OLD DAYS OVER-RATED, SAYS VETERAN FILM MAN

Radio Record, 9 December 1938, Page 24

OLD DAYS OVER-RATED, SAYS VETERAN FILM MAN

— Eby

Gordon

Mirams

turer who gave Horace Hull the idea. The lecturer had a magic lantern, and he claimed he was making £10 a week showing slides to illustrate his talks about the awful effects of alcohol on the human frame. Mr. Hull bought the magic lantern from the lecturer, not to give temperance talks, but to set up as an itinerant showman, travelling the South Island from end to end, giving the countryfolk what was, in those days, the equivalent of the modern marvel of the cinema show. That was back in 1898-40 years ago-and Mr. Hull is still in the movie business, operating a circuit of shows from his headquarters in Alexandra, Central Otago. In that time he has been out of the game for only two years-when he bought an interest in a coal-pit-and he claims to be the oldest permanent hand in the sereen business in New Zealand, with the possible exception of Sir Benjamin Fuller. NOWADAYS, you don’t buy films outright as you used to; you rent them from the exehanges; but Mr. Hull still likes to come occasionally to the centre of things in Wellington to satisfy himself he is get- | TY WAS a temperance lec-

ting the pictures he wants for his cireuit. It was on one of these trips the other day that I met him. Reg. Felton, publicity manager of Paramount Pictures, introduced us; and in the Paramount office Mr. Hull chatted about the old days. They were hard times, when aman would be away from home for two years on end, jogging about from one small country town to another in a waggon with two _ horses, sereening his pictures in some small hall for one night, sleeping wherever he could, and getting out on to the open road again early the next morningrunning the whole show singlehanded, making a small profit one night, a loss the next, and travelling in fair weather and foul over roads that were mainly foul, Sixty-six years old in March, Mr. Hull can look back now with a cheery laugh; but unlike the average pioneer he’s not prepared to wrap the hardships up in glamour and pretend that the old days were best. ‘It was a miserable life,’’ he says. ‘‘Hard work all the time. If I had my life over again, I wouldn’t take it on.’’

TH the magic lantern plant which he bought from the temperance lecturer, including a kerosene lamp, Mr. Hull began his eareer giving lantern lectures, illustrated with slides, about Ireland and the first Paris Exhibition. Then came the interlude of the coal-pit, and for two years he deserted the sereen and the open road. ~ But about 1904 he was back again; and found that the moving picture was ousting the magi¢ lantern. I was from the late Bob Shepard (N.Z. manager of J. G. Williamson Theatres, whose death. occurred recently) that Mr. Hull bought a kinematograph attachment for his magic lantern plant. Mr. Shepard was at that time head of the kinematograph department of the Bible and "Tract Society. FILM then cost 1/6 a foot. You bought it outright, and you eould sell it after you’d finished with it. But by the time you’d been finishing taking it on a two-year tour of practieally every inhabited place in the South Island, there usually wasn’t much left to sell, said Mr. Hull. ‘‘I can’t understand how the film stood up to such

treatment as well as it did.’’ ‘"‘Hor a long time I ran the show all by myself-and it took some running,’’ said Mr. Hull, with a reminiscent look in his eye as he recalled how he had to turn the handle of the projector with one hand, keep a gramophone running and change the records with the other. There was also the money to be collected. Those days the lighting was done by limelight. It was quite the usual thing to get a boy to sit on the bag of gas to keep up pressure. For this you gave him a ‘ticket to the show. By the Same price a boy was often hired to ring a bell round the town announcing the picture. "Yes, we had the free pass menace even then,’’ says © Mr. Hull. . & films of those days I remember? A thing ealled ‘Chasing a Husband’-that was always very popular. And ‘Leap Frog.’ So long as you had plenty of movement, that was all that mattered. People then didn’t worry. about a story. ‘‘Admission charges? 2/and 1/- were the usual ratesand in those days the best seats, the 2/- ones, were the ones nearest the screen. "‘T’m afraid we showed the public a lot of fakes. Especially at the time of the South African war. If we could get hold of anything at all with soldiers in it, it was supposed to have come straight from Africa, ‘In those early days, you almost had to drape the legs of tables for the sake of modesty. I remember I had a film of a girl in a grass skirt doing one of those wriggling dances-what do you call them? Hulas. Well, sometimes I put the hula dance picture on after the show just to give some of the boys a treat. But now, darn it, you find that sort of thing

-and worse-stuck right in the main picture. And nebody seems to mind, Ideas on morals aren’t what they used. to be.’’ When electric light arrived and caused a minor revolution in the movie business, Mr. Hull invested in a car, and used it to work the dynamo for his light. But after a while he got rid of the car and went back to his waggon and two horses, though he stuck to electric lighting. ‘Sometimes I’d find the Salvation Army screening films in opposition te me. People used to say that one of us was showing for God and the other for the Devil.’’ R. HULL remembers 2 time when a firm was able to buy the absolute monopoly for screening films in certain districts, such as Southland and Otago. Later he imported his own films from England, bringing such silent classics as ‘‘A Tale of Two Cities,’’? ‘‘The Sign of the Cross’’ and ‘‘Joan of Are"’ to New Zealand. He has shown Paramount pictures ever since the company has been in operation. Before that there was the Famous Lasky Film Service. The only places in the South Island where Mr. Hull has not screened films are Christchurch, Dunedin, Oamaru and. Hokitika (the first two were too big; there was opposition in the others). He has shown film in places-old mining towns-no longer in existence; and in dozens of places he was the first man who had ever turned the handle of a film projector. Mr. Hull believes that his only vival for the claim of being the oldest permanent: hand in the business may be Sir Benjamin: Fuller. He can remember Sir Benjamin in the early days, travelling with his father from place to place and operating films on the same lines as Mr, Hull’s outfit.