Parramatta in the 1940s
Parramatta had two cinemas within a couple of hundred metres of each other on George Street, and they had opposite ideas about what going to the pictures should feel like.
The Roxy, at 65–69 George Street, opened on 6 February 1930 with Maurice Chevalier in *Innocents of Paris*, playing to a packed house and several thousand more standing in the street opposite to look at the lit entrance. It seated 1,950. Its designers went full Spanish Mission — an arched entrance under an ornate tower, an open forecourt flanked by an arcade of shops, and inside the two-storey vestibule these photographs record: arcaded openings, wrought-iron light fittings, a patterned tiled floor and a tiled central stair, with poster stands out for whatever was on. It had a Christie three-manual, ten-rank organ, said at the time to be the largest installed in an Australian theatre. The building went on the State Heritage Register in 1999.
Down the road the Civic was a plainer proposition with a longer history — built for Western Suburbs Cinemas and open since August 1924, then gutted and reopened under its new name on 21 May 1938. The frontage is the Art Deco one — a stepped parapet, a vertical CIVIC sign, and an awning advertising two de-luxe sessions. Inside, the view from the balcony is stepped light fittings, wall sconces, a coffered ceiling, a curtained proscenium, and rows of empty stalls seats.
An empty cinema photographed in daylight is a strange object — all the machinery of an evening, with the evening taken out.
