Rep cinema owner rails against heritage front

Discussion surrounding the closure of the surviving repertory movie houses in the west end has evolved since initial reports – the entire Festival Cinemas chain will be calling it a day on June 30, with only The Fox in the Beaches due for survival under the current ownership should a new renter come along, although there are no such plans for The Paradise. Those armchair theatre managers offering ideas on how these second-run nabes could’ve survived were refuted with a comment on blogTO from owner Chris McQuillan, who inherited The Kingsway, The Revue and The Royal from his late father, but has found it tough to justify paying for new projector bulbs. While two-month-old mainstream studio fare increasingly became the staple of the cinemas – increasingly overlapping with DVD release dates – resulting in fewer avant-garde offerings, McQuillan explains that the locals accustomed to spontaneously leaping from their homes to luxuriate in the theatre seats aren’t going to be drawn to three-night Peter Greenaway retrospectives; conversely, there’s a lack of parking spaces to accommodate everyone in town who might be inclined to trek out for a unique screening, especially given how the subsidized Cinematheque Ontario fills this niche from its centrally located AGO home. The merciless maintenance costs associated with these early 20th century buildings doesn’t help sustain the concept of keeping popcorn prices low, either. Yet another comment from McQuillan, dropped at the North Ronces Blog, goes into further detail. Business is up slightly in 2006, but the publicity surrounding the closure hasn’t drawn more patrons: “I don’t want to see a Heritage designation because it will erase, in a second, hundreds of thousands of dollars that we have invested over the many years that we have operated The Revue,” he writes. “No one will buy the property – including other cinema operators – it makes no sense to do so.” But members of the Ronscesvalles community aren’t convinced, and their Save The Revue website includes a petition addressed to Councillor Sylvia Watson, with hopes that a Toronto Preservation Board meeting on June 22 will get it listed on the historical inventory. The Royal, meanwhile, which has been designated as a Heritage Building, may have its fate sealed Friday (June 9) when offers are due on its $2.7 million price. And even though The Kingsway hasn’t inspired any such preservation rally, its run as the first Festival Cinema will wrap with the most sentimental selection, Casablanca.

FURTHER reading at Cinema Treasures [Pic above via Dave's Brain]