The Astor to Close · 11 August 2008
The curtains are about to close on the Astor Theatre, ending a 97-year history of movies and entertainment.
The Astor Cinema on Beaufort St, Mt Lawley, will shut in less than three weeks because it is no longer profitable.
The Dark Knight, starring Perth’s late Heath Ledger, will be the last screening on August 27. Cinema manager Tania Ilarda said her father, Bruno Zimmermann, the owner of the building, could hardly get the words out when he told her he planned to close.
I’ll personally really miss the Astor – I had some great times there. I recently went to my good friends’ (above) wedding there (they were both ushers and met there, so they decided to have their ceremony there.) I even met MY girlfriend there!
That’s two Perth entertainment icons closing within a week.
I was upset to hear that one of Perth’s oldest icons is to close within a few weeks.
Interesting to note that the Astor Cinema in Melbourne went under too in December.
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Art-house cinemas are fast disappearing thanks to money and shifting tastes, writes Kate Shaw.
The sale of the Astor on the heels of other independent cinema closures – the Lumiere, the Longford, the Valhalla, the Carlton Moviehouse and the Trak in Melbourne, and the Valhalla and probably the Chauvel in Sydney – comes as no surprise to anyone into city culture. The usual suspects have been lined up: DVDs, home-entertainment systems, internet downloads and the recent spate of ordinary films, and they’re all partly guilty, contributing as they do to the absence of audiences.
So to people into art-house cinema: get out more! But there is more to the problem than the inconstant market for left-of-field entertainment. In the gentrifying city the pressure for highest and best (economic) use of land is phenomenal. The potential return to a landowner from a multi-residential development or shopping complex is much greater than the rent any single-screen cinema can pay. Even the most committed owners, such as those behind George Florence at the Astor, must find the economics tough in a slow period. As the owner of the Bullring in Fitzroy said last year when he closed the music venue for conversion to apartments, “the land value was too great to run it as it was”.
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