Nic Gergesha
Abstract
An often-overlooked component of the Yonge strip of the 1970s – the stretch from Queen Street to Gerrard occupied by unsavory merchants, transient individuals, and grindhouse and adult cinemas – is the audience that inhabited its theatres. Old and decaying, the heterogeneous publics that filled the auditoria of spaces like the Rio and the Coronet represented more than just a crowd of miscreants. Components for this assignment included consideration of theories of reception and publics, personal and email interviews, and web and city archives. My findings led me to suggest an alternative optic in which to view these spaces and their inhabitants in a manner that perhaps is less hegemonic than previous popular press accounts. It is my contention that audiences themselves provided a timeless counter- public that resisted the normative accounts of the day, producing a much-needed alternative to the rising ‘upper-crust’ fare favoured by most inhabitants of the city of Toronto.
Introduction and Methodology
[My roommate] leaves the door open and I wake up in the afternoon, about 3:00, and I swear to god my bed is surrounded by cops with their guns drawn. […] Apparently gunshots had been reported nearby at Yonge and Gerrard, and the door was open so they came in ready to shoot – Rob Salem, The Toronto Star
Yonge Street in the 1970s was a very different place than it is today. An anything-goes city centre adorned with flashing neon lights, shady figures, tourists and rotting facades, the blocks of the street leading north from Queen to Gerrard hosted a number of attractions (or deterrents depending on whom you associated with.) From record stores and pinball joints to strip clubs and ‘nude rub’ parlours, the strip was infamous for its detachment from Toronto as the ‘Good City.’[1] Threatened by zoning restrictions and the development of buildings such as the Eaton Centre, a ‘motley collection’ of retailers took advantage of cheapening real estate that added to a negative image of vice and garishness (Ruppert 16-17). Yonge Street – particularly in the area between Dundas and Gerrard – was seen as a breeding ground of licentiousness and grime, a transient urban centre that was decaying while the rest of the city progressed.[2] An over generalized view of this throughway positioned it as a “hellhole for the dirty raincoat brigade,” a morally lacking hub for sex shops and porn theatres that catered to dirty old men with more than popcorn in their hands” (Howell). What is lost in this description, however, is a more considered examination of Yonge Street grindhouses and the audiences that inhabited them.
A wide range of cinemas occupied the east side of the strip, where old ‘nabes’ like the Rio, the Coronet (formerly the Savoy), and the Biltmore commingled with ‘nude rub massage parlours’ and porn theatres like Cinema 2000.[3] These once glorious picture houses were in shambles by the mid 1970s, where years of managerial neglect and the activities of unsavoury patrons wearing out or grinding away at the space inside.[4] Amidst this neglect and unsavoriness, however, grindhouses like the Rio and the Coronet still brought in an audience.[5] Through a mediation of secondary texts that work to define publics, alongside a number of interviews and primary archival research I have conducted, it is my goal here not to generalize a national or international grindhouse audience or make any definitive conclusions about cult spectatorship, but rather to illustrate the experience inside a theatre on the Strip. What was a Yonge Street grindhouse, what films were screened, and, most importantly, who comprised its audience? What was it about these dilapidating theatres consecutively grinding out two, three, and sometimes four pictures that lured so many people? Utilizing works on publics by Michael Warner and the film audience by Mark Jancovich, I use interviews and information from subjects who frequented Yonge Street grindhouses to position this local audience as a public that is both heterogeneous, local and translocal. Given the area’s transient and unfixed population and the theatres’ tendency to let anyone into their multi-bill screenings, we will consider how these old theatres – presumably unchanged – acted as a space that resisted normalcy and elitism of the dominant theatergoing public.
Defining the Grindhouse
Guys would piss themselves in their seats, you’re standing there and you’re like, ‘aww.’ There’d be a puddle on the ground, and it was that kind of place. Owners didn’t give a damn. They knew that these people were just going in there and getting high and everything, they didn’t even care. It’s like, ‘whatever, we’re making money’ – Glenn Salter, owner of Suspect Video.
