“We’ve been asked by our customers for many years,‘can we please have a Palace cinema in Sydney with ample parking?’,” Zeccola said. “We were looking for exactly that when we remembered there’d been a four-screen cinema at the Entertainment Quarter that had fallen into disuse.”
Palace plans to rent that cinema,spend $500,000 to move in and refresh the amenities,then reopen it as Palace Moore Park.
Zeccola said that contractually the new cinema would not be able to compete with the nearby Hoyts EQ,which is screening such mainstream films asThe Marvels andThe Hunger Games:The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes.
“We’ll focus on our film festivals,foreign,art-house and indie content,” he said.
Palace had three cinemas on Oxford Street in Paddington until the Academy Twin closed when the chain was unable to renew the lease on that building in 2010. When the Verona shuts,it will only have the Chauvel left.
Zeccola is hoping film lovers will make Palace Moore Park their new local cinema.
A spokesman for the Verona building’s owners,Tom Speakman,said that while the City of Sydney had yet to approve the development application,the intention was to have four cinemas with more than 250 seats in a new building that would retain the existing facade,awning and other elements.
The longtime general manager of Palace Cinemas in Sydney,Nicolas Whatson,now the head of Palace distribution,said loyal customers had turned the Verona into one of the country’s best art-house operations.
“Everyone is still processing it,” he said of the closure. “With the change of the ownership of the building,everyone knew there was the possibility they might have plans for the site but I don’t think anyone quite expected that we’d be shutting.
“Mostly because you don’t expect it to be happening to,for the most part,thriving venues.”
Whatson said the box office on Oxford Street became a marketing tool for the cinema. When there was a queue down the street,“people would walk past going,‘what’s going on?’”
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He remembered Kidman officially opening the Verona with sold-out screenings of her filmTo Die For.
“She started to get a little bit edgy because we were dealing with an absolutely packed venue and things were running a little late,” he said. “I remember Tom Cruise being parked outside in his car;he was shootingMission:Impossible 2 in Sydney at the time.
“We got the sense he was starting to get a little irritated that his Valentine’s Day date,Nicole,was running late,but she was incredibly generous. She ended up introducing all four auditoriums.”
Another major success for the Verona was the 1996 Muhammad Ali-George Foreman documentaryWhen We Were Kings.
“It had back-to-back-to-back sold-out sessions for months,” Whatson said. “It became a bit of a cultural phenomenon. I have very strong memories of turning around and seeing Kerry and James Packer walking up the stairs surrounded by security guards.
“I suspect that they didn’t normally go to public cinemas to watch films but they clearly knew that there was something going on.”
Whatson said Lachlan Murdoch,now chief executive of Fox Corporation,once hired a cinema for a private staff screening ofIndependence Day.
“It was a Twentieth Century Fox film,” he said. “He was quite young at the time but I imagine,as he was learning the ropes of the business,he came and checked out his own production at Verona.”
Email Garry Maddox atgmaddox@smh.com.au and follow him on Twitter at@gmaddox.
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