too high?’ ”

He built the theatre around his garage, resenting the space that the car takes up. Everything came from cast-offs; from second-hand shops, demolition sites and closed-down theatres in Southland. “I confess I did a bit of grumbling sometimes,” says

Elsa. “Whenever it came to money for the theatre or for a lounge suite or clothes, it was always the theatre that won out.” She points to the intricately decorated ceiling, with its central rose and old chandelier. “That ceiling came from a homestead out at Winton which had burnt down. In pouring rain, that husband of mine climbed up a ladder, removed the charred ceiling and brought it home in strips. He spent the entire summer working on it; up at six, scraping it down and shaping it to fit the room — then going off to work for the day ... hopeless case;” she concludes, smiling up at him. The Sparkes researched theatre decor, and although they admit to using “some artistic licence,” the Little Theatre certainly has a feel of the Victorian/Edwardian era.

Walls coated with plaster panels are painstakingly etched in the rich colours of the day — reds and greens against a background of gold and white, the gold costing "$9O for a wee tin.”

The 52 seats came from theatres long since dead; 16 of them in the dress circle have a view of the miniature auditorium and its splendid decor, and the stage with its curtain, handstitched by Warren Sparkes. Two statues flank the curtain, and a grandfather clock graces a corner.

In front of the stage is a dummy organ and organist. “We couldn’t have a real organ; it wouldn’t fit in!” says Elsa. “Recently we had a school party in, and one wee child was distraught when we got outside: ‘you’ve locked the little man at the piano inside,’ he wept.” Warren leads the way upstairs to the projection room. “When the picture starts, our white cat shoots up the stairs, walks along those dress circle seats in front of the projection room — you sometimes see his tail go right the way across the screen —

then he sits on someone’s knee throughout the entire movie. He’ll usually pick on someone eating jellybeans — he loves jellybeans.” The Sparkes used to run a sweet stall in the theatre, but “my daughters would eat all the sweets while the pictures were on, so we abandoned that idea.”

The projection room is a maze of old cinematic equipment. All from Southland theatres and destined for the tip, it was rescued and restored by Warren. Two 1913 and 1928 projectors compete for room with a 1928 Western Electric Sound System which made silent pictures talk. Numerous boxes of glass slides,

many of them hand-coloured, stand nearby, alongside a mountain of film reels.

At the Little Theatre, the Sparkes put on picture shows for clubs, school parties, and surprise celebrations. “Tonight a group is coming for grandma’s eighty-second birthday — and we shall show ‘Daughter of Invercargill,’ but often we don’t decide on the film until our audience arrives. That way .we can ‘suss them out.’ Then we have to move fast!”

For years, the Sparkes have played a small but vital role in New Zealand’s heritage. Often there was only one copy made of a film, maihly kept by private

collectors like Warren. In addition to the hundreds of films in his possession, he has scores of film fragments, often the only piece remaining of a film. A few years ago, to the delight of the New Zealand Film Archives, he unearthed a tiny piece of New Zealand’s first feature film, “Down on the Farm.” Amongst his countless other prizes, is the 1908 "Shackleton Leaves New Zealand” showing Lyttelton and Christchurch as the explorer prepared for his doomed expedition. Warren points to the 35mm optical film printer — “I made it out of motor-bike gears and all sorts of other odds and ends;

anything I couldn’t buy, I would make.”

This extraordinarily compli-cated-looking machine is one of only two in New Zealand; it reprints old film with its nitrate base on to modern film base, to stop the old film from decomposing first to a sticky mess and later to dust.

“It’s a race against time, although some people reckon the Invercargill climate helps to preserve the film longer,” Warren reflects.

But it is not just silent movies that he shows; he is a great fan of Elvis Presley. "In my Arrow-

town theatre, swarms of people would queue for ‘Blue Hawaii.’ There weren’t enough seats, so they brought fruit boxes to stand on ... yes, those were the days. But this is where the fun is — the best thrill is to show a comedy in this Little Theatre, and hear them laugh.” And later, at the evening’s show, the audience certainly bears out what he says. Shrieks of laughter as, just in time, the heroine is rescued by her lover from the clutches of the villain. The screen flickers “The End,” the viewers clap enthusiastically, and the old theatre seats

flip up. The party squeezes its way down the circle stairs into the tiny foyer with its old ticket office, past the ancient phonograph which plays any of Warren’s collection of 78 r.p.m. records — 5000 of them — and the array of old movie posters. Grandma throws up her hands with happiness. “Oh, that was wonderful. What a beautiful little theatre, and, oh, how it took me back down Memory Lane!” Warren and Elsa Sparkes shake her by the hand, escort the people to the outside, and once more close the doors on New Zealand’s smallest theatre.

Cat lured by jellybeans