Obituaries: Virginia Grey, Dies at 87

VIRGINIA GREY

Actress longed for major role that never came

   Virginia Grey, who has died aged 87, spent a career before the cameras hoping for a role that would catapult her to international stardom; but she never showed the spark which launched her contemporaries Ruth Hussey and Laraine Day, and had to content herself with second lead ingenues.

   In more than 100 films she had supporting roles to such stars as Joan Crawford, Betty Grable, Susan Hayward, and even the Marx Brothers (in The Big Store, 1941). Off screen she attracted publicity by dating Clark Gable; she gave him a dachshund. But although she waited patiently for his divorce from Rhea Langham to come through, Gable married Carole Lombard instead. Heartbroken, Virginia Grey vowed never to let herself become too close to a man again and, although George Raft became a figure in her life she never married. Pressed to talk about her affair with Gable in 2003, she replied simply: "I adored him; I always will."

   Virginia Grey was born in Hollywood on. March 22,1917 the daughter of Ray Grey, an original Keystone Cop who became Universal Studio's comedy films director; among her babysitters was the actress Gloria Swanson. After Ray's death in 1925, Virginia's mother became a film cutter at the studio.

   When her mother heard that the studio was planning to remake Uncle Tom's Cabin in 1927, she encouraged young Virginia to do a screen test, which won her the role of Little Eva. Parts followed in Heart to Heart, with Mary Astor (1927); Jazz Mad, with Marian Nixon and George Lewis (1928); and The Michigan Kid (1928).

Daily Telegraph

Vancouver Sun - 1 December 2003

Mary Jolivet holds a photo of her late aunt, Rita Jolivet, who was a silent-screen star in the 1910s and '20s. She is looking for copies of movies featuring her aunt.

Family searches for a star

CONNECTIONS: A sensation on and off the silent screen, Rita Jolivet's descendants seek traces of her movies

BY JOHN MACKIE

VANCOUVER SUN

            Rita Jolivet's name has long 'shed from the public consciousness. But around the First World War, she was big news.

            Jolivet was a silent screen siren who starred in at least 18 Movies, including Cecil B. DeMille's The Unafraid. The same year it came out, she booked passage on the Lusitania, which was torpedoed by a German submarine May 7, 1915 and sank, killing 1,195 of the 1,959 people on board.

            Jolivet was among the survivors, and lived to marry and divorce an Italian count and then wed the wealthy scion of a Scottish family in the shipping industry.

            Rita and her husband lived in castles in Scotland and England, and also had residences in Paris and Monte Carlo, where she died in 1972 after lying about her age in a hospital and being given too much anaesthetic.

            Rita's brother Alfred moved to Vancouver in 1937, and the Canadian branch of the family last saw her during the Second World War. But her great-niece, Mary Jolivet of Vancouver, is very much intrigued by Rita's story, and has been searching high and low for any existing copies of her movies.

            You can find listings for them all over the Internet, but the only one she has been able to locate is The Unafraid, which is in the Cecil B. DeMille archives in Provo, Utah. But she has been unable to get the archives to make her a video copy of the film.

            Mary Jolivet read a Vancouver Sun story about the Association of Moving Image Archivists convention last week at the Hotel Vancouver, and wondered if any-one there knew of any existing Rita Jolivet movies.

            Unfortunately, AMIA's Laura Rooney says there is no master list of movies that still exist, although the AMIA, the Library of Congress and Rutgers University are working on one.

            Dennis Duffy of the Royal B.C. Museum in Victoria said it is anyone's guess whether the movies still exist, because they were made on nitrate film,

which often decomposes over time.

            Nitrate film also tended to catch fire when being shown: The projection booths in old movie theatres like the Orpheum were made like fireproof vaults, so that the fire would be contained in the booth and not spread to the theatre auditorium. Projectionists also had pails of sand to throw on the film when it caught fire, because mere water wouldn't put it out.

            Duffy said it's not surprising the DeMille archives won't make a copy of its 1915 film.

