Beyond Sex, Bond and Star Wars?: Exhibition Data from the Southampton Odeon, 1972-1980‪.‬

For too long the practices of exhibition and distribution have been the poor relations of Cinema and Film Studies. Richard Gray's Cinemas in Britain and Allen Eyles' studies of Odeon Cinemas are among the best to consider the importance of the British cinema as a space, (1) while Stuart Hanson's 2007 work From Silent Screen to Multi-Screen provides a much needed intervention in the field of British exhibition practices. Exhibition data offers crucial information about cinema-going, yet it is difficult to track down and, for key periods, including the 1970s, often little has been preserved. Some important sources for the 1970s period are the ledgers for the Odeon cinema in Southampton, England. These ledgers offer a meticulous record of what was exhibited at this particular cinema, how many people saw each film, how long each film played for and how much profit it generated. While an exciting and crucial find, this data only pertains to a specific cinema; it cannot offer a wider impression of cinema-going. The data presents a snapshot of a single exhibition space and it would be wrong to presume that it is typical or representative of cinema-going elsewhere. The data cannot be used to make firm assertions about cinema-going in the decade or about what audiences wanted to see in Britain, or even in Southampton. However, what it can do is indicate how such caches of information can be used to examine the practices of cinema exhibition. It also offers the cinema historian an opportunity to re-examine some of the dominant and prevailing myths about 1970s cinema. I want to use the mass of data in these ledgers to consider what was being offered to audiences by this cinema throughout the 1970s; in short, did it offer anything beyond sex films, James Bond adventures and the allure of Star Wars (Lucas 1977)?