Sitting in the lobby of the Shangri-la Hotel in Toronto, Vincenzo Guzzo looks relaxed and fashionable, having styled himself for the day and the shoot. Vince is the owner of the popular Cinemas Guzzo chain of theatres in Montreal and is in Toronto filming the popular show Dragons’ Den, which he has been a panel member of since 2018. Over the next hour or so, we have a long chat about his life, his family, and of course, movies and the movie business. Vince is eloquent and confident throughout our conversation, with a lot to say and a lot of passion for every topic we discuss.
Cinemas Guzzo was started by Vince’s father, who immigrated to Canada from Italy in the 1960s. Vince originally wanted to be a lawyer, even attending Western University for Economics and law school afterwards. However, his father encouraged Vince, as the only child, to take over the business, and he decided to give it a shot. “I ended up still being almost a lawyer in the sense of litigating on a continuous basis, only now I was litigating on my behalf, and I was litigating with US studios,” Vince explains, “And so, in some sense, I still felt satisfied that I was doing the work that I wanted to do, which was to be a litigator, only now I wasn’t litigating other people’s problems but my problems, which was getting movies.” He helped his father grow the business by getting American movies on top of the French films that Cinemas Guzzo showed, as well as buying real estate for the theatres instead of renting it. When it comes to working in the movie business, Vince strives for constant improvement, saying he loves “the continuous trying to reinvent the movie-going experience, trying to figure out what is the next thing, or how to better your margins without necessarily just being an accountant.” On the day we spoke, Vince had just come from a meeting with a popcorn maker in Vaughan, Ontario, where he was discussing making a popcorn brand for both retail and in use in his theatres. The first popcorn flavour he had approved that day was chocolate banana, with his goal being to develop flavours for sale that are different from those usually found in theatres; “I spent a lot of time today, working on or trying to make the movie-going theatre experience different. So, you go to the theatre, you get your regular buttered popcorn, but now you can get caramelized popcorn. But everyone has caramelized popcorn! Nobody has a banana chocolate, nobody has a dill pickle popcorn let’s say right, and all of these kinds of things. And slowly you know, I’m diversifying.”
With the rise of streaming, the increase in content in general, and the impact of COVID-19 this year, people like Vince are doing a lot of thinking about the movie business, the future of movies, and theatres going forward. “I still think there’s room for the movie business,” Vince says. He talks a lot about the cost of launching a movie, and about the changes as the world moves into the next era, “So I think what’s going to happen, we had let’s call it 100 movies a year, we’re going to have maybe 70 movies a year. But they are going to be 70 bigger movies, they’re going to be 70 more interesting movies, and they’re also going to be movies that we’re going to play longer. So, for example, Chris Nolan’s Tenet, will probably play 8-10 weeks, 12 weeks, versus normally it would play 4 weeks, 6 weeks, it would have been out, because it was being pushed out by something else.” When it comes to launching and advertising a movie, or even that you have that movie available in theatres, the growing number of channels, streaming services, and social media platforms makes it hard to focus marketing; “Because of the multiple avenues to now market a movie, it’s a nightmare. Like where do I put my money? There are so many tv stations, so many specialized, cable, streaming, online marketing, where do I put my money? So everybody’s trying to spread the money and you don’t really get anybody,” Vince states. Guzzo himself, with Cinemas Guzzo, will be launching a VOD platform—or relaunching, as it had been launched earlier in the year but there were issues due to COVID-19. He wants to launch it because he believes it can be used to allow people to see movies they may not have the time to see, or would not have the inclination to see in theatres, such as European films. An example Vince uses is the French comedy film Garde Alternee, which played in Cinemas Guzzo; “Did it work in Quebec? It did so-so, because of the French culture content, but had we had the time to work the movie better, let it sit there longer, let the word of mouth develop, it would have played better. So I now want to use our VOD platform to be an eventual look at the alternative content kind of movies that we can get, and create like–ok, so we know 90% of our business is going to come from big blockbusters, but there’s that 10% niche that we’re going to create, because I don’t think arthouses are going to exist for very much longer. I think they were already under an enormous amount of stress, and I think property values have gone through the roof. And just paying the property taxes sometimes, people can’t make ends meet. So this is a way of combining both sides of the business.”
In general, Vince maintains that the theatre experience itself will stay alive, explaining, “when you go to the movies you actually give the movie a chance. So you pay twelve bucks, you go into the auditorium, first 20 minutes of any movie is pretty slow, but you’re not going anywhere, right. Remember you left your house. You paid $12. You got dressed, you’re on a date, whatever…so you’ll watch the movie. You’ll actually give a movie, in theatres, a chance. This is something that cannot be replicated with streaming, and so while there are advantages to streaming, especially for TV shows, movie theatres are still a different way of consuming content. It doesn’t have to be an expensive or high-end experience either”, says Vince, “I don’t believe in the VIP concept, you know where you go there, get your red wine and dining. For me, going to the movies is not a Gucci experience, it’s a Walmart experience. I want to socialize without having to say hi to anybody.” It is that last point that has Vince believing that theatres will survive the pandemic. In discussing rules for reopening theatres with public health services, he said he thinks that at 50% capacity, theatres will be able to guarantee social distancing, and people won’t sit directly next to strangers: “ We have no issues in movie theatres, like I have got no issues with masks, no issues with people distancing in movie theatres, because it’s a natural reaction. Somebody once said to me, going to the movies is a social event where I don’t have to give you my name, I don’t have to shake your hand, but we’ve all cried together and we’ve all laughed together and we’ve sure as hell all got scared together, because one guy screams at the wrong time and everybody jumps right. And we need that right now.”