            "That's the nature of the archival business," he said. "Archives don't operate as lending libraries. They are unable to lend out their materials — there's rights issues and control and preservation issues.

            "We're in the same boat. If you want to see our collection of films about British Columbia, you've got to come to Victoria."

            In any event, Rita Jolivet sounds like a fascinating character.

            She was born in Paris in 1890, but spent much of her childhood in London.

            "The family was what they call a 'trans-manche' family, a trans' channel. family," explained Lawrence Jolivet, Rita's 85-year-old nephew and Mary's father, who lives in Victoria.

            "It means that you are equally at home in Paris and London. My grandfather was a wine merchant. He used Paris as a centre to purchase wine, and he had a house in London in which he sold it.

            "In those days you didn't have a shop, you used the dinner table of your house and entertained your customers.

            "His customers were the owners of large country houses in England, where they usually bought 2,000 or 3,000 cases of what they called claret, red Bordeaux or burgundy. These people, in their country houses, laid it down for their children. The old saying was that you never bought wine for yourself, you bought it for your children. Because you were drinking your father's wine.

            "In those days, [aristocrats] would have a house party of 25 people. Everyone drank like a fish, and they were there for a week. Each of the men polished off a bottle a night, so they'd go through a case of wine a night. There was a lot of volume of

Actress survives last-minute trip on doomed ship Lusitania

booze drunk in those days."

            The Jolivet family was quite artistic: Rita became an actress, and her sister Ines was a concert violinist. Alfred was the youngest, and became a stockbroker.

            "My father went through school in France, but he became very English," said Lawrence Jolivet. "My aunt became very continental and French, and so they didn't get on.

            "My father thought she was far too much of a self-aggrandizer. He thought she was far too flighty."

            Flighty or not, Rita was a hit on Broad-way when she made her debut in Kismet in 1911. She also became friends with theatre impresario Charles Frohman, a giant of the time. She made her screen debut in 1914 in the movie Fata Morgana.

            In May 1915, she booked a last-minute ticket on the Lusitania, apparently in order to see her brother before he was sent off to the front in the First World War. Frohman was also on board, along with her sister's husband George Vernon.

            According to a Lusitania Internet site, Rita was in her cabin on May 7 when a German torpedo hit the ship. She ran up on deck, where she put on a lifebelt and huddled with Vernon, Frohman and the ship's captain, Alick Scott.

            Frohman remained calm and soothed her nerves. Just before the ship lurched and sank, he quoted from James Barrie's Peter Pan: "Why fear death? It is the most beautiful adventure in life." It would become one of the disaster's most famous lines.

            The ship went down, and so did Rita. But she bobbed to the surface and clung to the side of a collapsible boat until she was rescued by the S.S. Westborough. But Frohman and Vernon both drowned. Her sister Ines was so distraught over the loss of her husband, she shot and killed herself later that year.

            Rita would re-enact her Lusitania experience in the movie Lest We Forget in 1918, but it bombed at the box office.

            On the personal side, Rita married the Italian Count Guiseppe de Cippico in 1916, but divorced him and married James Bryce Allan, of the Allan shipping line. Allan's mother was also a blue-blood, from the Coates cotton family.

            "He was a very meek, mild, quiet Scot, although he was extremely wealthy,' Lawrence Jolivet said

            "He was bowled over by Rita, who was very international and French, emotive and whatnot. The poor fellow didn't know what he was doing.

            "She had to live in a castle, she couldn't live in a house, so he bought her a huge place in Scotland called Ballikinrain Castle. It had 50 bedrooms and that sort of thing. You were piped into the dining room every night by a piper. They had 25 inside servants and 25 outside. There was a curling rink and 4,000 acres of shooting [land]. The usual Scottish-laird type of layout."

            Rita's last few films have French titles and were presumably made in Europe. The last one was Le Marchand de Bonheur in 1926. After that, she devoted most of her time to running the castle.

