Uncovering a colourful past - 4 December 2002

An Article from the Vancouver Sun

The Burr theatre on Columbia Street reveals a couple of secrets from its construction as a vaudeville house. Conservator Cheryle Harrison is delighted with the bright colours uncovered in the decorations originally applied to the walls and corbels of the theatre.

Theatre revealing its secrets

Early work on a $7-million restoration of New Westminster's 75-year-old Columbia Theatre

— now the Burr theatre — is uncovering some astonishing art beneath thick layers of paint

John Mackie

  Lost amidst the hubbub of the Orpheum's 75th anniversary cel­ebration was news that another local theatre recently had its 75th birthday.

New Westminster's Raymond Burr Performing
 Arts Centre hides a couple of secrets from its
    early days as a vaudeville house.

  The Columbia Theatre in New Westminster turned 75 on Nov 3. Now known as the Burr theatre, after New Westminster native Raymond Burr, the the­atre is in the early stages of a proposed $7-million restoration to return it to its former glory.

  The first stage of the restora­tion is beginning to take shape on the walls of the theatre. Buried under six layers of paint, drywall and plaster, conservator Cheryle Harrison is painstak­ingly uncovering a mural straight out of The Arabian Nights.

  The mural depicts a rolling landscape of trees and classical buildings, alongside a golden shield, crown and scroll. Wind­ing its way up a beam is a faux-painting of a trellis with wild roses and wisteria; the ceiling is a deep blue night sky, complete with sparkling silver leaf stars.

  The three-by-six-metre sec­tion uncovered so far points to the Columbia's origins, when it was one of Canada's first "atmospheric" theatres.

  In atmospheric theatres, the auditorium was painted in a fan­tasy theme, giving theatre-goers the feeling they were entering an enchanted never-never-land.

  "An atmospheric theatre is one that visually transports you to another place and time," said the theatre's historian, Jim Wolf. "It was the vogue at the time.

  "In the case of the Columbia, it was the fantasy of a Moorish garden. You stepped into a walled garden city, and walked down an old street in a Moorish town."

  The Columbia was the centerpiece of New West's theatre row when it opened in 1927. Like the Orpheum, it was a combination vaudeville/movie palace.

Theatre manager Billy Long stands
beside one of the huge fir pillars that
support the floor of the building over
the ravine it was sited on.

  The opening show featured a vignette from actors Francis & Hubert, dancing from Jeane Gauld, music from AV Thomas and His Columbians, and the "photoplay" Swim Girl Swim with Bebe Daniels.

  But time hasn't been kind to the theatre. The 1927 mural was probably covered up in the 1930s, the auditorium was split into a dual cinema in 1976, and the building was converted to a Fraternal Order of Eagles Hall in 1987.

In recent years the Eagles operated a bar in the upstairs cinema, while the lower cinema hosted events like Extreme Canadian Championship Wrestling.

  The city of New Westminster purchased the theatre in Sept., 2000. The bar is still upstairs, but the downstairs is now an extremely successful live theatre — 30,000 people have seen plays there in the last two years. (The next production is Mother Goose, from Dec. 11 to Jan. 4.)

  If funding is successful, Har­rison feels she could probably have the whole mural uncov­ered in a couple of years. It took about 400 hours to do the cur-rent section, which had to be uncovered layer by layer - each type of paint is taken off with a different solution.

  When she started working on the mural, she knew what it looked like from an old black and white photograph, but had no idea about the colour scheme.

  That changed about a month ago, when Wolf discovered a treasury of architectural draw­ings in the former home of the muralist, John Girvan. Among the find were the original colour drawings for the interior of the Columbia.

  Locating the Girvan collection involved detective work worthy of Perry Mason. A man named Peter McInnis showed up at a Burr theatre open house, and told someone his grandfather William had worked on the the­atre opening.

  "William McInnis remem­bered it quite well, because somebody had put their foot through the ceiling during the decoration and he had to madly work to fix the hole in the ceiling prior to the opening," Wolf said with a laugh.

A copy of a design drawing for the Columbia Theatre's original 1927 interior decoration.

  McInnis was a Scot who spe­cialized in applying gold leaf — he had done the extensive gold leaf in the Titanic's ballrooms. He was actually booked on the Titanic, but bowed out at the last minute when there was a death in his wife's family.

  "They missed their own funer­al by going to another funeral," said Wolf. "They caught another boat and ended up in New West­minster."

  In 1923, another Scottish artist, John Girvan, arrived in Vancou­ver. Girvan specialized in murals (he did a legendary mural series for the old Province building) and theatres, and convinced Famous Players to go with the atmos­pheric design at the Columbia.

The metal sign from the firm that
originally designed the Columbia Theatre.

  A story in Canadian Paint and Varnish magazine claimed that Girvan used 1000 pounds of paint and 100 books of metal leaf in the interior decoration.

  Peter McInnis remembered meeting Girvan's son at an open house several years ago in Burnaby or Vancouver, and Wolf start­ed scouring old directories trying to locate the house. When he finally found it, he looked up the address in a city directory and called the current owner, out of the blue.

