Bruce and Lesley Thompson are closing the Ohakune cinema their family has run for 90 years. Photo / Alan Gibson
Bruce and Lesley Thompson are closing the Ohakune cinema their family has run for 90 years. Photo / Alan Gibson
In a little mountain town otherwise famous for carrots, time has run out for a piece of Kiwi cinema history.
Ohakune's timber-floored Kings Theatre, now on the market, has not only one of the longest histories of any New Zealand cinema, but also one of the most fascinating.
During the 90 years the Thompson family have run it, it has been involved with some of New Zealand's most cherished films.
Shot within a short car ride from its front steps were The Lord of the Rings, River Queen and Geoff Murphy's cult classic Goodbye Pork Pie.
The Hollywood comedy Without a Paddle, largely based in nearby Raetihi, cast local children among its extras. Some of their names remain scribbled on a movie poster hanging in the theatre foyer.
But its biggest connection lies with Smash Palace - the theatre hosted the premiere of the 1981 film which started Roger Donaldson's directing career, and its namesake junkyard is still on the outskirts of town.
Lesley Thompson recalls entertaining Greer Robson in the foyer at the premiere - she'd played the daughter of Bruno Lawrence's Al Shaw, but was too young to attend the R-rated screening.
What was once a social centrepoint of Ohakune has been hit by shrinking audiences, movie rentals and film piracy.
The final blow was the industry's shift to digital from 35mm film.
"We were probably the oldest family [theatre] still going in New Zealand - we simply ran out of film," Bruce Thompson said.
Fittingly, one of the last films to go up on the big screen was a 35mm reel of The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, which showed Ohakune's Mt Ruapehu backdrop.
Greer Robson and Bruno Lawrence in Smash Palace
The theatre, still furnished with old pipe heaters that run under rows of classic leather seats, was opened by a parade of cadets in 1916, at the height of World War I.
Bruce's father, Harry Thompson, took over the local picture business in 1924, first screening in Raetihi, then moving to Ohakune and showing films to mill workers using a projector mounted on the back of a truck.
By 1929, the family were running three cinemas in the Waimarino area - the Kings Theatre, one at the former Plaza at Ohakune Junction, and a third at Raetihi. On a Friday night, all three would be packed.
The earliest offerings were 20-minute silent pictures with piano accompaniment, before the advent of "talkies".
One of the first shown - the 1929 picture Dynamite - proved a technical nightmare, Mr Thompson said.
"There was a big explosion toward the end of the film, and trying to get that sound to go with the explosion on the screen ... my mother used to to hold her head when she talked about it because it was almost impossible to do."
The theatre thrived through the years of the Great Depression and showed newsreels of the latest developments at the front when the next war came.
On Saturday nights, seats remained full when so-called "picture trains" from Waiouru pulled into town carrying keen moviegoers.
"It was their night out and they loved it," Mr Thompson said.
"We did all of these tricks to see them right through to the end of film, including sometimes even cutting a piece out of the film."
Clever skills were also needed when all three cinemas showed the same film on a single night at staggered starting times, requiring Mr Thompson to ferry reels back and forth between the theatres.
The night the James Dean epic Giant came to town - 13 reels in all - Mr Thompson estimated he drove more than 50km.But as patronage dropped, the junction cinema closed in 1967, before Raetihi lost its theatre three decades later.
"We've managed to keep this theatre going, even though it's been a battle for survival for the last few years," he said.
