It’s a smell that’s impossible to forget, as anyone who set foot in the Metro Theatre in the past 25 years could tell you. A sensitive nose will discern the cigarette smoke that clings to the carpets long after smoking was banned. Then there’s the harsher note of cleaning supplies undercut by the fainter odour from the concession area’s trusty hot dog steamer. And then there are the scents emitted by the Bloor West landmark’s clientele, customers who don’t have the means or privacy to access XXX entertainment anywhere else.
This pungent panoply is a large part of what makes the Metro feel like the saddest place in town. An anomalous sight in an otherwise ordinary strip of Koreatown, it’s a relic of porn’s post–Deep Throat/pre-VCR age. Any other evidence of this era that you might have found in Toronto was scrubbed away when Yonge Street was made safe for the arrival of the Eaton Centre in the 1970s. Since then, the Metro really has been one of a kind, though not in a good way.
Originally opened in 1939, the Metro existed for decades as one of the city’s hundreds of neighbourhood theatres before becoming an adult movie and burlesque palace in 1978. Shifting into a daily program of dirty movies by the mid-’80s, the two-screen theatre has steadily grown grimier while remaining otherwise unchanged.
During that same quarter-century, the Metro’s notoriety has attracted a more adventurous set of programmers keen to add a certain grindhouse authenticity to their events. An early incarnation of Colin Geddes’ Kung Fu Fridays series lured Quentin Tarantino to a screening in the mid-’90s. There were other forays by cult-cinema freaks into the building over the years, but all had to contend with viewers’ understandable reluctance to come into contact with any of the surfaces.
However, an effort to draw a new audience to the Metro may make that smell a part of the past. Later this month, the Studio Film Group—the same team behind the year-old Projection Booth in the east end—will begin evening screenings of arthouse and other adult-but-not-adult-oriented fare. Renovations to the theatre include fresh paint in the interior, new carpets, and reupholstered seats. The hot dog machine will also disappear pending a redesign of the concession area, though Ron Jeremy fans will be relieved to know the lobby display of golden-age-of-porn memorabilia may stay.
The Studio Film Group’s Jonathan Hlibka describes the Metro’s clean-up job and new programming direction as a “very ambitious endeavour,” one that his company is financing in cooperation with the family that has long owned the Metro. It’s also a surprising development for the building, which was put up for sale 10 years ago but has yet to find a buyer willing to meet the $3.59-million asking price.
The fact that the Metro will still feature porn screenings in the daytime means that this is not exactly a brave new dawn. But Hlibka believes that prospective patrons may be ready to embrace the Metro’s “sleaze appeal” and have some fun with it, provided that they feel the space has been sanitized for their protection.
Hlibka’s proud to say that it has. What’s more, he hopes that the new hygiene regimen will be enough to maintain a Maginot Line between the daytime smut and the evening’s more sophisticated programming. The porn may someday be phased out of the Metro entirely should the new direction prove to be viable.
The depressing possibility is that as much as the theatre’s clientele has dwindled over the years, it might still be a struggle to replace them with a steady stream of mainstream moviegoers. However anachronistic it might seem to screen porn in a movie theatre when nearly every conceivable variety of smut is only a few mouse clicks away, the Metro gives its current clientele something they are apparently unable to get anywhere else (it’s one of the few porn theatres left in Canada). In that respect, it has a clarity of purpose that operators of more respectable moviehouses may envy, what with the continued erosion of attendance across the board.
On the other hand, many Torontonians have such a passion for film-going they’ll do anything to preserve the few vintage movie palaces that we have left. The very fact of their survival here—whether as a freshly renovated festival homebase like the Bloor Hot Docs Cinema, a not-for-profit community-run theatre like the Revue, or even as an event space like the Eglinton Grand—can seem miraculous given how completely they’ve vanished from other cities. Nothing can entirely strip away the old-school glamour we associate with these places, which is why it’ll be exciting to learn what an experience in the Metro will be like now that it doesn’t smell like decades of despair…or, for that matter, a few seconds of pleasure.
Metro Theatre: The History
1939: Metro Theatre opens.
1978: Begins its life as an adult movie and burlesque palace.
Mid-’80s: Daily schedule of XXX films.
1996–’98: Colin Geddes hosts monthly kung-fu screenings (Quentin Tarantino makes an appearance).
2001: Hidden Cameras play a gig at the Metro.
2002: Owner Karim Hirji puts the Metro up for sale.
2009: Facade gets much-blogged-about repair job.
2012: Studio Film Group renovate the interior in order to begin screening arthouse fare.
