MOVIE GOING HABITS

Wairarapa Times-Age, 21 June 1940, Page 9

MOVIE GOING HABITS

SOME ODD CUSTOMS. In its annual survey of the world market (which isn’t staggering so dizzily as Hollywood would have you believe), Warner Brothers' foreign department has come up with some interesting oddities about movie-going habits in remote sections of the globe. Despite black-outs and mined territorial waters and political bans on the Hollywood product in and around Europe, some 150,000.000 people outside the United States are still stepping up to the wickets each week to buy movie tickets —and a goodly share of this entertainment still filters in to those countries from the American screen capital. Take Iceland, for instance. That country represents the northernmost point at which Hollywood films are shown. There are ten theatres now operating, with an average seating capacity of from 175 to 350. The largest theatre seats seven hundred. Two of them have American sound equipment.

Although Germany, France, Denmark and England, whose films Iceland also buys, are much closer to her than America, 85 per cent of all pictures shown carry the Hollywood brand. Errol Flynn, Mickey Rooney. Bette Davis, Edward G. Robinson, and Shirley Temple are the favourites there. Pictures are shown from two to four times a week, varying with the fishing season which regulates the. flow of life in that harsh country. Tn Costa Rica, the plantation country in Central America, there are five theatres in the capital city of San Jose. Here one of the strangest practices in motion pictures exhibition methods prevails. Every Saturday, from nine in the morning until midnight, the movie houses have continuous showings of feature pictures, with none shown twice. At the end of each production, the theatre is emptied and tickets collected all over again. Or. patrons may remain in the theatre if they buy tickets to the subsequent screenings. This plan is followed to give the people a chance to catch up on their movie shopping, since, working on the plantations week after week, they do .not have the opportunity to come into town very often. Iraq fosters still another quaint custom. Its forty theatres are- all wired for sound and American films —j especially adventure stories and music- j als —are great favourites with the populace. Next to the regular screen, the ] exhibitor' places a small one and on it flashes the titles, translated into four] or five different languages. Theatregoers are trained to see their film that way, preferring the separate screen for titles rather than looking at titles su-per-imposed on the picture itself —a custom followed in American theatres when foreign subjects go on display. Nigeria, on the African Gold Coast, has eleven theatres, five of which are sound-equipped. Nigeria, being the jumping off point for hunting parties and expeditions into the interior, has definite tourist seasons which regulate the frequency and number of films shown. ,

The famous island of Tahiti has one theatre, in Papeete, its capital city. A French possession, Tahiti naturally grants favour to French films, but despite this, American pictures are preferred and 40 per cent of pictures shown in the Theatre Moderne arc American.

Taiwan, also known as Formosa, has forty-one theatres, all wired for sound. Adventure and action pictures arc also favourites there, and even such typically American stories as “Dodge City ' and other nation-building themes entirely unfamiliar to the audience have proved popular, in some cases establishing records.