David's 10 Year Potted History (2021)
This is an update to the 5 year Potted History I posted in 2016!
I first started putting the idea of having a cinema in the Village around in February 2011 and received overwhelmingly positive feedback, so a small group of people formed the first committee and set about discovering how to go about it.
The first quandary was; if we were going to do it, where could we do it? The two obvious choices to consider were the Village Centre and the Players Theatre and, after looking at both, meeting the people who look after the venues and discussing it, it seemed obvious that that the Players Theatre would be the best option as it offered the perfect environment with total blackout and raked seating and we felt that the extra income we would give them would help them maintain and improve the building.
Having settled on the preferred venue and agreed the use of it with The Players committee, our next challenge was raising the money we needed to acquire the extra equipment. We needed a projector, a screen, a player, an AV receiver and extra speakers as well as a multitude of cables.
Here we have so many people to thank. The Hurstpierpoint Community Charity gave is our first donation, which, as well as being valuable from a monetary point of view, was the first payment to open the Film Society bank account and that gave us encouragement and even more impetus to deliver what we had promised. A number of businesses on the High Street kindly agreed to sponsor films in our first season and some incredibly generous local residents made personal donations to the Film Society, all of which gave us what we needed to acquire everything.
Once we had equipment, the Players were wonderfully helpful in installing it all and giving us space in their control room to run it from. We officially launched at St Lawrence Fair in July 2011, with our first screenings in Hurst Festival that year.
The first film we showed was the criminally underseen comedy drama Wonder Boys, starring Michael Douglas, Robert Downey Jr and Toby Maguire.
Our Box Office in Season 1 was run by Deb Hollywood at the friendly and welcoming, now sadly demised, Mint House bookshop. Her support was much appreciated and we thank her for it. We were delighted that estate agents Mishon Mackay agreed to take it on in Season 2 and they have been our warm, friendly and ever helpful box office since then.
So thanks to everyone who helped us get up and running, we could not have done it without you and I hope you all feel it has been worthwhile.
For our part, we have gradually expanded things to try to offer a diverse range of offerings to all.
The original idea was to offer one film a month over the film season, screening on Thursday evenings. But we soon realised that, given the popularity of the screenings, there was scope to offer a second weekday film. We decided to alternate the screenings on Thursdays and Fridays to give as many people as possible the chance to come.
In February 2013 we had another ridiculous idea; having this fantastic resource, it seemed wasteful not to make even more used of it and perhaps we could get Live Broadcasts beamed into the theatre. The Players committee agreed to partner up with us to add the necessary equipment to do this, but it was another 18 months before we finally managed to get agreement from NT Live and for the Players to get planning permission for the satellite dish and we finally launched Live Broadcasts in January 2015. The Live Broadcasts have been a wonderful success, playing largely to full houses and with rave responses.
We added a final strand to our offerings by launching the Sunday Cinema in 2014. While the original goal of the Village Cinema was to give people the chance to see films they would not have otherwise seen, including World Cinema, overlooked gems and independent cinema, we felt it would be good to offer people who perhaps couldn’t get to the cinema so easily the chance to see some more recent mainstream films. The Sunday Cinema has proven an incredibly popular addition to the Village Cinema, with full houses at almost all screenings.
In recent years our focus has been on improving on the audiovisual quality of the screenings and here I must mention one of our brilliant members, Ivor Knox, who has arranged some terrific deals and has given us a wealth of his time and experience, which has helped us to upgrade different pieces our equipment, The first stage of the upgrades was to replace the speakers in the auditorium with more powerful speakers to give a better and more complete surround sound experience.
In 2017 we were grateful to get a grant from West Sussex County Council towards the upgrade of our projector. The new projector is more powerful and has 4K upscaling to give a richer and clearer picture.
2017 was also a landmark year for me, in that I was (and this is a word I would never normally use) gobsmacked to be given the Roebuck Cup at the annual Film Society and Community Cinema of the Year awards. The Roebuck Cup is the highest individual award they can bestow, given to someone who has a significant impact on the Community Cinema world overall and I was simultaneously surprised, touched and moved to receive it
Following the upgrade of the Projector, we decided in 2019 that the next improvement would be to get a larger screen and that it would be amazing to get a Cinemascope screen, which would display all films at their best. These screens are very expensive, so we set up a crowdfunding page and were overwhelmed at the generosity of everyone, as we achieved our target in a matter of weeks. The Theatre was undergoing a refurbishment at the time, so we took the opportunity to install extra speakers to give us a 13 speaker immersive sound system, at the same time as we installed the new screen.
We reopened in January 2020 but, sadly, we were only able to show a couple of films before the global Covid pandemic forced a countrywide lockdown. As I write this, we are still in lockdown, a year on, but there is light at the end of the tunnel and we hope to be back to screening films on our almost unseen new audiovisual set up in the Festival of 2021.
It has been a lot of fun setting the Cinema and running it and we love the wonderful feedback we get from everyone, so hopefully you will carry on coming and I, or perhaps someone else, will be writing another one of these landmark updates in another 10 years!
