I picked up this book at Book Fair Australia earlier this year. Sadly, I was not able to talk to the author as he died almost two years ago, but I was able to talk to his son. Michael was there to sell his own book, Dodgy Mike, a series of stories about his own life. But he also had copies of his father’s book. And that is what caught my eye. I’m intrigued by Michael’s book so I might consider buying that if I see him again. I’ve had many Greek friends over the years. From a friend, whose name I’ve forgotten, in Primary School through to today where some of my treasured friends are on Facebook. I have fond memories of the young lady in Primary School, she used to take me home to her family where her grandmother would try to spoil me, something that never happened in my house.
I bought the English edition and it’s a good thing I did because my Greek is limited to a couple of spoken words and absolutely none in printed words. And most of what I know is food.
I’d like to spare a few words for the problems with this book. The bulk of them are formatting issues. What would be perfect on a movie poster does not work in a book. Almost all of the movie titles were in all caps and I found it stopped my reading on so many occasions. When I see formatting I’m not expecting it stops me in my tracks and slows my reading dramatically, I don’t know if it’s the case for other people.
The positives outweight the negatives. This book is brilliant. It shows us how a great entrepreneur can change the world. In this case it’s a small world, that of the Greek community in Melbourne, and parts of the rest of Australia. But, it’s still a world. Peter Yiannoudes brought Greek movies to Greek people in Australia at a time when the world was far away and it was expensive to travel back to Greece just to see a movie. The Greek immigrants were working very hard, often living with two or three families in one home to save money. Going to the movies on a Saturday night would have provided much needed time out for the whole family.
This book details how Yiannoudes travelled the breadth of Australia finding Greek communities everywhere and showing his movies. It’s a lovely story of connection, bringing people together and helping them understand more about the country they’d come from. Some of the people were immigrants, others were first generation Australians. Bringing the movies to them was a public service, helping them connect with a country they couldn’t see.
This book has issues, there are gaps in the narrative I’d love filled. Some of which I can do by running a search on the internet. Yiannoudes formed a company with a couple of friends, they bought cinemas so they would be able to be more flexible with their showing of movies. Not mentioned in the book is the price they paid for some of these buildings. I found this article on GitHub showing Peter Yiannoudes bought the Westgarth Cinema in 1966 for $70,000. If it wasn’t for this the Westgarth would have closed completely. It’s now run by Palace Cinemas, but if not for Yiannoudes this would not have been possible. Maybe he thought these details weren’t important, maybe he didn’t want to tell the world the finer details of his business. Both of those were his choice.
What I see in this book is a good starting point for a thesis on Greek cinema in Australia. It’s got enough details to give the student a good grounding in what was happening and also to give them something to search for across the internet and across many articles. It’s a thesis I’d love to read. If you’ve done this please hit me up.
With my search I noticed I’m not the only one to see that Yiannoudes has been so influential. When in died the Member of Parliament, Kat Theophanous, made a statement about him. I can’t see any parliamentarian making a statement to Parliament about me, I’m just not that important, but Yiannoudes was…and still is.
I made some notes, but I’ve used so many words already I’ll only mention a couple of them. The company Yiannoudes started with two friends, Cosmopolitan Motion Pictures, started their own magazine and the front cover is reproduced on page 90. I was very happy to see this. I’ve done my own magazine editing in the past and this cover spoke to me so much I stopped and looked for a long time. Ignore the fact that most of it is in Greek, I just had to look at it.
Page 151 had a reproduction of an advertising feature they used. It’s apparently a tissue distributed with some words about the upcoming movie. ‘BRING THIS WITH YOU.’ It says, ‘It will be useful to wipe your tears as you view the most moving, most dramatic film of all time…’ It is such a fantastic piece of marketing, I truly love it.
Anyway, if you can find a copy of this book I wholeheartedly recommend it. A lovely piece of work which I enjoyed tremendously despite the narrative gaps and formatting issues. It’s one that will stay on my shelves unless I lend it to friends.