JONATHAN RITTENHOUSE
Built at the height of the atmospheric theatre fad in early 1929, the Granada Theatre of Sherbrooke, Quebec has been many things to many people over the years. Starting as a double-bill house of United Amusements of Quebec (owned by Famous Players of Toronto,in turn owned by Paramount of New York), the Granada eventually became the premier performance space in Sherbrooke in the 1940s and 1950s. It was eventually replaced in this function in the late 1960s by cultural centres at the two local universities. While it was sold off by Famous Players in the early 1970s it still survives relatively intact, at the end of this century a curious architectural reminder of how things once were and perhaps still are. The theatre's past, present and future provide the author with an opportunity to reflect upon his own place in late 20th century Quebec.
Le Théâtre Granada, un cinéma atmospherique de l'année 1929 qui existe encore à la rue Wellington de Sherbrooke, Québec, offre pour l'auteur d'opportunité de faire des réflexions politiques, culturels et personnels. La nature de cet éspace comme un produit simultané local, provincial, fédéral, continental et mondial sugget pour l'auteur que ses éspaces comme le Granada peut donner aux chercheurs un terrain ou sujet fertile pour l'analyse des cultures québécoises.
In 1927 Irving Thalberg, the wunderkind Hollywood producer, had this to say:
The motion picture presents our customs and daily life more distinctly than any other medium and therefore if we were to come back a thousand years from today and try to find some sort of expression that clearly showed how we live today, it would have to be in motion pictures. (qtd. in May xi)
A little more than a decade after Thalberg's appeal in temporal terms to unproblematized universalist and essentialist notions (the simple our/we of his public relations rap), Thornton Wilder applied similarly essentialist spatial notions in his play Our Town. In that play the young girl, Rebecca, tells the story of someone in Grover's Corners (our town) receiving a letter addressed to a town, county, state, nation, geographic area, planet, universe and "mind of God" (Wilder 5). In such discourses, time and space (historical and metaphysical) are always/already American, mediated through the unqualified appropriation of "our." In what follows I have unabashedly appropriated the opening lines of Wilder's play spoken by the Stage Manager, "This play is called 'Our Town,'" and used its stunningly constructed and constructing declaration of American "ourness" as an initiating impulse to consider, reflect upon and somewhat deconstruct just such American totalization. I attempt to do so by focusing on another town (la ville de Sherbrooke where I now live) and provide a cultural history of a particular space--the Granada Theatre/Le Théâtre Granada, Wellington Street, Sherbrooke, Quebec, Canada, North America, the World--at a particular time--this century.
As I see it, the original Granada Theatre/Le Théâtre Granada, a motion picture theatre built in 1928 and opened in early 1929 on prime real estate in downtown Sherbrooke,(1) and now Le Granada, a slightly altered and renovated private/public hybrid concert venue, is/are has/have been many things to many different "ours." The space's multiple, overlapping, contradictory identities through time, yet dominant identity as purveyor of Hollywood-American culture, make it a fascinating site/sight to explore the complex issue of whose Granada it was. With some academic expediency, I also utilize the various Granadas I conjure up to help explain (provide "material" proof for) the political-cultural context of 20th century Quebec-Canada. Further, I imbricate some of my own selves (American/Quebecker-Québécois/Canadian) into this narrative in an explicitly self-conscious manner again utilizing (re-co-opting?) Wilder's Our Town. For better or worse, as they say--but that's an essay of a different pronoun.
******
For hundreds of years the river systems south and east of the St. Lawrence River were used as trade and travel routes by the Abenaki tribes of eastern North America. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries these waterways and surrounding lands, named the Eastern Townships by Imperial land agents, were developed by both American and British settlers. The mill town of Sherbrooke, located on the St. Francis River, was founded by those settlers a full half century before Confederation. It eventually became the administrative hub of the region when during the 1850s railroad construction connected it to Portland, Boston and Montreal. The region's timber and mineral resources were fully exploited and agriculture and textiles became the area's employment and economic mainstays. From 1850 on francophone migration south from the St. Lawrence land holdings eventually made Sherbrooke into a city as close to bilingual and bicultural as Canada ever achieved in its first hundred years of existence where the downtown shops were operated by Mitchells, Vaillancourts, Echenbergs and Chagnons cheek-by-jowl, not geographically, linguistically and culturally separated as in La Métropole.(2) While the Granada Theatre/Le Théâtre Granada attained both civic prominance and cultural significance among those downtown shops for the first thirty years of its operations, it had its influential predecessors (Rink Opera House and His Majesty's Theatre) and also its cultural inheritors (le Centre culturel). Each, in its own way, served and "represented" the ever-changing profile and cultural needs of its locals while also serving hegemonic interests far beyond the boundaries of the Granada's home address, 53 Wellington Street.
Between Rink Opera House, Water Street and le Centre culturel de l'Université de Sherbrooke is a huge gulf. Or, if you prefer, from Rink Opera House to le Centre culturel is a long voyage. Whatever spatial or temporal descriptors I use to describe them, however, these building structures were/are the dominant performance spaces of Sherbrooke in the late 19th and late 20th centuries. As its unilingual English name of Rink Opera House presumes, the Anglophones of Sherbrooke were culturally dominant in the late 19th century as they skated in late fall, winter and early spring and went to shows the rest of the year. That such seasonal ordering of activities did not conveniently conform to the conventional theatre calendar demonstrated Sherbrooke's continuing isolation from metropolitan influences, the Imperial presence and/or the culture of the American road show. Further, the delightful yoking together of the presumed extremes of "rink" and "opera house" not only illustrates the local area's particular skewing of socio-cultural activity but also serves, perhaps, as signifier to those of us doing research on just such phenomena of the lived permeability of such activities.
