Image: The Backlot roof-top drive-in.
Rooftop cinemas are a lovely idea, but there is a certain difficulty to them in more temperate areas. Deckchairs do not make the perfect emergency shelter as the gas-filled blow-up screens thrash in a gathering storm. There is no truth to the story that a Melbourne projectionist was once discovered clinging to a buoy in Port Phillip Bay.
Scattered around Australia are the plucky remnants of the once iconic suburban ritual – the drive-in. After collapsing into some Ballardian dystopia of cracked concrete and smashed speakers, the drive-in has been undergoing a quiet renaissance as digital projection turns out to be just perfect for a summer night filled with lovers in their utes and old Hyundais.
But to build a drive-in, you need a lot of space and a concentrated bunch of locals hungry for entertainment.
Small post and sound outfit Backlot, also a home for enterprising indy producers, has the space problem as well. It sits pretty well under the Westgate Approach flyover, and manages to run a quiet eighty seat cinema which it frequently hires out for special screenings. But co-proprietor Tony Ianiro is getting restless, and has assembled investors with a larger vision.
A little to the North-east is Docklands, another hymn to dystopia, with a lot of concrete, spiky towers, trapped water and wind. Also a large number of people who want to be entertained. Watching the Melbourne Star ferris wheel fail to turn round gets old fairly quickly.
Backlot has now mashed these three facts into one solution. On Boxing Day it will open a drive-in cinema on a rooftop in Docklands, with a special seats only area serviced by headphones. It will look as if Harry Seidler designed Bladerunner.
There will be two German state of the art inflatable screens, each faced by 65 car spaces and a lounge area for fifty walk-ins, all connected by FM radios to cars and headphones. There are two traditional Christie-equipped projection booths, a line of trailers to serve meals, and a holding area in the floor below for drivers queuing for the next session.
‘The concept’, said Ianiro, ‘is a drive-in on the edge of the city, with blockbuster day and date screenings seven days a week, not just for the summer, but as a full time operation. We think that hasn’t been tried anywhere else in the world, at least according to Google.’
They will run a family movie at 8.30, followed by a more adult second feature and then a late night screening at around 1.00am on Friday and Saturday nights in the summer. They should be able to flourish on the six hundred thousand people who live within a four km radius of the carpark. Ironically, the Docklands residents probably don’t own a huge number of cars.
The appeal to Harbourtown is exactly the drawing power from outside to what is effectively the dead end of Docklands, down near the huge shed of Costco, out by a windswept intersection to the western suburbs.
‘We want the big, cheery mainstream,’ Ianiro admitted. ‘I think we need to be as accessible to as many people as we can. The popcorn crowd is what we are going to be curating from a promotional perspective.’ At the same time he needs to pick his way around the competition for major titles from conventional cinemas. The Australian market is very carefully divided into fiefdoms, and studio titles are valuable properties.
They may also end up with speciality events, serving an Assassin’s Creed demographic, or the Monster Trucks gang, like a piston engine version of The Rocky Horror Picture Show with high fences and security guards. ‘It’s one of the unknowns, but sometimes that is where you find diamonds in the rough. We are backing ourselves with our knowledge and we are going to do everything we can to make it a destination point for Melbourne and tourists.’
Backlot is already plugged into the distribution business. The Australian office of NZ company Rialto Distribution is run from the Backlot building. Now that General Manager Mike Vile has left to become the Head of Film Programming at Reading Cinemas, Backlot will administer the Australian wing of Rialto.
This is our bid for the opening night film…