In “From Exhibition to Genre: The Case of Grind-House Films,” David Church outlines a common and generalized description of the grindhouse. Typically associated with lower-class downtown or inner-city areas in the 1960s-1970s, these houses would play multiple films with very little (or no) breaks between each screening. These multi-bill screenings were inexpensive and unglamorous (Church 1). This assumption that is commonly associated with films like Taxi Driver (in which Robert De Niro’s character takes his date to a grindhouse that is playing porno flicks) suggests, according to Church, “that the term has long connoted not only a specific site of exhibition but also films of dubious social worth” (2). By the late 1960s these theatres would operate from early morning to late at night (in some instances from 8AM to 4AM the next day), implying a kind of grinding of the projector and film reels. These spaces implemented “grind policies” that entailed playing films continuously for a cheap price to get audiences in for a quick buck (Church 3-9). Although Church goes on to explain the significance of “grind-house” as a kind of generic signifier later in the cinema, his positioning of the grindhouse theatre as a particular space is important to understanding the allure and appeal of Yonge street grindhouses like the Rio and the Biltmore in the seedy 70s.
Part of the appeal of these spaces rested on the notion of this “grind policy,” where theatre managers would grind or churn out a multitude of movies on a single screen. According to Don B., an interview subject, “[the Rio theatre was] a very old, dirty, mold infested 500 or 600 seater that had a bad air handling/air conditioning system. They played 4 films continuously from early morning until 3 or 4am. The Rio was the dirtiest and most poorly run grindhouse on the strip. It was very smoky (and I smoked), had bad seats, a small screen and they had a very loose policy of letting homeless folks in to drink and sleep. […] The Rio played action films and usually had an adult film thrown in for good measure” (Don B.). Playing from the early morning into the next day, the independently owned cinema would charge a low price, screen many films, and let anyone in to make a quick dollar.[6] Additionally, “the film prints back then ranged from decent to downright bad, some were missing short pieces of film or frames that had to be cut out because the film was presumably damaged” (Don B.). To understand why these grind policies were in effect on the strip, Rob Salem puts it bluntly: “by the 70s [all interstitial promotion] had gone by the wayside and nobody really gave a shit anymore. [Managers would say,] ‘let’s just put the damn thing up’” (Salem).
Though this study suggests that a counter public formed within these theatres, elements outlined by both Salem and Don B. work to characterize these spots as alluring for certain filmgoers and for the same ‘seedy’ individuals that characterized the strip. The persistent darkness in the Rio (films would screen back to back with no breaks), the indiscriminate security at the Biltmore, and each theatre’s grind policies – screening all day and showing all kinds of films – worked to draw a heterogeneous rather than a homogenous group of people. I emphasize heterogeneity here because cinephiles were not the only occupants. Take, for example, Don B.’s reminiscence of the Biltmore:
Further south [on Yonge near Dundas] was the Biltmore, my second favorite grindhouse. The Biltmore was a big 1000+ seat theatre that was fairly clean, had a decent snack bar and a small food joint attached for those long 3, 4 or 5 movie marathons, the bathrooms were fairly clean and the seats were OK. They played 4 or 5 films, always a couple of action films which usually included an Asian Kung Fu movie of some type, often an adult film and horror films could be found on the bill quite often. I came to learn that there was often a lot of action in the balcony, mostly the back part, so I would sit downstairs because I was there for the movies. There was open solicitation happening upstairs by both women and men then, they’d move to either the back of the balcony or the bathroom. Like the Rio the occasional scuffle would break out, sometimes I just heard it, and sometimes I’d see it. The police usually dealt with it at the Rio, The Biltmore had staff that would bounce the troublemakers out. The Biltmore ran unchanged throughout the 70s, always the same programming from 9:30am – 4am (except Sunday from 1pm) and then promptly closed with no notice about 1982-3 (Don B.)
While Don B.’s recollections echo the estrangement that these grindhouse spaces evoked (especially the case of the Biltmore, considered a ‘good’ grindhouse even though it hardly approximates the ‘tidiness’ or welcoming atmosphere offered by the more prestigious picture palaces in the city), there is a willingness to endure the more unsavory elements of the space in order to screen the theatres’ film offerings. Indeed, the grindhouses on Yonge had their share of nasty people.[7] At the same time, however, all patrons – cinephiles, drug abusers, prostitutes and all – constituted a simultaneously voluntary and involuntary group that, conscious of the film onscreen or not, existed outside the margins of spatial normativity (Hendrix, Warner 53-60).
