The popular graphic novels make use of many Annex locations. Image courtesy Oni Press.

By Tim Legault

As Bryan Lee O’Malley, creator of the Scott Pilgrim graphic novels, sat signing a stack of his sixth and final volume in the series (Scott Pilgrim’s Finest Hour) in preparation for the book’s launch party, he recalled Publishers Weekly’s review of his first volume six years ago.

“Scott Pilgrim is 23 years old, lives in a cold, unnamed Canadian town …” began the review.

“I’m like, ‘No, it’s named. It’s not a town. It’s Toronto!’” reflected O’Malley, whose graphic novels prominently feature the Annex. “So I think I might have taken a bit of offence by that and tried a little harder to make it more Toronto-ish.”

Scott and his friends lounge around Lee’s Palace. Image courtesy Oni Press.

Toronto has since become almost a secondary character in the series. The titular hero spends his time hanging out with friends at Sneaky Dee’s , fighting his girlfriend’s evil ex-boyfriends at Casa Loma or Lee’s Palace, shopping for CDs at Sonic Boom, or dodging late fee’s at No Account Video (a stand-in for Suspect Video).

“I think in the beginning, it was more like I just used [those locations] because they were all around me,” said the 31 year-old artist. “It’s the locations that I was kind of wandering around through when I was depressed. They have a personal significance to me.”

Since then, his books have been optioned and turned into a high-budget, summer blockbuster, starring Brampton-born Michael Cera and directed by Edgar Wright, the British director behind cult favourites Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz. The movie, released Aug.13  to coincide with the Scott Pilgrim video game, was filmed mostly in Toronto.

Scott Pilgrim visits Casa Loma. Image courtesy Oni Press.

The book’s midnight launch party, which took place at The Beguiling (where O’Malley once worked), The Central, Rocco’s Plum Tomato, and other surrounding stores, brought in a large enough crowd to fill up Mirvish Village. Some fans even dressed in costume and lined up to meet O’Malley, who was there signing books.

The series centres on Scott Pilgrim (named after a song by indie-band Plumtree), an unemployed twenty-something who falls for a girl, Ramona Flowers, who he can only continue to date on the condition that he defeats her seven evil ex-boyfriends. The series is defined by its esoteric video game and indie rock references, as well as it’s oscillation between moments of mundane naturalism and surreal, manga-influenced battle sequences. For example, a visit to the Toronto Reference Library quickly turns into an epic battle between Flowers and Scott’s ex-girlfriend. A party might be interrupted with a battle between Scott and an evil robot.

O’Malley was born in London; Ont. but grew up in northern Ontario. He later returned to London, where he went to a Catholic high school. After what he describes as “an unsuccessful stint” at The University of Western Ontario, he moved to Toronto in his early twenties.

“I was only here from 2001 to the middle of 2005,” said O’Malley, who now lives in Los Angeles with his wife Hope Larson, also an acclaimed cartoonist. “It was the first time I was out on my own. I was just very sheltered.”

O’Malley first started Scott Pilgrim after a long-distance relationship with a girl fell apart two months after his move to the city. He lived at Davenport and Ossington, and then later moved to Bathurst and St. Clair.

Scott and his friends regularly meet for drinks at Sneaky Dee’s. Image courtesy Oni Press.

“I was really moping around the whole summer and started writing these ideas for Scott Pilgrim,” he reflected. “Fortunately, I met another girl, became happier, and the story kind of took off on its own.”

Readers familiar with The Annex will certainly appreciate a pivotal scene in the third volume in the series, Scott Pilgrim and the Infinite Sadness. In it, Scott and an evil ex-boyfriend must test their strength by running through Honest Ed’s. When Scott is asked is he has been to the department store before, he replies, “No. Well Once, but I almost died.”

Smiling, O’Malley says that Honest Ed’s is “a bit of scary place.”

“I think people from other places, they don’t necessarily understand what [Honest Ed’s] is, but they get the feeling of it. People have come to Toronto from out of town after reading the book and go to Honest Ed’s and they’re just like ‘Ahh! He’s right!’”

It took O’Malley just six months to complete the first volume. As he has progressed as a storyteller and a cartoonist, each book has taken him longer and longer. “It took less time at the beginning because I was naïve and young and could stay up all night and just draw and draw and draw,” said O’Malley,  “The better I get at drawing, the longer I take. I feel like I’ve got to work harder and try harder. So I feel like I could write something on the side, like a screenplay or whatever.”

