From the 1970s to 2000s: The Paramount and Odeon Meet Cineplex and Galaxy
“Till the eyes tire, millions of us watch the shadows of shadows and find them substance; watch scenes, situations, actions, exchanges, crises. The slice of life, once a project of naturalist drama, is now a voluntary, habitual, internal rhythm; the flow of action and acting, of representation and performance, raised to a new convention, that of a basic need.” – Raymond Williams, “Drama in a Dramatised Society,” 1974.
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In the late 1960s and early 1970s, like other places Peterborough and its two theatres, the Paramount and Odeon, experienced an increased wave of interest generated at least in part by baby boomers, the “New Hollywood,” and a film culture that permeated life in a way that had not been seen since the 1940s. “It was at this specific moment in the 100-year history of cinema,” Susan Sontag wrote, “that going to movies, thinking about movies, talking about movies became a passion among university students and other young people. You fell in love not just with actors but with cinema itself.”
Despite the advent of video and easy access to movies at home in the 1980s, going to the movies was by no means, as often predicted, at a dead end. Writing in the early 1990s, Douglas Gomery looked at the last quarter of the twentieth century and saw a “renewed interest and more change in the movie theatre business than any time since the age of the movie palace.”
More screens needed. Again following a trend in other cities, the Paramount split itself into two screens in 1972. The Odeon followed suit by 1979, building a wall down the middle of its auditorium to create an extra space. Now the city had more but smaller places to see films. The city was now also a little larger, reaching about 65,000 in 1980.
Left: Examiner, July 26, 1974, p.16. Right: Examiner, July 4, 1978, p.18. The Paramount has theatres 1 and 2. At the Paramount in 1974, a rare Canadian film, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1974), and a re-run of M*A*S*H. (1972). Kravitz, says historian George Melnyk, represented “a breakthrough that signalled the coming age of multiculturalism” in Canada. The 1978 drive-in ad connects the Peterborough Mustang and the Port Hope and Lindsay theatres to the same owner, Premier Operating Company. The Peterborough Drive-In closed in 1985; the Mustang held on until September 2012.
True romance at the moving picture show: it must have happened more than once. Kathryn and Raymond Eathome, now living in England, told me they met for the first time at the Odeon Theatre in Peterborough. It was on a blind date set up by Kathryn’s sister — on April 16, 1970 — and in 2020 they were celebrating the 50th anniversary of that evening. The movie they saw: Anne of a Thousand Days, starring Québécois actor Geneviève Bujold.
Left: Examiner, April 14, 1970, p.20. Middle: Examiner, April 16, 1970, p.8. Right: Examiner, April 16, 1970, p.8, an enlargement of the Thousand Days ad.
The 1980s: enter the Cineplex, and more corporate complications
A new theatre sets up in the suburbs, at the Lansdowne Mall — for at least a while — “tapp[ing] into the market of grown-up baby boomers.”
The demise of the Paramount and Odeon/Trent Cinemas
A new and different and short-lived Trent Cinemas 7-Plex — and the Galaxy Cinemas
Just a little over two years later Ontario Cinemas, owners of Lansdowne Cinemas, opened the Trent Cinemas 7-Plex in the heart of the city as part of Peterborough Square — so that the city continued for a short while to have two mainstream movie theatres, one in a mall and the other downtown. “Movie-goers’ views mixed on new cinema,” reported the Examiner. “Some wondered if Peterborough could support that many theatres.”
Adrift in corporate irony: In 1995, when Ontario Cinemas closed the Trent Cinemas on George Street, its president, Norman Stern, remarked that the city was “saturated for” movies and that there were “simply too many screens in town right now.” In 1997, when the same company opened the new Trent Cinemas 7-Plex, Stern said: “The new downtown theatres in the former upper floor of Eaton’s department store will bring a broader range of movies to Peterborough.”
Note: The city also had a third very active and dynamic venue in the 1990s, a repertory theatre — the Kaos Cafe and Revue Cinema (1991—98) — on the southwest corner of George and King streets. But that is another story — along with other repertory theatres and film festivals and societies — still to come.
The Trent Cinemas 7-Plex had a short life. The corporations involved had other plans. Its owner, Ontario Cinemas, was subsumed into a newly formed company, Galaxy Entertainment, established in 1999 by Ellis Jacob and Steve Brown, backed by Canadian financing from Onex Corp. Jacob and Brown’s goal was to build multiplexes in mid-sized cities – and Peterborough would be among the first. By April 1999 Galaxy had announced plans to replace the Trent Cinemas with a dramatically altered theatre complex. The Trent Cinemas building would be completely demolished and rebuilt. Galaxy also owned the Lansdowne Cineplex, which remained open, but only for a while.
When Trent Cinemas 7-Plex closed on June 17, 1999, the city was without a downtown theatre, if only temporarily, for the first time in over ninety years. People who wanted to go to a movie had to go to the mall.
But the downtown bounced back onto the motion picture scene. The $8-million Galaxy Cinemas opened just a little more than a year later, in July 2000.
Lansdowne Cinemas remained in place for another year, closing after the first show of the evening on August 1, 2001. People who turned up for the second show received free tickets for the Galaxy. On August 10 an ad for the Lansdowne Cinemas told readers: “Lansdowne Cinemas is now closed. Thank you for your patronage. Please visit Galaxy Cinemas at Peterborough Square.”
The Lansdowne Mall theatre space was taken over by a Sport Chek store. Its last program, Wednesday, August 1: The Animal, Blow, The Mummy Returns, A Knight’s Tale, Along Came a Spider, and Bridget Jones’s Diary. Not exactly equivalent to the variety of its opening program in 1980.
With the closure of the Lansdowne Cinemas, the Galaxy became the only theatre in town – but with eleven screens in large rooms, stadium seating with ample leg room — and relatively lavish surroundings compared to early cineplexes. Still, as a less than impressed friend once said to me, “walking into the Galaxy is like being sucked into a vacuum cleaner.”
Examiner, July 12, 2000, p.D5. On its opening evening it was screening a Canadian movie, New Waterford Girl (1999). But as the years passed, that sort of thing would become rare.
“We plan to cater to film lovers of all ages and tastes,” said the Cineplex vice-president of marketing, Ken Prue. “And we believe Peterborough is a movie-going city.” The theatre would have an “astronomically-themed carpet” in a huge lobby area with high ceilings. “The box office is meant to look like a floating satellite,” said the paper. A food court, and cafés, and (harkening back to the penny arcade of 1906—7), a game section with billiards and interactive video games. Its eleven theatres would have 2,359 seats (and 42 spaces for people who use wheelchairs). It had a target of 550,000 guests per year.
In December 2019 Cineplex — the owner of the most screens in Canada — was sold to the British company Cineworld, becoming part of a global chain so entirely separate from local interests. Still, at the very least Peterborough is fortunate in that it has a downtown motion picture theatre that contributes to the health of the city core; even if on most nights, with the now-aging emphasis on action-movie, comic-book copies and sequels — “massive, monolithic blockbusters” — the eleven theatres offer minimal choice or variety.
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There is much more to add to this story — accounts of the theatres themselves — and especially a few of the people involved — more on the film festivals and repertory cinemas, and what has sometimes been labelled the “non-theatrical” (but is not really so non-theatrical). Stay tuned.