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Kev Franzi’s
JOURNEYS IN TIME

"Good Lord! It's a Harmour and Heath"

Melbourne’s Star Newsreel Theatrette was located at 34 Elizabeth
Street, about half a block from Flinders Street. Like most Newsreel
Theatrettes of that era (the 1940s to the '60s) it occupied the basement
of an inner city building, with a narrow stairway leading down to a
small ticket office and the double doors that gave access to a little
cinema with perhaps one to two hundred seats. (The Star had 238 seats.)

It occurs to me that a whole generation of people have now grown up
without experiencing the joys of a Newsreel Theatrette where, for one
shilling and six pence (15 cents) you could spend an idle hour viewing
the latest newsreel coverage of events from around the world, together
with a cartoon or two, a comedy short, a travelogue, a "March of
Time" or some other piece of high adventure captured by the Motion
Picture Camera for dramatic presentation on "The Big Screen".

As a boy I watched World War II
unfold on the big screen at the beau-
tiful little Century Newsreel Theatre
opposite the Melbourne Town Hall.
In those days visiting a "Picture
Show" was the only way you could
see and hear this living history. That
was before television destroyed it all,
with its instant images of the day's
disasters to be consumed with your
evening meal. There's little doubt that
my regular visits to the Century
sowed the seeds that flowered into a
lifetime's involvement in Documen-
tary Filmmaking.

A superbly engineered, robust "no non-
sense" projector designed to give years
of reliable service; I think eventually lost
the race against a deluge of lighter
“showponies” imported from overseas.
The capstan like fitting (lower front)
raises or lowers the machine on an "L"
shaped leg, and the gear train oil level
inspection port is adjacent to the big
flywheel.

4 REEL DEALS September 2019