The Agenda with Steve Paikin (Audio) - Saving the Revue Cinema

Episode Date: November 6, 2024

Despite the challenges facing theatres in the streaming age, Toronto's Revue Cinema was thriving with sold-out shows and a devoted audience. But when their lease renewal fell through, the future of Canada's oldest operating cinema was suddenly in doubt.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I think working in an indie cinema attracts a wide range of people for a lot of different reasons. I think many people say it's like a cool job to have and I tend to agree. It's again an opportunity to be part of something that is bigger than yourself, something in our case that has a long long history in the city of Toronto, which I think is often part of the appeal, and then an opportunity to be a film nerd at work and get to talk to people who care about the same as you care about. I'm Grant Oyston.

I'm the chair of the board of directors at the Review Film Society. The Review is Canada's oldest operating cinema. To the best of our knowledge, it was built between 1911 and 1912 and has been here now for 112 years as a cinema almost continuously that entire time. Over the decades it's changed a lot, it's adapted. At one time it showed mostly German language films based on the needs of the local community. Today it's an independent non-profit cinema that the Review Film Society operates and

we try to show a really diverse range of programming that reflects the interests of Torontonians. The Revue Cinema itself is quite an unusual building. It's built in a way that you certainly wouldn't see a modern cinema built. For example, to get up to the projection booth in the office, you go up a secret door in one of the washrooms at the back, tucked away, and you go upstairs, it's's almost a ladder calling it stairs is a push. There's a random toilet up in the projection booth from back in the day when the projectionist might be there for hours on end. It's quite a unique space and there's really nothing like it. The Review Cinema is probably one of the top independent

cinemas in Canada just by box office in terms of cinemas of our scale and size and our ability to sell out. We regularly sell out anywhere from three to five to six screenings a week, which is really truly remarkable that there's not many independent cinemas that get that type of audience so frequently. Come on in. Between 2005 and 2006, when the cinema faced closure, permanent closure, their previous owners

were selling off the building. Danny and Letty Mullins, two local residents who have lived in the neighborhood for many many years now and they were sad to think of the cinema closing and they came out and saved the cinema by buying the building. So they've been our landlords now for over 17 years. It really had felt like the cinema had found its audience and was finally seeing great success. And then we discovered with two business days left in our lease that a landlord did not intend to renew that lease and that he intended to take the cinema into his own hands and run it as a private business.

And I had some major concerns about whether that would be feasible for them. A lot of the infrastructure from ticket sales to the computer systems to social media to even the digital projector and parts of the sound system are all things that are not original to the building. They're the things that belong to the film society and so the Mollins would have had to rebuild all of that and buy all that equipment and set all of that up from scratch. I was shocked. We've had obviously a very long-standing and successful partnership and we felt the cinema was in a better place than it had been in a long long time. So it was really genuinely so surprising and devastating to know that

there wasn't an intention to renew and that we could be out in a matter of days. So we had sold I think over 5,000 tickets for future and upcoming events. We had booked rentals, film festivals in the coming months. We typically book anywhere from two to three months ahead. So we had been operating under the belief that we already had the lease renewal and that we would continue to operate as normal. So we went to a lawyer and we were able to secure an emergency injunction or court order, which extended our tenancy at least until the end of October,

at which point a judge will determine whether we have a valid lease extension. It was terrifying to get that news, especially so close to the end of the lease. Terrifying in terms of thinking about the cinema closing and also thinking about our staff. We have, you know, over a dozen people who work at the cinema and the idea that they could all be out of work come Monday was really heart-wrenching. I found out about the lease situation in the middle of a shift during a sold-out screening of The Matrix. Somebody called up and said somebody wanted to speak to the manager, so I went down and there was a man who introduced himself and said that our

lease was up at the end of the month. It got kind of emotional. He said that anyone who wanted to continue working past Monday, and this was like a Thursday or Friday, had to write their email down on a sheet of paper. And I had never seen him before. And then there was a board member at the screening. So I went up to speak to him after and he said everything would be fine so I went to bed thinking everything was fine and then the next morning I was at work and got an email

saying urgent the review is subject to closure. I think for a lot of our patrons the review very much is a second home. It's you know there's certainly people who come once a year or less but there's a lot of people who are here many times a week, and the prospect of losing this place and this community that they're a part of, I think that's the hardest thing. It's not just losing a cinema, but it's the dismantling of the potential

to see a whole community kind of disintegrate. Our patrons are genuinely the best. They're so committed to seeing this place survive and thrive. We have pulled the numbers. There are people who come to over 400 screenings a year. They're literally on average more than once a day. The first year I moved here, I was here 146 times, apparently. Independent film is where you find the true,

a true expression of someone's art. It's art. It's pure. It may not be the most polished work of art, maybe a bit rough around the edges, but at least it's honest. It hasn't been focus group to get to death. Frankenstein, Frankenstein.

Well, I'm here tonight for Frankenstein. And on a big screen, that's what I haven't seen before, on a big screen. I moved into the neighborhood in 2004, just around the corner, so I've been coming here for 20 years. I have a family membership, which entitles me to unlimited movies for four,

and a popcorn and a drink for four for any movie. Awesome, thank you. When I heard about the lease situation at the end of June, I was pretty upset for a number of reasons. One of the most significant reasons to me was the timeliness because the following Wednesday I had tickets to one of the movies that got me really excited about Zombies which is Return of the Living Dead and I had never seen it on the big screen because it came out when I was too young. I think this is a wonderful community place.