This is an update to the 5 year Potted History I posted in 2016!
I first started putting the idea of having a cinema in the Village around in February 2011 and received overwhelmingly positive feedback, so a small group of people formed the first committee and set about discovering how to go about it.
The first quandary was; if we were going to do it, where could we do it? The two obvious choices to consider were the Village Centre and the Players Theatre and, after looking at both, meeting the people who look after the venues and discussing it, it seemed obvious that that the Players Theatre would be the best option as it offered the perfect environment with total blackout and raked seating and we felt that the extra income we would give them would help them maintain and improve the building.
Having settled on the preferred venue and agreed the use of it with The Players committee, our next challenge was raising the money we needed to acquire the extra equipment. We needed a projector, a screen, a player, an AV receiver and extra speakers as well as a multitude of cables.
Here we have so many people to thank. The Hurstpierpoint Community Charity gave is our first donation, which, as well as being valuable from a monetary point of view, was the first payment to open the Film Society bank account and that gave us encouragement and even more impetus to deliver what we had promised. A number of businesses on the High Street kindly agreed to sponsor films in our first season and some incredibly generous local residents made personal donations to the Film Society, all of which gave us what we needed to acquire everything.
Once we had equipment, the Players were wonderfully helpful in installing it all and giving us space in their control room to run it from. We officially launched at St Lawrence Fair in July 2011, with our first screenings in Hurst Festival that year.
The first film we showed was the criminally underseen comedy drama Wonder Boys, starring Michael Douglas, Robert Downey Jr and Toby Maguire.
Our Box Office in Season 1 was run by Deb Hollywood at the friendly and welcoming, now sadly demised, Mint House bookshop. Her support was much appreciated and we thank her for it. We were delighted that estate agents Mishon Mackay agreed to take it on in Season 2 and they have been our warm, friendly and ever helpful box office since then.
So thanks to everyone who helped us get up and running, we could not have done it without you and I hope you all feel it has been worthwhile.
For our part, we have gradually expanded things to try to offer a diverse range of offerings to all.
The original idea was to offer one film a month over the film season, screening on Thursday evenings. But we soon realised that, given the popularity of the screenings, there was scope to offer a second weekday film. We decided to alternate the screenings on Thursdays and Fridays to give as many people as possible the chance to come.
In February 2013 we had another ridiculous idea; having this fantastic resource, it seemed wasteful not to make even more used of it and perhaps we could get Live Broadcasts beamed into the theatre. The Players committee agreed to partner up with us to add the necessary equipment to do this, but it was another 18 months before we finally managed to get agreement from NT Live and for the Players to get planning permission for the satellite dish and we finally launched Live Broadcasts in January 2015. The Live Broadcasts have been a wonderful success, playing largely to full houses and with rave responses.
We added a final strand to our offerings by launching the Sunday Cinema in 2014. While the original goal of the Village Cinema was to give people the chance to see films they would not have otherwise seen, including World Cinema, overlooked gems and independent cinema, we felt it would be good to offer people who perhaps couldn’t get to the cinema so easily the chance to see some more recent mainstream films. The Sunday Cinema has proven an incredibly popular addition to the Village Cinema, with full houses at almost all screenings.
In recent years our focus has been on improving on the audiovisual quality of the screenings and here I must mention one of our brilliant members, Ivor Knox, who has arranged some terrific deals and has given us a wealth of his time and experience, which has helped us to upgrade different pieces our equipment, The first stage of the upgrades was to replace the speakers in the auditorium with more powerful speakers to give a better and more complete surround sound experience.
In 2017 we were grateful to get a grant from West Sussex County Council towards the upgrade of our projector. The new projector is more powerful and has 4K upscaling to give a richer and clearer picture.
2017 was also a landmark year for me, in that I was (and this is a word I would never normally use) gobsmacked to be given the Roebuck Cup at the annual Film Society and Community Cinema of the Year awards. The Roebuck Cup is the highest individual award they can bestow, given to someone who has a significant impact on the Community Cinema world overall and I was simultaneously surprised, touched and moved to receive it
Following the upgrade of the Projector, we decided in 2019 that the next improvement would be to get a larger screen and that it would be amazing to get a Cinemascope screen, which would display all films at their best. These screens are very expensive, so we set up a crowdfunding page and were overwhelmed at the generosity of everyone, as we achieved our target in a matter of weeks. The Theatre was undergoing a refurbishment at the time, so we took the opportunity to install extra speakers to give us a 13 speaker immersive sound system, at the same time as we installed the new screen.
We reopened in January 2020 but, sadly, we were only able to show a couple of films before the global Covid pandemic forced a countrywide lockdown. As I write this, we are still in lockdown, a year on, but there is light at the end of the tunnel and we hope to be back to screening films on our almost unseen new audiovisual set up in the Festival of 2021.
It has been a lot of fun setting the Cinema and running it and we love the wonderful feedback we get from everyone, so hopefully you will carry on coming and I, or perhaps someone else, will be writing another one of these landmark updates in another 10 years!