Positioning the Strip
In Toronto, [the grindhouses] were more accurately known as “hellholes for the dirty raincoat brigade” – Peter Howell, The Toronto Star
How do we account for the Yonge grindhouse viewership from the mid 70s to the early 1980s? During the strip’s era of permissiveness from 1975-1976 there was a general ethos of being able to get away with anything. Storefronts boldly advertised with slogans such as “Nude Body rub / Attractive Hostesses / Private Sessions,” and pinball emporiums told passersby that they could “walk in” and have a great time.[8] One photograph (courtesy of Peter Sramek’s photo collection) “Yonge Street and the Permissive Revolution” communicates the mishmash of ‘things’ to do on the strip: a man in the foreground walks by with an ice cream cone melting in his hand while a long-haired man disconcertingly glances at the camera, clutching the back of his head in the background. The lights are bright as day, emanating from a sign that reads “Fun Street.” When asked what elements of the strip stood out as a whole during this ‘permissive revolution,’ Don B. replies: “the lights and the people. I loved it at night most of all. There was so much neon, flashing lights and large signs for the arcades, cinema marquees, record store signs and restaurants.” This liveliness did not end on the exterior of the strip. “It was so alive, and so alluring,” he continues. “Everything happened here, it was exciting and like being at the centre of the universe as a young teenager.”
This idea of being at the centre of a universe is key. The sense of the Strip’s ‘anything-goes’ atmosphere that Don B. describes does not just connote seediness or slumminess, but rather one that derives from the larger social surround. Mark Jancovich notes that in Britain during the 1960s audiences changed, whereby neighborhood theatres no longer catered to families, but to a primarily white-collar public that exited the area at night (150-151). Residents and city inhabitants blamed the city centre’s cinemas for creating this kind of urban decay, for they too changed over to a grind policy that featured adult films and a continuous bill of films that played until the small hours of the morning. The issue, however, was not the cinemas but rather the city centre: as each theatre’s surroundings shifted, they had to adopt new practices to stay alive. Similarly, by the mid 1970s height and zoning restrictions alongside the development of the Eaton Centre (which did not at this point open onto the strip) became the “smoking gun” in ‘killing’ Yonge Street, or at least creating a throughway that was disconnected from all kinds of development (Gillmor 1). In his article “The Longest Mall” Don Gillmor claims, “the Eaton Centre took the few good tenants left and turned its back on the rest of the street. The properties became less attractive and less valuable, a spiral that led to little money going into maintenance or renovation, which led to the buildings becoming even less valuable. Yonge devolved into a seedy mecca of dollar stores, porn outlets and drug dealers” (Gillmor 2-3). As the area became more transient and proceeded to both literally and figuratively disconnect from this notion as ‘Toronto the Good,’ the local neighborhood theatres – The Rio, the Biltmore, and the Coronet – adapted to the demands of the cheapening area and its potential audience.
Switching over to a grind policy enabled many of these theatres to play oddities they would buy for cheap prices to screen them in double or even triple bills (the 3 movie special was a staple of both the Rio and the Biltmore).[9] From James Bond marathons at the Coronet featuring Roger Moore to double bills featuring horror films and barf bags, these Yonge street staples always provided an experience for the film fan. “It was a totally unique experience,” Rob Salem laments. “Again, it was the 70s and you’d see Bambi Meets Godzilla, El Topo, and just the weirdest shit. And then, because it was pre-video and pre-Internet, there was like industrial films and public education films (‘are you popular?’), and just the weirdest shit!” Toronto Star advertisements in selected papers from 1972-1977 feature everything from a triple bill at the Rio screening Hitler’s ‘After Mein Kampf,’ Jesus Trip, and John Wayne in El Dorado to Catch-22 alongside the adult Sweet Sins of Sexy Susan, and it was not hard to find a trashy film to tickle your fancy.[10] However, Eric Veillette notes that this was indicative of the time: “It wasn’t so much ghettoized as a lot of people seem to think it was. Sure, the Yonge strip was someplace where you could go see six movies for a dollar – buy your ticket and it was like the best, cheapest motel in town. It was just that era of cheap filmmaking where product turned around so quickly that most of the films that you saw on Yonge Street you could see pretty much anywhere else in town” (Veillette) . If in the 1970s these theatres were screening what was considered ‘normative,’ why would anyone consider trekking out to what was considered by many a sleazy “hellhole for the dirty raincoat brigade? (Howell).”
