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01 Marina Picture PalaceSydney2019
ISO 3202.5 secf/8.014mm
Series · 20 prints
Map · Mapbox · OpenStreetMap
The Marina Theatre, at first the Marina Picture Palace, is a former suburban cinema at Rosebery in Sydney, opened in 1927 and run as a cinema until 1984. The architect William de Putron designed it in 1925 and was one of the consortium formed to establish and run it, with the builder William Henry Rumble and the theatre manager Eric Christensen. It is brick, with a rendered Inter-War free-classical front under a stepped parapet and a corrugated iron roof.
The Marina Theatre was built not by Union Theatres or Hoyts, the major cinema chains, but by that consortium, and de Putron designed it in the year he left his partnership with David Thomas Morrow. Rumble's 1926 building application, for a picture palace, shop and dwelling, was quoted at £6,000, and that November a shortage of steel girders brought work to a standstill. Beneath the stage were an orchestra pit and dressing rooms for live variety, and the silent-film screen was painted onto the rear wall.
After the rates went unpaid the Marina Theatre was sold in 1935 to William and Norman Ward; in November 1938 it was passed in at auction at £9,950 and sold within days for £10,500, and from January 1939 it was part of Leon Snider and George Dean's suburban circuit. Chris and Chaniglia Louis of Louis Film Company bought it in 1967, and it became a cinema for Greek-language films. It closed in June 1982, reopened under Paul Brennan that October and closed as a cinema on 8 February 1984.
The Louis family turned the stalls into a video and DVD shop, with a steel-lined room for the tapes. The shop closed in 2002, and the theatre has been unused since. The building was first heritage listed on 25 February 2000, as the Former Roxy Theatre in Botany LEP 1995, and in 2018 the foyer with its twin stairs, the dress circle and the classical proscenium arch were found substantially intact. The Marina Theatre is Bayside LEP 2021 item I363.
State Heritage Inventory record 1210109, Sydney Morning Herald (19 November 1938), NSW Government Gazette (25 February 2000) and Bayside LEP 2021
Hand-signed and numbered, printed from the original RAW file. Open editions in the two smallest sizes; limited editions of 100, 50 and 25 in the three larger, never reissued once they sell through.
Made to order by Brett in Sydney, from the original RAW file. Each print is hand-signed and numbered before it ships.
Paper
Ilford Galerie cotton rag, 310 gsm. Acrylic on metallic gloss, 260 gsm.
Lead time
Unframed: 5 to 10 business days. Framed and acrylic: 10 to 20.
Eric Christensen had worked at silent shows in Kensington and Waterloo and held exhibitor's licence No. 1 for New South Wales. While the Marina Theatre was being built he placed a gold sovereign in its brickwork for luck. Retired and in his 80s, he was back helping the lessee keep the theatre open before the 1982 closure.
Building magazine wrote in 1927 that at one time it was necessary to ring a bell to attract people to a site, 'but now it is only necessary to illuminate the scene and people flock towards the brightness.' De Putron's drawing in the magazine topped the stepped parapet with five large light standards. A photograph of about 1941 shows no sign that they were installed, though a vertical fin sign reading 'MARINA' had been added.
Chris Louis bought the theatre in honour of his wife, whose name was also Marina, as he said in an April 2016 interview cited in the heritage record. When the building was assessed in 2018, the partition built in the auditorium for the video business still carried its price boards and a sign reading 'Greek movies'.