Running through Honest Ed’s proves to be a tough challenge for Scott. Image courtesy Oni Press.

When the Scott Pilgrim movie began to take shape, O’Malley says there was never any talk, at least to him, of changing the setting of the story. In what would have been a suitably ironic twist, there was one moment where there was talk of shooting in New York and having it double as Toronto (“Which I can’t even imagine”).

“I feel like in those days, when we were first starting to talk about it, I was just a starving artist and I would have just taken anything. I would have been like, ‘Sure, set it in, you know, rural Nebraska—I don’t care.’ However, they didn’t.”

Scott visits Sonic Boom, the local music store by Bathurst and Bloor. Image courtesy Oni Press.

After O’Malley finishes his grueling promotional work (a recent tweet of his read: “If you’ll excuse me, I have 50,0000,000000,000,00 more interviews to do”), he plans to relax for a little bit and do some writing.

“I’ve got these ideas in my head. I’m trying to write a script with a friend. I think I’ll probably just take it easy for a bit.”

Austrian-born pianist Anton Kuerti delivered an awe-inspiring opening night performance for the TSM Festival at Koerner Hall on Tuesday July 20. Courtesy Toronto Summer Music Festival

By Emily Dontsos

If master pianist Anton Kuerti’s spectacular opening night performance for the Toronto Summer Music Festival on July 20 is any indication of what to expect from the festival’s 12 remaining concerts, then classical music lovers are in for a treat.

Held at the architecturally and acoustically astounding new Koerner Hall in The Royal Conservatory of Music’s TELUS Centre for Performance and Learning (273 Bloor St. W.), Kuerti’s all-Schumann program kicked off the festival’s fifth season with a brilliant display of masterful interpretation, impeccable timing, and truly awe-inspiring musicianship.

Preceded by proud and heartfelt opening remarks from TSM president Barbara Thompson and outgoing artistic director Agnes Grossmann, the mastermind behind the festival’s inception and growth within a city previously lacking access to classical music during the summer months, Kuerti’s performance opened with three dramatic and highly varied movements from Schumann’s Novelettes, Op. 21.

Bent over Koerner Hall’s beautiful new Hamburg Steinway piano, with his shock of white hair and matching jacket adding an air of drama to the already charged atmosphere, Kuerti delved into the opening pieces with utter commitment to his music. Fully concentrated and emotionally involved, the pianist’s rendering of Schumann’s exhilarating, playful and deeply moving compositions captivated the audience completely.

The three Novelettes were followed by the soaring Fantasie in C major, Op. 17 and the powerful Toccata in C major, Op. 7, with the towering Grand Sonata No. 1 in F# minor, Op. 11 as the closing piece. Punctuated by dramatic moments of seemingly impossible silence between movements, Kuerti’s interpretation of each piece reflected a deep respect for Robert Schumann’s emotionally complex and highly intricate work. Masterfully perfecting the frequent and sudden transitions from building crescendo to peaceful melody that are characteristic of the Romantic composer’s music, Kuerti’s performance was nothing short of brilliant.

Born in Austria, Anton Kuerti was raised in the U.S. but has spent the majority of his adult life in Canada. He has toured 39 countries and has performed with most major U.S. orchestras, including the New York Philharmonic, as well as the Toronto Symphony and Montreal Symphony orchestras. A leading performer of Schumann’s works, Kuerti was honoured with the 2007 Schumann Prize of the Schumann Gesellschaft in Germany, and is also a recipient of the National Arts Prize of the Banff Centre in Canada (2007) and the Governor General’s Lifetime Artistic Achievement (2008).

The TSM Festival’s opening night performance by one of the world’s greatest living pianists was an unequivocal success. With 12 concerts featuring some of the best established and up-and-coming international artists still to go, the festival’s fifth season is truly a cause for celebration.

As she prepares to move on from the festival to pursue her international conducting and concert schedule more fully, Maestra Grossmann can rest assured that what she set out to accomplish has been achieved: the TSM Festival is quickly becoming an anticipated fixture in Toronto’s classical music scene, an institution unto itself, and an integral part of city residents’ summer plans.

The TSM Festival runs from July 20 to August 13.

Artists Eric Moschopedis and Mia Rushton are turning parks into bedrooms. Courtesy The Theatre Centre

By Brendan Hair

On July 17 and 18 The Theatre Centre in partnership with Cooking Fire Theatre Festival will be presenting a public napping project called Z’s by the C.

