We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
Organization of Great Britain, which thus entered the Canadian field. Prior to the sale, Rank’s UK Odeon theatre circuit had no connection with the Can¬ adian one of the same name. The Rank Organization subsequently acquired the rest of the Odeon circuit from Paul Nathanson. Odeon brought a type of theatre architecture that was new to Canada and gave us some of the world’s newest and most beautiful cinemas. The company’s entrance into Canadian exhi¬ bition was a leading factor in the un¬ precedented increase in the number of theatres constructed for the first five years following the war. The competi¬ tion it provided stirred the entire in¬ dustry.
Today the Odeon circuit is the second largest theatre chain in the Dominion of Canada. The third is Twentieth Cen¬ tury Theatres, now a Famous Players affiliate, which was started in 1935 by N. A. Taylor and Raoul Auerbach of Toronto.
rpHE leading Canadian film pioneer still with us is Ernest Ouimet of Montreal. A projectionist and itinerant exhibitor, Ouimet opened a theatre called the Ouimetoscope in a converted dancehall on January 1, 1906. In 1907 he startled the theatre world by open¬ ing his new Ouimetoscope, a $100,000 investment, on May 1 as the first de¬ luxe motion picture theatre in North America, preceding the Strand, New York by eight years. The Ouimetoscope was the first movie house to challenge the legitimate theatre, offering reserved seats, advanced prices, two perform¬ ances a day, an orchestra and singers. For his Ouimetoscope Ouimet says he made the first Canadian newsreels. At that time most movies were still in store shows, with kitchen chairs and bedsheet screens.
In May, 1906 Ouimet opened the first film exchange in Canada when he ar¬ ranged with P. L. Waters of New York, mentioned earlier, for the right to re-rent films imported for his theatre. This led to his operation of the Bijou : Dream Theatre in Saint John, NB,
which he acquired for the $500 due him when the luckless owner burnt a Ouimet film. He sent Edouard Auger to man¬ age it and sing with the illustrated slide program. This was in 1907. Ouimet, with Auger, Charles Kerr and William Daley, opened the Biograph in Saint
John, also an early NB house. Ed Auger died a few years ago, at which time he was one of the top executives in the Victor RCA theatre equipment division at Fort Lee, New Jersey.
About the same time the Bennett Bros, of Hamilton, Ontario opened the Unique, near the Biograph, with W. P. Covert, now head of the IATSE in Canada, as projectionist. The third theatre was the |Nickel, which came
JULE ALLEN
under Guy Bradford's management in 1907 and in April of that year it was changed from a vaudeville house to one exclusively devoted to movies. Movies spread to many Maritime com¬ munities in that year, among them Yarmouth, where S. L. Kerr laid the foundation for the present F. G. Spencer circuit.
The first phase of modern motion pic¬ ture exhibition in Canada seems to date from 1906 — the time when Ouimet, Grif¬ fin, the Bennett Bros., the Allens and others left store shows behind to estab¬ lish movie theatres. The second phase came in 1945, when the lifting of war¬ time restrictions on building allowed a period of expansion to begin during which about 100 new theatres were erected every year since and almost
33