Just one day after announcing his Bathurst Street home cinema would be closing in the wake of a postering turf war with local flyer kingpin "Dr. Jamie" Gillis, Reg Hartt has changed his mind—while Gillis has responded to Hartt's accusations.
“I’m gonna bring it back with a goddamn vengeance,” said Reg Hartt this morning during an unexpected phone call—the “it” being The Cineforum, the repertory movie theatre and event space he runs out of the living room of his Bathurst Street home. This was a complete reversal from Tuesday, when Hartt announced on his personal blog that the venue would be shuttering permanently, after more than 30 years in business, due to alleged harassment from a Bathurst Street flyer kingpin Jamie Gillis, who runs a postering company called Dr. Jamie’s Events.
Hartt accuses Gillis of having orchestrated a smear campaign against him. Posters, which have appeared on utility poles and other vertical surfaces in the Queen West area, insinuate serious accusations against Hartt (which, since they verge on libel, The Grid won’t reprint or summarize). Hartt has retaliated with his own postering campaign; his flyers compare Gillis, who sells used bikes, to Igor Kenk.
Hartt believes Gillis is motivated by a desire to muscle him out of the postering business. The Cineforum posts flyers all throughout downtown in order to promote its nightly screenings, making Hartt a major competitor for wall and utility-pole space.
The decision to save (or at any rate, not close) The Cineforum seems to have come about when Hartt realized that his detractor wasn’t giving up. Hartt claims that fresh copies of the offending flyers have appeared within the past day. Whereas at first he said he was worried for his personal safety—particularly after a series of posters that accused one of Hartt’s tenants of covertly videotaping drug deals—his attitude as of this morning was more cavalier.
“If [Gillis] can’t stop, I don’t think the drug dealers of Toronto are dumb enough to fall for his crap,” he said.
Gillis, reached by phone yesterday afternoon, was evasive when questioned about the posters.
“I don’t really care what Reg is saying about me,” he said. “I’ve been in this business for 12 years. I’ve heard lots of his lies.”
Asked if he was denying that he was responsible for the anti-Hartt posters, Gillis said only, “It doesn’t matter what he’s saying, I did or didn’t. That doesn’t matter.”
As to the accusation that he’s trying to eliminate competition for postering turf, Gillis was dismissive.
“[Hartt's] accusation is that I want to control all the poster boards,” Gillis said. “I think, really, it’s the other way around.”
An odd footnote to this saga is the fact that Gillis lived in one of the hostel-like rooms in the Cineforum 20 years ago, when he first came to Toronto. By his account, he and Hartt were, at that time, friendly with one another. Gillis said the relationship soured only when he began postering professionally, in 2000. This latest fight is the crescendo of a feud that has been simmering for at least that long.
