Rep refusal rocks Cinema V

Veteran do-gooder wheeler-dealer Steve Laudi has—in the face of impending deadline and a federal nixing of charitable status to their proposed repertory theatre—jumped the Cinema V ship. “I’m asked about 20 times a day what’s happening with the Cinema V and I don’t have enough new things to say,” he says. Laudi had been working since 1995 on the project to restore the one-time Empress Theatre on Sherbrooke near Girouard and was unhappy with a recent decision by the feds to make funding conditional to them not running “such superfluous activity” as a cinema, according to a letter from a federal civil servant.

The Cinema V folks can, however, still rent space out to a separate group that would run a theatre on the site, and board exec Peter McAuslan has ears wide open. “We’re just about to go out with a call for proposals from people in the arts community for the use of some space in the building,” says McAuslan. NDG city councillor Michael Applebaum, who has power to thumb up or down funding for such area projects, says the Cinema Fivers have until next month to put a budget and plan together that doesn’t include them operating a repertory cinema. “I don’t think it’s for the city of Montreal or other levels of government to put in $4.2-million so there could be a rep theatre with three or four employees. That’s not my view of how it should be,” says Applebaum. :
—Kristian Gravenor