1. Manchester Culture
• By the end of the 19th century, Manchester already had a reputation
for merrymaking:
• Public house stirs, music halls, penny gaffs, organ grinders on the
street, the monkey parade
• Between the wars, Manchester’s export market for textiles collapsed to
just one third of it’s 1913 level
• One third of cotton workers out of work, many on reduced hours
• Cinema provided not only a form of entertainment, but a form of
escapism
• Importantly, it was also a cheep form of entertainment
2. Early Cinema In Manchester
• Well before Hollywood dominated the film world, films were shown to the
Manchester mass
• In make shift venues (like ‘Penny Gaffs’) and limited by technology (short
clips)
• Accompanied by a compares, musicians and singers
• 1896: First films shown in Manchester, St James’ Theatre, Oxford Road
• 1896: Films shown at the old YMCA building on St Peter’s Street
• 1986: Lumiere Brothers promote a show at the Lesser Free Trade Hall
• 1889: 15,000 people watched five showings of the Corbett vs.
Fitzsimmons boxing world championship bout
• Newsreels (via Gaumont and Pathe) of ‘real life events (death of King
Edward, San Francisco earthquake) were shown in the city
• By 1909 there were regular shows at most of the main theatres
• Production companies, film rental and repair companies clustered around
Deansgate and Great Ducie Street
3. The First Cinemas
• Longsight Picture Palace, Stockport Road
• Alhambra, Openshaw
• King’s Hall, Hulme
• Cinematographers Act, 1909 – required cinemas to abide by safety
standards and hold an entertainments license
• Trivoli on Peter Street was one of the first granted a license
• The Picture House (McDonlads at the top of Oxford Road) was one of
the first purpose built cinemas in 1911
• The Picture House seat 1000 people – ‘… the largest and finest
cinematograph theatre in the UK
• The Kinemacolour (1910) – on the site of the main Cornerhouse
screen
4. Growing Popularity
• in 1913, there were 111 licensed cinemas in Manchester
• Serving a population on 714,000
• More cinemas per head than any other city
• 1914 – weekly cinema audiences for the UK were in excess of 20
million people
5. The 1927 Cinematographers Act
• By the mid-1920s, British film production has ground to a
halt (only 33 British films were made in 1925)
• In 1926, over 600 American films were shown in Britain
• In 1927 Parliament brought in an important piece of
legislation the Cinematographers Trade Bill, designed to
ensure there was a guaranteed home market for British
made films
• This meant that 5% of the total number of movies shown in
theatres had to be from Britain (this figure rose to 20% by
1936)
• American companies simply came over to the UK and
started making films
• These were terrible and known as ‘Quota Quickies’
6. History
J. Arthur Rank
• In 1933, J. Arthur Rank, who had started
by making religious films in order to
spread the word of the gospel, founded
British National
• In 1935, he went into partnership with
C.M.Woolf to take over Pinewood Studios,
20 miles west of London and found the
Rank Organisation
• When some early films that he was
involved with didn't get a very good
circulation he realised that control of the
movie theatres was the key to success
• He went into partnership with a gent
called Oscar Deutsch who was building a
J. Arthur Rank chain of cinemas
• The two established the ODEON (Oscar
Deutsch Entertains Our Nation) cinema
chain
7. Film In Manchester
• The story of the Mancunian Film Company began in 1908
• Market trader James Blakeley entered the world of entertainment
when he decided to buy a cinema of his own accord
• It would have been what was known then as a ‘Penny Gaff’, a building,
often a converted shop or chapel with rows of benches on a sloping
floor, a projector and a sheet for a screen
• In America, a similar process took place in shops front
• These were called ‘Nickelodeons’ in America
• Cinema was in its early days and parts of it were still considered by
many to be too rough and ready for a sophisticated audience, yet
James managed to pack in the crowds
8. Film In Manchester
• James sold the cinema and set up a
film rental company with his two sons
– James Jnr and John E. Blakeley
• Blakeley’s Central Film Agency scored
a major coup in 1915 when John E
persuaded his father that a movie
called Tillie’s Punctured Romance
would be a big hit.
• Tillie starred Charlie Chaplin in his first
full-length comedy and other rental
firms thought it would be too long to
hold an audience’s attention
9. America vs. Britain
• Until WWI, the American and British
film industries grew at a similar rate
• WWI saw huge investment in the war
effort resulting in a diminished film
industry in Britain
• America flourished and began flooding
the UK with American films
• Not only were few British films being
made, few people actually wanted to
see them
• The major studio cornered the
distribution market in the UK
10. Film Production
• In 1927 John E talked the family into taking the plunge and making
their own films.
• With his canny gift of guessing correctly Blakeley produced a series of
what we might call ‘silent musicals’ – or ‘singalong silents’
• Once again these were highly successful and led to John E trying his
luck at making a feature film
• The result – Two Little Drummer Boys starred Wee Georgie Wood and
recouped its costs in no time.
• Even though these films had to be shot in London studios it remained
John E’s dream to set up a studio in Manchester
11. Film Production
• The 1930s and sound led to even
more success for the Mancunian Film
Company, John E, having more or
less taken charge, introducing to the
world the talented George Formby in
his first two movies Boots Boots and
Off The Dole
• Made for very little overheads in a
film studio over a London garage
they proved to John E once and for
all that his seemingly simple formula
for making movies – no fancy
camera work, simple plots, very little
editing combined with the best
talents the Northern Variety Halls
had available – was all you needed
to make a highly profitable and
successful movie
12. Manchester’s First Film Studio
• The Second World War saw a series of cheery comedies emerge from
Mancunian, all of them eagerly lapped up by a wartime audience that
needed morale boosting movies that would lift the spirits.
• Three of them starred Lancashire comic Frank Randle who was, at that
time, the highest paid comedian in England.
• After the War Randle and Blakeley
(with several other partners)
became directors of the Film
Studios Manchester and in 1947
John E’s dream came to fruition
with the opening of the Dickenson
Road studio in Rusholme
• At a cost of £70,000, Film Studios
(Manchester) was equipped and
The ‘Fun Factory’ or ‘Jollywood’
housed in an old Wesleyan
Church, on Dickenson Road,
Rusholme.
13. The First Manchester-Made Film
• The first Manchester made feature
film to be released was called Cup-
Tie Honeymoon (1948) and starred
Sandy Powell
• It was the first of many similar films
to be made in Rusholme, all of them
panned by the critics but loved by
audiences
• Mancunian films regularly outdrew
Hollywood productions in cinemas
around the North West