A Fond Farewell to Riverside Studios - Steve Davis

So it was time to say a tearful goodbye to the Hammersmith Riverside Studios. On Saturday 2nd August the cinema sadly conducted its final exhibition, showing Carol Reed's 1949 classic 'The Third Man' - another film  has only this weekend made it into my personal top 10.

David Gothard, former Artistic Director for the site, and Shira Macloed, Riverside’s Cinema Director, welcomed a whole host of past and present collaborators and colleagues of the Hammersmith Riverside, as they gave a very moving introduction to the evening. They highlighting many of the amazing contributions the Riverside Studios has made to the industry over the last five decades.

The Triumph Film Company bought, what was a factory, in 1933 beginning a long tradition of film and television production at Riverside. Triumph transformed the engineering works into two large film studios to break into the latest fad – talking pictures. Following further ownership changes, by 1946, Sydney and Muriel Box produced one of the greatest commercial successes in British film-making history at Riverside – The Seventh Veil – starring Ann Todd, Herbert Lom and James Mason. Rank, the distributors, were worried about its success because of the unusual nature of the story. But The Seventh Veil filled cinemas continuously for 10 years - I doubt Frozen will be running that long!

In the mid-fifties the Riverside was hailed as the finest television centre in the world. It was here that some of the earliest experiments with colour were filmed and broadcast. The BBC also started to use the recording theatre as a dubbing theatre, as it had previously been used as a scoring stage by RCA to record music in stereo for some of the early CinemaScope films. The Cruel Sea was just one such film dubbed here.

The purpose-built cinema opened in 1987 and immediately established itself as one of London’s leading repertory programmes. Now, sadly we say goodbye to the last wholly repertory programme in the capital, famous for its double bills and international festivals. It was one of the few places where the best contemporary theatre, film and television sat alongside one another.

On behalf of DCM, thank you for letting us be a part of the history of the amazing cinema, and we wish Shira ever success for the future.

I am sure this will not be that last we see of her...