ADELAIDE PICTURE THEATRE ORCHESTRAS

Motion picture technology developed rapidly after the appearance of Thomas Edison’s Kinetoscope in the U.S.A. in 1894. Adelaide was introduced to the cinema by entrepreneur Wybert Reeve at Hindley Street’s Theatre Royal on October 19th, 1896. This was less than a year after the Lumière brothers had presented the first public screening of their Cinematographe. Reeve’s projection equipment was moved to a shop in the Beehive Buildings in King William Street where Adelaide’s first silent picture house was established. The Edison Vitascope arrived at the Bijou Theatre in King William Street in May 1897. After a period of dormancy, the cinema regained its momentum in December 1905. The Story of the Ned Kelly Gang, the world’s first feature film, was screened in 1906. At this time, the Adelaide

Town Hall was the main venue for the cinema. There were complaints when famous visiting artists such as Dame Nellie Melba had to perform in other venues because the Town Hall was booked out for the picture shows. The public’s enthusiasm increased and a number of outdoor picture theatres were opened in early 1908.

At the turn of the century, a building was erected on the southern side of Hindley Street to show scenes on a moving cyclorama. This wasn’t successful and the building was converted into the Olympia Skating Rink. In 1908, the building was leased by West’s, who refitted it for use as a picture theatre. West’s Olympia opened as Adelaide’s first permanent cinema on December 5th, 1908. On June 18th, 1913, the Italian silent movie Quo Vadis? opened at West’s Olympia and ran for 5 weeks, an Adelaide box office record at the time. Quo Vadis? was based on Polish novelist Henryk Sienkiewicz’s romance about Roman society under the Emperor Nero. West’s chief musical director, Lewis De Groen, was sent from the eastern states to direct the orchestra for Quo Vadis? West’s Olympia had one of Adelaide’s largest cinema orchestras, known as De Groen’s Vice Regal Orchestra, with about 12 players. Alfred Lellmann, father of our Honorary Life Member, Sid Lellmann, was the Principal Flute

player in the orchestra at West’s Olympia until he moved to the country in 1926. The South Australian Flute Club was formed in March 1926. The committee compiled a list of local flautists so they could be invited to join the Flute Club. The list included ‘John Gilbert, West’s Olympia, Hindley Street’ (records indicate that he never joined the South Australian Flute Club). John Gilbert seems to have followed Alfred Lellmann as Principal Flute in De Groen’s Vice Regal Orchestra.

As more and more cinemas were built in Adelaide and its suburbs, the demand for orchestral musicians increased, and theatre managers vied for the best players. Sometimes, the orchestras had a higher rating than the films being screened. Those cinemas with inferior orchestras were known as ‘bug houses’ and required the erection of cages to protect the musicians from missiles, including rotten vegetables, thrown by members of the audience. Musicians needed to have good sightreading skills because the music was changing constantly and was never rehearsed. Alfred Lellmann said ‘that the standard was acceptable as musical accompaniment to the film, the general standard just got by. The exception to this was the Overture; this was the highlight!’ Many musicians had daytime jobs and played in the cinema orchestras at night. The evolution of the movie sound track was inevitable, and the first ‘talkie’, The Jazz Singer, starring Al Jolson, appeared in 1927. The arrival of the ‘talkies’

heralded the gradual demise of the cinema orchestras. These orchestras had all been phased out by the mid 1930s. West’s demolished the Olympia building in 1938 and replaced it with a new theatre, which is still extant, now housing an amusement centre.

-Robert Brown, SA Flute Society