What the Rink Opera House finally invoked to the elite stakeholders of civic pride, their final judgement on "our town" at the turn of this century, were embarrassed lamentations concerning Sherbrooke's inability to get it together to construct/support/patronize discrete and sophistication-enhancing cultural institutions, as occurred, of course, in the closest metropolitan centres of Montreal and Boston. As I have argued elsewhere, it was, in fact, the reprinting of a Dickensian portrait of the Rink Opera House in the Sherbrooke Daily Record (from a paper in the decidedly un-Parisien hamlet of Colebrook, NH, no less) that fueled the Record's determination to convince all of us (the city's primarily English-speaking elite) to put our heads together and think of ways to bring culture--in terms of a material structure as well as performances--to the Queen of the Eastern Townships.(3)
Finally in 1901--in the new century, "our" century as M. Laurier would have it--Sherbrooke's first purpose-built theatre, Clement's Opera House, was erected on Wellington Street, the major downtown artery. Built by Mr Frank Clement, an American entrepreneur, the Opera House was like most other theatres of its type in North America, built for live performances with seating for more or less 1000 patrons. In its first decade it served almost exclusively as a road show house for American companies touring the Northeast. In its second decade it got a new name chosen by readers of the Record--His Majesty's Theatre--a name that indicated the continuing British presence in Sherbrooke, a boundary outpost of the Empire. However, since it could also be referred to as "le théâtre" (even in ads in the Record), its name provided some small acknowledgement of the city's increasing francophone majority.
Le Centre culturel de l'Université de Sherbrooke,(4) a 900 seat performing arts space, art gallery and subterranean espace libre located within a university complex of library and administrative offices, has been the dominant high culture space of the region since its development over thirty years ago. Unlike the private enterprise Opera Houses, le Centre culturel was publicly funded by the state when, during Quebec's Quiet Revolution of the 1960s, government effectively took over from the Church the responsibility for and the financing of education. While the private enterprise Opera Houses were in the downtown business core, le Centre culturel was situated on a university campus on a tract of land at the city limits. Culture's identity or boundary, then, was not framed/formed by sharing the same geographic space downtown with Dominion's, Woolworths and Tip Top Tailors. Rather culture developed on separated and designated space where its function or structure had clear political and educational boundaries.
Both Opera Houses and le Centre culturel have names which open themselves to denote a range of activities. The Rink Opera House reflected, I venture, relatively unthinking economic pragmatism (multiple uses and easy to locate) and His Majesty's, the residual if declining self-consciousness of English/British cultural importance in the region. Le Centre culturel reflected and reflects cultural nationalism fostered by the "centre's" statist and formalized support of culture. More obviously, le Centre culturel denotes itself as a francophone institution within a francophone university. Now, within a more than 90% francophone city, le Centre promotes and disseminates to its public as much Québécois fare (Marjo, Courtemanche, Lepage) as the market will bear. As Premier ministre Bouchard might unproblematically put it, "C'est nous qui déciderons."
Enter Stage Manager
Well, now that you have met a few of the characters in this region and been given a kind of account, as to where we were and where we are, culturally speaking, I would like us to get to know our star of this show, The Granada Theatre/Le Théâtre Granada. You know the story--why we were born, the trials and joys of growing up and performing, our progeny, the final, perhaps, bow.
While Thalberg, Adolph Zukor (President of Paramount Pictures), J.P. Morgan and members of the Rockefeller banking clan weren't actually there on Friday 18 January 1929 when the Granada officially opened and didn't actually see the Canadian premiere of the MGM featured photoplay, Alias Jimmy Valentine, the Hollywood-New York dream-spinners, industry czars and financial backers had always-already been there, as each had done his job well to ensure/insure that the Granada would inevitably come into existence. Thus, while the Granada was originally physically built by locals (S.G. Newton, contractor), while its fare was only consumed by locals (francophone and anglophone alike), and the building existed, and still exists, as locally-valued real estate in a very specific area of a particular city, it was others (people from Montreal, Toronto and New York) who, in fact, created and invested the space with originary, physical meaning (what the Granada looked like), named it, produced and distributed the vast proportion of what was seen in the space and, eventually, made the decision to relinquish the space, the building, the memories and possible future.
The Granada's genesis and history are, as I have suggested, particularly complex because of the many conflicting and complicating threads of its story, its many "ours": an American capitalized, Canadian managed and locally consumed space whose changing municipal demography from 1920 to today shows cultural heterogeneity giving way to homogeneity. Each factor is in potentially absolute conflict with the others and, as indicated for local consumers, each factor is potentially composed of conflicting internal constituents. But I can, perhaps, start with a blandly simple statement and then start to unpack, as it were, its contents to begin the Granada story.