            "She was very amusing," said Lawrence. "But everything was a crisis. In Scotland at Christmas, oh, the organization that had to go on. This had to be done, that had to be done. And she insisted on having a French chef. To pull a French chef out of the south of France and stick him in a place in the depths of Scotland ... she went through chefs about one a fortnight."

            Following "the slump" in the 1930s, Rita and her husband downsized to Ince Castle, a smaller estate in Plymouth, England.

            "It was more modest, but was still a huge place," Lawrence said. "It was a square house with a turret in each corner of the square, and an internal courtyard. The original owner was supposed to have kept a different wife in each corner, that was the rumour. It was a very nice place — I think it had 15 bedrooms."

            During the Second World War, Rita and Allan moved to New York to look after the family interests. This was the last time Lawrence saw them in person, although he stayed in Rita's rent-controlled flat in Paris several times after-wards.

            "She kept a flat in Paris which she never used," he said. "She was very French, very parsimonious. It was opposite the Grand Palais on the Rue Franklin Roosevelt."

            Rita's husband died in Monaco in 1967.

            "He died very tragically," said Lawrence. "He was trying to start a car in Monte, and he poured some gas down the carburetor and the thing backfired, the petrol can caught alight and he went up in flames, like a monk."

            Rita died five years later at the age of 82, also in Monte Carlo.

            "She died because she lied about her age," Mary Jolivet said.

            "Being the actress that she was, she told them she was 20 years younger than she actually was. I think they gave her too much anaesthetic, and that killed her."

            Rita and her husband had no children. All Mary Jolivet has of her aunt are some old photos and some old newspaper clippings; she would love to find an old film that could give her some sense of what she was like.

            "I'm looking purely for sentimental reasons," she said. "She certainly was an interesting character."

jmackie@png.canwest.com 605-2126

TV actor Buddy Ebsen of Beverly Hillbillies dies at 95

   OBITUARY/LOS ANGELES — Buddy Ebsen, the loose-limbed Broadway dancer who achieved

stardom and riches in the television series The Beverly Hillbillies and Barnaby Jones, has died, a hospital official said Monday. He was 95.

   Ebsen died early Sunday at Torrance Memorial Medical Center in Torrance, Calif., said Pam Hope, an administrative nursing supervisor.

   Ebsen and his sister, Vilma, danced through Broadway shows and MGM musicals of the 1930s. When she retired, Ebsen continued on his own, dancing with Shirley Temple and turning dramatic actor.

   Except for an allergy to aluminum paint, he would have been one of the Yellow Brick Road quartet in the classic The Wizard of Oz. But after 10 days of filming, Ebsen, playing the Tin Man, fell ill because of the aluminum makeup on his skin and was replaced by jack Haley.

   Television brought Ebsen's amiable personality to the home screen, first as Fess Parker's sidekick in Davy Crockett.

   As Jed Clampett, the easygoing head of a newly rich Ozark family plunked down in snooty Beverly Hills, Ebsen became a North American favourite. While scorned by most critics, The Beverly Hillbillies attracted as many as 60 million viewers on CBS from 1962 to 1971.

   "As I recall, the only good notice was in the Saturday Review," Ebsen once said. "The critic said the show possessed social comment combined with a high Nielsen, an almost impossible achievement in these days. I kind of liked that."

   The show was still earning good ratings when it was cancelled by CBS because advertisers shunned a series that attracted primarily a rural audience.

   Ebsen returned to series TV in 1973 as Barnaby Jones, a private investigator forced out of retirement to solve the murder of his son Hal, who had taken over the business.

   Barnaby Jones also drew critical blasts. But Ebsen's folksy manner and a warm relationship with his daughter-in-law, played by Lee Meriwether, made the series a success.

   Ebsen, who was six foot three, jerked sodas until he landed a chorus job in the 1928 Whoopee, starring Eddie Cantor. The dancer sent for his sister Vilma and they, formed a dancing team that played vaudeville, supper clubs and shows such as Flying Colors and Ziegfeld Follies.

   A screen test led to an MGM contract for the dance team, and they were a hit in Broadway Melody of 1936.

