cinema needs you

I live quite literally round the corner from one of the most beautiful cinema's in the country, The Cameo Cinema in Edinburgh.

Now some emotionally and historically retarded property developer wants to tear to pieces this magnificent and nigh on one hundred year old main auditorium and turn it into another fucking awful bar, stripping this beautiful room of its history and its purpose and reducing it to warehouse for cheap booze and cheaper conversation.

This cinema is one of the last bastions of the glorious heart of film. Stepping inside fills you with the magnificent spirit of awe and excitement that flooded every aspect of the art. In this room you are closer than you can be anywhere else to Chaplin and Bogart and Hepburn and every wide eyed cinema lover who has gripped the arm rests with anticipation from 1914 right up to this present day. This room is cinema. And they want to destroy it. This cannot happen.

If you're from Edinburgh go to the save the cameo website and do everything you can from there.

If you're from elsewhere take bookdrunk's advice and do the following:

The other route - particularly if you live outside the city centre of Edinburgh - is to contact Historic Scotland and to urge them to consider protected status for the premises, which would prevent major alterations - such as an enormous bar where there used to be a cinema screen. Email hs.listingandconsents@scotland.gsi.gov.uk

We cannot allow this shameless cultural vandalism to take place in a building of such importance to the history to the history both of Edinburgh and of the greatest art form of the twentieth century. This cinema is a breathtaking monument to century of film that can still miraculously be enjoyed in the way it was orginally intended. For now at least...