In his handy, advice-laden 400 page book, The Management of Motion Picture Theatres, Frank H. Ricketson Jr. distils most everything to this creed: "The sole purpose of theatre operations is to make money" (5). Indeed it was Adolph Zukor who put into place an industrial system for motion pictures that stayed all but intact from the mid 1920s to the mid 1950s despite the extraordinary upheavals of this century. Zukor was a movie producer when the field was wide open before and after the First World War. During that war he successfully took control of many other independent producers and one of the major American distribution companies (Paramount) and, in one year alone, produced and distributed 220 feature films. Then, thoroughly bankrolled by a Wall Street convinced of his ability to make and deliver the product and, more importantly, willing to provide substantial real estate loans, he spent the next decade building new theatres and acquiring other theatres or theatre chains at home and abroad. His newly formed Paramount Publix Corporation of 1930, a model of the completely integrated industrial/manufacturing company (producer, distributor and retailer/exhibitor), became the largest ever theatre operation.(5)
Zukor and his system "made money" and it was within this reasonably uncomplicated industrial strategy that the Sherbrooke Granada (a product of the Paramount zeitgeist) was designed and created. The story was, of course, more complicated and, to still maintain a long-shot focus, there were, potentially, a variety of forces that attempted or might have attempted to keep Zukor's strategy from being implemented. From the very beginning of Zukor's integrative strategy, independent chains and exhibitors had called foul invoking anti-trust legislation when asking the courts to find Zukor's company guilty of monopolistic activities. Eventually (in 1948!) the Supreme Court decided against the largest motion picture companies (the big five, as they were termed--Zukor's Paramount, Warner Brothers, Loews, Fox and RKO) ordering them to formally divest their theatre holdings from their production/distribution companies.(6) Also, early on in the construction of the Hollywood studio system, there were American voices demanding a legislated end to the industry's absolute control of the business convinced, with some good reason, that the courts would never expeditiously deal with the situation. In 1926 William Seabury argued that motion pictures should be made into a public utility and so regulated by government control;(7) in 1927 the Rev. Case wanted a neutral, centralized distribution agency to ensure play-time in theatres for educational or religious films.(8)
Internationally, special investigations of the League of Nations (1925-26) and the British Imperial Conference of 1926 concluded that the American near-total domination of the world film industry needed to change. The remedy included taking legislative action to implement total restrictions and quotas on the distribution and exhibition of non-national product. Of particular importance to the consideration of the still-gestating Granada was the discussion document prepared for the Imperial Conference.
The proportion of British films, that is films produced within the Empire by British companies employing British actors, to the total number shown in the United Kingdom has been rapidly declining, and at present amounts to 5 per cent. It is understood that a similar position prevails throughout the Empire generally, and that in some parts practically none but foreign films are shown. . . .
A position in which so powerful an influence as that of the Cinema, reaching as it does all classes and all ages of the community, is exercised throughout the empire almost wholly by non-British producers is obviously a dangerous one. (qtd. in Jarvie 69,70)
Canada was, in fact, the overwhelmed Dominion referred to in this document but the Imperial use of "obviously" above needs close reading as its uncritical assumption of common us/we values in historical, political terms is akin to Thalberg's hegemonic cultural discourse. Could Canada in the 1920s speak and/or act outside/beside the forces/powers behind such utterances? Should it, or should it simply let the market do what it will do? And what about bilingual, bicultural Sherbrooke, whose original 1912 provincial guidelines for handling the new medium of films so delicately avers:
Owing to the mixed population of the Province of Quebec, special care must be given to the questions of nationality, religious belief and general customs. (qtd. in Lamande 30)
Would an anglophone Sherbrooke resident have seen herself excluded from those American film images she had been so thoroughly exposed to since the war; were they "dangerous"? Would a francophone Sherbrooke resident have seen the situation the same way, perceived a threat to his way of seeing things as the British Imperialists so firmly conceived such threats; were British/American conflated on the silver screen when he read the English sub-titles of the films he saw? Such questions, and many more not posed here, are easy to ask but difficult to answer. My tally of those I have posed is three no's and a final, probable yes, given my assessment. An Americanized Quebec-Canada's Quebec sensibilities, however, could never simply adopt Imperialist discourse and its savvy was focussing on the force/power that, perhaps, overrode "nationality, religious belief and general custom"--language.
To further detail the Quebec-Canada version of the Granada story, it is useful to turn to the Canadian Zukor, N.L. Nathanson, founder and creator of Toronto's Famous Players Corporation, perceived by both his contemporaries and later historians of Canada's cultural development as an extraordinarily influential figure in the Canadian motion picture industry.(9) In 1920 N.L. Nathanson took up on a deal offered by Zukor's company. They would help him increase his exhibition circuit across Canada (which, of course, would be theirs, as well) if he would exhibit all Paramount product in his theatres for the next twenty years. The deal was extraordinarily sweet for Paramount since in N.L. Nathanson they found someone as single-mindedly relentless in his business dealings as they were in theirs, enabling Famous Players and Paramount to secure a total lock on exhibition and distribution in Canada by 1924--a position they have never relinquished. In order to achieve such dominance one needed majority control of first-run motion picture theatres in the major centres, which Famous Players succeeded in gaining when they bought out their only real circuit competitor, the Canadian-run Allen chain. Further, N.L. Nathanson simply adapted the Zukor industrial strategy vis à vis exhibition and distribution so that Famous Players had first pick of the distributors' projected list of the best movies, a huge delay (clearance, as it was called in the industry) between the last day of showing such quality films and the competitor's first day and the business edge of paying for film rentals after the showing at preferential rates while competitors paid COD at higher percentage rentals. All this ensured, for Famous Players Canada, economic control of the industry. And just in case anyone might invest in an old theatre or see motion picture theatre possibilities in available real estate, Famous Players would quickly move in and outbid, bluff or threaten potential competitors.(10)
This is how the Granada was born. In the late 1920s Famous Players' subsidiary in Quebec, United Amusements Corporation (UAC), was aggressively expanding its circuit.(11) In 1927 Paramount, the American parent company, took control of the old His Majesty's Theatre in Sherbrooke to best assess the economic feasibility of refitting this old theatre for their motion picture theatre chain and/or to keep control of the real estate space away from any prospective competitor. In the crucial years of sound introduction and conversion, when the costs of renovating old theatres were weighed against building new ones, it was always nice to know that one had all the aces. In this instance UAC (Famous Players, Paramount) decided not to pour money into His Majesty's. Rather it off-loaded the theatre to "friendly" competition (a small Quebec chain, Consolidated Theatres, specializing in B-movie fare and French sub-titled films),(12) and built their new theatre, the Granada, secure that no one else was going to seriously refit the old His Majesty's and be in real competition with their expensive, brand-new theatre.
