August 11, 1989

You Ever Danced with the Devil in the Pale Moonlight?

I have been inside many buildings that no longer exist.

What a melancholic line. I was pretty pleased with that one. It’s the first line of my unfinished (and, as yet, unnamed) Dead Leaves sequel. I wanted something along the lines of Bret Easton Ellis’ first line from Less Than Zero -

People are afraid to merge on freeways in Los Angeles.

That’s a great first line, although I don’t fully understand it. I think it taps into the fear and dreamlike nihilism of the novel, and of the times themselves. The fear of others, maybe. The distrust of living and being connected?

Less Than Zero is a key Gen X text, and I feel its generational malaise to this day.

But going back to my own first line. The older I get, the more and more that line becomes reality.

I have been inside many buildings that no longer exist.

The house I grew up in has now been gutted and turned into a HMO. My school - Noel Baker in Alvaston, Derby - was torn down in the early 2010s and rebuilt as a super-academy. Countless pubs and clubs I frequented in my wilder days are gone, as well as all my video shops, and now, the cinema of my teenage years is about to be demolished.

The Showcase Cinemas on the border of Sinfin and Normanton in Derby was my hometown’s first multiplex. It opened in 1988 on the site of the old Normanton Barracks, a military installation for almost a hundred years and home of the Sherwood Foresters, which was demolished in 1981.

The multiplex became, in time, my place. My cinema.

(My cinema, in Derby, back in the day)

Before Showcase, I went to the ABC in town, which was proper old school. Velvet curtains, a balcony, and Ice Cream Ladies walking the aisles with their neck trays during the Intermission (yes, that is how old I am).

The first film I saw at the Showcase was either Who Framed Roger Rabbit? or Scrooged in December 1988. It was my first time in a multi-screen cinema and it blew my thirteen-year-old mind. You see, when I was growing up, going to the pictures, as we used to call it, was an event. And as there was only one screen at the ABC, you kinda just watched what was playing, whereas at this new Movie Mecca, I had choice. Multiple choices! So once it opened, me and my mates were always on the bus up to Sinfin to watch anything and everything. And I mean everything we could.

Forgotten films like Her Alibi with Magnum in it and the Jerry Lee Lewis bio-pic, Great Balls of Fire! (there was a packed house for that one, and we saw some girls from school and sat with them, which was a massive deal at the time). I also saw Parenthood, The ‘Burbs, Uncle Buck, Last Crusade, Back to the Future II, and so on and so on. All in 1989. I remember my mate Rhys and I trying not to show we were both crying at the end of Dead Poets Society, and my other mate Ben and I paying for Her Alibi (again), which was a PG, then sneaking into Pet Sematary, which was, of course, an 18.

“Don’t go down that road…”

Happy, happy days.

But there was one movie during that hallowed first year of my multiplex viewing that towered above all others - Tim Burton’s Batman.

Never before, or since for that matter, have I ever wanted to see a film so badly. I turned 14 that summer - which I now think of as the Summer of the Bat - and Burton’s movie became something of an obsession.

The hype for Batman was unlike anything that had come before. It was a mania. Or a Batmania, as the press dubbed it. The UK release date for the movie was August 11, a date that has been seared onto my brain (Ben and I still send each other Batman GIFs on that date every year). The US release date was June 23rd, so we had to wait almost two months for it.

I pored over every article, every picture, and every interview I could find related to the film. I would stand at bus stops just to stare at the poster. There was even a spate of bus stops being smashed up in order to steal the poster. I never went that far, but man, it was a cool poster. Just the black and gold Bat Symbol set against a pitch-black background. Nothing more was needed (see above).

Ben and I saw the film on opening day, first showing. August 11, 1989. Excitement and expectation were at a fever pitch. I still remember the feeling I had sitting there as the opening credit sequence played out (back when credit sequence were such a thing). I couldn’t believe I was actually watching it.

For my 14-year-old self, it was everything I could possibly have wanted. We came out of that Showcase Cinemas on an absolute high. Adrenaline pumping, imaginary Batcapes around our shoulders, talking about all the cool bits.

Plus, there’s nothing quite like emerging from the darkness of a cinema into the brightness of a summer’s day.

How do I feel about the film now? Well, I have a nostalgic love for it, but it’s creaky. Nicholson and Keaton are great (he’s still my favourite Bruce Wayne), but the darkness everyone spoke of back then now looks like high camp. Burton’s templates were Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns and Alan Moore & Brian Bolland’s The Killing Joke, but his Batman never gets close to that kind of darkness. But I’m fine with that. Batman ‘89 is an entertaining noirish cartoon, as it should be; it’s just perhaps not as slick as it could have been. But as I said, I still love it. (And, yes, I put it above Nolan’s overrated Bat films.)

Moreover, I don’t think I’d be on this path without that film. Sure, I loved movies before Batman, but that summer instilled in me the drive and hunger to create my own movies and books. A drive and hunger that has never left me. Yet, ironically, I have little to no interest in comic book movies these days.

I had my time and it was glorious.

In time, I discovered other kinds of films. Hal Hartley films, Jim Jarmusch, John Waters, Russ Meyer, and then came along Nick Gomez’s Laws of Gravity and Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs, and they opened my eyes to other kinds of filmmaking - more DIY, more accessible. I remember seeing Kevin Smith tell a similar story of going from Batman (which a DIY filmmaker could never emulate) to then seeing Spike Lee’s She’s Gotta Have It and Robert Townsend’s Hollywood Shuffle and it blowing his mind because he realised that you can do it yourself. I had the same revelation from watching those films, only thing is he actually went out and did it (see Clerks). It took me another decade or more.

Anyway, that’s all a story for another time.

And so, the cinema where all this magic happened in my younger years is to be torn down. It closed its doors in 2020, during the Pandemic, and has stood abandoned and decaying ever since. Between 1989 and 1995, I must have gone to that cinema at least once a week, often twice a week (I even worked there, briefly, in the mid-90s: I think I got sacked). I pretty much saw everything released during those years. Commercial multiplex films, anyway. I used to save every ticket stub. I had stacks of them.

I wish I still had them.

(the last time I visited the site in December 2024)

I met my first proper girlfriend, Debbie, in 1991. We were together until 1996, and in that time, Showcase became our meeting place. I have a very clear memory of playing an arcade game in the lobby of the cinema one summer’s night and Debbie coming up behind me, pressing herself against my back, and wrapping her arms around my chest. The feel of her in her summer dress. The hum of the hot night. The sense of complete bliss. I had everything I needed, or wanted, in that moment.

It’s the little things sometimes, isn’t it?

I have been inside many buildings that no longer exist.

That cinema has now become another thing I carry inside me. One of the reasons I’m still writing, still making, still pushing. More pieces of the jigsaw of how I became who I am.

When it’s demolished, it’ll be replaced by a Greggs, a Burger King, and a Starbucks.

Progress, they say.