About two hours northeast of Toronto stands a movie palace carved out of cedars and mosquitos. There are more theatre seats in the five screening rooms in this homemade multiplex than there are people in the small town where it exists, Kinmount, Ontario. Yet, from May through October, every summer for 40 years, families from neighbouring towns and villages in Ontario’s cottage country have braved bear cubs in the parking lot to see everything from “Barbie” to the latest “Despicable Me” flick.
It is entirely the vision of one of Kinmount’s native sons, Keith Stata. “The Movie Man,” a documentary about this remarkable entrepreneur’s Don Quixote-like obsession with showing movies the way God intended — with an audience — is streaming now exclusively at Hollywood Suite.
Directed and photographed over several years by Matt Finlin, the film was also a hit at the Santa Barbara film festival. One viewer there, Martin Sheen (The West Wing), was so impressed with this salute to Ontario’s Movie Man that he shot an endorsement for the project.
That intro and the feature were shown two weeks ago to a bus load of friends of Hollywood Suite, which just happens to be a sponsor here brioux.tv.
Besides the distance, I’m not sure what took me so long to make the two hour trip to the Highlands. When I was a kid in high school, I was an usher at the Kingsway Theatre in Etobicoke, crawling out an upstairs window on Thursday nights to change the letters on the marquee. With my own basement still filled with 16mm films on metal reels, various projectors and other movie memorabilia, I’m just a background in contruction away from being Keith Stata.
Once off the bus, our group marched up a short hill and checked out the tall sign spelling out the movies and the show times. Near the top are portraits of Laurel & Hardy, the first indication that patrons are in for a special celuloid treat.
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Beyond a general store and an ice cream parlor, there is not a lot to Kinmount. As the documentary reveals, this place on the Burnt River used to be a thriving mill town. A couple of catastrophic fires and the end of the railway line put a dent in Kinmount’s population.
Stata, however, persisted. He worked in construction, and poured enough concrete to form the floor of a cinema built onto the family house. More screening rooms followed, along with a maze of hallways that form one of the most extensive museums of motion picture paraphenalia I’ve ever seen. I think Highlands features more vintage photographs of classing California movie houses than I’ve seen anywhere in Hollywood.
Over the years, Stata plundered the remains of cinemas shut down in neighbouring towns and villages. He took a ticket booth here, the art deco light fixtures there, and filled several large, metal intermodal shipping containers with abandoned seats, curtains and even 35mm films.
There is no question the museum brings people back to Highlands; a spooky movie monster wing is a big hit closer to Halloween. Things take a turn for the worse, however, when the COVID-19 pandemic hits in the spring of 2020. Stata’s ecentric enterprise is shut down for two years. Movie going in general takes a hit it still hasn’t recovered from, with many choosing Netflix and chill over driving, parking, rude patrons and sticky floors. Stata also decries the deline in pictures patrons want to see, the true, “Indiana Jones”-style popcorn epics customers lined up for again and again.
Throughout the grim days of COVID, director Finlin chose to stick with his aging subject in hopes of a happy ending. There is still a measure of dispair over the eventual fate of the Highlands. Stata is getting too old to be crawling out onto the marquee and hanging letters, navigating the complicated modern world of digital movie imaging and simply keeping the place clear and tidy. (The good news is that the Highlands — despite Stata’s absurd hobby of keeping up to 50 stray cats in an oddball outdoor maze — has been scrubbed and kept clean.)
Stata himself, is a series of musings, wonders if his own private cinema paradisio is doomed. There is no likely heir to take over once he’s gone. It is getting harder to find student help to run the snack bar, not to mention cleaning cat boxes and feeding leftover popcorn to wild animals.
He talks a lot in the film about his favourite feature, H.G. Wells’ “The Time Machine,” a 1960 sci-fi classic starring Rod Tailor. Models of the time machine featured in the movie can be found in the museum. If only he had one of those real contraptions, Stata laments, he could go back to a time when he and the movies were young again.
By the end of the film, however, viewers are left with the impression that there is no time like the present. Stata is making money. Last year, he was back near his profitable peak. Customers are coming back, including one regular over the years who is an executive producer of “The Movie Man,” Barenaked Ladies frontman and guitarist Ed Robertson.
Distributed by Mongrel Media in Canada, “The Movie Man” is not the story of one man’s crazy dream to build the ultimate home theatre in the middle of nowhere. It is about a shared escape, in a special place, plus popcorn.