As discussed earlier, American film historians tell us that in the 1920s the major companies in the movie industry swiftly restructured themselves into vertically integrated dynamos, secured blue-chip financing by having most of their assets tied up in real estate--motion picture theatres--and thoroughly developed the infinite-boundary mode of chain-store retailing.(13) In the big picture, then, the Granada was a product of the extraordinary monopoly success of the American motion picture industry, as specifically practiced by the American-controlled subsidiary, Famous Players, and its wholly controlled Quebec subsidiary UAC. Since Americans considered Canada a statistical part of the domestic market (3-5%, in fact) from the beginnings of feature-length motion pictures circa 1914 through the Second World War, one cannot but conclude that the Granada, far more thoroughly than its smaller-scale Opera House predecessors or its aggressively pro-Quebec successor le Centre culturel, operated in an effectively boundary-less pre-NAFTA North America where Montreal, Toronto and New York managers were virtually identical--a model for the present trans-national economic paradigm.
Canada was the country in the world with the oldest continuing national film production organization.(14) As well, with the White Report of 1930-31, it became the first country to carry out a government-sponsored commission to investigate the combine or monopolistic activities of the motion picture industry (Famous Players and its affiliates, to be precise). Further, with other industries of mass communications--telephone, radio and, later, television--Canada controlled them as public utilities answerable to Canadian concerns or supported the creation of national broadcasting networks, for the explicit purpose of fostering and promoting Canadian identity and unity. Despite all this evidence of state concern and state intervention in such issues as mass culture and Canadian identity, a countervailing trend in Canadian society--branch-plant, laissez-faire economics--was equally present. It was this powerful cultural tendency / economic "pragmatism"/ unthinking expediency which allowed the Granada, one specific component of the American motion picture industry, to provide for nearly thirty years, almost entirely unimpeded, a steady diet of the domestic versions of well over 5000 movies.
Re-enter Stage Manager
Well, now that you have read about the history and background of "our Granada" and just what "our" might mean (and in case you're wondering one of those movies seen at the Granada was that Thornton Wilder's famous play, you know the one I mean) it's time to look at the theatre up close. We've read what the professors at the universities had to say; now let's allow the local folk, the editors of our two dailies, to have a word in edgeways.
The Sherbrooke Daily Record had been in existence since the last years of the Rink Opera House's operations (1897). The paper had been a big supporter of the erection of a "real" Opera House and gave thorough and complete coverage of the Granada's construction and opening. La Tribune started up when His Majesty's got its name (1910) and gave even more positive reporting to the Granada's grand opening. From the outset, then, both mainstream mouthpieces of political and cultural influence in the city were uncritically and unqualifiedly bullish about the Granada's appearance in downtown Sherbrooke.
It is understood that the proposed theatre would be a thoroughly modern structure, a real big city theatre, and absolutely fireproof. (DailyRecord Jan. 18, 1928)
The building was erected by the Newton Construction Company, of this city, and is a tribute to the work turned out by local contractors, whose employees are practically all Sherbrooke men, . . . and given employment for nearly ten months. (DailyRecord Dec. 21, 1928)
Ce nouveau théâtre de Sherbrooke, l'un des plus sumpteux de la province et même du Canada, offrira de gala pour son ouverture officielle. (Tribune 12 jan. 1929)
The Granada Theatre . . . is a very valuable asset to the City of Sherbrooke. The exterior of the building is a wonderful addition to the buildings of Wellington Street and a building the people of Sherbrooke can point to with pride and satisfaction. (DailyRecord Jan. 18, 1929)
Le nouveau théâtre sera sous le gérance de M. Eugène Lefebvre, l'un des Canadiens- français les plus en vues dans le monde des théâtres de la Métropole. (Tribune 12 jan. 1929)
Mayor J.S. Tétrault declared the theatre formally opened. Speaking in both English and French the Chief Magistrate of the city expressed the pleasure of the City Council and of the citizens in having such a fine theatre erected in Sherbrooke. (DailyRecord Jan. 19, 1929)
La réprésentation de ce soir sera écrite en lettre d'or dans les annales artistiques des Cantons de l'Est, avec 600 invités spéciaux un programme cinématographique inédit et Maurice Meerte et autres artistes de Montréal sur la scène. (Tribune 18 jan. 1929)
Locally the Granada was long perceived as the jewel of local culture and was the premier performance space of the region into the early 1960s. Most local people who remember the Granada in its heyday have very personal recollections (its beautiful interior, its glamour, its ghost). For them the theatre was not always-already someone else's, not theirs, but a space in which "tout Sherbrooke" could be proud. How does one interpret, then, the historical non-critique from canadien-français and English-Canadian locals of the Granada, their embrace(s) of the space, its name, its décor, its non-stop dissemination of the gaze of "others"? As I have done, do you tilt towards an Althusserian or Frankfurt-style analysis where locals, really, know not what Paramount has wrought? Or do you take the pragmatic critical approach of Ian Jarvie, who in his Hollywood's Overseas Campaign fully accepts total Hollywood control in Canada but argues for local demand for most of that product (say 75% of the 5000 figure noted above) and considers academic/intellectual concern about the rest as just another paternalistic spin/answer to the question "what do locals want"?(15) Or do you, perhaps, take the radical-response popular culture approach of John Fiske who sees in every Madonna-wannabe (or every Granada addict) a powerful subversive mis-reading of the hegemonic and so grant to locals the ultimate power of meaning construction, to re-phrase the words of another complicated site of Quebec-Canada-America culture, Leonard Cohen, "First we take Granada, then we take New York"?
