A few weeks ago now I had the pleasure of talking to and interviewing Allan Hall. Allan, ran the Ozone Theatre at Semaphore between the years of 1978 to 1985, he was also involved in the Unley Theatre (and I will bring that part of the interview to you later). He was wonderful to talk to, he shared some great memories of picture theatres from the later 1930s onwards, he very generous with his time and I want to thank him again for his time, and Dylan Walker too, for introducing us.
Here is an abridged version of the interview with Allan where he discusses the Semaphore Ozone.
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ES) Can you tell us about Semaphore?
Ah) Yes, that's comes from buying an awful lot of chairs and casting my eyes around and knowing that that the theatre was there and find it had the youth club in it. I went down there one night and saw these kids outside kicking footballs in there off the proscenium, and knocking the plaster off the thing. And there was a boxing ring in the middle, and there's only about 8 people in in the youth club. So I talked to Bob Parr about it. And Bob and I went to see, he came with me. He’s an old mate of mine. He went down and we put this proposal to them and they were quite keen to have it because they had lost, they were going to lose the Port Ozone, it was going to be demolished to make way for a shopping centre. And they were right in favour of it, so we got the place, cost us 50 bucks a week. Believe it or not .
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ES) What year was that?
AH) 78 or 78 to 80's always say 78 to 87, but that's not right 78 to 85. So yeah, we were involved, and that's where Wallis’ came into the party with us to get involved with us. They did the buying. And, you know, and we got good product. Got good stuff. We kept it simple. We had a good candy bar. Yeah, as Bob said, yeah you might not make a fortune but we've got another leg in that we can go to distributors and say we've got that many theatres. They had at that stage the Academy, Piccadilly and Glenelg, and me.
We always found that if our film is good, they come back the next one. That has an enduring effect on people. If they've enjoyed themselves like. We had coffee, but you could take him to the theatre in a cup, in a cup and saucer. Yes, take it into the theatre, Can I? Yes, but bring it out after the show. Most of them did, you very rarely get a cup left inside. We had them all trained.(Laughter). Which was good, and we were just serving ordinary, just ordinary Nescafe coffee. At the once-a-year meeting the theatre lost $20,000 that year, but the candy bar made $70,000 (laughter).Could not believe it, 70 Grand. Because Wallis’ did all the buying of the sweets and did all the packaging themselves. And of course, it’s all profit, those sorts of things, because you are doing it all yourself. Because the staff who are on duty at the theatre, or various theatres across the circuit, in between serving people and showing them into the theatre they were also packing sweets, so you’re already paying for them you know.
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ES) How much input did they have in it though?
AH) Oh you’ve just got to follow the leader, you know. They advertise that this is on or that’s on, and that’s want you do. You go down there, and you run the show the best you can. Which we did. We didn't have any real trouble except one night, showing a movie. I put the film down and changeover, put the film there and changeover, put the film there. And for some reason or other. I must have moved the spool over there for some reason I got that one. Put it on, showed the thing, OK, finished early tonight. On the way out a friend said, a man came up to me and said he said he seemed pretty sure he's seen this film before, and he didn't think it was that short. It was that short, it was 20 minutes short.
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ES) Did you leave one of the spools off?
AH) Yeah. Never happened again. Yeah, it's very easy to do if you've got a little rack of spools and you're not concentrating, which is very hard because you gotta remember I'm also an owner of the business or operator of the business. I’m not always up there. 20 minutes later might get a call on the phone. I had an intercom set up with downstairs. The box office, and the candy bar was up on the 1st floor, up the intermediate floor that goes up to the theatre. So, we did, we didn't have downstairs at all operational. Though we eventually did we wound up with the candy bar built where the ice cream shop is now. Proper candy bar and we had someone selling tickets in the ticket box. Lovely ticket box. Anyway, yeah you would have to come down if there was some sort of disaster, you know. If I wasn't showing slides in interval, I’d nip down, especially before the show, I could go down there, just leave music playing, lights on everything like that, and usher. And go down and help serve in the candy bar, or during the show make ice creams, well I was the best ice cream maker you ever seen.
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