GIVEN the chance to lie on the grass and watch a movie with drinks in Centennial Park at sunset, it’s little wonder romance is regularly in the air at Moonlight Cinema. Sometimes, however, people get a little too cuddly.
“It wouldn’t be Moonlight if someone wasn’t caught in the bushes during the season,” spokeswoman Jillian Bowen says. “The nature of outdoor cinema is that the drama of the screen tends to connect with the atmosphere of the evening, so people often find themselves, um, enjoying in a really realistic setting. Sometimes a few people get a bit more adventurous.”
The growing batch of summer open-air cinemas - entrants in recent years include Starlight Cinema at Leichhardt and North Sydney ovals, Bondi Openair Cinema and the free Movies in the Overflow at Sydney Olympic Park - and faster ticket sales suggest they’re gaining in popularity.
At the well-established St George OpenAir Cinema at Mrs Macquaries Point, “the rate at which we sell out has grown dramatically”, managing director Rob Bryant says. “Last year we had 35 nights and 34 of them sold out, and that’s a capacity of just short of 1900 each night.”
It pays to be quick. “In the first actual 48 hours of sales last year, 35,000 tickets sold … [It was] rock-concert type sales. It’s hard to imagine anywhere in the world with a better outlook for an outdoor cinema than where we are. It’s Sydney on a plate.”
In OpenAir’s 34 nights, “we’ve got 15 premieres or previews”, Bryant says. Night one has The Jane Austen Book Club; other Australian premieres include comedy drama Juno and Tom Hanks in Charlie Wilson’s War.
Moonlight’s season opens with the first Australian screening of comedy The Darjeeling Limited, with Owen Wilson and Adrien Brody as two of three brothers on a train trip in India that goes awry.
The three-month program has fresh cuts such as 3:10 to Yuma with Russell Crowe (screening January 29), Jerry Seinfeld’s Bee Movie (February 2) and evergreens including Wall Street (December 16) and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (January 15).
At Breakfast At Tiffany’s (January 31), “without fail, someone will propose”, Bowen predicts. “One day we need to count the number of proposals.”