When NOW moved from Church and Shuter to Spadina and Phoebe last fall, there was the usual period of adjustment and discovery as we settled into our new space.
We learned the elevator was a little temperamental. We found out where the good coffee shops were.
And we discovered the vault.
The vault was weird. The vault was cool. And, as it turned out, the vault belongs to Colin Geddes, who filled it with treasure back when he had an office in the building.
It starts with the posters, most of them rescued by Geddes from the junk pile at a College Street martial arts grindhouse called the Golden Princess in the early 90s. That theatre, by the way, was subsequently rehabilitated and relaunched as the Royal. Geddes and his wife, Katarina Gligorijevic, became its programmers in 2014.
“I took, like, five van-loads of movie posters and ephemera,” he says, “and there’s a lot of really rare items. I’ve got stuff they don’t even have currently in Hong Kong. I can probably safely boast that I’ve got one of the biggest privately held Hong Kong poster and lobby card collections, with images from around 1,500 films.”
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One of Colin Geddes’s prized possessions is his Andy Lau action figure.
When NOW photographed items from the collection earlier this month, Geddes proved particularly fond of an Andy Lau action figure from Fulltime Killer, a collection of lobby cards from John Woo’s Bullet In The Head and an iconic poster of Chow Yun-Fat in Woo’s 1992 masterpiece, Hard Boiled.
A few years after his initial find, he started salvaging film prints as well, and ultimately donated about 400 features to the University of Toronto in 2010. (“I’ve kept a number of the fun ones,” he admits.)
Tucked away on one shelf is a print of Allan King’s 1967 documentary Warrendale, salvaged from a massive 16mm film collection that used to belong to the Toronto Reference Library. Geddes and then-officemate Eric Veillette leapt on it when TPL cleared out its film archive in 2010 due to lack of space.
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Colin Geddes shows off his Hong Kong movie paraphernalia.
“Six thousand cans of film,” Veillette tells me in a separate interview. “I found a storage space in the Junction, and Colin, being Colin, managed to get 40 people to come out over two nights [to move it all]. We had to do it after hours – the library gave us one security guard who just sat there. They were so hands-off about the whole process.
“And I realized why: had I been working at the library as an archivist and found out it was giving away this huge collection to a bunch of dudes, I would have been outside picketing.”
In addition to the prints of Hollywood studio classics (and not so classics) that he screens at the Revue these days, Veillette discovered a raft of unexpected treasures.
There were envelopes of footage of 1950s Toronto, likely shot as background material for CFTO-TV. And there’s 40,000,000 Miles A Year, a film commissioned by the Toronto Transit Commission to argue for the Yonge subway line back in the late 40s.
“I was watching it in the office with Colin, and we were like, ‘This is incredible!'” he says, adding that he called the TTC archives to offer it to them. “They were like, ‘No, we have no record of that, you’re wrong.'” He’s digitizing it now, along with a trove of Toronto news footage shot sometime in the 50s.
Veillette has asked me not to reveal the location of his collection, but Geddes is fine with talking about the location of his own cache. The vault is pretty secure.
“It used to be for payroll back in the garment manufacturing days, and it is, like, a full steel door [with] another set of doors within. And honestly, if anyone got into it, I really don’t think they’d know what to do with what’s in there,” he laughs.
“It’s not like you can easily run away with a 50-pound 35mm film print.”
normw@nowtoronto.com | @normwilner
