It’s Monday morning and I’m still coming down from an exhilarating weekend high. My friend Dave Barber, programmer of the Cinematheque, has been talking to me since last year about screening my documentary, Going: Remembering Winnipeg Movie Theatres, but the question was always how to fit it into his schedule. Well, that and the fact […]
Although my documentary on Winnipeg movie theatres was originally conceived as a one-hour show, I ended up interviewing almost thirty people who gave me more great material than I could possibly fit into that format. As a result, the project grew to feature length. But even then, there were interesting stories and observations which simply […]
If it’s possible to feel exhilarated and anti-climactic at the same time, that’s how I feel this evening. It’s been just over a year since I shot Going: Remembering Winnipeg Movie Theatres, my documentary about the experience of going to the movies back when there were real theatres instead of multi-screen bunkers, and the process […]
It’s always tough to be original, but I was made nervous last year as I started on my documentary about Winnipeg movie theatres when I learned that local writer Russ Gourluck was working on a book about Manitoba movie theatres called Silver Screens On the Prairie. Russ has written a number of books on local […]
My documentary about Winnipeg movie theatres is creeping towards completion – I had a session with the person doing the on-line last Thursday; he’s working on several projects simultaneously, but hopefully mine will be done by the end of the coming week. And the sound files should be going to the person who’ll do clean-up and […]
I recorded the voice over for my documentary last Friday and spent the next few days making final detail changes in the edit. Yesterday, I turned the project over to the techies for on-line picture corrections and sound fix-ups and mix. So the editing is finally done and I’m feeling a kind of post-partum depression […]
Researching for my documentary on Winnipeg movie theatres sent me on a long trip down memory lane, looking up movie ads in the newspaper archive at the library.
I’ve been pretty silent for a few months about my on-going, still-untitled documentary on Winnipeg movie theatres. The reason for that was a massive case of creative block which had me stumped. Faced with the material (28 interviews of various lengths, a slowly accumulating collection of archival and personal photos, a small amount of video […]
I recently started work on a documentary about the history of movie theatres and movie-going in Winnipeg. A brief article about the project in the Winnipeg Free Press has brought an amazing number of calls and emails from a wide range of people who have quite passionate memories of the old neighbourhood theatres and the […]
Continuing my personal tour of Winnipeg’s vanishing downtown movie theatres … In the late ’70s, the city got its first multiplex. In the downtown Eaton Place mall, just across Graham Avenue from the Eaton’s department store, seven very small screening rooms were built just off the second floor food court (average capacity about 65 seats). […]