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This Londoner has collected hundreds of old cinema tickets – and he wants yours too

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Time Out Film
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The last time you went to the cinema, what did your ticket look like? Did you even get a ticket? Or just a QR code scanned from your phone? As cinema tickets get blander, a designer from Kilburn, Ben Smith, is keeping the romance of the cinema stub alive with an Instagram archive Tickets Please.

A cinema ticket nerd, Smith keeps all of his in a scrapbook. Has done for years: ‘It’s about having a physical memory of where you’ve been and what you’ve seen. I’ve got a bad memory for who was in what, or what year a film was released. But I can always remember what cinema I was in and who I was with. I’ve got a photographic memory for that stuff.’

Smith started his archive last month. ‘I wanted to document them before they vanish.’ The oldest stub in his collection is a ticket from a showing of Disney’s 1938 ‘Snow White’ at a cinema in LA.

 

— 🎟 Whittier Theatre 📍 Whittier, CA 🎥 Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs 🗓 1938

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The most eye-catching is ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ from a cinema in New York.

 

— 🎟 Century's Huntington 📍 Huntington, NY 🎥 A Hard Day's Night 🗓 1964

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Smith’s personal favourite involves a ticket mess-up from one of his first dates with his girlfriend to see ‘The Hunger Games’ at a cinema in Wimbledon. ‘The cashier put through the wrong film, and printed a ticket for ‘The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel’, then scribbled it out. Those are the little eccentric details I like. Strange touches that make it interesting to me.’

 

— 🎟 Odeon Wimbledon 📍 London, UK 🎥 The Hunger Games 🗓 2012

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Find the Tickets Please archive on Instagram @ticketsplz 

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