Category: Movies

On the outside looking in

1/8/2020

I had cultivated my love and appreciation for film in Tokyo, back in the day when going to the movies was a more special and potentially life affecting experience.
Screen viewing time then was probably no more than ten percent of what it is these days. Video was only just being developed, our TV before we left Australia was a tiny black and white screen - so to watch a film was a rare and powerful experience - one of my favourite things.

So when I returned to Australia and needed to get part time work while at Art School, it dawned on me that working as a cinema usher would be an ideal job. When I presented myself at the three main cinema chains on George St., Sydney, I was curtly turned away by the front of house matrons. I didn’t know it then but being an usher or usherette was a coveted position and almost always filled by referral from an insider. Walking in off the street and asking for a spot was next to impossible. Disappointed, I applied for other jobs. Bookshops, preferably second hand, were the second choice. Then art supply shops and game centres, pool halls. Nothing manifested.

Then, in what can only be described as a moment of pure, guided by the light, inspiration that came one afternoon when I was with my brother and girlfriend in a wonderful second hand bookshop on George St., called Gould’s, I spontaneously marched into Hoyts, the largest of the chains and presented myself at the front counter. I can’t remember my exact words to the lady but I mentioned job and usher and before I could finish, she asked ‘Are you here for the interview?’

‘Yes!’, I replied.
‘Wait here a moment, please, I will let the manager, Mr. Cesaro, know that you are here.’

She came out a few minutes later from the back office and asked me to head down past the counters to the glass doors. There I was greeted by an efficient seeming gentleman in a suit who invited me in through the security doors to the back office area.

He then proceeded to interview me. I told him about art school and how I had grown up in Tokyo. Amazingly, he was very curious about Japan and asked me all sorts of questions about it and my time there, how the cinemas run, etc. I used my best storytelling skills and before long, I knew I had a captivated audience. Plus, he was a genuinely warm fellow (from an Italian immigrant family) and we connected well. I was thrilled when he then offered me the job! I started that weekend, beginning with the Friday and Saturday night shifts (the least popular as they were so busy).
Eventually, I added some weeknight shifts and even some weekend days shifts. My duties began with dressing up in the scarlet red blazer, white shirt and bow tie, with black slacks and leather shoes. Then, I would get my assigned flashlight from my locker, my essential weekly time schedule, folded four times and slipped into the top left jacket pocket. It included the start and finish times of each of the seven cinemas, over two floors with detail timings of preview and ad durations before actual showing and gap times between final credit rolls and next session.

On Saturdays and Sunday evenings, all seats were reserved and many of the cinemas were completely sold out. This meant every patron or group had to be met at the doors and lead to their exact seats. The largest cinemas, three, five and seven, held over a thousand people each. So there were as many as thirty ushers and usherettes on the floors on these nights. As the films were about to end, the large double doors would be opened and floods of patrons would flood out. I remember standing there, nodding and smiling, watching all the faces in a kind of movie scene itself. Sometimes, it would continue for ten minutes. It was mesmerising. Waiting in line, often round the corner and down the stairs, would be the group for the next session.

My other duties included, emptying the ticket stub boxes into large plastic bags and taking them to the inner offices, changing the posters on the inside and outside display cases, manning the foyer in a concierge/security guard way and finally, every Thursday evening using the five metre long special gripping pole to arrange the chunky forty centimetre black plastic letters on the marquee outside.

At two and a half years it was the longest I have ever stayed in any job. Best part was, of course, that all movies were free! Not just at Hoyts because they had reciprocal deals with the other cinema chains - so I could go to any movie, anywhere in Sydney (with a plus one) for nothing - as often as I wished. And, as you may imagine, it was often.

O.G in the Ginza

1/2/2020

Sunday afternoon/evening was family day in Tokyo. Especially in the early years, before we each formed our own social networks, the five of us were like a floating island in a sea of exotic and unfamiliar marine activity. Dad was starting a company from the bottom up, so to get the momentum going, he had to devote a lot of time and energy to the business. As well as taking care of her three young boys, Mum, also helped out at the office when she could. We used to all go in to the Roppongi office together, especially in the evenings sometimes after the staff had left. (There were five or six in the beginning which eventually grew to twenty plus full time.)

An empty office has a certain kind of feeling about it. Like some of the buzz from the daytime activity is still lingering, slow to settle to silence before the next morning’s pace revs up again. My brothers and I would find a chair in the conference room, sit at the large table, draw pictures or do some reading. There was also a room dedicated to the telex machine - which was like a hefty electric typewriter that had a dedicated phone line. The messages would, before being sent overseas, be recorded onto 3cm thick paper tape with tiny holes punched encoded onto it to keep the ‘online’ time to a minimum as it was expensive in those days.

Received messages would be printed out at about 60 wpm on the enclosed roll of perforated paper. It was a mechanical forerunner to the net. When it would start up, my brothers and I would hear it erupt and run in to witness the magical communication as it beamed across the oceans. Sometimes we would sit in the room and wait, hoping to be startled by the noisey and frenetic, clicking beast, playing with the spent paper tape snakes.

The Sunday tradition was for us all to go together to a movie on the big screen in one of Tokyo’s many cinemas. We would travel where the good flicks were - usually either Shibuya, Ginza, Hibiya - rarely Shinjuku in our second hand, late 60’s, white Toyota Crown. If we were going to Shibuya, sometimes we would first stop by Yoyogi park and ride around on the bicycle track on the free hire bikes. If we were near the Ginza, we would make the most of the Sunday main road closure and stroll up and down the broad, fancy shop lined Ginza street. Evidenced in the photo, from the early seventies, our Dad is looking simultaneously hip and debonair in his Sunday attire in the middle of Ginza Dori.

The movie session options were listed in an English language weekly called Tokyo Weekender (started in 1970), available from the local Azabu National supermarket every Friday. As well as the movie listings there was one movie review per week by the editor, a colourful character called Corky Alexander. There was no IMDB, of course, but the family was pretty good at choosing good flicks. There were no ratings in Japan, so as kids we were privileged to see films that were M and R rated back in Australia. I like to think of it as an important part of our education. Mum and Dad would judiciously get us to cover our eyes during scenes of excessive violence or overt sexual activity. Sometimes my fingers just would not close properly.

After the film, we would go out to a restaurant. My favourite was Italian. I talk about it at length in the book, but the owner/maître d of our regular Italian spot was later jailed for his covert criminal connections and activity. He gave us kids free banana splits, so not that we knew anything but even if we did, we would not have snitched.

At the time, the whole Japan experience was what was happening. It wasn’t till I was a bit older that I realised how lucky we were to even be there and what a trail blazer our father was to conceive of and manifest a successful, independent, self started business in Tokyo way back then. He has told me about some of the many early challenges - everything was new - but also mentioned that they were some of the most satisfying years of his life. He went from sleeping on a futon on the floor of a tiny office space (for the three months before the family arrived) to building an international recognised, thriving and efficient company that connected Australia (and later, the rest of the world) to Japanese industry, trade and business. Bravo, Dad.

THE LL2J journey

On the outside looking in

O.G in the Ginza

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