   Buddy's style was far removed from that of the reigning dance king of films, Fred A e. The angular Ebsen moved with a smooth, sliding shuffle, his arms gyrating like a wind-blown scarecrow. He made a charming partner with the tiny Shirley Temple in Captain January.

   His other films of the 1930s included Banjo on My Knee, Four Girls in White, Girl of the Golden West (Jeanette MacDonald-Nelson Eddy) and My Lucky Star (Sonja Henie). His first dramatic role was in Yellow jack with Robert Montgomery. Ebsen's later films included Attack, Breakfast at Tiffany's, The Interns, Mail Order Bride, The One and Only Genuine Original Family Band. In 1993, he made a cameo appearance as Barnaby Jones in the film version of The Beverly Hillbillies.

--- ASSOCIATED PRESS

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.

Ghosts of Mars Review - 24 August 2001

Carpenter quickly cuts off what's good about Ghosts

After Pam Grier loses her head in a promising opening scene of butchy banter, Ghosts of Mars just gets worse

GHOSTS OF MARS

James "Desolation" Williams (Ice Cube, left) and Jericho 

(Jason Statham) battle evil Martian ghosts.

Starring Natasha Henstridge, Ice Cube, Jason Statham, Pam Grier, Clea Duvall and Joanna Cassidy.
18A. 98 min.

By KATHERINE MONK

  At one point in John Carpenter's latest schlock attack, Ghosts of Mars, the butt-kicking cop played by Natasha Henstridge makes it to safety after a 20-minute battle sequence with blood-thirsty assailants that nearly leaves her headless.

  She has a chance at making it back home in one piece, but instead of hopping on the next ship back to Earth, she tells the remnants of her crew that they have to go back to the battle zone. "We have to," she says in all earnestness. "This is about dominion."

  In other words, this burnt-orange waste dump of a planet teeming with severed heads and monsters pulled from the park­ing lot of a Marilyn Manson con­cert is a place nice enough to call home.

  Personally, I can think of a lot of things more appealing than living in a concrete bunker on the red, red sands of home — where psychotic bludgeoners and body-pierced ghouls roam.

  Then again, this movie is not aimed at me. I have no idea just who Carpenter was trying to reach with this dreary mess of cartoon violence, lame lines and cosmetics abuse, except perhaps the handful of genuine psy­chotics who feel they, too, have been possessed by Martians — but there's little doubt that even the most hardcore Carpenter fan will find Ghosts of Mars a com­plete disappointment.

  The film had promise. Opening with a scene of butchy banter between team leader Braddock (Pam Grier) and Lieutenant Melanie Ballard (Henstridge), I thought I was about to experi­ence another sci-fi kitsch fest in the spirit of Paul Verhoeven's satirical Starship Troopers. No sooner do we arrive at our desti­nation of a small Martian mining colony, however, than we lose Grier, our tough-talking team leader.

  Poof. Gone. Decapitated just like that.

  Things just get worse from there. In one pathetic sequence, we go from Henstridge telling her macho sergeant that "I might sleep with you if you were the last man on Earth ... and we aren't even on Earth," to necking with him in a storage room five min­utes later.

  If that weren't had enough, the only two people who do have any chemistry -Henstridge and Ice Cube, who plays a dangerous criminal named Desolation Williams (aieee! scary!) — save each others' lives several times over, but don't so much as kiss.

  No logic. No motivation. Bad special effects and little more than a thread of a script, Ghosts of Mars makes the old Star Trek look like Blade Runner.

So I guess in the big picture, the premature decapitation sort of fits the movie perfectly. A loose collage of moronic dia­logue, screaming fits as an excuse for acting, and blurry shots of blood spurting from sev­ered limbs, nothing quite sums up the experience of seeing the mindless movie called Ghosts of Mars like someone losing their head in the first few frames.

  Next time, Mr. Carpenter says "cut" — I hope he doesn't mean it literally.

Vancouver Sun Movie Critic

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