Leonard Schein was off to a good start on his first night operating Vancouver’s Ridge Theatre in March of 1978.
They were screening Casablanca, and the lineups seemed endless.
“We sold out and were turning people away. I couldn’t believe it,” said Schein, a former psychologist who came to theatre operation after he couldn’t find a theatre in Vancouver that played the art-house and classic movies he liked.
“I had never been in business before, all of a sudden we’ve got all these people coming to see Casablanca. It was an amazing feeling – we sold out every show that weekend.”
But the beautiful friendship started that weekend is coming to an end next month, as the 63-year-old Ridge, a Vancouver landmark on Arbutus Street at West 16th Avenue, shuts its doors forever in anticipation of demolition later this year.
For Schein, who came to Vancouver from California in 1972, the Ridge launched a new career that led to the founding of the Vancouver International Film Festival in 1982, a stint running the Toronto International Film Festival, and back to Vancouver where he started the Festival Cinemas chain. He brought the Ridge into that chain’s fold in 2005.
The Ridge itself was built in 1950, and flourished in the pre-blockbuster era, when big movies opened across North America on only a few hundred screens, allowing for long runs at individual theatres. The Sound of Music played the Ridge for two years on its 1965 release.
The era of wide releases on thousands of screens that began in the 1970s killed that kind of release longevity, giving birth to the multiplex where, if you didn’t want to see last week’s release, there was always a new movie as well.
Schein’s reinvention of the Ridge as a repertory theatre showing foreign films, classic Hollywood and cult films gave the old girl a new life.
“We showed all the restored Hitchcock classics there,” he says. “We brought in 35-mm prints of Charlie Chaplin, W.C. Fields, Mae West, European and Japanese films.”
The Ridge was the first Vancouver theatre to do midnight screenings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, which packed the house every Saturday for more than two years, starting in 1978. Costumed fans in corsets and mascara – girls came, too – would chant back at the screen, throw toast, shine lights and toss rice to participate in the onscreen camp-musical story.
“We had confetti and rice thrown, but we preferred rice because it was easier to sweep up,” says Schein. “We preferred that people use flashlights versus lighters because of the fire marshal.”
That ended in 1981, when the city council of the day passed a bylaw banning the Ridge from screening Rocky Horror. Schein hired a lawyer to fight the ban, which was then rewritten more generically to prohibit theatres outside the downtown core from showing movies that ended after 1 a.m.
Since 2005, the Ridge has been showing first-run movies as part of the Festival chain, which also includes the Park on Cambie and the five-screen Fifth Avenue Cinemas on Burrard.
Schein says the Ridge was still financially viable as recently as 2011, but lost business after that when news of the pending development had people thinking the theatre was already closed.
Feb. 3 will be the last night of movies at the Ridge, capping a 10-day festival of movies – at $5 a seat – that will include everything from the latest Bond flick Skyfall, this year’s foreign-film Oscar nominee The Intouchables and, yes, Rocky Horror.
A singalong screening of The Sound of Music will have a $10 ticket price, as will a screening of director Sandy Wilson’s B.C.-filmed classic My American Cousin, a benefit for the family of the late Vancouver movie critic Ian Caddell. The director and her lead actress Maggie Langrick will do a question-and-answer session at that screening. Screening info is at festivalcinemas.ca.
The mini-festival marks the end of another era as well, as Schein resolved to screen 35-mm film prints of all those movies. New theatres being built today only allow for digital screenings.
After the screen goes dark, Schein plans to parcel off chunks of the theatre’s decor – the theatre curtain goes to the Jewish Film Festival, while the seats will go to the Fox Theatre.
Condo developers Cressey Development Group will keep the original Ridge sign at the new project that will rise at the site.
The theatre’s stained glass windows, an Art Deco depiction of film projectors, are being offered to Cineplex to adorn one of their new multiplexes.
Schein will hand over the Ridge’s keys to the landlord for the last time on March 1.
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