The story of the 20th century is one told in film.
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Movies like Star Wars or Mary Poppins are distillations of a decade or time, and cinemas are the places we reflect on our shared history.
As such, this year's Ballarat Heritage Festival will draw into focus the city's cinematic history, reviving an old classic for one night only.
On May 18, The Ballaraat Mechanics' Institute will bring back Vegas 70, the oldest moving picture cinema in Ballarat, for a double feature of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Saturday Night Fever.
Vegas 70 operated under several different names across its almost 100 years in Ballarat. The cinema, which is now the BMI's Minerva Space showed its first bioscope picture in 1909 before being leased in 1917 to show silent films.
The space became a fully fledged cinema in 1919 with the opening of Britannia Pictures, which became the Odeon and then Vegas 70 in 1966.
Vegas 70 was started under the ownership of renowned Ballarat cinema pioneer and filmmaker Jack Anderson, who also owned the Regent and the Village drive-ins at Wendouree and Sebastopol.
A piece of Ballarat history
John Bourke was ten-years-old when Vegas 70 first opened, and was involved in the business through a familial connection.
He remembered the council allowing the closure of Sturt Street for a street parade celebrating the newly established cinema, as well as a unique telegram to the businesses' owners from a Hollywood star.
"The very first night it opened, there was a telegram sent from America which said to Rock Kirby (co-owner) and Jack Anderson 'All the best to the opening of the Vegas 70 cinema, best wishes Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton'," Mr Bourke said.
The name Vegas 70 came from a mural of Las Vegas' Stardust Casino painted in the cinema's main foyer.
Mr Bourke was put to work for the cinema at an early age, spending weekends walking down Ballarat's streets and visiting football games holding signs with what films were on at the Vegas.
The cinema even ran a regular float at the Begonia Festival, which would involve Mr Bourke and his siblings sitting in toy cars as model attendees at a mock-up drive-in theatre.
Cinema's golden age
The Vegas 70 cinema could sit between 600 to 700 people, and featured tiered balcony seating which has since been removed from the space.
"In those days the cinema was full on Saturday afternoons. It didn't matter what was on it was always full," Mr Bourke said.
"My memory goes back to Saturday afternoon matinees. You had double features, you had intermissions. You would go around swapping comics with complete strangers."
The cinema-going experience was far different in the heyday of the Vegas 70. Screenings would feature two films divided by intermissions in which management would host competitions for attendees.
"They would have these apple eating contests where you would have to hold your hands behind your back and try to bite an apple. We would also do competitions on the street," Mr Bourke said.
Projectionists would have to cart two 25kg tins of film reels up into the projection room for each movie, often a precarious situation in the heritage mechanics institute building, which lacked an elevator.
On weekend afternoons, films shown at The Regent would then hastily be loaded onto a trolley and ferried down Sturt Street to the Vegas 70 for a later screening.
The reels themselves also contained flammable nitrate, which sometimes made a dangerous combination when inside red hot analog projectors.
"I remember the projectionist saying 'this is my fire escape', and it was a piece of rope and a pair of leather gloves all wrapped up and he throws it over the side to get out," Mr Bourke said.
The Vegas 70 projectionist's job was also made all the more difficult by pigeons, who flew into the cinema and would sometimes disrupt the projection.
Reflecting on decades of history
Mr Bourke worked his way up the chain, first as a carhop at the Village southern drive-in in Delacombe, onto work as an assistant projectionist and then as the manger of The Regent Cinema, which operated alongside the Vegas 70, later called the Sturt Cinema.
He will be giving a Twilight Talk session alongside Showbiz Cinema director and Sturt Cinema alum Chris Jones as part of the Heritage Festival's roster of events on May 22, at the BMI's Minerva Space.
The pair will speak on the history of cinema in Ballarat, to accompany a photo exhibition at the BMI and the May 18 Vegas 70 double-feature.
BMI's venue and events manager Sam McColl said he hoped attendees could experience the role movies play in shaping our experiences and the way we perceive the world.
"For the audience it is an hour-and-a-half, two hours of their time. But for the people who put it together it is years and years of process, filming and production," Mr McColl said.
"It requires so many people and so much effort to create something that could literally change the world in a sense.
"You look back in history and you think about different years, you go 'that is the year Charlie and the Chocolate Factory came out'.
"Look recently at the Barbie film, and how that can steer the narrative about what people are talking about in the day and age we live in."
For more information on the Vegas 70 event for the Ballarat Heritage Festival, visit https://vegas70.com.au/.
The BMI is also on the look out for stories from the public about the memories of the historic cinema. Submissions can be made on the Vegas 70 website.
