Going Attractions: The Definitive Story of the Movie Palace (2019)

(On Cable TV, July 2021) While I haven’t stepped in a movie theatre in years, I spent a good chunk of my time between 25 and 35 in Ottawa’s movie theatres, and have fond memories of the time — memories made even more special now that many of those theatres have closed down in the years since then. One of my showcase books is Alain Miguelez’s definitive and magistral A Theatre Near You: 150 Years of Going to the Show in Ottawa-Gatineau, which clued me onto the incredibly rich heritage that movie theatres left in Ottawa, including the magnificent Capitol Cinema, which was the city’s biggest-ever movie palace with 2,530 seats. The Capitol doesn’t exist any more: torn down in 1970, its history and ultimate fate mirror that of many other theatres built across North America during the initial boom of Classic Hollywood, and torn down once the crowds stopped going to the big screen as their primary form of entertainment. You may not care all that much about the Capitol, but the history of movie palaces is very much the story of theatrical exhibition, and it’s that topic that Going Attractions tackles in expansive fashion. A mixture of talking heads, archival material and modern footage, this is a film that propels us through a dense but easy-to-follow history of theatrical film exhibition from the early twentieth century to the 1970s, mirroring the rise and fall of movie palaces, with much of the film’s last act being dedicated to the restoration efforts made to preserve many of those theatres. Propelled by a strong soundtrack, we get to marvel once more at the grandiose ambition of those who built multi-thousand-seat theatres, the craftsmanship of their elaborate decorations and the experience of seeing a film in a place that employed professional ushers and strove to make everyone feel like royalty. Some of the material in the second act is tougher to stomach, whether it’s photographs of ruined theatres, footage of their demolition, or testimony from a photographer who faced many hazards in documenting their decrepitude. Even the fate of some of those theatres still standing is not entirely comforting — such as the East Lost Angeles Golden Gate Theatre, where people can walk in on the ground floor while… shopping at a CVS pharmacy, completely ignoring the elaborate cavernous space above. There’s a fine line to walk here between unwarranted nostalgia and honest appreciation of the power of watching a film with thousands of other persons, and writer-director April Wright threads the needle quite well, especially in showing how these theatres can still be relevant today as community centres. But much of Going Attractions’s interest is in the archival material and the evocation of a different time — as much as I do like my UDH home theatre setup, progress does not run in a straight ever-improving line: you gain some, and you lose some. It’s not a bad idea to reflect on what was lost once in a while.