Featured Exhibitor
Colinsburgh Community Cinema in Fife started operation around a year ago and already have a thriving organisation presenting a wide selection of films. To find out how you can do the same in your area, pop along to the Community Cinema Festival in Falkirk (18th-19th April) to hear the Colinsburgh team explain in person how they made their dreams a reality. Here, Peter Marshall recounts how the smallest seeds of inspiration blossomed into a fantastic success.
The First Reel
It seemed like a good idea after two bottles of wine. It still seemed like a good idea the following morning. It was just that the hangover brought it into a painfully bright perspective. Still, four of us had agreed and weren’t going to admit defeat before the idea had been given a chance of life.
Life in Colinsburgh is good. There is a fine community spirit, a school, a pub, two shops and a petrol station where you can hire ‘High School Musical’ and other assorted blockbusters. The trouble is that short of going to St. Andrews (twelve miles away) or Kirkcaldy (a sixteen mile trek) there is little chance of seeing the sort of films that you might enviously read about in the Sunday papers.
Now there are those that will be content to watch a film on the TV or even on a mobile phone, and there are also those who want to get their teeth into the real thing but to be honest we didn’t know if a film club in Colinsburgh would attract an audience or not - that was the calculation and the gamble. Setting up a film club is as much a test of your fellow residents and neighbours as it is of your mettle and persistence.
Our group had Sue, a genius at trawling the internet and any other media and with an uncanny accuracy to home in on the essential links. Within a week she had identified BFFS Scotland as an essential contact and Ian Kerr as the man to talk to. A meeting was arranged and advertised and Ian came and explained to a respectable audience of twenty odd enthusiasts how you set up a film club.
The nightmare of being engulfed in miles of irretrievably unravelling celluloid as your audience watch a blank screen is now largely the province of Laurel and Hardy films, thanks to the miracle of digital technology - but you still need some expensive kit. Forget the home cinema set-up, we are talking an expensive projector, sound system, a twelve foot screen, amplifier and the rest - £6000 for starters. That was the bad news from Ian Kerr. The good news was that he had a kit that we could borrow for the first year while we found out if the audience for a film club was feasible.
An Offer We Couldn’t Refuse...
Ian offered us a free show courtesy of BFFS Scotland offering to set up the kit as we watched and learned. The residents of Colinsburgh and the villages of the East Neuk could sample the experience of a custom made cinema for free. It was an offer out of ‘The Godfather’.
The first hurdle we had to jump was a suitable venue. We cleared that one, despite nudging the hurdle. Colinsburgh has a fine old Town Hall built in the days of Pantomine and Jimmy Shand Ceilidhs. However, the hall is big and sound tends to resonate whilst acoustic demands of modern cinema are a little more sophisticated. It wasn’t enough to be a major problem but sound is something that you take for granted and needs to be tested. We checked the blackout and made some temporary arrangements as even on dark nights street lighting can be a problem. The chairs were just about adequate although we now have a cushion bank with a range of rejected cushions in classic seventies and eighties designs. The regulars bring their own with a couple even bringing their own chairs. However, we are lucky that the Town Hall in Colinsburgh is a community resource and very cheap to hire.
Soon, we were ready for our first show – Casino Royale. Ian Kerr came and with our help set up the equipment. We offered visitors a glass of wine to help the evening along and to our delight and surprise forty three curious Cineastes came through the doors for the free show. We took names and addresses like demented DCIs and asked folk to fill in sheets with films they wanted to see. Daniel Craig did his stuff strutting around an imaginary Montenegro and the evening was pronounced a great success. To be honest the four of us had done a quick calculation of likely punters amongst our friends and they came out of loyalty, but a lot more came out of interest. Once you have a suitable hall and a loan of the equipment the free show is the easy part. Keeping the audience is the hard part.
We opted for a dual system – club members paying £30 a season for ten films and those paying £4 on the door. This way you maximise your possible audience and you are unlikely to have to pay the higher rate of a third of your takings to Filmbank and other film hire companies. We worked out to do this you would have to attract audiences in excess of 200 – our hall has a limit of 140. The mathematics of film club economics are simple if curious. To hire a film cost s about £100. Add onto that the cost of the hall and a small amount for advertising and incidentals and we came to a cost of £120 per film. Now with forty members paying £30 for a season you can afford to show ten films. Sixty members for the same membership fee gives you fifteen films. As the membership rises the cost per film drops making the club more attractive.
The wanna-see returns were very useful, not to draw up a list for the first trial mini-season of four films but to give us a good idea of the range of films that our audience would like to see. Programming is the secret of a successful film club and each club will have its own critical character. However an endless run of costume dramas or action movies will pall and it is essential to ensure variety in scope and genre. The clue is to keep talking to your audience and in making their feedback an essential part of the club. Ian told us of the button vote. Like all great ideas it is ludicrously simple. A box of old buttons and five dishes ranked from 5- ‘excellent’ to 1 – ‘I wish I hadn’t come’. After some prompting our audience vote as a matter of course and the averaged out score is published each month in a table with previous films.
Choosing the Films
A golden rule for Colinsburgh is to always see any film we are considering for our programme before deciding to show it. Philip French and Mark Cousins may have forgotten more about film than Jonathon Ross will ever know but they may coming from a completely different place to your average film club member. I wondered about ‘The Heartbeat Detector’ which had a rave review from Philip French. Thankfully I hired it out for rental before adding it to the new season’s programme only to find that it was completely inappropriate for our audience.
Within our initial mini-season we played it safe but provided variety; ‘Little Miss Sunshine’; ‘Atonement’; ‘The Last King of Scotland’ and ‘The Good German.’ It was a success with audiences averaging out at 37 and enough interest in buying membership to suggest a full season might be possible. More importantly film night had become a social event that people looked forward to, a chance to meet friends and exchange gossip over a glass of wine with a good film thrown in.
For our first full season we took Ian’s advice to programme in two halves, committing ourselves to the first five films and then deciding the next five in the light of our audience reaction. Having canvassed opinion we have included three foreign language films: ‘Volver’ ‘Les Choristes’ and ‘La Vie en Rose’.
Looking to the Future
Our next strategy is a membership drive making sure posters are up in the libraries, newsagents, post offices and cafes in the East Neuk and getting our monthly screening reviewed in the local press. We always think that we must have told everybody, but there are always folk turning up saying ‘I wish I had known about this before.’ Our target is fifty members by the beginning of our third season.
It is early days but so far so good. Audience figures are being maintained and, crucially, the club members are enthusiastic. The really good news is that we have been accepted for grants from Hi-Arts and Fife Council which means that we will be able to buy our own kit.
Organising a film club is a lot of hard work and takes a major commitment but let’s face it - nothing beats watching a film on a twelve foot screen, unless it’s watching it on a twenty four foot screen!
Peter Marshall
Colinsburgh Community Cinema
Don't forget that Colinsburgh Community Cinema will be in Falkirk for the Community Cinema Festival (18th-19th April). Click to find out more about this exciting event.
