Becky Hallsmith reviews the restoration work at the Ultimate Picture Palace which is now entering the home stretch.

Our three-year project to restore East Oxford’s much loved Art Deco treasure to full splendour has reached the home stretch. We now have a decent sound system, a digital projector, improved washroom facilities, the worst of the damp has been attended to and the auditorium redecorated, and of course there’s the gorgeous new façade.

I’m really proud that the work to the outside of the building has been recognised by the Oxford Preservation Trust who have give the external lighting scheme an award this year. The plaque is locked away in our safe waiting for James to find a prominent spot for us to display it! So what’s left for us to do? Well, the seats need replacing. The ones we currently have are a bit of a hit and miss affair. They look good and some of them are very comfortable, but unfortunately some of them are not. The real problem is that they’re all falling apart and poor James (our long-suffering manager) spends a disproportionate amount of his time wielding a screwdriver before we open every evening.

This summer I invited a couple of companies to quote. The first showed us some perfectly serviceable off-the-peg seats that are within our budget. The second showed us something far more exciting: a gorgeous design and ideas to improve sight lines. This left us with a bit of a dilemma: the seats we have will just about make it through one more winter, but we don’t have enough spare parts to get us through two. We want to give our customers the best we possibly we can, but the cash flow won’t be quite there this year.

So we’ve decided to see if we can raise the £6,000 shortfall by turning to the community for crowdfunding using the Kickstarter website (well if Spike Lee has managed to finance his latest film that way, surely we can raise a bit of money).

Together with Xanna, my marketing assistant, we’ve had a lot of fun coming up with rewards to entice investors. Among the offers: the ubiquitous plaques on seats, commemorative T-shirts and a chance to programme a season of classics.

Talking of classics, we’ve programmed some fantastic ones taking us up to Christmas: Powell and Pressburger’s dark fairy tale The Red Shoes, evergreen family film Wizard of Oz and perennial festive favourite It’s A Wonderful Life. What ties them all together is the surprising fact that they all had shaky starts at the box office.

We’ll then close for a week over Christmas, bouncing back on December 28. We’ve got an epic New Year’s Day planned again with the BFI’s restoration of Gone with the Wind to look forward to, all four hours of it! When the lights come up for the intermission I’ll be the one sobbing uncontrollably at the back — scene with Olivia de Havilland gets me every time.

And don’t worry, the seats we have WILL see us through the winter — if you find that yours needs adjusting, just let James know . . .