An Unconscious Public
You could smoke [in the theatres], it was great. The Coronet was in the process of switching over from B-Movies into porn. So you’d still get the filthy little guys in their raincoats. It was pretty seedy, but that was part of the fun – Rob Salem.
You’d be [at the Rio] and it wouldn’t be very crowded, but some guy would sit right next to you and you’d go ‘oh man.’ You kind of don’t [want to get up], but I’m sure most people would – Hal Kelly, editor of Trash Compactor.
In “Publics and Counterpublics,” Michael Warner explains how the construction of a public is informed and maintained by discourse and the circulation of texts. Warner divides a normative public – that which is interpellated into the ideological functions of any text, whether it be an essay, a speech, or a film – into seven subsections. Within a normative public (a public sphere rather than the public), a number of individuals must organize themselves as a body that exists outside of the state (Warner 51). People are powerless if their orientations are governed by already existing frameworks he claims. By extension, Yonge Street’s grindhouses in the mid 1970s were spaces where publics could organize, existing outside already established frameworks. Relatedly, Rio or the Coronet gave rise to spaces where patrons needed the film – self-organizing around participating in a film-reception discourse – but simultaneously disregarded the film’s presence. “The best thing about the Rio,” Dion Conflict claims, “was people’s reactions as the films ran. People would audibly cat call, and shout things to the screen.” In spaces like the Rio, groups of miscreants, the homeless, street kids and film fans would congregate to create an unusual space in which the discourse of the text was external to their self-organized public rather than projecting an external one on them (Warner 53). This was evident in the catcalling, a call and response presence watching the film, yet distanced enough to comment upon it. Thus the notion of a unified viewership is troubled: tough guys claiming an entire row as their own cohabit a space with passed-out drunks, erotic escorts, and those genuinely interested in watching the movie.[11] Herein we find an interaction of consciously or unconsciously involved strangers.
Strangers make up a public, and it is their active uptake (or refusal thereof) in participating within the discourse – becoming its audience – that unifies them as a public (Warner 58-60). When we engage as an audience we transition from being a stranger to becoming someone or something involved in a public. (Some might call this a form of what Louis Althusser explains as hailing, how we are interpolated by the ideology of a discourse.[12] This ‘conversation’ with a text could suggest a normative public. Yet the Yonge grindhouse audience actively resisted being hailed through their direct response to films. The Rio, for example, brought in “many homeless folks who were looking for a roof over their head to drink and/or sleep for a few hours. They’d snore, sometimes smell bad, [and] people would shout out if snoring or talking to him or herself exceeded ‘normal’ limits. So while the ‘old pervs’ and balcony masturbators tended to their own business – essentially ignoring the film – some attendees would carry a conversation. According to Warner, simply counting those who watched the torn screen is insufficient: the act of showing up in and of itself produces an addressable public (61).
The opinion that “no real film fan went to these places,” does not exempt these publics from scrutiny, as they legitimately inform Toronto’s film history. Audience members of comprised a self-governed public of addressable strangers. They might have been asleep, masturbating under a raincoat, or hiding in a pup tent in the walking space near the front of the theatre,[13] yet they still remain a discernable counter public. Indeed such audiences work against the normative prominence of the Yonge strip’s ‘Good’ image.[14] These attendees simply used the film screenings to become communally strange, resisting the ‘Good film’ like Yonge resisted the ‘Good’ city.’[15]
The grindhouse buildings themselves had either failed to modernize (neither rebuilding or gentrifying alongside the rest of the city (think of the expansive mall that would become the Eaton Centre). The combination of their dilapidating interiors, coupled with screenings of trashy and progressively less desirable films, created a public, opposed to both mainstream film taste and space.
