News - January 22, 2005

January 22, 2005

The Double Life of the Regent
To most, the repertory theatre on Mount Pleasant is a good place to watch a movie. For filmmakers such as Atom Egoyan, it's the place to edit one.

The Globe and Mail
By Guy Dixon

In the bright winter sunshine, the stark marquee of the Regent Theatre -- like every theatre street front in daylight -- looks utterly unremarkable. Anyone actually in the film business surely must work far away in some decidedly more glamorous setting than this stretch of Mount Pleasant Road near Eglinton Avenue.

But there is film director Atom Egoyan, in one of the city's most technically advanced digital-editing suites, cutting his next film, Where the Truth Lies. A single image is frozen on the cinema's 45-foot screen as technicians hover around a large sound-mixing console on the theatre's upper balcony.

Rather than keeping Toronto's film industry cloistered in gated studios or hidden behind a wagon train of white location trucks, the operators of the Regent -- a neighbourhood fixture since 1927 that shows films a month or two after their first run -- are being a little more neighbourly.

Their theatre may not have quite the same effect on the surrounding area as, say, Spike Lee's offices in the Brooklyn neighbourhood of Fort Greene, which helped to add to a sense of pride among nearby residents, but when the sound and picture postproduction company Theatre D set up shop in the Regent in 2002, they turned it into a state-of-the-art theatre, while keeping the building's old movie-land charm.

And like the modernist Camera bar and cinema on Queen Street West, which also houses the offices of film distributor Mongrel Media (co-owned by Mr. Egoyan), the Regent is part of a continuing move by the city's film industry to become just a bit more mindful of the surrounding streets.

"When we first came in, one of the things we wanted to do was to make sure that we preserved the heritage of the theatre and the feel of it," said John Hazen, co-founder of Theatre D. Functioning as an editing and mixing space by day, the Regent is still a regular cinema at night.

"So we didn't come in with a wrecking ball and hobnail boots and start converting it specifically to our purpose of postproduction," Mr. Hazen said.

Theatre D provides filmmakers with digital picture-editing equipment and suites that allow directors and editors to walk out of their booths on the second floor into the main cinema and immediately see what their edits look like on a big screen in a 600-seat theatre. The recently released Being Julia, starring Annette Bening, was edited there, as were films by director Norman Jewison, local filmmaker Sudz Sutherland, who directed the well-received Canadian independent feature Love, Sex and Eating the Bones, and a long list of others.

With black and grey foam panels covering the theatre's walls, the acoustics are designed to meet high-end Dolby sound-mix requirements, allowing filmmakers who do their sound mixes there to obtain that all-important Dolby seal of approval that they can tack on the end of their credits. Yet few top-quality, motion picture sound-mixing facilities have the original gold-painted moulding on the ceiling and old popcorn stand in the lobby that the Regent has.

Indeed, Theatre D still operates the old landmark very much as a working cinema, while also renting the space out to corporations and private groups wanting to set up special screenings or presentations. On a recent visit, popcorn littered the carpet from a premiere the previous night of the new film version of The Phantom of the Opera, part of a fundraising event by the Canadian Film Centre.

For all its high-tech refurbishments, Theatre D and the Regent's continuing owner, Peter Sorok, have avoided the trend to turn the cinema into a banquet hall, like the Capitol, Eglinton and York Theatres. Although those sites have lost their original function, they at least haven't been torn down. But mention this, and Mr. Hazen, 48, whose background is in theatre sound, answers with a sharp intake of air, as if to suggest a kind of sacrilege was committed against those cinemas.

"Our angle is that we are maintaining it as a theatre. The seats all still face forward," added business partner Dan Peel, 38, whose background is in technical software sales. A third partner, Carlos Herrera, 42, brings to the team expertise in the technical side of picture editing. "It's all about the presentation [of a film]. It's about the screen. It's about the sound," Mr. Peel said.

With this project, it's also about maintaining the heritage of the structure itself. Originally opened as the Belsize Theatre in 1927, it was rapidly looking its age by the early 1950s. It was renamed the Crest Theatre, and owners Murray and Donald Davis refurbished it into the famed, pioneering professional theatre company of the same name, regarded as breaking the ground for Stratford and other professional stage companies in Canada.

By 1966, however, financial problems caused the theatre to revert to showing films. In 1988, it was renamed the Regent.

"A lot of current television producers that are working in Toronto now, their parents once acted on this stage. So it really means a lot to our clients too," Mr. Peel said, noting that the Regent still has a backstage, as well as fly galleries and pin rails for stage sets.

"I think it's an incredible privilege and luxury to be able to do our work here in the theatre," Mr. Hazen added. "I worked at the Stratford Festival for five seasons as well, so I have a sensitivity to the theatre. And I just love the building. It's got such a great vibe. It's what a lot of people in [film] postproduction can't get."

It's really an idea that could be transferred to almost any old cinema. Calgary-based production-services company Medianet Communications is currently in talks to buy Theatre D to do just that in the Alberta city. Theatre D sees this as a way to expand its expertise in refurbishing old cinemas for high-end, digital postproduction purposes.

"We've always referred to this as being a boutique-type operation -- 'boutique' meaning that we're not a huge machine," Mr. Peel explained. "We're not a manufacturer of movies. We don't have hundreds of people on the floor working on different projects at the same time.

"When you're here, it's very intimate and it's very family-oriented. We're very focused on the projects we are working on, one at a time."

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