ROMAINE HART
(14 June 1933 - 28 December 2021)
Romaine Hart, who has died aged 88, was a force to be reckoned with in the British film industry. Born into a family of cinema exhibitors, she grew up in a man's world but, as a woman, made all the difference. She rejected the idea of local cinemas just showing the latest US and home-grown product dished out by the main distributors for the prominent cinema chains such as ABC, Odeon, Granada and Essoldo etc, by focussing on independent films and running her own chain of cinemas that were not beholden to any major company.
She was born in south London, the daughter of Alex Bloom and his wife Goldie. The family had been in the business of showing films right from the days of silent cinema. Leaving school at sixteen, she trained to be a secretary, while her father gave her the experience of working in the film business by letting her programme one of his cinemas, The Royal in Deal, Kent, part of the Bloom Theatre Circuit.
When her father died in 1968, she inherited his share of the business. Many of the family's cinemas were low-rent houses in poor condition, so in 1970 Hart took the run-down Rex in Islington, north London, which dates from 1913, and transformed it into an attractive arthouse cinema with a policy of showing films that other exhibitors would not touch. Thus was born the first of her seven Screen cinemas, The Screen on the Green.
She sought out the type of films she wanted to see herself and took a chance on her own tastes which paid off handsomely. She also employed a young assistant, Roger Austin, only twenty when he began working for her, and he subsequently became her chief programmer looking to show the best of independent world cinema. She pushed such films as Michael Ritchie's Downhill Racer, Abraham Polonsky's Tell Them Willie Boy is Here and Monte Hellman's Two-Lane Blacktop. She also encouraged the works of Paul Verhoeven, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Barbet Schroeder and Bruce Weber, etc.
Finding it difficult to show some of the films she wanted, Hart then created her own distribution company, Mainline Pictures. Under this banner she acquired the films of John Waters including Pink Flamingos, David Lynch's Eraserhead, Ang Lee's The Wedding Banquet, Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan, Todd Haynes' Poison and Rob Reiner's This Is Spinal Tap, among many others. Although it was made for Channel 4, Hart bought the rights to Stephen Frears' My Beautiful Laundrette for just a few thousand pounds and yet it raked in over a million.
In her day, Romaine Hart made further changes that have influenced other cinema groups, such as the serving of coffee and hot food in the foyer, having special seasons and previews with question and answer sessions and generally making the cinema-going experience something more than just the showing of films. In the early days of the Screen on the Green, bands such as The Clash, Buzzcocks, The Sex Pistols and Adam and the Ants appeared on stage, while lately it has mounted comedy nights with the likes of Stewart Lee, Stephen K. Amos and Phil Jupitus.
The Screen on the Hill opened in 1977, a revamp of the local Hampstead Odeon on Haverstock Hill in Belsize Park, which she turned into an attractive and very comfortable art-house venue. Later on there were more conversions for the Screen on Baker Street, and the Screens at Reigate, Walton-on-Thames, Oxted and Winchester. In 2008, when Hart retired, the Everyman Media Group took over the circuit which now has over thirty venues. All have been renamed as Everyman houses, although, like the ethos of the original Everyman in Hampstead, the Screen on Islington Green's programming policy has been changed to mostly the showing of the main cinema releases. However, the Everyman Screen on the Green has kept its name as a reminder of how one pioneering woman changed the face of film exhibition in the UK and made a definite difference.
Hart was also active in other areas of the cinema industry. She became a member of David Puttnam's National Film Finance Corporation board and also served on the admissions board of the National Film and Television School. For her contribution to the film industry she was awarded an OBE in 1993.
Romaine Hart was married to the businessman John Hart but they divorced in 1981. They have two daughters, Nicola and Zara.
MICHAEL DARVELL