Reel Life Behind the Screen: A Cinema Manager Remembers

A nostalgic tome dedicated solely to subjective recollections of the thrilling drama of a cinema manager arranging cinema usherette rotas and checking choc-ice deliveries might not be expected to attract many readers. Yet weird stuff kept happening to Nick Scudamore doing just this. Here he offers a memoir of sticky seats and of scary situations; dead bodies, robberies, audience near riots, bizarre public misbehaviour, even the occasional celebrity. And remarkable movies from the 1970s and 1980s, from high end art-house all the way through to soft-core smut and teen-trash. Both as a memoir and as social history, this autobiography provides much of interest for both the contemporary film enthusiast as well as for the historically curious general reader.

From 1979 to 1987 Nick served as manager to a series of art-house cinemas in London, the Screen on Islington Green and the Paris Pullman in Chelsea to name but two. The operational and economic context of films and the film business as a whole has changed so very much in the forty years since the events he remembers that it seems now worthwhile to record just a little of this pre-internet history before it fades from his memory.