The Story of the Forum Cinema Glasthule in the 80s

 

Have technological advancements robbed our Innocence ?

 

The first movie I ever saw in the cinema was “The Jungle Book”. My Da brought myself and my sister to see it in The Forum cinema in Glasthule in South County Dublin. It was in 1987 and the movie was rereleased for its twentieth anniversary. Though it’s not out of the realms of possibility that it actually just took twenty years to eventually make it to Irish cinemas.

The Forum doesn’t exist anymore, in a world where megaplexes rule, the old fashioned two screen cinema just couldn’t compete and The Forum closed in the late nineties, not lasting long enough to see the new millennium. The Forum was my local cinema all through my childhood and early adulthood and I still think of it very fondly. There’s a cliché that’s still attached to cinemas in general, coming out of a dark cinema into a bright day. It’s a very simple thing, but it’s something that most everyone is familiar with and even now after all of the multitude of cinemas I’ve gone to in Ireland, England, Scotland and even America, when I think of walking from the darkness in to the light, it’s The Forum that I think of.

When I was in my formative years, during the summer holidays the parents of the local kids used to enrol us in what was called a “Summer Project”. It was basically a way to get the kids out of the house or off the streets for a few hours a couple of days each week while we weren’t in school. As much as we enjoyed it, looking back at it I think the parents enjoyed it more because when they weren’t scheduled to go along with the kids as a minder, they got some much needed peace and quiet. Here and now, I can’t remember a lot of what we used to do because I’m getting old and I need space in my memory for a stupid amount of passwords and the Green Lantern oath. But I remember that ice-skating was a firm favourite, as was the trip to the Coca Cola bottling plant. But the one activity that I loved the most was always the trip to the cinema. My diet was pretty restricted when I was a kid (which actually took a bit of the sting out of being diabetic, I was never one for eating much sugary food anyway) but the trip to the cinema with the Summer Project was always a guarantee of sweets and happiness for a couple of hours. In the here and now, I go to the cinema at the drop of a hat, but going to The Forum was always a treat and an adventure.

Because The Forum only had two screens, there was never a massive selection of movies, but I never once felt like I was missing out on anything. I remember waiting outside the cinema on multiple occasions for the doors to open for the afternoon or screenings. The box office and the concession stand were separate from each other. The concession stand with it’s treasure trove of goodies was brilliantly located right between the entrances to the two screens so that there was no real way to avoid walking past it or walking by it. The entrances to the two screens themselves were guarded by heavy velvet curtains that you had to manoeuvre through to get to the actual doorway into the screens. It was probably a hygiene nightmare with drinks and stale popcorn trapped in the recesses and folds but thinking back on it, walking through the velvet curtains just screams class to me.

Over the years, I saw an awful lot of movies (but not a lot of awful movies) in that cinema with an awful lot of people. I have no problem at all in going to the cinema on my own, but when I went to the Forum, I was always with my family or my friends. My entire family were with me on the last trip I made to The Forum. I didn’t start working until I left school and with my first wage packet, we went to The Forum and we saw Saving Private Ryan. I don’t think my Ma was overly sold on the movie but the rest of us enjoyed it and it’s the kind of movie that I’m glad I was able to close out my time in The Forum with.

It was soon after that that The Forum closed its doors for the last time, replaced in 1999 by the IMC in Dun Laoghaire roughly a mile up the road. In every tangible, measurable, definable way the IMC is a superior cinema but I do still miss The Forum. When I was growing up, it was THE place to go for movies and it’s where my love of the cinema was born.

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