From The City Magazine (Toronto Star), 1978
Nat Taylor emits a throaty laugh and his eyes twinkle when he is asked about his latest venture, a mammoth, 18-theatre cinema complex now under construction in the Eaton Centre. When completed in January, the complex will boast three times as many screens as any other Toronto movie house, and top-rated foreign films will be imported to fill them.
“Among all the cinemas ever built in the world, this has to be unique,” Taylor declares. “You can’t even conceive of it unless you see a model. Not even with a plan could you understand it. This has to be something that, to use a trite phrase, is just out of this world.”
When Taylor told a group of motion picture theatre owners in Kansas City in 1965 that the single-theatre movie house was outdated and the future belonged to multiscreen complexes, they thought he was out of this world. “I was a bomb,” he admits. “They just didn’t know what I was talking about.” But at least one person there was listening: he started the American Multi-Cinema Corporation, which now operates about 500 screens in the U.S.
At 72, Nathan Aaron Taylor is the Grand Old Man of Canadian Film. A shrewd businessman and a born innovator, he built the world’s first dual theatre in Ottawa in 1948, and the same year built Toronto’s Westwood in such a way that another theatre could be added later at minimum cost (which was done in 1966). Foresight is the cornerstone of his success. Until he and his partner handed over his 20th Century chain of 60 movie houses to Famous Players in 1974 (retaining only the drive-ins), Nat Taylor had a larger personal interest in motion picture theatres than anyone north of the 49th parallel.
His influence on moviegoing in Toronto is awesome. He married the cinema and the shopping mall by constructing Canada’s first underground theatre (two screens) in Yorkdale, and later built four movie theatre in Square One in Mississauga. Taylor leased the International Cinema (the old Oriole) for his late first wife, Yvonne, so she could run it as an “art” theatre, and later, in 1948, built the Towne Cinema for her.
Along with others in the industry, Taylor fought the ban on Sunday movies in Ontario for years before it was finally lifted in 1961. In 1969, he converted the old Loew’s Uptown into five theatres, then kept the movie Woodstock alive for a year by moving it from the largest theatre (850 seats) through the others and finally putting it into the mall 150-seater, pushing the Uptown’s gross from $400,000 one year to a startling $1.6 million the next.
In 1918, when Taylor was 12, he started selling picture postcards of Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks and other stars to movie theatres after school at $3 per thousand. When his employer’s company was gutted by fire a year later, Taylor went into business for himself. By diligently making weekly visits to each of the 75 theatres then in Toronto, he met every exhibitor in the city, and still boasts that he can name every theatre that was on Queen Street from Roncesvalles to the Beaches.
He ran his first theatre in 1923, but the first theatre in the 20th Century chain wasn’t acquired until 1934. The second one came later that year and, by 1936, he had purchased several more. “By 1941, my partner and I had an interest in 17 theatres,” he recalls. “Then we made a deal with Famous Players and we jumped overnight from 17 to 42. Then we just kept going.”
A film historian recently approached Taylor with the idea of writing a biography, and Taylor has been jotting down notes. Among the heading: How I Acquired an Interest in a Profitable Theatre without Any Money, and How I Once Bought a Motion Picture Building in Five Minutes.
This year marks Taylor’s 60th in the industry. Although he now works only 20 to 25 hours a week compared with the 60 to 70 he averaged in his earlier years, Taylor has no plans for retirement. He points to a stack of architectural blueprints behind his desk. “You want to see plans? I’ll how you plans.” The movie houses that Toronto will see tomorrow are waiting for Taylor’s inspection and approval today. “People keep telling me they heard I was retired,” he says with a slight grimace. “I can only quote Mark Twain: ‘The reports of my death have been grossly exaggerated.’
“People tell me I’m a self-made man,” he says. “I’m not. I’m just lucky because I was at the right corner at the right time.” He pauses, and a wide grin spreads across his face. “And I just happened to know which bus to board.” ♦