At this event residents can craft their own sleeping mask and have a sweet dream or catch up on lost sleep from the hectic work week.

The project, founded by artists Eric Moschopedis and Mia Rushton in 2008, began in Calgary when anti-loitering bylaws were passed. According to Moschopedis, the bylaw restricted the amount of time people could spend in parks without a specific purpose and prohibited feet resting on benches. Eventually these laws led to public napping becoming illegal.

Since then, Moschopedis and Rushton have used this project as way to protest the privatizations of public space.

He believes public sleeping is viewed by many socially unacceptable behaviour. According to Moschopedis, public sleeping is often seen as threatening behaviour. And since it’s usually a private activity, Moschopedis sees this project as one that’s “transgressing social norms.”

Theatre Centre Director Franco Boni previously participated in the project at the Magnetic North Theatre Festival in Ottawa.

“I’m looking at it as a performance piece but I’m also looking at it as a community event because that’s what this kind of work can do,” said Boni.

Moschopedis believes that as a community, if we’re not acting in a genuine manner then we’ve lost our grip on public space.

“I think that’s the risk,” said Moschopedis.

Moschopedis believes dreams differ depending where you sleep. To him dreams are a site-specific activity.

“When you’re in your bedroom you have [a] certain type of dream and when you move to a different environment [like] a hotel or camping your dreams change.”

Besides Calgary and Ottawa, the project has stopped in New York and Zurich. But what makes Moschopedis excited about Toronto is the event’s setting at the proposed Lisgar Park. While the site is currently just a parking lot with sod, Moschopedis believes it suits the concept of this project.

“People can come to this park and dream what might be possible [and] what this new public space [might] look like.”

Mayor David Miller has officially proclaimed July 12 to 18th  Mad Pride Week.

“It’s throwing the word back in the face of the general public who think mad is a horrible kind of state to be in, so we throw it back into the face of society, just like gays throw queer back, and there are various groups in Mad Pride who take different positions on the whole matter. Some are psychiatrized, some are just  ‘normal people’,” said Mel Starkman, a co-organizer of Mad Pride.

Borrowing from Gay Pride, Mad Pride attempts to reclaim terms that are used against them as a source of empowerment, giving the self-proclaimed mad community the opportunity to celebrate their own difference, and raise awareness of the obstacles that they face including the stigma attached to being in the psychiatric system

The Mad Pride organizing committee comprises of a group of psychiatric survivors and friends within the city including The Friendly Spike Theatre Band (TFSTB), an artist-run community theatre dedicated to encouraging theatrical expression for psychiatric and consumer survivors.

Heinz Klein, a co-organizer and technical director for Mad Pride explains that the psychiatric survivor community in Parkdale is strong because many survivor migrated to the area after deinstitutionalization.

“Parkdale in itself was really close to Queen Street and to the old Lakeshore hospital. So people gathered here together and they really created a life for themselves here. That’s why there is a high population of psychiatric survivors and others who have been affected by the mental health system in this area. There are certain services here that other parts of the city don’t have or only sporadically have, like the Parkdale Activity Recreation Centre (PARC), created to accommodate people who have been pushed out of hospitals just simply to give them a place to hang out.”

Starkman added, “Basically it grows out of poverty. You know, when you are poor and you can’t cope with society you get into a situation where you’re strung out and more and more people are entering that stage in this failing economy, and more and more people are turning to the whole concept of madness to express themselves—they are angry they have to live in such a way that they are oppressed, and that’s a very dangerous way to live.”

Klein believes that Mad Pride Week is just the right outlet for channelling that expression.

“To celebrate Mad Pride and make it a weeklong event is actually using something which I call, ‘creative resilience’. That means we are overcoming the obstacles in the kind of creative way that claims for us the label mad as something positive, whereas everybody else is looking at that and says it’s something negative.”

The big event at this year’s festivities will undoubtedly be the “Bed Push,” on July 17, involving survivors in pyjamas pushing a gurney dressed like a bed with sheets covered in words of empowerment. Ruth explains that the bed push—originating in 2006 by Rufus May, a psychiatric survivor and activist in England—is a metaphor for Mad Pride.

“We push out of the medical model of understanding difference and into the community,” said Ruth Ruth, community theatre director with TFSTB. The Bed Push starts on the grounds of CAMH, down Queen West, into Parkdale and stops at PARC.

Though this may sound “crazy” to some, Klein observes that there are much crazier decisions going on in the world.

