Today on the Scroll: More updates from the future — of this column, website, and entire multi-platform media enterprise — with a peek behind the curtain of one of those surviving neighbourhood movie theatres that Toronto only gets all sentimental over the moment they risk being closed. In this case, almost two-and-a-half years after showing its last pictures as a repertory theatre, the Kingsway plans to buck the second-run default in favour of a true throwback: new movies, just slightly off the beaten path.
A new sound system is being installed, amongst other aesthetic improvements, with the hope of re-opening later this month.
Rui Pereira spent about a dozen years working in a local corporate bijous that predated the multiplex, starting as a 19-year-old in 1986 at the Showcase on Yonge south of Bloor — once and again named the New Yorker, now the tourist-trapping live musical Panasonic Theatre. Later, he did time at the Cineplex Odeon Humber in Bloor West Village — closed in 2003, waiting for someone to figure out what to do with it ever since. Most sentimental for him, though, was a few years working at the Eglinton, ditched by then-owner Famous Players in 2001, right after being ordered to incoprorate wheelchair accessibility.
Today, it serves as a sporadically-booked banquet hall called the Eglinton Grand. Failing an attempt at a similar strategy, the York Theatre at Eglinton and Yonge is now a fitness club, while the Roxy at Danforth and Greenwood had a façade salvaged for a convenience store.
While most of the other surviving local theatres situated along sidewalks were adopted at one time or another by the Festival Cinemas chain, their decision to give up those ghosts in June 2006 led to an outpouring of sentiment, if considerably out of tune with what became the reality of the second-run cinema business: assembly-line Hollywood for a couple of bucks less in the narrowing window prior to DVD.
Reality was that no one was going to take the time and money to trek across town to see something unique, knowing there were easier methods of watching it at home. So, the double-bills got more predictable, but even that centre could not hold.
“The Rogers video store across the street from here is second-run now,” says Pereira between shifts of supervising the renovation. “Running this kind of theatre also means you have to be in tune with the surrounding neighbourhood.”
SwitchWorks Technologies, the company Pereria works for, secured a lease from the Kingsway building’s owner in August. The no-longer “final” screenings coincided with a hasty effort to designate the building a heritage site, ensuring that its circa 1939 art deco elements be preserved in any future development.
Turns out that, in the Etobicoke strip originally designed to evoke old-timey England — albeit in the age of the automobile — movies remained the best idea anyone had for the building at 3030 Bloor St. W.
The renovation effort is also designed to steer attention to SwitchWorks’ service, WHIP tv, offering a broadband streaming media television package that focuses on ethnic niche channels, but also the infamously regulation-defying channel Star Ray TV.
Pereria thinks that being alongside the Royal York subway station can only work in the new Kingsway’s favour — perhaps even luring people with little awareness of the area — although local demand will factor in the decisions of what flicks will play for two to four weeks at a time. The idea is to bring the movies that tend to draw audiences at the Cumberland and Varsity about 10 kilometres west, while never overlapping with the nearby Cineplex-owned Queensway.
Curiously enough, the big-chain cinema business in Toronto has never swung back around to the idea of salvaging an old movie house, if just for sentimental reasons. Three other theatres attached to the Festival chain at its end, the Fox, Revue and Royal, have all resumed operations independent of one another, each having applied distinct survival strategies. That leaves the Paradise — which Pereria investigated into taking over, to no avail — still standing vacant, although recently removed graffiti would suggest some stirrings.
Meanwhile, the century-old Bloor Cinema, which has been managed independently for the past decade, provides Pereira with inspiration of how a theatre can survive without leaning on last-chance screenings of movies that cycled out of the gargantuan AMCs, even if they still do some of that. But not unlike its anachronistic counterpart in a sleepy neighbourhood, the Mt. Pleasant, plans for the Kingsway are banking on the theory that playing one movie on one screen for consecutive evenings can still draw a crowd.
“People can complain about a disappearing theatre all they want,” says Pereira. “But for the purpose of being able to stay in business, it always comes down to one basic question — did you actually bother going when it was there?”
scroll@eyeweekly.com