All these approaches can be used when one comes to look at the very space itself and its name--the Granada. The usefully neutral name "Granada," the easy way le Théâtre Granada/ Granada Theatre could be referred to in either French or English without offence to either group, could enable locals to identify their theatre without excluding others, without asserting heirarchy. It could stand as a marker of a harmonious Quebec-Canada where French and English could play together. Or "Granada" could be seen as a name that has worked and will work as a marker of the readily-commodifiable exotic for cinema marquees throughout the world, whose past and future economic successes have been and will once again be proven on yet another downtown street in an urban centre. Or "Granada" could be seen as an ersatz-name of the Fordist economy, whose lit marquee provided the necessary mis-direction of the conjurer, where the supposed pleasure of somewhere else masked the relentless sameness of one Metro comedy after another rolling off the studio lots and onto Wellington Street.
Once past that marquee and the sidewalk of downtown Sherbrooke, the Granada provided painted mural angels, brightly painted plaster crests, a border of plaster griffin-dragons and references to other UAC chain theatres (Mount Royal, Regent and Rialto) to help usher patrons into the theatre. Once through substantial French doors there was, in the beginning years, a hallway full of goldfish, singing birds, fancy furniture and surreal stone fountains each in the shape of the prow of a boat. Finely carved pillars with gargoyle effects, terra cotta roof tiling along the central aisle and solid tile floors in bold square pattern finished the entrance look. The arched corridor to the auditorium had a series of shell-dome niches with snake-on-vase or female nude plaster fixtures. One set of marble stairs led to the orchestra and two others to the balcony. The latter's marble effect was particularly indicative of the decor's theatricality in that real marble slabs eventually gave way to painted artifice in such manner as to give the illusion, like a Hollywood sound set, of even greater opulence and expenditure than was the case.
Inside the auditorium the traditional theatre's proscenium arch or central dome focus was replaced by the trademark atmospheric theatre's surround effect. The walls, including a tiled border across the proscenium top, and the sky dome ceiling which changed from twilight to night via lighting "magic" gave a plaster and painted illusion of a "Granada" courtyard. The overall effect and the curious details throughout--highly decorative stained glass lozenges at the front of the balcony overhang, a landscape effect painting on a crest near one of the side exits (which no audience member could ever see!), archways through which one "saw" the vista of a Spanish landscape, a large opening at the rear of the orchestra where seated patrons would look up to see a monumental wooden railing with innumerable heavy wooden supports (all plaster, of course)--all made the Granada an extraordinarily constructed and visually interesting space.(16)
And what might all this excess of decor mean? Was the "theatrical" interior design so well-crafted (in both aesthetic and economic terms) as to give the audience members an illusion of another world or, in more post-modern terms, a perfect replication of a state-of-the-art movie set? Did such decor so perfectly replicate the Hollywood-New York hegemonic surround (pleasurable exoticism icing the ideologically banal and pervasive) as to provide to such as myself the theoretical equivalent of shooting rabbits in a barrel? In many ways the Granada was both extraordinary and striking while mind-bogglingly replicative and replicatory. The craftspeople involved (D.G. Crighton--architect; Emmanuel Briffa--scenic painter and designer; DiGiorgio Limited of Montreal--plaster cast specialists) were experienced and highly skilled experts, all of whom had worked together on various movie theatres and on a number of other Spanish atmospheric theatres.(17)The space, as a result of such expertise, was illusionary and total--constant outdoor effects in an indoor environment. Everything was so professionally theatricalized that the entire experience of going to the Granada could, I would offer, be seen as simultaneously hyper-intensifying the movies watched (whipped cream on your Black Forest cake) and also providing a kind of cocoon sameness to all images and thus naturalizing the innumerable flickering images emanating from the Granada's screen.
Of importance to the space's local identity was it being considered the area's premier performing arts space once His Majesty's closed its doors on the eve of the Second World War. Here, for example, touring acts like Maurice Chevalier, Kay Kayser, the Von Trapp Singers, a production of Le Barbier de Seville (whose semiotic excesses in the Granada make me dizzy!) and Gratien Gélinas' touring production of his play Tit-Coq were seen. Particularly in the 1950s, the growing francophone dominance in Sherbrooke altered the city's and the Granada's cultural tone. A florescence of activity occurred, coinciding with local native Louis St. Laurent having become Prime Minister. L'Université de Sherbrooke was established, local radio and TV stations developed, a prestigious concert series brought even more stars and glamour to the local Granada. In 1956 the Dominion Drama Festival came to Sherbrooke, promoted by two quasi-professional theatre troupes, who provided high-quality productions including a hugely successful adaptation of Wilder's Our Town, Notre Petite Ville, in 1957. For the first time the Granada started to present movies in French, along with the newer Cinéma de Paris (1948) and Cinéma Capitol (1949).(18)
With the coming of the 1960s and Quebec's Quiet Revolution the Granada became displaced by le Centre culturel as the premier performance space in town. When Famous Players (now owned by Gulf & Western) made its corporate decision in the late 1960s and early 1970s to transform its downtown properties into high-rise development projects or multiplexes or simply off-load them and become one with the muzaked siren call of the Mall, the selling off of the Granada occurred in Sherbrooke.(19)The Granada's cultural status was assumed by/subsumed to le Centre culturel whose orientation to the pure laine sense of québécois in the 1960s and 1970s displaced the American, bi-cultural, even canadien-français affects of the Granada. The Granada's economic affiliations with chain store pop culture were also firmly severed when the three little Famous Players movie houses (60% of the seating capacity of the Granada)-- cinémas de Carrefour de l'Estrie--came on line in early 1974. These cultural spaces had moved to the different loci of institutional and economic power (the University and the Mall) while the Granada remained behind, isolated and bounded by the bleak future of downtown.
