Cuttack: Rickety sitting arrangements, broken chairs, ragged upholstery, unhygienic and badly lit toilets, poor sound and picture quality in cinema halls have now forced the die-hard cinemagoers of Cuttack city to think twice before visiting a cinema theatre.

While many exhibitors blame it on whopping entertainment tax, fat energy bills and lack of government assistance for the poor condition of the theatres, some of them have decided to stop exhibiting cinemas in their halls and convert the theatre compound into other commercial houses.

Thin attendance

The situation in rural areas of the district is not better either. The entire Cuttack district that was once boasting of having 32 cinema houses now has only 19 of them exhibiting movies with thin attendance.

``I have not visited a theatre in the last 10 years, though I watch at least two to three cinemas every week at home,'' says bank official Debendra Hota, a cinema buff. Poor facilities and hazardous conditions are said to be a major factor for the diehard cinemagoers to stop visiting cinema theatres.

Film exhibition, like other traditional entertainment shows, was once an integral part of Cuttack district. Particularly, the millennium city, among its other glorious past, was once famous for having many quality cinema houses. With an area of nearly 200 sq. km, the city was once bursting at the seams with as many as 14 cinema houses that were running houseful almost every season of the year.

But unable to survive against the onslaught of TV and home video, including several other professional hazards, as many as five cinema houses in the city have now closed while the remaining are finding it difficult to hang around in the trade. Exhibitors are now converting theatres into either marriage halls or godowns as returns from film exhibition have come down considerably.

"Earlier it would take almost four weeks for celluloid prints to reach small towns, but today people are getting access to films much faster," says an office-bearer of the Orissa Film Distributors Syndicate. People can now watch the latest movies within a few days of their release thanks to video piracy, he quipped.

"It was difficult to maintain the cinema hall from the meagre earnings, forget about earning a living from this trade," says an exhibitor, who converted his cinema house into a marriage hall recently.

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