  "I said `Do you know anything about Girvan [Studios]? This woman said `Not only do I know about Girvan, I have their entire studio collection in the basement,"' said Wolf.

  He went to see it the next day — 75 years to the day after the Columbia Theatre opened.

  The Girvan Studios collection isn't the only discovery in the Burr theatre project. Underneath the auditorium is an old ravine — the building actually sits on piles. Before it was covered by the the­atre in 1927, people had been throwing their garbage into the ravine for decades. All sorts of relics have been found, including pottery and remnants of the orig­inal theatre facade.

  "We haven't even done a dig yet, this is all just lying on the surface down there," said Wolf.

  "It's quite incredible. Inside it's a historic garbage dump of New Westminster going back to the 1860s."

Ex-filmmaker for Nazis unrepentant at 100

THE VANCOUVER SUN, FRIDAY, August 23, 2002

Leni Riefenstahl is still working at craft

By DAVID RISING

   BERLIN — The films she made for Adolf Hitler brought her international attention, then destroyed her postwar directorial career. But as she turned 100 on Thursday, it is still those movies that Leni Riefenstahl thinks of most proudly.

   Once dubbed a "Nazi pin-up girl" by The Saturday Evening Post, Riefenstahl remains unrepentant about her work for Hitler, saying her films portraying Nazi Germany were about art, not propaganda or ideology.

   Speaking to The Associated Press by telephone from her home near Munich, she dismissed the notion, prevalent in Germany, that she should apologize for helping to glorify Hitler and the Nazi party. Instead, she emphasized the prizes she received for them.

   "I don't know what I should apologize for," Riefenstahl said. "I cannot apologize, for example, for having made the film Triumph of the Will. It won the top prize. All my films won the top prize."

   In Triumph of the Will, a critically acclaimed documentary, Riefenstahl employed a crew of 120 with 40 cameras to put together mesmerizing montages of goose-stepping soldiers in torchlight parades, endless rows of swastikas, and close-ups of Hitler and other Nazi leaders speaking to a dazzled German public.

   Riefenstahl admits it was used to sell National Socialism, but says that was not her intent.

   "One can use it for propaganda, but in and of itself it is no propaganda film — it has absolutely no commentary. . . . There is not one single anti-Semitic word in my film," she said.

   One of Riefenstahl's biographers, Rainer Rother, called her view simplistic.

   "I think she might not have been an anti-Semitic woman, but she still was aware of what was going on," said Rother, whose book Leni Riefenstahl: The Seduction of Talent is being released in English this month to coincide with her birthday.

   "National Socialism means at least you don't say no to anti-Semitism — that's something she must have known at the time and calculated."

   Despite her age and poor health due to injuries sustained in accidents — including a helicopter crash in Sudan in 2000 — Riefenstahl is still working and physically active — diving for three weeks in March in the Maldives.

   She is also about to release her first film in nearly half a century. A 45-minute documentary cut from footage shot during dives in the Indian Ocean between 1974 and 2000, Impressions under Water will be broadcast on German television later this month in honour of her birth-day.

   So powerful were the images in Triumph of the Will and her documentary of the 1936 Berlin Olympics, Olympia, that Riefenstahl was unable to escape their stigma after the war. She turned to still photography, but still faced criticism that she promoted a Nazi esthetic of the Uebermensch, or superman, in particular in her photos of sculpted African tribesmen.

   Born Helene Bertha Amalie Riefenstahl in Berlin in 1902, Riefenstahl was a dancer until she sustained a knee injury. In 1926, she debuted as an actress in the derring-do movie The Sacred Mountain — one of director Arnold Fanck's many alpine films emphasizing athleticism.

   After several more movies, she made her directorial debut in 1932 with The Blue Light, in which she also starred. While her documentaries have won the most praise, it is this metaphorical film that is Riefenstahl's favourite.

   "The action, the story and also the reproduction of the film make it particularly beautiful and picturesque," she said.

   The same year that The Blue Light was released, Riefenstahl heard Hitler speak at a Berlin rally and offered her services as a filmmaker. "He had everyone under a spell," she later said.

   She provided the Nazis with a medium that transcended borders, Rother said.

   "She never was a true believer, but she had a unique opportunity. No one else at that time could command such a lot of cameramen and the support of the party and state for the rallies. She used, in a way, the system for a work of art but also served the ideology. There's no doubt the party rally films are carefully constructed to support the party message."

Early movie artifact comes to light

Stained glass sign for the Kinemacolor Theatre was found in ex-restaurant site

 

A circa-1913 stained glass window that was missing for decades is now in the
possession of a dealer in architectural antiques

By JOHN MACKIE

Vancouver Sun

   A unique artifact from the dawn of the movie age has sur­faced at a Vancouver antique store — a stained glass sign for the Kinemacolor Theatre.

Kinemacolor was a primitive colour film process that was all the rage in Europe just before the First World War.

   Its North American debut was at Madison Square Garden in New York in 1909, and on Feb. 24, 1913, Canada's first Kinemacolor Theatre opened at 603 Granville, at Dunsmuir.