“We have over a hundred thousand homeless people living in the city, and yet the government wants to spend over a billion dollars to accommodate 20 people instead of spending only ten percent of this money to accommodate a hundred thousand of their own kind in this country. That is madness. And they call us mad. But what they are doing is madness.”

Every year The Friendly Spike Theatre Band develops a community based play. This year they will be staging, The Dega and the Delbasid, at 20 Westlodge Ave. on July 16 at 7 p.m. To find out more details of events happening on Mad Pride Week, click here.

Purrr play the Bread & Circus June 19. Courtesy Christopher Wadsworth.

By Karen Bliss

More than 2,500 artists applied for a spot at the 2010 North By Northeast music festival, which takes place all over the city from June 14 to 20, so the 650 bands and solo acts that were accepted have obviously been given the thumbs up from the organizers.

“We have a jury that goes through all the [online] Sonicbids [entries] that we receive and then they’re marked by a rating system and at a certain level it will be a no,” explained Yvonne Matsell, director and music programmer of NXNE. “As soon as they’ve gone through them all, I usually come in from January and start working on the schedule.”

Matsell, who is also the year-round booker at the El Mocambo, works alongside NXNE’s Crispin Giles on the enormous task of placing the 650 acts in the 40-something venues, determining who plays where, when, and if the line-up makes sense.

“Generally, we have a master list of the clubs we’ve used in the last couple of years and then we’ll go through them and decide, ‘Does this work again?’” says Matsell. “Sometimes, some of the places have closed but then others open too. So it’s a case of going to check out the new clubs, or the club people will contact us.”

The artists come from all over Canada and many from the United States, but there are also some that make the trip from Israel, Denmark, Ireland, Japan, England, Australia, Hungary, Norway, Iceland and France. But if you want to stay strictly local Matsell has some recommendations.

On June 17, Matsell says the alt. folk/country band Elliott Brood and indie rockers Dinosaur Bones at The Horseshoe Tavern should be a good one.

That same night, Modernboys Moderngirls, fronted by Kensington resident Akira Alemany, play The Boat at 1 a.m. “He’s a hardworking guy, that one,” she said. “It’s indie pop rock.”

If you can’t make it out to that show, there is also the chance to check them out at The Rivoli the following night at 2 a.m.

Also on the 17th is a great bill at Lee’s Palace, called Outlaws & Gunslingers featuring such notable singer-songwriters as Blue Rodeo’s Jim Cuddy and Greg Keelor, Hawksley Workman, Colleen Brown, Justin Rutledge, Oh Susanna, Andy Maize, and Amelia Curran.

On June 18, Rancho Relaxo hosts a “very cool psychedelic blues rock band” called Revolvers and the El Mo has the much loved indie pop/rockers The Golden Dogs.

The Cadillac Lounge hosts “a lot of good stuff,” that same night, including The Heartbroken, which is the new band formed from Damhnait Doyle (Shaye); and folk act Flashlight Radio, comprised of singer Suzy Wilde and bassist Ben Whitely, the offspring of Nancy White and Ken Whitely, respectively. The following night, the same venue has highly touted rock band Five Star Trailer Park and a jaunt east on Queen at the Horseshoe CBC Night features Attack In Black, now based in Toronto.

Also on June 19, producer/composer Byron Wong hosts the night at Bread & Circus and featured on the bill is Purrr, an intense rave-rock trio that is mesmerizing live.

Tickets/wristbands are a steal for all the talent one will get a chance to see. The five-day pass is $50 and one day is $25. They are available online at www.nxne.com, as well as at various locations, such as Rotate This (801 Queen St. W.) and Criminal Records (493 Queen St. W.). The full schedule is also on the web site.

NXNE is now in its 16th year and has expanded from the music festival and conference (June 17 to 20th) with panels, keynote speeches and interviews to include more than 40 music-centric film screenings (June 16th to 20th), an interactive media conference (14 to 16th), and charity soccer game (20th) between the Rockers and The World.

The music festival also includes stages at Pearson International Airport and Union Station, and free open-air concerts at Yonge-Dundas Square.

By Emily Landau

To outside eyes, Lilly Barnes may be a woman of the world, but her world ends in the Annex.

“My kids tease me—they say I act as if I get a nosebleed north of Dupont,” she chuckles. Barnes has lived in the Annex for almost six decades, where she has thrived as an activist and writer in many forms. This past winter, she published her first novel, Mara, set in Toronto in 1964, a city on the cusp of a worldwide countercultural revolution.

