This should have been just locked and candy counter space.
Wow, you're in candy camera.
Wait for a second.
Can you tell what the balance is right there?
So if you don't want to be on my shoot.
If you don't want to be on camera, I just stay on one side.
Thank you.
Like the.
She can't hear.
Wouldn't actually be bad from here, you know, because it's nice to be able to start off with a shot of just seeing it.
See right here.
Start.
Yeah.
Church can you see the twinkling light where you are?
We've got really enough generalized stuff for the theater itself.
Right up above me right here.
Yeah.
You've taken quite a bit of interest in the Roxy theater over the past while you've written a thesis or an essay on it.
Well, I was hired to do the research on the building when they put a plaque on building like they did on this one.
They hire someone to do research on the building so they know all the history of the building.
It's personally something that I'm really interested in anyway.
That's why they hired me.
What is the history of the Roxy theater?
That's a big question.
Well, when did it open, for example?
It opened in the 1930.
It started off as one of the first sound houses in Saskatoon.
It was still in the nitrate film era.
There were fires in many theaters that caused many deaths.
There was a fire in this one, for instance.
It didn't come to much though, but it still was happening on the street.
I understand the projectionist literally had to throw the film out the window.
Yeah, he burnt his hands.
He saved the day through the film out of the theater into the – well, there was a little balcony on the front window.
It caused quite a commotion on the street, but the assistant projectionist continued on with the show.
The people inside the theater didn't know what happened.
It just continued on.
People walking down the street must have said, boy, that's one hot film.
It was actually Trouble in Paradise.
There was.
Yes.
Paradise was a common name for theaters in those days.
It was the Roxy Theater.
Tell me about it.
Was it a second run house?
No, it was the first run house.
It was just another theater in its day that they would get what films they could get.
They would run second run if that's what came their way, but often they would show films that were released to them.
For instance, they had films like King Kong.
There are some photographs that Nels Warner took of the children lining up.
They lined up from the theater entrance all the way to Avenue D and around the corner, all the way around the little Sky Chief service station.
It's quite an interesting film, and the kids wanted to come out.
There was a special promotion for that film.
The front of the theater was quite often decorated in the theme of the film.
Yes, they would often put banners on or put a completely stylized front on the theater.
For the film Rio Grande, for instance, they would put up hoarding that looked like log cabin construction.
They would try to continue the theme of the film right up to the edge of the sidewalk to try to draw people in with that.
The theater is interesting. I think of it as a small capital theater in many ways.
That's how it's referred to by a lot of people.
A lot of people looked at the capital theater. They watched films in the capital theater.
It seated about 1,400 people. This theater at the time seated about 900.
Then later on it was decreased to 700 and 600.
It was about a half to a quarter the size of the other theater, but it still had the same architectural elements, the same Spanish revival style.
The interior of the theater would look like the courtyard of a Spanish villa.
It was a great movie going experience.
It looked like the capital theater and it probably was referred to as a miniature capital theater or a poor man's capital theater seeing as it was on the other side of the tracks.
When you walked into it, you could imagine yourself just walking into a Spanish courtyard.
Just after dusk, the lights had just gone down and you were watching them.
That's the effect. A dark blue, cobalt blue sky with twinkling lights.
That's one advantage it had over the capital theater.
The capital theater had painted stars, but the stars in this theater actually twinkled on and off.
They had a special mechanism in the light socket that would periodically turn them off every four or five seconds.
Interesting way of cooling the theater.
Oh yes. This was one of the first theaters with air conditioning.
It was cooled with water that was brought in from an artesian well in the 1930s, the first few years that the theater was open.
The theater had an artesian well dug in the sidewalk right in the front of the theater.
Water would come up under its own pressure at about 35 degrees and it would be channeled into a large chamber and sprayed in front of a fan.
The fan would move the air through the cold water and cool the air down. It created a very humid air.
Later on they replaced the nozzles with an enormous wall-sized radiator, probably about six feet tall.
Interesting stuff. You mentioned the ceiling. What does it make out of?
This theater was advertised as one of the theaters that had the best sound in the West.
The whole ceiling and part of the walls were sprayed with a cork compound.
It made the acoustics in the building just perfect. There wouldn't be any sound rebounding or reverberating off the walls, the concrete walls.
So it had probably the best acoustics in the city.
But in those spots in the theater where the seating would reach up to the parts where the walls were sprayed with cork,
the audience members would often engrave their initials into the side of the wall.
There are parts of the theater where you can see quite a few initials engraved into the wall. It's like a trophy wall.
The theater itself is worth preserving. How special is this theater and how unique is it?
There are two reasons why it's important. First of all, I've researched every theater building in the city and of the buildings that were used for theaters.
This is the last one. Just a few weeks ago there was a fire on 22nd Street that destroyed the building that housed the original Daylight Theater.
After that one went, this is the last, literally the last building that was used for theatrical purposes.
It's an important building in that it's one of the atmospheric theater designs from the 1920s and 30s.
They were very popular at the time. A lot of architectural elements inside the auditorium made a viewing experience beyond just the film.
People would often come to see the film, but they would also come to see the theater.
They would get lost in watching the movie and they would look at the stars, they would look at the courtyard scene and then stay to see the movie a second time to film the parts that they missed.
It was a great theater, a great design, smaller than the Capitol Theater, but it's literally all that we have left.
It's also important for another reason. The theater was built at a time when cinemas were being constructed and they were just empty boxes.
This cinema still harks back to the time when they would have live theater, a legitimate theater in a theater, as well as films.
This one theater still has a proscenium arch at the front of the auditorium. It's a non-functioning stage.
The stage is literally about five or six feet deep, just enough space for a speaker system and a screen and a curtain.
Beyond that, there's a wall and then there's the alleyway, so there's no real stage, but it still has that fake proscenium.
It's a theater from a crossover period in the 20s and 30s, vaudeville, and legitimate theater was dying out and cinema was taking over.
Motion picture films took over. It was the state of the art, the technology at the time.
This theater marks that changeover from legitimate theater to cinema.
Just stay the way you are, don't move a muscle, and we'll ask Mohamed to move back and we'll get a two-shot now.
No mic, that's right.
Yeah, well, just to see the both of us talking here.