Wayne Brittenden is opposed to capital punishment, but could almost make an exception for people who talk on cellphones at the movies.
Going to the "pictures" is not the event it used to be, says the author of The Celluloid Circus: The Heyday of the New Zealand Picture Theatre.
With the blurring of private and public spheres, more people behaved not as if they were collectively watching a film but as though they were at home "half-distractedly watching TV on a particularly large screen - chatting, chomping, drinking and texting".
The scene he describes is far removed from the cinemas of the 1940s or '50s when audiences stood for the national anthem, before taking their seats in lavish surroundings.
It was a time of advertising slides, tray boys and illuminated waterfall curtains. In 1950, the average New Zealander went to the movies 19 times a year. By 1970 - when Brittenden's book ends - that had fallen to fewer than five.
A former foreign correspondent who runs his own investigative documentary unit in London's West End, Brittenden said his theatre-manager father had planned to write a book himself but did not get around to it before his untimely death.
Cedric Brittenden was only 19 when he began managing The Roxy theatre, in Princes St, Dunedin, in 1930.
Formerly called Everybody's, the place had been closed for six months while it was redecorated and "wired up for sound".
Weeks after it reopened, Cedric Brittenden decided to exploit freezing June temperatures and the crowds that were in town for an international rugby match by placing a table at the theatre's entrance and opening a box plan for the 8pm session.
Boldly, he also levied a booking fee. By the time the doors opened, it was snowing, and grateful patrons moved inside.
But five minutes before the show was to start, there was chaos. About 60 people were still milling around without seats. The teenage manager had used an old seating plan, unaware that two entire rows had been removed in the theatre's refurbishment.
Luckily, he remembered there were some forms in the backyard of an adjoining paint merchant, and hastily helped himself to those.
Last year, while researching his book, Wayne Brittenden visited the remains of the Roxy and found it "suspended in time, with its yellowed plasterwork and . . . projection box hanging from the back wall".
He was still unsure why it lasted only a year before closing but suspected that having eight or nine theatres in Dunedin in the Depression was simply not viable.
Brittenden discovered a woman in her 90s who remembered doing her courting at the Roxy; and he talked to former Dunedin projectionist Frank Rowan, whose living room, he said, was decked out like a digital picture theatre.
Brittenden's book is also sprinkled with the names of other theatres familiar to Dunedin readers - the Embassy, His Majesty's, the St James, the State.
The Octagon, which closed in 1992, was owned by the Dunedin Methodist Mission, he said.
Six days a week, movie posters were displayed; but on Saturday nights, the caretaker flipped poster boards around to reveal the mission's messages, brought the church organ out from behind the screen and generally made the place look "sober enough" for a church service the following morning.
The landlord kept a close eye on the sorts of films screened there, reserving the right to inspect the synopses, and occasionally fining the Amalgamated chain 10 if it displayed a prohibited poster.
As a boy, Brittenden biked around Gisborne after school, changing movie posters for a theatre his father managed.
The posters he made into kites or cut up for scrap paper would be worth a fortune now, he said, adding there was an antique movie shop near his London office.
"Nearly every damn week, there is a poster in the window like one I discarded, with a 700 price tag on it . . . It's almost unbearable to think about."
Long before television, picture theatres were the places where people were entertained, where they socialised and were kept informed through newsreels.
And New Zealanders were among the world's most frequent movie-goers, exceeded only by the Americans.
"America was a big, widely-spaced country and movies in all the small towns and far-flung suburbs were the only form of entertainment. And that's how it was for big swathes of the New Zealand population far from the city. They had their radios, the movies and an occasional public dance, and that was about it.
"Compared to a dance with a pretty dodgy band and a bag full of fish and chips, the movies was a . . . luxurious prospect."
Many people attended every Friday or Saturday night, and some even had permanently reserved seats in cinemas that held up to 2000 patrons. At intermission, the well-dressed movie-goers retired to luxurious lounges to sip coffee, puff on a cigarette or buy a box of chocolates.
The book's title referred to a time when show business and cinema were linked, and run by a host of colourful characters, Brittenden said.
"It brings out all the chaos and ballyhoo that went with films . . . the overtures, the projectionist working the waterfall curtains, the things that made people feel they were somehow part of not just a film show but a performance - a special night out."
In fact, before short films were common, touring vaudeville acts often made up the first half of the programme.
With only a few prints of a film imported (compared to 70 or 80 now), there was no such thing as a movie being released simultaneously around the country and advertising being co-ordinated on a national basis.
By 1950, Amalgamated Theatres and Kerridge-Odeon had "chewed up" most of the competition.
Independent theatres were still in business but the big chains got first pick of all films and made it tough for the independents to secure product within a reasonable time.
In 1953, there were 531 35mm picture venues in New Zealand (including nearly 30 in small Otago towns like Clinton, Kaka Point, Tapanui, Glenorchy and Palmerston). By 1969, only 239 remained.
That demise would have pleased an old Gisborne woman who, Brittenden recalled, armed herself with biblical tracts and stationed herself outside cinemas warning people not to enter: "There was a real anti-movie culture . . . Which saw cinemas as the work of the devil."
But it was television, 10 o'clock closing and even night trots that dealt wounding blows to picture theatres in the 1960s.
Later, video "demystified" films - allowing people to see them whenever they wanted, fast forward and rewind, or freeze on a particular scene.
Now, he envisages a time when home movie screens will rival the size of those at the local cinema and people will be able to "call up" any film they want to.
Brittenden said it was great that Dunedin's old St James theatre was sensitively redeveloped as the Rialto, and that a trust had lovingly restored The Regent. But it was a huge shame so many other theatres had disappeared.
"The Regent is the one that gives you an idea of how things were - and there were a lot of those places. It's amazing to think that all the seats were filled."
• The Celluloid Circus: The Heyday of the New Zealand Picture Theatre (pbk, $49.99) is published by Godwit.