The middle-aged Granada did, however, continue on in the decade leading up to the first Quebec Referendum in 1980. With the development of the successful home-grown sex film industry, the Granada provided a kind of seedy ambience for such french-language fare. It further shed its original, identifying trace when its trademark marquee was dismantled in May 1974 and the space assumed a new name and identity as Cinéma festival. The new movie house was operated by Montreal entrepreneurs with expertise in Famous Players' cast-offs.(20) They kept it alive as a thoroughly québécois enterprise providing mainly french-language repertory, a few rock concerts, some porno flicks and the occasional saturation-distributed Hollywood blockbuster such as Star Wars.
Following the Referendum, the space bacame more and more like its downtown neighbours, scuzzy to look at, unnamed, all-but-forgotten. It was sold to locals who, finally, for the first time (1982), owned the space. They envisaged for their property a downtown complement to le centre culturel at the University: a hybrid public/private structure that would neither threaten nor compete with the publicly-funded le centre culturel. They further renamed the building Place d'arts Estrie but did next to nothing with the space. It hit rock bottom as another unused eyesore of downtown decay--its identity thoroughly obliterated and defined by city core decline.
Or was it? At this nadir point a local heritage group, Le fonds du patrimoine estrien, took on the challenge of the unused building and space. In fact, one could say that it was the Granada which "created" the heritage group as it was around the issue of saving the Granada, of revitalizing the downtown core through pride in the past, that le fonds organized itself and began to produce its Newsletter/bulletin--the first issue devoted to the Granada case. In the sense of remembering the name, of asserting the cultural values of the space (it was beautiful, it cost a lot, "we" all went to it), of arguing in both official languages of Canada to save the space, this mid 1980s Sherbrooke-led initiative was, in heritage terms, an equivalent effort to Quebec soft nationalists' attempts to negotiate Quebec's proper place in Canada. Was le fonds' constant phrasing, "notre Granada,"
a convenient and less egregious stand-in for "notre Canada"? Whatever underlying politics of discourse there were or were not, the heritage group wanted the city and le fonds to purchase the property, run it as a non-profit municipal operation and, like le Centre culturel, seek government funding.(21) This did not occur and though new Quebec City owners in the late 1980s gave the Granada a structural facelift (perhaps a pragmatic and economic variation of the cultural flirting of le fonds patrimoine with "le beau risque" or maybe just doing the requisite plastic surgery so necessary for this aging Hollywood relic), they did very little with the space, selling it once more to locals in 1995. The city now leases the property, now le Granada, but its status, like most everything else after the second spectacularly inconclusive Quebec referendum of 1995 is, as they (we?, I?) say, unsure. This residue of American popular culture, then, awaits the fates of its city, its province and/or its country. How many "ours" are those?
Re-enter Stage Manager
Well, that just about covers the ground for the Granada, its past and possible future and the space it occupied and occupies on a street, in a city, in a province, in a country, on a continent, etc. I {authorial voice} might as well come clean and reveal that all you have read is, of course, just one academic's way of understanding self(ves), one's various "ours," identities and structures.
During Centennial year, in the biological space of adolescence and puberty, on the auditorium stage of Montreal West High School, I performed (what my memory seems to recall in a metaphysical haze) "for the first time." The role was the Stage Manager in the play Our Town. It was an awakening of sorts--of selves and identities. I was a thoroughly Americanized young man, an animate Granada through my daily diet of American TV fodder. And here I was learning one of the longest roles of the American stage in Wilder's paean to the never-never land of American small town life and values. The experience did spur reflections about my personal future and, given that particular time's extraordinary explosion in conscious emphases on being Canadian, the experience also dislodged my usually passive sense of things American as "being ours," with a sense of differences/boundaries between my country and theirs.
And today, if I may assume some accurate self-analysis, I am clearly still obsesssed with such things, with my own complicated American/ Quebecker-Québécois/ Canadian selves. Finally, my anecdotage likes to recall (and I studiously refrain from verifying the memory through research) that the very week I surprised my father with the "pretty convincing" job I'd done with the role of the Stage Manager, I was thoroughly upstaged by a visit to Quebec by a gentleman who disregarded the diplomatic bounds of speaking guardedly on other people's turf. M. De Gaulle's ringing, extraordinary declamatory conclusion, "Vive le Canada, vive le Québec, vive le Québec libre!" was a phrase that reverberated within the boundaries of my town then, and, I venture to say, still resonates now, in your town --our town?
