“We’re not just putting on a screening;
it’s an event,” says Charlie Lawton
in the box office of the Underground
Cinema. “The building itself
takes on the spirit and magic of the
people who come through.” The
room, like the rest of the venue, reflects
the cinephilia of its owners.
Movie posters deck the walls like ivy
and at the entrance of the seven hundred-
seat theatre (to date the largest
single screen auditorium in Toronto),
a quote from Japanese filmmaker
Akira Kurosawa greets ticket holders:
“Take me, subtract movies, and
you get zero.”
Lawton co-founded the Underground
in May 2010 with Alex Woodside
and Nigel Agnew, former employees
of the Bloor Cinema. The
basement theatre at 186 Spadina
used to be The Golden Harvest, one
of many Chinatown cinemas that
specialized in Kung Fu film from
Hong Kong until it closed in the late
1980s. In 1994 the theatre opened
again as The Golden Classics. Colin
Geddes, of TIFF Midnight Madness
fame, brought back Kung Fu content
along with Anime and other Asian
titles during the cinema’s brief revival.
It would close for another fifteen
years before Lawton, Woodside, and
Agnew renamed the theatre and took
it in a new direction.
It boils down to what Lawton said
about “event cinema.” Last year,
Adam West appeared at a screening
of the original Batman. Next summer
Robert Englund will talk at screenings
of The Nightmare on Elm Street
movies, in which he played the iconic
Freddy Krueger. The Video Game
Armageddon series allows guests
to play vintage games on Sega Mega
Drive. It’s not insignificant that the
owners got to know each other during
the production of Woodside’s
Jurassic Park shadow cast performance,
where actors playing humans
and dinosaurs re-enacted the
film as it screened behind
them. The theatre’s mandate
has always been to
make film-going as much of
a personal, interactive experience
as possible.
The theatre has maintained
ties to Toronto’s
Chinese community by
screening films from the
Reel Asian Festival and
working with Chinatown’s
BIAs (Business Improvement
Areas). In May, the
Underground had films
from both ends of the
Asian cinematic spectrum:
the big-budget Kung-Fu
spectacle Guardians and
Assassins and the independent Japanese
Karate-Robo Zaborgar, about a
robot with expertise in motorcycle
maintenance and karate.
“[In the multiplexes] it’s very corporate
and very cold; you see the
movie and you leave. Here it’s very
rare that you’ll leave and not have a
discussion with someone standing
around. We don’t have fifty cell phone
ads before the movie starts.” During
this interview, friends and acquaintances
of the owners hang around
the snack bar; inside the theatre
gamers play level after level of Sonic
the Hedgehog. The Underground has
a mixture of repertory theatre grandeur
(the sweeping staircase and red
carpet) and the relaxed nostalgia of
video stores that still carry VHS.
The mainstays for film content
are cult films from the 80s like Fright
Night (free on July 21) and independent
Canadian film like Unleashed
(premiered July 8). Woodside and
his colleagues see value in all types
of cinema and do not maintain distinctions
between “high” and “low”
art. In fact, the Underground is often
more interested in the features that
were critically panned.
“One of our series was called ‘Defending
the Indefensible,’ where local
critics chose a film and one of
them defends it and one of them denounces
it. I think we really cater to
the 20–30 year-old market.”
“We look at programming in a different
way than the other indie theatres,”
says Agnew. “They do a lot
more second-run content than we
do, whereas we think of what movies
we’d like to see on the
big screen, and if we didn’t
get to see them when we
were younger or we want
to see them again, then we
try to do something special
with it.” Hence ‘Defending
the Indefensible’ or the
Seven Deadly Sins Series,
in which they picked a
double feature to represent
each vice. Agnew, a P.T. Anderson
fan, appropriately
chose There Will Be Blood
for Greed.
“We try and engender a
different way of watching a
movie,” continues Agnew.
“You can go to the Cinématheque
and watch Fellini films
and there’s no food and it’s quiet and
that’s fine. It’s an art medium and it
deserves to be viewed as such. But
if you want to watch Barbed Wire
Dolls about chicks in prison in the
’70s and there’s nudity half the time
and you’re in a theatre where people
have snuck in their mickeys and are
throwing popcorn and shit — that’s
the flipside to the Cinématheque.
We want to do the warm inclusive
atmosphere, to come and enjoy the
film with likeminded people and yell
at the screen.”
The owners also want to give independent
Toronto film makers a
chance to premiere their work. “Seeing
their work on the big screen with
their friends is an experience that
you can’t recreate,” says Lawton.
“And we help provide that.”
When the conversation turns to
the current state of affairs in Hollywood,
Woodside is critical and
perceptive: “Now with the advent
of digital technologies and global
releases, at least 50–70% of a
blockbuster’s total gross is coming
from overseas. Especially in the
’90s, there was a thick wave of very
“American” movies, but Hollywood
is going to be changing their tune
and catering to a global audience.
Right now, Hollywood is in the worst
slump they’ve been in, who knows
how fucking long. It’s disgraceful
the kind of shit they’re putting out
right now.” Agnew and Lawton nod
in agreement and mutter “garbage.”
“Fuck Spiderman. We just fucking
had it and now they’re redoing it
again. But they’re going to have to
change their tune, now that other
countries can get into the game a lot
more seriously.”
Coming up at the Underground is
a Shadow Cast of Batman Returns
and a swathe of exciting material
for October.