Creating a Timeless Counterpublic
I can’t really think of any particular change [in the theatres]. I can remember those theatres still getting pretty good crowds because they existed outside of the mainstream – Hal Kelly
The main thing the police were after was trying to keep prostitution off Yonge Street and shutting down the rub & tugs one by one, as they were able to nail them with infractions. The adult bookstores, adult cinemas, grindhouses and strip joints weren’t affected – Don B., avid Toronto grindhouse attendee.
As noted, the Yonge grindhouses in the early to mid 1970s played what other theatres were screening. The Toronto Star entertainment section indicates ‘exploitation’ or ‘blaxploitation’ pictures grinding away not only at the Rio or the Coronet, but also at the Imperial and the Uptown. Into the 1980s the landscape gave way to a changing Yonge street with the elimination of many sleazier stores and parlours on the strip, and this impacted the grindhouse scene as well. Eliding the impact of Emanuel Jaques’ murder – a shoeshine boy’s death resulting in a swift cleanup of the Yonge city centre – the increasing presence of the A-film blockbuster lessened the desire for B-films and trash pictures.[16] With mainstream filmmaking becoming increasingly ‘refined’, grindhouses on Yonge screened more historical fare. While the body rubs disappeared and storefronts were cleaned up, theatres remained dilapidated.[17] “Back in the eighties,” Dion Conflict claims, “it was a great strip which seemed still kinda dodgy, but fun. The strip had a ton of record stores (A&A, Cheapies, Sam’s, Vinyl Museum), the dodgy “Yonge Dundas Square” and lots of head shops with t-shirts you could really only wear once. [It was] kinda like a big flea market for film and music junkies.” The strip, still ‘dodgy’ but in a sense ‘maturing,’ still housed grindhouse theatres like the Rio and the Coronet (the Biltmore had officially closed down in 1977). Though minimal refinements had been done to their facades, the same urban decay, heterogeneous and transient public, and audience behaviour remained. Quadruple bills, such as Russ Meyer and American International Pictures marathons, films dating well before the 80s were mostly featured.
According to Warner’s notion of a public, the circulation of a text creates the scene, and its circulation organizes a public’s time. Accordingly, these spots on the Yonge strip appeared to exist in their own little worlds, a product of decay that seemed almost timeless. Unable to continue circulating by the 80s, with the introduction of blockbusters and home video, they seemed out of step with their surround ( like Russ Meyer flicks from the 60s and the AIP bills from earlier). The grindhouses on Yonge refused normative positioning of a public by resisting a host of factors, including reflexive call and response from its spectators. A theatre like the Rio would receive a film print, and would move on to the next theatre. ‘Bad movies’ were screened and enjoyed in the 70s; some chose to see them on the Strip. After most theatrical releases switched to A pictures and exploitation film prints were harder to come by (due to direct to video practices), some still chose to see circulated films on the strip. If circulation is neither continuous nor indefinite to a public, if it is characterized by specific rhymes and rhythms where temporality can be measured, why was this public on Yonge Street different (Warner 66)? What was it about their disunity as a public (as strangers, if you will) that characterized them as opposite to the ‘Good’ public that viewed ‘good’ films at middle class spaces like the University or the Imperial 6? The grindhouse audiences of the Rio, the Biltmore, the Coronet, and so many others represented a heterogeneous mixture of personalities, constituting a counterpublic.
A counterpublic is “a scene in which a dominated group aspires to re-create itself as a public and, in doing so, finds itself in conflict not only with the dominant social group, but also with the norms that constitute the dominant culture as a public” (Warner 80). In this way, the Yonge grindhouse audience constitutes a counterpublic. A rebellious teenager out on the town, a second generation hippy who freely admits to smoking pot, disenfranchised youth, winos, bums, and the trench coat brigade all appear as a commingling group of strangers who are self-organized within the space of the grindhouse, opposing the normative public as well as dominant hegemonic (and potentially elitist) groups. It is precisely the strangers’ indifference to the text/film, and also to each other, that would constitutes a counterpublic. Warner states:
A counterpublic maintains at some level, conscious or not, an awareness of its subordinate status. The cultural horizon against which it marks itself off is not just a general or wider public, but also a dominant one. And the conflict extends not just to ideas or policy questions, but also to the speech genres and modes of address that constitute the public and to the hierarchy among the media. The discourse that constitutes it is not merely a different or alternative idiom, but one that in other contexts would be regarded with hostility or with a sense of indecorousness. […] Friction against the dominant public forces the poetic-expressive character of counterpublic discourse to become salient to consciousness (Warner 86).