The research for this essay was financially supported by the Research Committee at Bishop's University. Research was carried out in Lennoxville, Sherbrooke, Montreal, New York, Edinburgh and Aberdeen. Oral presentations of this research were first given in Edinburgh and St. Catherine's in 1995. I would like to thank my research assistant, Jeff Ballantyne, for his work and support, as well as Philip Dombowsky. I would also like to thank the TRIC/RTC editors (Stephen Johnson, in particular) for his patient and skilled job at enabling me to "translate" oral effect into printed meaning.
Notes
1. The real estate cost the owners, United Amusement
Corporation Limited (UAC) of Montreal, about $25,000. Construction permits
indicate a minimum $210,000 in construction costs. Theatre equipment and
full installation of a sound system in 1929 put the total cost of the Granada
at well over $300,000.
Return to article
2. There is no comprehensive recent history of Sherbrooke
and the Townships. J. Derek Booth's Les cantons de la Saint-François/Townships
of the St. Francis provides an illustrated introduction to the subject.
Return to article
3. See my article, "Building a Theatre: Sherbrooke
and its Opera House" in Theatre History in Canada/Histoire du théâtre
au Canada, 11, 1 (Spring 1990): 71-84.
Return to article
4. The most complete assessment of le Centre
culturel can be found in André Lachance and Jacques Labrecque's
article "Le Centre culturel de l'Université de Sherbrooke"
in L'Essor culturel de Sherbrooke et de la région depuis 1950,
pp. 235- 245.
Return to article
5. For complete and detailed anlyses of the cultural
economy of Hollywood see: Anthony H. Dawson, "Motion Picture Economics,"
Hollywood Quarterly, 3, 217-240; Michael Conant, Antitrust in
the Motion Picture Industry Economic and Legal Analysis (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1960); Douglas Gomery, The Hollywood
Studio System (London: Macmillan, 1986); Douglas Gomery, Shared
Pleasures A History of Movie Presentation in the United States (Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1992); Gorham Kindem, ed., The
American Movie Industry The Business of Motion Pictures (Carbondale
& Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1982); Tino
Balio, ed., The American Film Industry (Madison: University
of Wisconsin Press, 1976); Richard Dyer McCann, American Movies: The
First Thirty Years The First Tycoons (Methuchen, New Jersey & London:
The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 1987); Philip Davies and Brian Neve, eds., Cinema,
Politics and Society in America (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1981).
Return to article
6. Simon N. Whitney's article "Antitrust Policies
and the Motion Picture Industry," in Kindem (161-204), provides a very
clear historical assesment of this process.
Return to article
7. See: William Marston Seabury, The Public and
the Motion Picture Industry. New York: Macmillan, 1926.
Return to article
8. See: Rev. Wm Sheafe Case, D.D., The Case for
the Federal Supervision of Motion Pictures. Washington, 1927.
Return to article
9. See, for example, Seabury, 29 and Peter C. White,
Commissioner, Investigation into an Alleged Combine in the Motion Picture
Industry in Canada (Ottawa: Department of Labour, 1931), passim
for contemporary references to N.L. Nathanson. Kirwan Cox, "Hollywood's
Empire in Canada," in Pierre Véronneau, ed., Self-Portrait Essays
on the Canadian and Quebec Cinemas (Ottawa: Canadian Film Institute,
1980), 11-41 and Manjunath Pendakur, Canadian Dreams and American Control
(Toronto: Garamond Press, 1988), 56-91 provide more recent assessments
of Nathanson's place in cultural history.
Return to article
10. The White Report, the Cox article and Pendakur
book carefully anatomize the ways and means by which Famous Players achieved
market control.
Return to article
11. Further information on the United Amusements
Corporation can be found in Dane Lanken's Montreal Movie Palaces Great
Theatres in the Golden Era 1884-1938 (Waterloo, Ont: Penumbra
Press, 1993), passim and Philip Dombowsky's Master Thesis, "Emmanuel
Briffa Revisted" (Concordia University, 1995), passim.
Return to article
12. The Special Valuation Rolls of the City of Sherbrooke,
Centre Ward Subdivision no.23, in the Sherbrooke office of l'Archives
nationale provide information concerning the changeover of property
in the downtown district, including His Majesty's.
Return to article
13. Of the many references noted in footnote 5 above,
Douglas Gomery's article "The Movies Become Big Business: Publix Theatres
and the Chain-Store Strategy," in Kindem, 104-116, is, perhaps, the most
pertinent in understanding the economic reasons behind the creation of
the Sherbrooke Granada.
Return to article
14. It was set up in 1918. Peter Morris' Embattled
Shadows A History of Canadian Cinema 1895-1939 (Montreal & Kingston:
McGill-Queen's University Press, 1992, 2nd ed.) provides useful information
about the early industry.
Return to article
15. See, in particular, his discussion on pages
26-7 and 41-2.
Return to article
16. The above description of the Granada's interior
and a brief assessment of the theatre's local importance come from an article
I wrote for the Historic Theatres' Trust Bulletin (Spring/ Summer
1995), 11-12. The special focus of this issue was atmospheric theatres
in Canada.
Return to article
17. See Lanken and Dombowsky for full details of
the careers of these professionals.
Return to article
18. While much of the information concerning the
Granada's change of orientation and focus comes from articles in the Sherbrooke
Daily Record and La Tribune, the archives of the Société
d'histoire de Sherbrooke were also useful sources of information. See,
for example, the following fonds: Cinéma de Sherbrooke:
le Granada (S51.01); Rodrigue Guilbault (P161.1, III); J.M.