I've met new people here that I probably wouldn't meet someone of middle age like myself. So I just love it. I think it's really important to the neighborhood that it stays around. The support we got from the community when we announced that there was a risk of closure was I think unprecedented and really heartwarming for myself, for the staff, for the board. People really came out of the woodworks and were keen to see how they could help us and what they could do to support us. I think we sold more memberships than we probably ever sold in 17 years in a couple of weeks

at that point. And folks were so keen to do anything they could. There was a petition that circulated that got, I think, over 40,000 signatures. We had messages of support from other independent cinema owners across the city and across the country. Sadly, there's not a lot of independent cinemas left in Canada, and so it's a pretty tight-knit community. Hi, I'm Andy Willick.

I'm the owner of the Fox Theater in Toronto, the Apollo Cinema Kitchener Bytown Cinema in Ottawa, and I'm the chair of NICE, the Network of Independent Canadian Exhibitors. My first thought was just to everyone who's involved with the review, because there's a lot of love and time that's dedicated to their programming, to what they do there, and I was just kind of concerned for their future there and what was going to happen with the theatre and for this space too in the long term, because when an independent

theatre closes, it generally is really open. Halifax is one of the major cities in Canada and they don't have a single independent cinema because once the cinema's closed, one became a brewery, they transformed. The spaces themselves transformed, so it's very hard to build a new, a net new cinema.

The Review is a great example of a cinema that has taken these headwinds and really gone full on with repertory and event cinema, brought out a great audience and is also cultivating and growing an audience in Toronto that's more ambitious, that's coming out to things that they maybe wouldn't have before. Small cinemas are absolutely viable these days.

I mean, when you look at the doom and gloom around theatrical exhibition, a lot of that is based on really the big multiplexes and the model that they've been after for a long time. These like large films that have a really long theatrical window and then go to home video or something else. Independent cinemas, small cinemas, they can be nimble. They can serve their community and they also are run by really, really committed people who are part of their community. And so when I look at the future of cinema I really

see independence as the future. Independent theaters have to adapt to the competition that they face by thinking critically about what people really want to see. They have to know their audiences intimately, they have to know what will get people off the couch and into the cinema. A lot of that comes down to events based programming so it's not just you know taking something you could watch on Netflix. A lot of our success is thanks to our director of programming Serena Whitney who has done a remarkable job over the past four years really getting to know our audience in depth and

understanding what it is that they want to see on our screen. It's the crowd that really makes the event so how to get the crowd to love your event is by providing something that they can't do normally at a multiplex, whether it's playing games, being able to be rowdy, being able to win prizes. We usually do live band performances in front of screenings and there's always fun surprises here. So we always make people feel like they're coming to an event rather than just coming to see a film. We've exceeded a million dollars in revenue for the first time in our history in our last

fiscal year and we are currently doing our end of year accounting right now for this fiscal year but we expect to exceed that again this year and set new records in terms of box office revenue. So we're very lucky and very fortunate to have the audience that we have and to have the success that we've had. I can't believe that we can fill this theater up like every day, almost sold out screenings.

It's regular for us. And it's also cool to see that other independent theaters are kind of seeing what we're doing and trying to do the same thing. On our programming team, we have about 15 programmers who specialize for special events. They all do something a little different, provide something that no one in the city is providing,

and all cater to different audiences. I'm Anthony Oliveira. I'm a programmer here at The Review for Dumpster Raccoon Cinema. Dumpster Raccoon Cinema is, I think of it as an attempt to dig through the garbage of pop culture. We do a lot of forgotten disaster pieces. We do movies like Barbarella and Flash Gordon

and Phantom of the Paradise. It's a chance to use cinema as an occasion for community building. It's a way to get people together who share each other's kind of bent point of view and watch a movie together. I think that that's what film is for and that's kind of what we're losing in the streaming age. My favorite thing about my job is seeing people happy after the movie is like let out and they go onto the sidewalk and they talk about it

and then they talk to strangers and then they all go for drinks next door at the local. It's always my favorite thing to see. Although there's a little bit of uncertainty as to the future of the review, we are still programming as if everything's going to be long term. It's amazing how fast things can change when you have the right people in the room.

Almost immediately after we spoke with TPO, things started to change very quickly. We found out there was hope. A couple of weeks ago when the former Mayor John Tory got involved. He came to the cinema and said, hey, is there any way I could help out? And we were very grateful for the offer. He was able to reach out to the Mullins, take them out for coffee and listen to their side of things,

understand what they were looking to do, what they wanted to see in the new lease. And over the course of a few weeks, they met several times, we sent some drafts back and forth, and ultimately he was able to get us all to a place where we had a lease we were all really happy with. It was just so overwhelming to know

that finally the saga is over. The whole community, I think, was so, so excited to hear the news. So much gratitude for the hard work that our staff have put in, the stress that they've all been through, and the whole board of directors as well. All the, you know, really a team effort to get here.

And of course to John Tory, who was ultimately kind of the key to getting this signed and to keeping the cinema open. I hope that in five years, the cinema will be stronger than ever. And I hope that our community is still just as engaged and passionate as they are now, if not more. As someone who lives in the neighborhood,

I think it's so wonderful to have an independent cinema as a neighbor. It's a real sense of community. It really is a huge attraction and part of why I love living here.