The Yonge street spaces under consideration were not unified. Entering these spaces incorporated one into a subaltern space where strangers resisted the hegemonic ‘good city,’ thus extended to the ‘good film.’ These spaces existed as a repudiation of the ‘trash’ dominant culture produced. Where else could you see a film like Ilsa and scream at the screen while someone got a blowjob in the balcony? Where else could you see that film, period?
These groups, simultaneously voluntary and involuntary (enjoying the heterogeneous experience of every stranger) created a counterpublic – like the strip – by working in direct opposition to the progression of the ‘good city’ (or the ‘good film’). You’d never go to the University Theatre and holler out at a Barbra Streisand movie (unless you wanted to be swiftly kicked out), just as you’d never go into a Forest Hill department store to sit and smoke marijuana. In the Rio, the Biltmore, the Coronet, and even Cinema 2000, these spaces offered a new kind of idiom for the outsider. If you were a film fan and didn’t buy into the ‘elite status’ of bourgeois pictures, you could enter an oppositional zone, one that could tolerate call and response filmic engagement, allowing critique and commentary. While these spaces and their audiences may have disgusted a ‘real’ film fan, this same disgust allowed for counterpublics. Yonge Street grindhouses gave their patrons escape, offering a timeless space where films were not bogged down by dated historicity, or the call of city progress. As seedy as these places were, they provided a self-fashioning of sorts—a counterpublic.
Works Cited
B., Don. “Yonge St., 70s & 80s.” Message to Nicholas Gergesha. 07 Dec. 2011. E-mail.
Church, David. “From Exhibition to Genre: The Case of Grind-House Films.” Cinema Journal 50 2011: 1-25. Print.
Conflict, Dion. “The Rio.” Message to Nicholas Gergesha. 5 Dec. 2011. E-mail.
Gillmor, Don. “The Longest Mall.” Toronto Life. Feb 2008: 1-5. Web. 9 Dec. 2011. <http://www.torontolife.com/features/longest-mall/?pageno=1>.
Hendrix, Grady. “This Old Grindhouse: The theaters were awful and so were the movies.” Slate. 6 Apr. 2007: n. page. Web. 9 Dec. 2011. <http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2007/04/this_old_grindhouse.html>.
Howell, Peter. “Yonge St. Grindhouses.” Message to Nicholas Gergesha. 4 Dec. 2011. E-mail.
Jancovich, Mark, Lucy Faire, and Sarah Stubbings. The Place of the Audience: Cultural Geographies of Film Consumption. London: British Film Institute, 2003. Print.
Kelly, Hal. Personal Interview. 01 Dec 2011.
Kupferman, Steve. “Where have all the ‘Girls! Girls! Girls! Gone?.” Grid 1 Dec. 2011, 27-29. Print.
Myers, Jay. The Great Canadian Road: A History of Yonge Street. Toronto: Red Rock Pub. Co, 1977. Print
Ruppert, Evelyn S. The Moral Economy of Cities: Shaping Good Citizens. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006. Print.
Salem, Rob. Personal Interview. 3 Dec. 2011.
Salter, Glenn, and Luis Ceriz. Personal Interview. 5 Dec. 2011.
Veillette, Eric. Personal Interview. 30 Nov. 2011.
Veillette, Eric. “The Yonge Street Strip.” Silent Toronto. WordPress, May 2009. Web. <http://silenttoronto.com/?p=395>.
Warner, Michael. “Publics and Counterpublics.” Public Culture. 14. (2002): 49-90. Print.
Appendix
NOTE: Appendixes are included in a separate, zipped folder for online. They are labeled by figure and should be easy enough to follow.
