88: The Imperial Six (with Gerry Flahive) (Patreon)

Writer and former NFB senior producer Gerry Flahive joins the podcast to discuss moviegoing in Toronto in the 1970s, at the dawn of the multiplex age. Gerry worked as a teenage usher at the new Imperial Six cinema, under the precise command of cinema manager Phil Traynor, the inspiration for Gerry’s alternate Twitter persona Bert Xanadu, who tweets from the year 1973 where he is both the reigning mayor of Toronto and the manager of the Imperial Six. Bert’s tweets and essays have been collected in Gerry’s new book I Own This Town: The Mayor Bert Xanadu Xanthology.

Gerry and I talk about the many movie theatres, from cavernous palaces to alternate film spaces to grindhouses that used to exist on Yonge Street, the eclectic programming and architecture of the Imperial Six, and the local film culture that led to the development of cinema multiplexes and the Toronto International Film Festival.

Follow Gerry Flahive and Mayor Bert Xanadu on Twitter.

I Own This Town: The Mayor Bert Xanadu Xanthology by Gerry Flahive is now available at the Spacing store in Toronto and other fine bookstores. Also available as an e-book at Amazon. 

Famous Players Theatres “Next Attraction” snipe, mid-1970s

Famous Players Theatres “Gift Books” snipe, 1972

Trailer for Emperor of the North (Robert Aldrich, 1973)

Trailer for The Harrad Experiment (Ted Post, 1973)