Romaine Hart, who passed away last December at the age of 88. In 1970, native Londoner Hart — the daughter of a cinema boss who showed her the ropes of programming and managing theaters — took over one of the family-owned fleapits, The Rex, making it over into the renamed Screen on the Green.
In doing so, she changed the face of an arthouse circuit in the city that was refined but not especially fun, bringing a punk sensibility to the venue that aligned with the growing audacity and experimentalism of the era’s filmmaking.The cinema reopened with a premiere of the surprisingly cerebral Robert Redford skiing drama “Downhill Racer” — an apt compromise between mainstream and avant-garde sensibilities — with Laurence Olivier and Richard Attenborough among the luminaries in attendance.
Hart’s on-the-money programming continued through the decade, as she pulled sizeable crowds to the likes of Peter Weir’s “Picnic at Hanging Rock,” Robert Altman’s “Nashville” and Martin Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver,” and even challenging them with such provocations as John Waters’ “Pink Flamingoes” and “Monty Python’s Life of Brian.” Furthermore, she saw cinemas as more than just film venues, as the Screen on the Green — as well as six further Screen Cinema venues she acquired in the wake of its pioneering success — would further play host to comedy nights, poetry readings, themed parties and, most famously, an all-night punk gig, with films interspersed between performances by the Sex Pistols, the Clash and the Buzzcocks.Eventually, merely exhibiting great cinema wasn’t sufficient for the ambitious cinephile and businesswoman, and she muscled in on the distribution game.
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