From rte.ie
By Paul Markey, writer, projectionist and cinephileI’ve found It’s easier to be consistent with such a task when your life is generally, well, consistent and perhaps, okay, a tad predictable.
The years-long gaps in my diary keeping often reflect periods when my life was full of change and drama - no time to write, gotta live!
One of many attic roots during lockdown turned up a biscuit tin containing a dickie-bowtie and a small black reporter’s notebook.
Somehow this box had survived seven flat moves across twenty-four years. Inside these pages, the year stretched from 1998 to '99. After a brief stint in The Ambassador in O'Connell Street, I was sent to the Screen Cinema (nee Metropole) to be an usher/doorman/security fella.
Dublin. The time of the (Celtic) Tiger. I was 27. Two years in South America had left me a skinny shell of a man. At the behest of the staff, the names have been changed.
Out of respect for cinema, the rest has been told exactly as it occurred.
1998
June
Instrumental in the removal of two not the full shilling types from screen 3. Felt guilty afterwards. They weren’t causing any real trouble. And there’s a lot worse to be done than hanging around a picture house all day. You wouldn’t look twice at this couple. Apparently they’ve been loitering in this place for ten years, forcing friendships on various staff members to get in for free. Then staying for an entire day, slipping between shows. Before their expulsion today, and before I knew their reputation, yer woman asked me my name on the way in. I must’ve sensed something because I lied and said it was Jorge.
Liam (my boss, Chief Usher, 60) challenged me at the door with a fiver for tea bags, sent me up to the shops. I come back with the usual Lyons and suit-up, deep into the second half of Columbia Vs. Romania. Liam is a master of the trivial. He stands on the lobby steps like Washington crossing the Delaware, looking out across Pearse Street to Trinity College deep in thought. Not on the current instability in the Balkans or the outcome of the last G7 summit. But rather if the student sitting on the ledge outside is going to litter the place with their sandwich. "Animals!" is his crying mantra.
July
Communist wheelchair access: A woman arrived in a wheelchair pushed by her male companion. He doesn’t say anything. She asks me if she can stash the chair while they see a film. Sure thing, says I. She gets out of the wheelchair. Helps her companion fold it up. They hand it to me. I store it without comment. They return from a show of Washington Square. I dug out the chair. They fold it out. He gets into it and she wheels him off. What the actual?
Never in my life have I seen so many girls of a certain age gather in groups as those which flooded the lobby all afternoon. Every man jack of them done up to the nines. They were there for the remake of Lolita. For the late show, the audience switched to a certain type of older men. I see. A film which deals with a middle-aged man’s obsession over a beautiful young girl gets audience of same.
August
These glass doors are my IMAX to the world: a couple argue, broke up, the boy stormed off into the rain. The girl remained. Two teenagers soaked each other as they danced in a giant pool of rainwater. The shower faded. The boy returned. The girl remained the same. Isn’t that every movie, right there?
My favourite films of all time: A Room With a View, Les Amants Du Point Neuf, The Lavender Hill Mob, Europa, Subway, Hannah and Her Sisters, The Great Escape, Le Femme Nikita, The Vanishing, Do The Right Thing.
Part-time usherette, Nora, regaled me with tales of her Savoy cinema salad days in the 1960s. The most coveted spot, she said, was under an actual spotlight, before shows and during intervals when concession and cigarette sales would be announced. Nora is cool. Lovely smile. Happily married. No Kids. Travels the country and the world.
The Omen…A seventy-year-old woman dropped dead outside. A young couple asked me to stash a heavy black bin bag while they saw a film. It contained a wreath for the fellas’s dead brother. Notification of death benefits arrived in the post for the long term staff. I go home and find out my mother’s late twin sister’s husband has died in Holland.
A dozen Spanish students came at me with their tickets one at a time. "Top of the stairs, on the left, screen number three" I said, and each and every one repeated the line back to me, practising their English out in the wild. Liam says we’ll get a new film on Friday. Maybe Primary Colours. Must check the news to see if Clinton has confessed to anything. It’s bizarre to think the President of the United States' affair two years ago has such ramifications across the globe it will affect how late I get home over the next four weeks (the movie runs 2 hours and 23 minutes)
September
A spate of new posters to put up today: Firelight, costume melodrama slash love story, with a poster image you’d see in a chemist advertising condoms. "Passion has no limits," it says. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, can’t wait to hear what the retired afternoon crowd say when they walk out of this one! Out of Sight, anyone who says George Clooney isn’t a movie star needs to check out this image. The Spanish Prisoner, David Mamet mind feck. Have to work the press screening of this next week and hopefully avoid spoilers in the lobby.
