The Cinema Was Always Home: The Starlight Cinema Story

I met Tamasin while volunteering at my daughter’s school, and within five minutes I knew I wanted to sit down properly and hear her story. I was curious how she and her husband Charlie found the building, and all the work that went on behind the scenes while the town eagerly waited for the movies to reopen. What I didn’t expect was how many times along the way it almost didn’t happen, and how far the plan drifted from where it landed. 

What does the cinema mean to you? 

For Tamasin, it isn’t really a business, it’s home. She grew up in Taupo, raised by her dad, who held the cleaning contract at the old Starlight, so she was there every day as a kid. The cinema was always warm and buzzing, and one of her earliest memories is running around the place at five, tagging along after her dad and pretending to help, probably more of a hindrance than anything. So when the chance came to own it herself, it felt less like a business decision and more like coming home. 

What made you come back to Taupo? 

Tamasin spent years on a golf scholarship  in Oklahoma, then moved to Texas and met Charlie there not long after finishing university. They started a family, and Taupo stayed a constant pull in the background, a non-negotiable trip home every year. The real turning point came when her eldest was about seven and the school started running active shooter drills. Tamasin described what getting into that school actually looked like, photo ID, scanners, kids dropped off like a drive-through so parents never even go inside, and it rattled her in a way nothing here ever had. She said to Charlie that if they had the chance to come home and didn’t take it, and something happened, she’d never forgive herself. “It was Taupo or Texas,” she told me. “I wasn’t moving anywhere else.” 

Was buying the cinema always the plan? 

Not exactly, and definitely not in this building. Years before they moved home, Tamasin had half-jokingly floated the idea to Charlie of buying the cinema. He said absolutely not, but the more they sat with it, the more it made sense, and it became something they were genuinely serious about. Once home, she went to Peter Smith, who’d owned Starlight for 42 years and known her since she was a little girl trailing after her dad. She asked if he’d ever sell to her. With COVID hitting and no clarity on the industry, he wasn’t comfortable selling, and told her to come back in twelve months. She did, and he was ready. 

What she inherited also came with an expiry date though; the landlord gave them a year before the old building came down, since it wasn’t up to earthquake code. So while Top Gun, Barbie and Oppenheimer packed the old six screens out, giving them a lucky financial start, Tamasin and Charlie were quietly hunting for somewhere new to put a cinema. 

They looked at a building in town first and ruled it out, too small. Then, running the business day to day, they realised they’d been sitting on far more space than Taupo needed, six cinemas and 600 seats, some days heating a 188-seat room for three people. So the plan flipped, downsize and do it smarter. They looked at a number of different locations, but deal after deal fell over for reasons outside their control.

 Funnily enough, the building they landed in wasn’t even one Tamasin wanted to look at; she’d written that side of town off entirely. It took close to two years to circle back to it. All up, twenty five months passed between closing the old cinema and opening this one, and for a chunk of that they had a storage shed full of projectors with no guarantee they’d ever be plugged in again. And yet it’s turned out exactly right, the ceilings are high enough for a cinema, there’s always enough parking, and it’s a spot that has pleasantly surprised most of us.

 Was there a moment you thought this might not happen? 

Plenty, she told me. There were stretches of months spent on a building that then fell through overnight, over and over. What kept her going was simply picturing how good it would feel once it actually happened. 

What did this teach you about yourself? 

“Probably that I can withstand a lot more than I thought I could,” Tamasin said, and she explained it with a dog analogy that’s stuck with me. Terriers, apparently, if you let them go at a sprinkler, will chase the water so relentlessly they can drown themselves, they just go and go and don’t know when to stop. “That’s me,” she said. “I just go and go and go and I won’t give up.” For years she thought that was a good thing. She’s since realised it isn’t always; there are times you have to know when to let something go, because sometimes you’ll drown. It’s part of what’s got her leaning into working smarter rather than harder. 

What has this taught you about people? 

Going through something this hard, she told me, shows you exactly who someone is, just multiplied by ten. The difficult people got more difficult; the good ones showed up in a big way. Every single staff member from the old cinema found their way back to the new one, and it really blows her mind how loyal these ones are. She’s also learned not to take negative feedback so personally. One star reviews used to feel like a personal attack, “like they were telling me I’m a horrible woman,” she said. You put so much of yourself into a business, but she’s learning to separate herself from it; most of the time it’s just someone annoyed that a session sold out. 

If you had unlimited resources and money, what would you do? 

She would like to finish the private cinema room properly, with a big custom couch people can book out, and more space to hang around before and after a movie. Really, she just wants Starlight to be somewhere people can walk in, leave the world outside, and settle in for a couple of hours the phone can’t touch. Another long-held dream of hers has quietly been a bookshop alongside the cinema. That one sent us off on a total tangent about books, let’s just say I’m a total fan of that idea. Sitting with Tamasin, what stayed with me most was how far this journey wandered from the plan, and how right it ended up looking anyway. She’s spent her whole adult life finding her way back to that same warmth from her childhood, and now, in a building nobody expected, she gets to hand it to the rest of us too.