Australians Experiment With Rooftop Cinema
Filed under: Distribution, Exhibition, Tales of the City
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According to the Saturday edition of the Australian newspaper The Age, a new open-air, rooftop movie theater will open in Melbourne this December. The entrepreneur behind the project, who has sunk nearly a million dollars into it, claims that the lights of Melbourne's ubiquitous skyscrapers make for an amazing cinematic vision, and when used as a backdrop to a city-lights-heavy movie like Lost in Translation, can jack up the whole experience to another level. The high-altitude, open-air setting also apparently keeps ambient noise to a minimum. The theater will seat 200 and provide dinner and drinks.
No word yet on whether Melbournites will be able to view first-run releases in this fashion -- only vintage fare like Blade Runner and Flashdance is being billed as of now. Personally, I think it's hard to beat complete blackness as the ideal environment for cinema. Nothing is more frustrating than a theater that keeps some 'mood lighting' on at all times or the sudden illumination of a thousand Blackberries as the lights go out. Are there any sophisticated rooftop theaters in Manhattan that I'm not aware of? I doubt that we have anything as elaborate as this. The noise level in the city, which gets worse every year, would probably make such an experiment more trouble than it's worth. But it would be a fun thing to try.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
9-24-2006 @ 7:10PM
Hayley said...
It seems the appeal of such a venue would be comperable to outdoor film events found in city parks and squares during the summer and autumn around the country. The purpose of these are films as events, where the focus is on the novelty of the outdoors as a venue and not so much on the film itself, and that is why you find film line-ups on the culty or classic side and not first-run (which should be viewed in a theatre in complete darkness, I agree) or "thinking" fare that requires audience concentration. Anyhow, if someone starts staring at the skyscrapers and misses a segment of "Flashdance," does it reallly distract from "Flashdance" at all?
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9-24-2006 @ 7:11PM
jmchez said...
Wow! I can just imagine watching Bladerunner atop the stadium-sized heliport on the 800 feet high Pan Am Building (Met Life now). Taking a helicopter from JFK to the Pan Am is what gave Ridley Scott the idea for the look of that movie. The lights from the helicopters, airplanes and blimps swirling all around would meld into the movie and the street noise would not be that bad that high up.
Let's all call Met Life to suggest this.
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