The novel, at once a stylish thriller, historical fiction, and complex character study, tells the story of a young jazz musician’s obsession with Mara DeJong, an enigmatic Russian classical pianist. As the novel gets underway, Mara stands accused of a bizarre crime: cutting off her dead daughter’s earlobes. Some of the biographical details of the title character were based on Barnes’s mother, a graduate of the Leningrad Conservatory, but Barnes insists that Mara’s mysterious, slightly sinister personality bears little resemblance to her mother’s.

“I [didn’t] want to spend years in my mother’s head. Who does?” she muses. “What came to me was that I could write about her life without being in her head if I was using a different narrator.”

As told by Ted O’Sullivan, a jazz pianist struggling to understand Mara, the novel is a classically spun noir that immerses the reader in a vividly remembered Toronto. In addition to the whodunit element, the novel also looks at how history and circumstances were capable of trapping women in post-war Europe.

“To me, the entire trajectory of a very smart, very talented, very, in many ways, courageous woman, got curtailed, got chopped short by historical events,” suggested Barnes. “She goes where her choices are, and it becomes almost perverted.”

Barnes herself has been blessed with a plethora of choices—high achievement seems to run in the family’s female gene pool. “I have one aunt who was a partisan fighter against the Nazis in Germany during the Second World War and [was] decorated for it,” she said. Another aunt was Russia’s first female parachutist. “Isn’t that great? I love that,” she laughed.

Born in Russia to a German father and Russian mother, the family moved to Germany before World War II. “We lived in plain sight, but in hiding,” said Barnes, explaining that although her mother was Jewish, she was not raised as a Jew and didn’t speak German with a Jewish accent, which likely saved the family from detection.

While Barnes prefers not to identify herself in terms of ethnicity, she recognizes that this composite cultural background contributed to shaping the beliefs she has fought for as an activist.

“I’m half-German and half-Jewish. This is something like being half-black and half-white in South Africa during Apartheid days,” she comments. “I know that it’s my particular ethnic mix that … put me into the perfect place in this universe to fight prejudice and racism of any kind.”

After living on an Israeli kibbutz for three years, Barnes came to Canada and landed on Ulster Street. She married a Canadian and briefly studied in Europe, but soon planted her feet firmly in Annex soil with her husband and children, where she studied English literature and philosophy at the University of Toronto. “It was at university that I discovered I had a brain. Nobody had mentioned it to me before,” she said.

Courtesy Lily Barnes

Barnes says she always knew she would be a writer. For its entire run between 1967 and 1996, she was a senior scriptwriter for Mr. Dressup, a show that will make everyone from baby boomers to Gen-Yers nostalgic for the halcyon land of puppets and make-believe. For her body of work on the show, she won a Gemini award in 2007. She has also worked as an arts journalist for CBC Radio and has published a variety of poetry and short stories.

Despite her impressive resume, writing Mara was still brand new territory for Barnes. “I remember writing about a third of it in one summer in a big heat,” she said, adding that the novel went through many incarnations over a number of years. “I was basically learning to write the novel while I was writing the novel.”

In between lucrative writing gigs, Barnes has moonlighted as a strident activist, particularly for local issues affecting her community. For example, she was one of the strongest voices against the creation of the Spadina Expressway, which she argues would have “cut a community in half.” Some ventures were less successful. At one point, she was briefly jailed for protesting the development of a nuclear power plant just east of the city, which ultimately got built.

“It made no difference in the end.” she sighed. But, she said, “I [didn’t] want my grandchildren to ask me, ‘You knew this was happening. What did you do about it?’ You know? I don’t want to ever be in that position, which is why I’m still an activist.”

For Barnes, writing is an outlet for activism—Mr. Dressup, for example, was a conscious exercise in educating children about tolerance. “From the very beginning, we made sure that there was no racism, no sexism, no ageism,” she says proudly. “We basically worked against stereotype and against prejudice of any kind.”

Even Mara, while not an explicitly political text, speaks to causes that were just beginning to gain steam in the 1960s, like feminism, the civil rights movement, and art for art’s sake, as well as emerging issues of post-war culture-clash. “We were drawn to the [novel] because it pushes the social and cultural expectations of Canadians by bringing into question the assumptions we have of cultural backgrounds and social norms,” writes Sandra Huh, Barnes’s editor at Variety Crossing Press, in a statement.

