Bring back the intermission for big-screen epics

They were a chance to chat, bitch about the actors and discuss the second half of the film

A small revolution is taking place in cinema. It hit me when I went the other day to see Disney's The Lion King on Imax – which, I agree, sounds rather a strange affair to be heralding as a revolution. Imax, after all, is the big-screen gimmick, the size of 12 double-decker buses and all that, which you take the kids to on their birthdays. They are handed 3-D glasses at the door and get a thrill when the dragons or speeding cars seem to fly out of the screen and into their faces.

But with The Lion King there are no 3-D effects. The old Disney movie has simply been remastered on to the Imax technology and looks fantastic. Huge African panoramas make the familiar animation feel like a brand new experience.

The Disney film is just the start. Imax plans to use its cinemas – of which several more are about to be built in Britain – to show conventional blockbuster releases, doing away with the 3-D effects, in the hope that audiences would rather see new movies on Imax at the same time as they are released nationwide. Hollywood appears to be coming behind the idea. Tom Hanks has become a convert after seeing an Imax remastering of Apollo 13, and that film's director Ron Howard said he was "blown away". George Lucas gave his blessing last year for the most recent Star Wars project to be released on Imax.

But there is a snag. The effect of the big, big screen is overwhelming. I think it could be genuinely bad for the audience's health to stare at a screen the size of all those double-deckers for anything longer than 90 minutes. The Imax people seem to agree. Their co-chairman Bradley J Wechsler tells me that he is thinking about putting intermissions into any lengthy major new releases they screen.

With that proviso, I see no reason why their plan to show new blockbusters on Imax concurrent with their normal release, and to have an Imax venue in most of the major British cities, shouldn't work.

Best of all, it will see the return of the intermission. Here, Mr Wechsler and his colleagues may have hit on a wheeze that could prove even more attractive than a screen the size of all those double-deckers. Intermissions in epic films for some reason went out of fashion some years ago. I never understood why. They were a chance to have a drink or an ice cream and stretch your legs. They were a chance to chat, bitch about the performers and speculate on the second half of the film. They were also, invaluably, a chance to sneak out surreptitiously.

* I found the Royal Shakespeare Company's Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children a long haul at three and a quarter hours. But it did at least give me time to reflect on the curious title. Most stage adaptations of novels do not place the author's name in front of the book's title. A recent stage version of War and Peace was not called "Tolstoy's War and Peace", even though Tolstoy is arguably even more of a draw than Rushdie. Indeed, I can think of no stage adaptation of a book that has ever adopted the practice of sticking the author's name up there. What could have been the reason, I wonder. Could the RSC really have believed that its audience would be ignorant of who wrote the Booker-prize winning novel. Or did Mr Rushdie in a moment of vanity insist on having his name up in lights? Either way, the production received rather poor reviews. Which is a pity for cast and director, but doubly awkward for the chap with his name above the show.

* When the editor of the Evening Standard accidentally called the paper's film awards the theatre awards last Sunday night, it can be counted an unlucky mistake. She, after all, is not a public speaker. When later in the evening Hugh Grant went up to present an award to the producers of one of the winning films and forgot their names, that can be counted rudeness. It was one of the biggest moments in the lives of those young producers. Besides, aren't actors supposed to learn their lines?

* I'm puzzled by letters to the press this week saying that Martin Smith, the chairman of the English National Opera, gave incorrect information and figures to a press conference about the company's financial crisis. The letters came from Mr Smith's predecessor as chairman and from a former head of corporate affairs for the company. These two people must know what they are talking about, and would certainly have double-checked before writing. Equally, Mr Smith, as chairman of a public company, would not have given incorrect financial information at a press conference. That would be enough to provoke the wrath of the Arts Council and the Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell. Yet they have remained silent. Ms Jowell did, though, recently compare Britain unfavourably to Germany in cultural matters. Perhaps she was really thinking about our cultural leaders' maths.

d.lister@independent.co.uk