Big picture thinker: William Vince

Kevin Chong | Image: Vancouver Sun | Published: August 01, 2008

Every Saturday night on a desolate downtown stretch of Vancouver’s Main Street, District 319 casts a ray of light and movie magic. The newly refurbished movie house, just a few rundown, gated storefronts away from the itinerant souls huddled around the Carnegie Community Centre at Hastings Street, still features the Chinese lettering of the Golden Harvest movie theatre – the building’s previous incarnation – on its facade. Its backlit awning glows an ambient rosy red. Through the front windows, where movie posters might generally be displayed, a film can be seen playing on two screens tucked inside the lobby. Outside, speakers broadcast the film’s audio, and passersby stop to watch and listen.

“Sometimes we just play music out there. Or we’ll put the news on,” said film producer and District 319’s owner William Vince back in the spring. Vince’s production company, Infinity Features, has offices in the theatre and the building next door at 323 Main Street.

The locale – and the complimentary screenings – are unexpected, perhaps, for one of North America’s most successful independent film studios. But Vince was never a fan of the obvious. “It’s just to make the area feel alive again. It frustrates me that there’s no pride in the area,” he noted, adding that his theatre still had no bars on its windows. “Not having bars is a statement. We’re saying, ‘You can go bust our windows if you want and break in. But we’ll still be here.’ ”

I spoke with Vince in April – two months before he died of cancer, on June 21, at age 44. He didn’t mention the disease, which he’d been fighting for a year and a half, in our conversation, and there was no misty-eyed, valedictory tone in the way he talked about past triumphs. Rather, he continually spoke about the future – the next big project, this up-and-coming neighbourhood and the yet-to-be-tapped Canadian talent in the film industry.

For two decades, the movie maverick avoided typecasting by producing and financing more than $500-million worth of feature films that run the stylistic gamut, from the broad Ryan Reynolds crowd-pleaser Just Friends to The Snow Walker, an adaptation of

a Farley Mowat adventure novel, to Saved, a satire starring Mandy Moore and Jena Malone that generated controversy in the U.S. with its portrayal of Christian teens. Along the way, Vince nabbed an Oscar nomination for best picture with his most successful, both financially and critically, project to date: 2005’s Capote. (The dramatization of Truman Capote’s writing of the true-crime story In Cold Blood also earned Philip Seymour Hoffman, the film’s star, an Oscar for best actor.) As for Infinity’s most recent project, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, it’s now back on track after the death of the film’s star, Heath Ledger, in January. Ultimately, that film will be a tribute to two men gone too soon.
“Everyone told me not to do Capote, not to do Saved,” Vince said when we talked about his company’s most recent successes. “The movies I do aren’t conventional.” Ian Caddell, editor of the B.C.-based film magazine Reel West, agrees. “Vince was definitely a risk taker,” says Caddell. “His strength as a businessman and producer was in being someone who believed in his instincts and stuck with them. That’s what has made him one of the more important people on the Canadian scene.”

“Bill changed cinema in Western Canada,” adds Tony Pantages, an actor and filmmaker who knew Vince from high school. “He allowed us to be world-recognized, instead of just regional players.”
Vince’s appetite for risk was what took him to the Downtown Eastside, with the bright lights of District 319 (originally named Cinema 319) paying homage to the area’s not-so-distant past. For the better part of the previous century, the Downtown Eastside was the city’s main entertainment and shopping district, anchored around the Woodward’s building, Smilin’ Buddha Cabaret and Pantages Theatre (which has been renamed several times since it was built in 1908). But as the city’s downtown core shifted westward, the dynamic, neon-lit concerns that filled the street with families gave way to pawnshops, dive bars and boarded-up entrances. It was midway through this transition that the Golden Harvest opened in 1973 on the edge of a friendlier, livelier version of today’s Chinatown.

Living with my grandmother as a 12-year-old in the summer of 1987, I remember snuggling down in the theatre’s dusky interior to savour John Woo’s operatic and bloody crime drama A Better Tomorrow. Though the neighbourhood still had an edge, there wasn’t enough grit back then to keep a family from walking there at night. But the steady diffusion of the local Chinese population, from Chinatown to other parts of the city and its suburbs, helped bring about the theatre’s closing in 1994, contributing to the area’s decline. A dispute between the theatre’s co-owners in Hong Kong and Canada subsequently left the building rundown and almost unsalvageable. In fact, when Vince first inquired about purchasing the theatre, the realtor insisted it was a teardown and tried to prevent him from stepping inside. And when Vince and Pete Valleau, the Infinity project manager who would eventually oversee District 319’s restoration, gained access, they saw what resembled the set of a post-apocalyptic zombie flick. “There was mould on the front of the building, paint was peeling outside, the roof had been leaking,” says Valleau. “Upstairs, light was coming into the manager’s office; grass and mushrooms were growing on the floor.”

Undeterred, Vince bought the property for $280,000 in 2004, then worked with his wife, designer Cynthia Miles, and architect Martin Nielsen of Busby Perkins + Will on the renovations, sandblasting the walls, deepening the lobby area and converting the balcony level into office space. The producer estimated he spent $1.7 million on the makeover. “I didn’t do it in a cheap way,” he explained. “You couldn’t just sweep it and throw some carpet on it.” Modelled after the Electric Cinema, a multi-purpose venue in London, the theatre’s current incarnation is a cross between your typical art-house screening room and a high-end steak house. Its lobby features a full-service bar as a centrepiece. Miniature replicas of Qin Dynasty terracotta warriors line a shelf encircling the bar’s counter: a tasteful touch of chinoiserie that acknowledges the space’s past as a screening room for hundreds of kung fu flicks, many of which remain in storage at the theatre. To one side of the reception area, goldfish swim in an aquarium framed in red tile. In the theatre itself are both film and digital projectors, a Dolby THX sound system and 150-plus red club seats – with footrests – that can be carted around to suit the event. Life-size versions of the lobby’s terracotta warriors stand, bottom-lit, on platforms along the outer walls.