   But it failed to ignite Vancou­ver's masses, and by 1914, the the­atre name had been changed to the Colonial. The Colonial lasted until 1972, when it was torn down to make way for the Pacific Cen­tre Mall/Block 42 development downtown.

   The kinemacolor process died out by 1920, a victim of a patent lawsuit in England and the inven­tion of technicolor in 1917. Most kinemacolor films have been lost, and any kinemacolor memorabil­ia is extremely rare.

   The Kinemacolor Theatre stained glass was recently pur­chased by Eric Cohen of Archi­tectural Antiques.

   It had been hanging on the wall at the former Keg restaurant location at Thurlow and Alberni after mysteriously vanishing from the Colonial in 1972.

   Theatre legend Hugh Pickett said the huge semi-circular stained glass sign (which is 13 feet wide and seven feet high) was originally installed over the entrance to the old theatre.

   "I can remember it very well, because when the theatre was sold, they promised me four pieces of stained glass," Pickett said.

   "The night before it was to be taken out, somebody went in there and took it."

   Two oval stained glass sky-lights featuring the kinemacolor torch logo also turned up at the old Keg. Cohen purchased them as well, and is selling them for $15,000 for the pair. He hasn't put a price tag on the Kinemacolor Theatre sign.

   How they wound up at the Keg is a mystery. Retired architect Bill Dunn helped design the Keg on Thurlow in 1977. He said most of the furnishings, which included elaborate oak bookshelves and oak wall panels, cam' from a 19th-century apothecary (drug-store) in Minneapolis and were purchased at auction in Los Angeles.

   Dunn thinks the stained glass came from the collection of then landlord John Adams, but has no idea how Adams obtained it. He thinks the restaurant furnishings may have cost about $100,000 in 1977.

   The Keg moved to a bigger location across the street last fall, but most of the furnishings were left behind. A carpenter hap­pened by when a demolition crew was ripping out the oak walls and some stained glass, which was going to b: thrown out.

   He asked if he could have it, and contacted Cohen, who bought a couple of stained-glass windows and a garage filled with century-old oak panels

Cohen then went down to the old Keg to poke around He spotted the Kinemacolor Theatre sign, bought it, and assembled a crew of six to take it down off the wall (he estimates it weighs 600 to 700 pounds.)

   "It was stuck right up o the top of the ceiling," he said. I walked to the top of a 17 foot ladder, and I was standing knocking a metal pin out to release the window."

   The Kinemacolor sign is one of the few remnants of Vancouver's silent movie era, when theatres had colourful name like the Cameraphone, the Bijou and the Maple Leaf. A couple old the­atres still remain from the era, like the Pantages on Hastings street and the Edison now the Paramount in New Westminster, but finding an original sign is nothing short of miraculous.

   In fact, English kinemacolor expert Luke McKerna has nev­er heard of a kinemacolor stained glass sign. He thinks it may have been commissioned by the the­atre owner, who probably thought that having the only colour movies in town would be a gold mine.

   Kinemacolor was invented by English cinematographer George Albert Smith, and marketed by American entrepreneur Charles Urban. Film was run through a projector at 32 frames per sec­ond, twice the normal speed, and then filtered through red and green coloured lenses to produce "the world's wonders in nature's colours."

   Vancouver's Kinemacolor The­atre was located in the Van Horne building, which was built in 1889. It opened with a program of Wild Birds of Asia, Doctor's Blind Child, The Note in a Shirt, Two of a Kind, and Niagara Falls, which a Vancouver World writer dubbed "the finest reel ever put on a screen." A nine-piece orchestra accompanied the short films, and a baritone named George C. Temple "delighted the audience with some of the old songs." Later, the theatre added a $10,000 organ to accompany the silent movies.

   Pickett has fond memories of the theatre when it was called the Colonial. He got his first job there in 1929.

   "I'll tell you something tragic," says Pickett, who turns 88 in a few weeks. "My first job there, I had to go into a room in the basement of the building, which had been condemned by the fire department because it was full of paper. All the old three sheets [movie posters], one sheets, 24 sheets, stills, everything was in that room. I had to take it out in barrels and take it out into the lane and burn it.

   "Can you imagine what it would be worth today? A one sheet of Marlene Dietrich in a picture that she made early on in her career sold for $300,000 at Parke Burnett [gallery] in New York. I had no interest in them then. Good God, now I've had had them all. It was the whole history of the Colonial theatre. It took about three weeks to burn it all"

­   The Kinemacolor Theatre sign isn't the only piece of historic stained glass Cohen has for sale. When Mark James renovated the 1913 Lotus Hotel, he sold Archi­tectural Antiques several finely detailed pieces of stained glass. The old stained glass window from the Lotus bar, for example, is now for sale for $5,500.

   Cohen is now trying to piece together the oak bookcase from the Minneapolis apothecary, which had been disassembled. The centrepiece of the bookcase features carved griffins, mythical beasts that look like lions.

   Cohen might have 30 feet of bookcase by the time he's finished.