Please Open - The Crystal Palace Documentary

A near century of fatigue is worn proudly in The Crystal Palace. The loving overuse of the cinema has left her tired, but always reverberating with an inherent sense of cool. The carbon rods that explosively connect to light the 80 year old projectors may be in finite supply but the old girls whirr on and The Crystal Palace keeps finding ways to bring in a crowd. The Jazz, The Dancing, The Orchestra, The Talkies, The Discos, The Surf Movies, The Bollywood Movies, 'The Room' - she's always been a flexible and plucky character - but has The Crystal Palace finally lost her 'cool'?


Why The Crystal Palace?


In 1928 The Crystal Palace opened its doors to Auckland to come and see it's first screening. Played with a full orchestra accompaniment and a dazzling light show that shorted the local power station, the suburban theatre instantly became a stalwart of the local community.

With every cultural shift, The Crystal Palace found a way to stay relevant; The first suburban theatre to have sound in NZ, a pumping jazz and dance hall until the 40s, reopened in the 60s as a disco, showing surf films in the 70s and 80s, and now monthly screenings of the best worst movie 'The Room'.

But now the theatre, with it's original features starting to show their age, is at risk of being forgotten and lost.

We think The Crystal Palace still has a place as a cinema, venue and important heritage building and hope that in making this short documentary, we will both reconnect people with the theatre and their personal histories there, as well as introducing it to a whole new community who may be yet to discover a forgotten treasure.

What we need...


Our team, Co-Directors Karl Sheridan and Robin Gee and Producers Taylor MacGregor and Monster Valley, need your support to help raise funds to help cover the production and post-production costs of making this film.


We hope to raise $2000 (to be matched by Loading Docs) to help us pay our awesome editor Levi Beamish to cut together the final film, to hire some swanky cameras to take some beautiful pictures and to fund the recording of a very special soundtrack that is being composed especially for our film.


We hope that your contributions to our project will encourage you to reconnect with the theatre yourself and that our film will be a new experience of The Crystal Palace.


Donate. Watch. Tell us your stories. We want as many people as we can find to be a part of this process and to let us know whether you think that The Crystal Palace still has the goods. There are still plenty of Jaffas to be rolled down the aisles and we'd like to keep those doors open as long as we can.