In my student days (early 1970s), Birmingham had a cinema called the Cinephone, which was generally known as the Pornophone because it specialised in moderately-dodgy films for the city's greasy mac brigade. And also because the whole building was painted in an advertorially suggestive blue. Anyway, this cinema did very well out of these lonely old gits. But, every few months, it would screen a dead-certain guaranteed money-loser for tax reasons. (You've read the plot of The Producers?)
Very often, the sacrificial films on the screen would be high-class European art films, in foreign languages with subtitles. Chabrol, Wim Wenders, Fassbinder, Truffaut, Fellini. So we'd go down to see them on a Friday night, and the place would be empty except for a couple of dozen losers who’d been too drunk to realise that there was no point in paying to get in for this one, because the boobs and bums were going to be (a) scarce-to-non-existent and (b) much too arty-farty for their baser instincts in any case.
As a general rule, we’d be twenty minutes into the film before the usual suspects would start to wake up and realise that this wasn’t going to be Naughty Night-Shift Sausage Factory Fraulein with der Big Oompah after all. And, worse, that it consisted mostly of people doing boring things such as talking. And so, one by one, the seats would go bang, and another one would head for the door in disgust.
After an hour, it was entirely normal to find that every one of these sad old gits had given up and gone home, and that there were only half a dozen people left in the auditorium – us!. And, by the end of the performance, the projectionist would have uncorked a bottle and locked up the front of the cinema, so that we had to leave by the only opening fire exit at the back - trying not to fall over the rubbish bins that were lying about in the pitch darkness of the car park. God knows what health and safety would have made of that shambles?
It was, you might say, a "different" cinematic experience. A lot of pretty good films, and we’d helped the cinema to save some tax. A successful enterprise all round, in fact.
BJ