In Barnes’s experience, Canada “is a great place to be any kind of writer,” and for her, no place embodies this spirit better than the Annex. She praises its greenspace, walk-able terrain, and communal atmosphere as creating a fertile breeding ground for the arts.

“The pace [here] is very different than if you’re working or living in the suburbs and do everything by car,” she argues. “And I think that it is a lot more conducive to creative thinking.”

When it came to releasing Mara, she was determined to publishing the novel in Canada. “I wanted to be published where my life is, where my people are,” she said. In a fortuitous turn of events, Barnes became friendly with the owner of a Harbord Street flower shop who was starting an independent press. After publishing some of her poetry, Variety Crossing Press took on Barnes’s novel.

For Barnes, the story of how her novel was published exemplifies the organic community and camaraderie she has experienced in the Annex, where she says she lives as she would in a village.

Mara is the first title in Variety Crossing Press’s Stories that Bind imprint, and Barnes will continue to write and live in her little corner of the Annex, where, she declares, “I can be exactly as I am without bending myself out of shape in any way whatsoever. In the Annex I am most completely me. It’s my turf.”

Inside The Bloor Cinema with filmmaker Robin Sharp. In 2005, he and fellow filmmaker Peter Kuplowsky pieced together the history of The Bloor Cinema for your viewing pleasure.

By Matt James

The Bloor Cinema (506 Bloor St. W.), like a lot of centarians, has shrunk with age.

Back in 1941 when it was known as the Midtown, it could seat 1,125 people. You could catch a flick for 35 cents, and if you threw in an extra dime, they would let you smoke in there.

These days it seats around 800, smoking is not allowed, and while this revue theatre is still affordable, most trips to the movies will cost you upwards of $15, minus the popcorn.

A good way to learn about this historical building and keep some money in your pocket would be to watch The Bloor, a 20 minute documentary available online about the Annex institution.

When Toronto filmmakers Robin Sharp and Peter Kuplowsky learned the theatre was celebrating its centennial anniversary in 2005, they decided to create an homage to the past of the building. The Bloor was filmed between summer 2005 and winter 2006.

While a film soundtrack boomed from behind the thick doors of the theatre in mid-December, Sharp agreed the bowels of The Bloor were best for a quiet and uninterrupted interview. Walking down a maze of small, narrow and uneven hallways with tight tricky turns, any visible open space was rimmed with aging and forgotten film paraphernalia languishing in the dark.

It was that historic ”waste” that drove Sharp and Kuplowsky to make their film. Both employees of the theatre, they were surrounded by constant reminders of its history; the stunning architectural design, the yellowed photos hanging from the walls. Backstage, old reels and cases lie still untouched, and letters once used on the marquee lay thick with dust that’s literally been there since the 1940s.

We made our way down to the basement and entered a room that smelled predictably damp, settling into old chairs at an old table. Sharp told me what the most complex part of making the film was.

“The trickiest part was to sort of unearth all these old documents,” he said.

They spent countless hours in the library searching for documentation on the cinema.

As a youngster, Sharp grew up in the neighbourhood and became an oft-paying customer at The Bloor long before staring working there as an 18-year-old. Nearly five years later, he still enjoys a weekly shift on Sundays. He feels he’s come to know the building like you would a friend.

The end product Sharp and Kuplowsky put together is a short, catchy film worth watching—especially for those with any appreciation of history and great music.

The soundtrack and voiceovers take the viewer back through some of the most unforgettable decades of music.

“The music was extremely important in setting the film’s tone,” said Sharp. Because of the historical nature of the documentary, it was important that the tracks matched the times.

While the film allows the viewer to travel back in time, there is a slight focus on the building in the 1940s. A decade dubbed as those who lived it, “the golden age” of the theatre.

Personal experiences from dozens of colourful characters such as past and present managers, owners and employees are shared—from a general manager reminiscing of the first time the theatre showed The Rocky Horror Picture Show in 1981, to the time when soft-core porn dominated the big screen, to when it was managed by Ed Bruce as The Eden.

“It was before porn on video,” said Sharp. “Everyone would come out to this communal theatre situation—it’s so bizarre.”

What began as a vaudeville theatre would get a number of name changes over the years. And like many of its patrons, The Bloor and it’s predecessors endured change and overcame much adversity. Today it stands as the city’s oldest original-screen movie theatre.

The Bloor is available for free online here. Or simply visit YouTube for Part 1 and Part 2).  For more information call Sharp at the theatre at 416-516-2331.