A short poem, by Paul Markey: The rain it rainith down. Beats of the ground. And comes through the roof in screen one.
Just saw Saving Private Ryan at the press show in The Savoy with Derek. Dear god, what a film. What cinema. There wasn’t an empty seat or dry eye in the house. The walk up the aisle towards the toilets as the credits rolled was a procession of teary-eyed sniffing grown men. Us amongst them. Liam says word from on top is we’re likely to get it in the Screen, too, as opening day bookings at the Savoy have been so heavy.
I noticed there's a sweet spot in the upper lobby where the sound from all three screens meet and mingle into this Parallax View-like sound scape. I recorded it tonight on my dad’s machine. The result doesn’t quite capture the phenomenon. But Dancing at Lughnasa does sound like Donegal is being shelled by the US Eighth Army. "Didiidle-di-idleday..." (INCOMING!)
Celeb alert! Bono and Ali for Elizabeth. But we’re sold out! Embarrassing. But this Cate Blanchett is packing them in.
1999
February
Hungover after a week in Amsterdam. Returned to chaos. Life is Beautiful? Or so they say. Who are ‘they’? Feckin’ everybody, it seems like. While I was away, the Screen Cinema’s biggest hit in years opened. Roberto Benigni’s Life Is Beautiful has struck the mother-lode. It’s playing exclusively at the Screen. And when I say exclusively… nowhere else in the entire country! Not even the IFC. Masses of great reviews and seven Oscar nominations have pulled folk from all corners of the city (the country?). I feel like Moses out there, alone trying to wrangle the mob. Except I’m not crying out Ten Commandments. Just the one: "Centre doors, top of the stairs! Screen one!"
Siobhan in the box office waved at me intermittently from behind the glass. I jumped up from the crowd and waved back like a lost seafarer. Siobhan’s been there almost a decade and has never seen the like of this. I found out Chief Liam, apparently, is in his element. The constant crowds are what it used to be like every weekend back in his Metropole heyday. He’s lovin’ every wranglin’ minute of this madness.
Celeb alert! Van Morrison and Michelle Rocca. Japers. Your classic rock star and statuesque model height disparity in the flesh.
March
A month on release and it’s only getting worse. All the people who received recommendations from their friends who saw Life is Beautiful last month are starting to show up en masse. The crux of my daily flood control problem is this: hundreds are showing up to collect their pre-booked credit card tickets fifteen minutes before the programme starts, all thinking they can just collect their tickets right then and stroll straight in. I’ve never been abused by so many people with Dublin 4 accents in one night in my life.
Ah…can’t believe it. Stanley Kubrick has died. Printed out a memorial note at home and stuck it up in the lobby. He died at home in London yesterday morning, leaving three daughters, twelve films and the impending release of his thirteenth (Eyes Wide Shut), starring the world’s biggest actor, shot within an hour's drive of his gaff.
April
It hasn’t stopped. Those who came on a recommendation have told more. But cracks are appearing: about an hour into Life is Beautiful, an elderly fella comes out to me: "Is this the only Italian film with subtitles you have on?" "Yeah. ‘La Vita Bella’. Nominated for seven Oscars. Sold out nearly every night since it opened," I replied. "Well, what’s good about it?", he mumbles to himself as he goes back up the stairs. An old dear sticks her head around the door. "He says it’s the right one," he says to her. "Sold out every night." They disappear back inside. I look at my watch. They haven’t gotten to the concentration camp scenes yet.
I’m a year at the Screen as of today. After two years in South America, I’ve spent the last twelve months bang smack in the middle of Dublin and I still don’t know if I’m where I should be. Small ad in the Evening Herald: "Trainee Projectionist wanted for suburban multiplex cinema."
Postscript: In retrospect, I realise my year at the Screen was the last time I worked with the public. That merciless mob, comprised of us. I was to spend the next decade out in LIffey Valley locked away in a projection booth. But for a year there, near the end of the twentieth century, I had the key to my own cinema. I was the last one left at night. I doused the lights, locked the doors, strolled off into the night in search of the last bus.
The building is gone now. But cinema lives! Along with the memories, as long as I’m still standing.
https://www.rte.ie/culture/2023/0401/1365917-the-diary-of-a-dublin-cinema-usher/
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