The unique combination of red velvet seats, nostalgic Hollywood glitz and Hawaiian jazz is coming back to Newcastle as the Regal cinema lights up for the first time in five years.
The city's last single-screen picture house will reopen with gusto on Friday for the launch of Newcastle International Film Festival (NIFF).
Operators of the Birmingham Gardens kitsch hotspot, Jo Smith and George Merryman, said the Hunter was the only place of its size without a "dedicated film festival". They wanted to change that.
The couple used to run the travelling film arm of the Sydney Film festival and NIFF felt like the perfect way to gather audiences after long "plotting a return".
"A lot of cinemas over the past three years, while they've been open, [have] been running at a loss," Ms Smith said. "Attendances in Australia are still down 25 per cent from pre-COVID levels including at [most] festivals, so we were waiting until it was ready."
Amongst the weekend line-up is Indian drama Last Film Show, a stunning musical documentary about Little Richard - who once rode the Stockton ferry - and The Ear, a 1969 Czechoslovakian thriller that was banned for 20 years.
"We show all kinds of movies. We do show latest releases, but we will also hark back to earlier times - the Regal itself is a bit of a step back in time," Mr Merryman said.
Having the more "glamourous" jobs of the pair, Mr Merryman has spent hundreds of hours curating the perfect program.
"It's not as easy as it sounds. You have to kiss a lot of frogs to find the princes amongst them," he said.
But the Regal isn't just about movies. Its heartbeat is community, stretching across decades of Novocastrian history.
The Regal was built in the 1930s by volunteer labour, but its doors closed in 2006. Through the efforts of volunteers it was renovated and re-opened in 2014.
"That spirit has just carried through to today," Mr Merryman said.
"We had volunteers who were weeding our garden for years before we even knew who was doing it," Mr Merryman said. "We had people turn up with biscuits for the entire audience.
"Because we have so much generosity coming our way, we can be generous and kind. It is chicken and egg," he said.
It is a culture the couple first adopted when they were in university and frequented the Regal as students.
Mr Merryman described every session at the Regal at "a party" with complementary food and drinks and a house band, the High Andies, who play Hawaiian jazz.
"I thought we were about showing movies but in the pandemic when we couldn't show movies, I realised what I missed and what our audiences missed was the community," Mr Merryman said.
