Adventures in Running a Movie Theatre

PART TWO: RUNNING THE THEATRE

In the next years special reserved seat pictures came to an end and
the theatre showed regular films. The name was changed to La Pigalle
and even naughty sex pictures showed there. It was said. Then one day
I learned that the theatre was to be closed and torn down, the real
estate being worth more than the business. The theatre was owned by a
private family and leased to a major theatre chain. They didn't renew
the association and the other major chain ran it for a while, but they
couldn't make a go of it either. The property taxes were enormous and
the city also taxed theatres on the number of seats they had.

I went to the owner and said I would run it for him. Surprisingly, he
agreed. We had to clean up the theatre first, as it had been closed,
and in so doing, we found, incredibly, a reel from the original
showing of Ben-Hur. I told the projectionist, who was there arranging
the projection booth, to adapt one of the newer projectors the theatre
had to show this old format film. Philip, one of our guys from the
studio who was helping that day and I sat alone in the huge theatre
watching the ten minute or so reel. It wasn't the chariot race, but
the majesty and sound of the thing was so moving in that place, that
when the lights went up the two film fans each had tears in our eyes.

My first thought was to turn it into a Disney theatre, showing Disney
films. This was not as wild an idea as first meets the eye. Theatres
like the Guild 50th in New York City, for example, were virtually
exclusively showing Disney, as were other theatres in cities around
the world. In Montreal most Disney films played at the Kent, Avon, Van
Horne, Avenue and Westmount theatres.

I knew that new Disney pictures were given to Famous Players theatre
chain, and the most we could hope for would be second run. Still,
there was another factor in my favor. Montreal showed both English and
French films, and there were Disney films in French that never showed
in Canada, only in other French-speaking countries. Disney would make
up animated features of shorts featuring Donald Duck or Goofy for
example. A lot of the two-part Disney TV shows like A Horse Without a
Head were made as feature films, but for various reasons were not
shown in theatres but went directly to Disney's weekly TV show. They
were shown in French, however, and I thought we could show both new
Disney films or reissued ones on second run, and the European
features. I spoke with Buena Vista, Disney's distribution subsidiary,
first New York and then California. I said the Disney presence would
be constant, even result in increased merchandise sales in stores and
other arguments. In the end, though sympathetic and somewhat
intrigued, the eventual answer was negative, because there would be
too much involved for just one theatre.

What we decided to do was to bring back the double feature. Knowing we
would never get first-run films we'd do second run, but double
features, sometimes in English and sometimes in French. We renamed the
theatre Le Carrefour and I had a good idea of how to start with a
bang. This was 1979. The big hit of 1977 was Saturday Night Fever. The
big hit of 1978 was Grease. They had disappeared from theatres and
there was no videos or DVDs yet and they had not showed on television.
My idea was to show both John Travolta hits and I thought it would do
great business and get us attention in town.

Paramount was the distributor of both films. I couldn't get anywhere
with the local office, so brought my idea to New York. They were
sceptical, thinking that few would want to see these again, as they
had been played out. Still, they let me do it. I told them it would be
so successful that I predicted they would combine the two features
themselves the following summer across North America. And they did. It
did especially well in drive-ins. On our opening day the crowds
extended down the street. I remember one night a group of motorcycle
fellows came up to me and thanked me for running Grease. They said
they especially liked the musical number “Greased Lightning.” It being
the end of the evening I had the projectionist find the reel with that
number in it and ran it for them a couple of times.

TO BE CONTINUED