Rodrigue (P.196.3); Claire Dion (P.212.3). For photo archives
see the following fonds: Paul-Emile Fortier et Albert Vincent
(1P57 PN 2.3a/5); Radio-Québec (1P 165 PN 1.1.c/1, 2.1-2.7);
La Tribune (1P.122 P.N.c/4).
Return to article
19. Sid Adelman's article in The Telegram
(April 18, 1970), 54 provides insight into Famous Players' corporate decisions
through an interview with George Destounis, President of Famous Players.
Return to article
20. Lanken in his Montreal Movie Palaces,
136-37, discusses Roland Smith's career as a restorer/recycler of such
Montreal cinemas as the Outremont, Regent, Globe and Verdi.
Return to article
21. Le Fonds du patrimoine estrien dealt
with the Granada issue not only in their premier issue of Patrimoine
Estrie 1,1 ( juin-juillet-août 1987), but also in 1, 2, (octobre
1987, 2) and 2,4 (printemps-été 1989, 7). They had previously
commissioned urban planner, Pierre St-Cyr, to do an analysis of the Granada,
«Le Théâtre Granada valeur historique et patrimoniale»
(21 octobre 1985) and the newly-formed heritage group produced their own
report in September 1986, «Le Fonds du patrimoine Estrien et la sauvegarde
du Théâtre Granada».
Return to article
WORKS CITED
Adilman, Sid. "Famous Players' Unsought Fortune." The Telegram (April 18, 1970), 54
Balio, Tino, ed. The American Film Industry. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1976.
Booth, J. Derek. Les cantons de la Saint-François/Townships of the St. Francis. Montreal: McCord Museum, McGill University, 1984.
Case, Wm. Sheafe. The Case for the Federal Supervision of Motion Pictures. Washington: n.p., 1927.
Davies, Philip, and Brian Neve, eds. Cinema, Politics and Society in America. New York: St. Martin's, 1981.
Dawson, Anthony H. "Motion Picture Economics." Hollywood Quarterly 3 (Spring 1948): 217-240.
Conant, Michael. Antitrust in the Motion Picture Industry Economic and Legal Analysis. Berkeley: Uof California P, 1960.
Cox, Kirwan. "Hollywood's Empire in Canada," in Pierre Véronneau, ed., Self-Portrait Essays on the Canadian and Quebec Cinemas. Ottawa: Canadian Film Institute, 1980. 11-41.
Dombowsky, Philip. "Emmanuel Briffa Revisited." MA Thesis. Concordia U, 1995.
«Le Fonds du patrimoine Estrien et la sauvegarde du Théâtre Granada». Sherbrooke: Le Fond du patriomoine estrien. 1986.
Gomery, Douglas. The Hollywood Studio System (London: Macmillan, 1986.
---. "The Movies Become Big Business: Publix Theatres and the Chain-Store Strategy." Kindem, 104-116
---. Shared Pleasures A History of Movie Presentation in the United States. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1992.
Jarvie, Ian. Hollywood's Overseas Campaign The North Atlantic Movie Trade, 1920-50. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992.
Kindem, Gorham, ed. The American Movie Industry The Business of Motion Pictures. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1982.
Labrecque, Jacques. "Le Centre culturel de l'Université de Sherbrooke.," L'Essor culturel de Sherbrooke et de la région depuis 1950. Eds. Antoine Sirois and Agnès Bastin. Sherbrooke: Université de Sherbrooke, 1985. 235- 245.
Lamande, Yves, and Pierre-François Hébert. Le Cinéma au Québec: essai de statistique historique (1896 à nos jours). Québec: Institut québécois de recherche sur la culture, 1981.
Lanken, Dane. Montreal Movie Palaces Great Theatres in the Golden Era 1884-1938. Waterloo ON: Penumbra, 1993.
May, Lary. Screening Out The Past. New York: Oxford UP, 1980.
McCann, Richard Dyer. American Movies: The First Thirty Years The First Tycoons. Methuchen: Scarecrow, 1987.
Morris, Peter. Embattled Shadows A History of Canadian Cinema 1895-1939. 2nd ed. Montreal: McGill-Queen's UP, 1992.
Patrimoine Estrie. Sherbrooke: Le Fonds du patrimoine estrien. 1, 1 (juin, juillet, août 1987); 1, 2 (octobre 1987); 2, 4 (printemps-été 1989).
Pendakur, Manjunath. Canadian Dreams and American Control. Toronto: Garamond, 1988.
Ricketson, Frank H. Jr. The Management of Motion Picture Theatres. New York: McGraw, 1938.
Rittenhouse, Jonathan. "Building a Theatre: Sherbrooke and its Opera House." Theatre History in Canada/Histoire du théâtre au Canada 11.1 (Spring 1990): 71-84.
---. "Sherbrooke's Granada Theatre." [Historic Theatres' Trust] Bulletin (Spring/Summer 1995), 11-12.
Seabury, William Marston. The Public and the Motion Picture Industry. New York: Macmillan, 1926.
St-Cyr, Pierre. «Le Théâtre Granada valeur historique et patrimoniale». Sherbrooke: Le Fonds du patrimoine estrien. 1985.
Valuation Rolls of the City of Sherbrooke, Centre Ward Subdivision no.23. Archives nationale. Sherbrooke, Quebec.
White, Peter C. Investigation into an Alleged Combine in the Motion Picture Industry in Canada. Ottawa: Department of Labour, 1931.
Whitney, Simon N. "Antitrust Policies and the Motion Picture Industry." Kindem 161-204.
Wilder, Thorton. Our Town. Three Plays by Thornton Wilder. New York: Bantam, 1972. 5-64.