[1] In her dissertation “On Yonge,” Eleftheria Kalfakis illustrates some of the storefronts that belonged to the Yonge strip on pgs. 57-59. Additionally, one can see a map of some of the seedier areas in Steve Kupferman’s “Where have all the ‘Girls! Girls! Girls! Gone?’ in the Dec. 1st-Dec. 7th issue of The Grid (pgs. 27-29). Both are presented in the appendix (Figures 1 and 2).
[2] Chapter 15 of Jay Myers’ book The Great Canadian Road: a history of Yonge Street outlines the trajectory of this area from a location of prominence – replete with annual traffic-barring pedestrian malls during the summer – to one that was decried by residents and conservative politicians. Though it lies outside the scope of this paper, the chapter offers a rich summation of some of the legislative decisions that were made to control and maintain the body rub parlours and strip clubs. Note that this was before the ‘cleanup’ of Yonge that occurred after the murder of Emanuel Jaques.
[3] In the appendix one can see postcards that map how close together these theatres were —all on the east side of the street! (Figure 3).
[4] Files from the Ken Webster fonds at the Toronto City Archives are reproduced in the appendix for a select number of the Yonge Street grindhouses. Many of these theatres were actually owned by major theatre chains like Odeon and Famous Players, one of the key differentiators existing at the Rio. The Ulster family bought the Rio Theatre in 1941, and had also owned the Embassy (which later became the New Yorker [also on the strip] and is now the Panasonic Theatre). Mark Ulster provides a very brief history of his grandparents’ estate in the interview transcriptions I have included in the appendix, and Don B. (another interview subject) also proves very knowledgeable and enlightening about these grindhouse theatres (Figures 3 and 4).
[5] In a post about the Yonge strip in the 1970s on his Silent Toronto website, Eric Veillette notes that in its later days, the Rio was plagued by an 18” gash “ripped right into the screen,” and that sections of the roof were about to cave in. Mark Ulster also confers that ‘hoodlums’ used to throw lit cigarettes at the screen. Don B. remembers seats missing from the Coronet, mould problems at the Rio, and a relative unpleasantness at the Cinema 2000 adult cinema. In the comments section of Veillette’s post, a user by the name of ‘will’ describes the Rio during the 70s as such: “you could stay all day, no one messed with the audience of smoking and drinking youth and old Perverts trying cop a feel in the back row. The bathroom in the basement was like a dungeon. Walls of grey dirty paint oozing slime, small smelly trough for a urinal. I don’t think many people would ever sit on that toilet…yikes…”
[6] See the Rio Theatre (Figure 5).
[8] Peter Sramek’s photo collection, (Figure 3).
[9] Refer to the Toronto Star advertisements (Figure 6).
[10] Ibid
[11] Hal Kelly states: “I can remember going to the Orpheum and even the Rio, and guys would kick you out of their row. Like, they had their row and they kept it, and if you sat in it they would tell you to get lost” (Figure 4).
[12] Louis Althusser claims that individuals become subjects of the dominant ideology by submitting to a kind of ‘hailing’ that we are interpolated by. By calling, hey you! the policeman or authority figure makes us a part of a dominant system the moment we respond to it.
[13] Hal Kelly relates a story in which he attended a grindhouse in New York, and a small tent was set up at the front of the auditorium where people could enter and partake in illicit activities (Figure 4).
[14] The shift of the cinematic landscape saw a turn toward A-movie fare in the early 1980s. This worked to eliminate the B-movie, and relegating it to the strip. This shift is evident in the Toronto Star where, at the tail end of the 1970s and into the 1980s, little to no advertising space is dedicated to the grindhouses that once occupied the entire listings page.
[15] As an extension of the last note, I apply the ‘Good film’ in the same way Ruppert uses the ‘Good city:’ not in a descriptive sense, but ‘Good’ in a hegemonic and hierarchical sense of bourgeois taste.
[16] Disappearance of the B-film is discussed in the linked video interview with Rob Salem.
[17] For an insightful scholarly account on the cleanup of Yonge Street see Evelyn S. Ruppert’s The Moral Economy of Cities, and Margaret Beare’s “The History and the Future of the Politics of Policing.”
Local Film Cultures: Toronto 