The last picture show — doors close on Frederick Cinemas
Neighbourhood movie house was a tribute to the power of persistence
Walking into Kitchener’s Frederick Cinemas — which closes for good Thursday after an extended 40-year run — is like a trip to the recent past.
As you make your way down the indoor mall staircase along the swirling, multicoloured carpet, you see the vestiges of what used to be: a long shuttered box office. a video arcade room now used for storage.
a glass walled projection booth where folksy operators once welcomed visitors, now fully automated with no human interface.
Investigate further and you’ll see the cavernous old-school popcorn maker behind the snack bar and the faded red and black carpet strip running down theatre aisles, a lone remnant of the Frederick’s opening day colour scheme.
And there are less appealing fixtures: a dilapidated grey water fountain tacked to the wall, naked lobby walls stripped of the artwork that once beckoned visitors, yellowing bathroom stalls with seedy ’70s faucets and urinals.
This isn’t an epitaph for a crown jewel from Hollywood’s glory days.
It won’t be celebrated like the iconic movie palaces of old — The Lyric, The Capitol — when the rise of megaplexes sparked a raft of downtown theatre closures.
With its budget pricing ($7.50 adults, $6 kids), utilitarian mall setting and constant struggles to stay afloat, The Frederick Twin, as it was formerly known, was never about that.
But homey and low-key with friendly staff who went the extra mile, it had the distinction of being Waterloo Region’s last family oriented, budget-priced neighbourhood mall cinema.
For this, it will be missed. “Retail malls in general are really struggling,” notes Gina Facca, chief operating officer of Imagine Cinemas, the indie chain that saved the Frederick from extinction five years ago.
“It’s a tough business. We never saw profits in that location.”
To be fair, the obits on this subterranean strip mall cinema were written as far back as 1987, when its original operator, Premier Theatres, handed it over to Cineplex Odeon in the face of growing downtown movie competition.
“I could see the writing on the wall,” notes Premier president Brian Allen, who entered the family business in the ’80s and has clear memories of the Frederick.
“It didn’t have enough of a critical mass.”
“The key to making money is you’ve got to have multiple screens. The Frederick was never gonna be that. There wasn’t enough variety, and the mall wasn’t enough of a centre.”
Cineplex abandoned ship in ’99, when Kitchener’s first megaplex arrived, handing it off to Canada Post worker Kelly MacLeod, who worked there as an usher 20 years earlier and took over operations as a labour of love.
Even then, it was living on borrowed time.
By 2013, when megaplexes tightened their hold and his market share shrunk from 11 per cent to almost zero, a change of stewardship again became inevitable.
And again, eight months later, the new owners — after big talk about expansions that never happened — pulled the plug and the theatre ended up in the hands of its current proprietor.
As the third largest theatre chain in Canada, Imagine had the finances to make the investments necessary for survival — digital projection, improved sound, better seating.
But it was too little, too late to save this old fashioned vestige of Kitchener’s cinema past.
And when the last frame of “Dora & the Lost City of Gold” and “The Art of Racing in the Rain” flicker to a close around 9 p.m. Thursday, this old fangled neighbourhood throwback — like a punch-drunk fighter gone one round too long — will quietly cease to exist.
After 40 years, what killed it? The usual stuff: shrinking profits, an aging facility, the impracticality of a dual screen family cinema in a multiscreen superhero world.
And let’s be honest: Frederick Mall, despite its serial renovations, is like a hollowed out monument to mid-century Canada, populated by a flower store, sewing machine shop and throwback cafeteria reminiscent of the heyday of Kresge’s and K-Mart.
But the final knockout blow, says Facca, was something no one expected: the introduction of reclining luxury VIP seating.
“They’re really changing the way moviegoers are choosing to see movies,” she notes of these high-end multiplex appendages. “It’s better than home.”
There’s no regret in Facca’s voice. With 90 screens at 14 locations, Imagine did the best it could.
For them, closing the Frederick isn’t personal. It was a business investment that worked for a while, sort of, then didn’t.
They will pack up, donate the vintage seats they procured from Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood to a community theatre company, wish them well and move on.
No harm, no foul.
For Macleod, who was there at the beginning and struggled to keep the theatre afloat as a momand-pop indie from 1999 to 2013, it’s more personal.
“It smelled fresh,” he recalls when I ask him to paint a picture of the cinema in November 1979, when it opened with films that included the Bette Midler drama “The Rose.”
“It had lineups going right into the mall. It was a cool place to work.”
The arcade across from the perpetually busy box office had 30 machines, he recalls, both video and pinball, which gave it cache.
The now-decrepit water fountain was shiny and new, the walls adorned with colourful posters, and when that era’s big candy seller — licorice-spiked Goodies — spilled on the cinema’s sloped floors, “we would spend a lot of time chasing them all over the theatre.”
With regrets, he put that part of his life behind him with the theatre’s 2013 handover, but when news leaked out about its closing, old feelings resurfaced.
“It was all in the past until the last week and a half,” he notes.
“People have Facebooked me: ‘Would you reopen it?’ I tell them if I could make an arrangement with the mall.”
He hesitates, then backtracks reluctantly.
“It was hard when I closed that theatre. My wife and I were emotionally distressed. In the 14 years we ran it we had a lot of staff, some with us for six or nine years.
“My wife said ‘Don’t you even think about it. We’re not going there again!’”
In the end, that’s how it has to be.
And when — barring a phoenix-like rise from the dead — the Frederick shutters its doors one final time on Thursday, MacLeod will be 787 kilometres away, watching his son play soccer in Washington, D.C.
For a less sentimental view, John Tutt — who runs Waterloo’s Princess Cinema theatres — offers this eulogy.
“It’s a basement theatre with smaller screens, playing the same things big chain theatres are playing. It had poor signage, a weak mall setting and it wasn’t distinct.”
“I’m not singing the blues about the decline of people going to movies — there are a lot of wrong things to do with why it closed.”
He pauses, less cynical than impressed with its tenacity.
“If I’m standing over the coffin, I’d say to the fellow next to me, ‘I’m surprised it lasted this long!’”
That fighting underdog spirit — and memories — is the Frederick’s real legacy.