Of course, when it comes to movies in general, Vince has a lot to say. He is critical of movie critics—“I always ask myself, what are your credentials? What gives you the right to tell me this is a good movie or that’s a bad movie”—and doesn’t like horror but likes comedies. He likes story-based movies and movies that make him forget, movies that make him put himself in the place of one of the characters. It also depends on the context of the film, such as with the example of Demain il sera trop tard (Tomorrow will be too late), a French film which really affected Vince as a child, “when I was 6, 7 years old, this crushed me as a kid. But when I rewatched it as a 30-year-old, it wasn’t the same. So the movies I like, you know, it depends.” These days, watching movies is very much a job for Vince, even though he doesn’t want to be the one doing the selecting for the public when he puts films in his theatres, he still likes to think about what the public may like. However, “The movies I watch the most these days are animated pictures because I sit down with my daughter who is 9 years old and we watch it together and I ask her ‘should daddy buy this movie?’ because there I literally buy the rights to this movie and I become the distributor,” Vince says, “But even that feels like a job sometimes.” Vince is still interested in film in general and what makes a successful film. He tells a story about a conversation he had with famous director James Cameron, about how he has directed two of the biggest movies of all time, Avatar and Titanic, “I said to him, what do you think you’re doing that got you 1 and 2? And he said, ‘you know it’s the same movie, right? It’s the same story. Man meets woman, from two different worlds–In one it’s economic, in one it’s spatial–, forbidden love’. And I was like, f*ck it is the same story. And ultimately, you know you hear people say, love stories don’t work in movies. But the top-grossing movies are love stories, and one of the top movies before they came out was Love Story. So because of that, I said why don’t I go see Love Story again and see what the connection was there. And once again, poor girl, rich guy, at Harvard, he’s unhappy with his dad and blah blah blah, and what do you know it’s the Romeo and Juliet story all over again.”
As someone with an Italian background, I had to ask Vince how his Italian background and upbringing has impacted how he handles himself. Throughout our discussion, it became clear that the biggest things he attributed to his Italian heritage were the importance he places on family and the way he handles conflict. One of the things Vince prides himself on is being a good father, and emphasizing the importance of family togetherness to his five children; “I want to bring up my kids in a way that they have a connection to the family. But I did maybe the same thing with my kids where I said to them look, you can all have your own careers, but why don’t you find a career the whole family can invest in,” he says, “For example, you want to a be a neurologist, we’ll open neurology clinics if we have to, the family fund we’ll call it, and you’ll be a partner, and you’ll operate it and you’ll be the president of that division and so forth and so forth. I’ve got 5 kids, 5 kids you’ve got to find a lot of moving businesses so that they can all have their own space.” But when he talks family, he doesn’t only mean by blood. Vince’s employees, some of whom have been with him over 20 years, are considered part of his family as well. When it comes to conflict within both families—blood and workplace—Vince says, “you know the way we handle those conflicts is very much rooted in my parents’ upbringing of me. Would I call it Italian in the modern sense of today’s Italy? No. It’s very outdated Italian. But the next generations caught up pretty quickly.” Vince makes sure to emphasize that being raised by Italian immigrants is a unique experience in itself, and important to understand how he conducts himself, explaining, “The Italian heritage has had an influence, but it’s had more of an influence because I come from immigrant parents. And a lot of people don’t realize that immigrants are a snapshot in time of a culture. They are not that culture. So in other words when my dad went back…he would look at all the Canadian non-Italian and non-ethnic girls and say, these girls are not like our daughters that have morals etc. etc., until they went back to Italy, and when my father went back to Italy after 25 years he realized that even the girls in Italy wore mini skirts! It wasn’t only the girls in Canada. So all of a sudden, he realizes wait a minute, how come I’m so outdated even in my own country of origin? And it’s because you crystalized your culture and didn’t evolve. Italy evolved. Canada evolved. You stayed still. And that’s what happened to a lot of immigrant families.”
As he was in Toronto filming Dragons’ Den, I asked Vince, as an experienced businessman, what advice he would give to the aspiring entrepreneurs and business people, the kind of people who may even be standing in front of the panel on the show. The first thing he says is kind of unexpected: “You know I would tell them, probably, be careful what you wish for. Because the truth of the matter is, you know everybody thinks, everybody looks at me or looks at somebody that they look up to and says, f*ck they’re lucky, look at them. But they don’t realize the anxiety levels, the stress levels, and I think the thing that nobody ever tells you, because I guess most people that society will label as successful, they don’t want to admit that they’re traditionally very lonely people. Because the truth of the matter is, as you go up this pyramid – well it’s a pyramid – it gets smaller and smaller at the top, and there’s less people that stand at the same level.” Vince has been open throughout our conversation about previous marriages and how his partners often come last in his list of priorities and confirms it’s not at all uncommon with entrepreneurs, who also often worry if people are with them for the right reasons. They can also feel distanced from other partners and employees, and are not, he says, as lucky as he was to go through this journey with his father. Vince further reflects on the pressure to feel like you must do anything to achieve success, the pressure to never say no, and the feeling of never being satisfied. “The problem is when you do it when you’re working, your lifestyle changes as you’re getting to that ten million dollars, you’ll get to ten million and say, it’s not enough, I want 25 million now. Because when I wanted ten million, I was only spending 15 thousand a year, now I’m spending 250 thousand, ten million’s not enough, I actually need more,” Vince muses. “So it ends up that the finish line you never get to because every time you get there, there’s another one. So eventually, when you get to a certain age, what happens is you start telling yourself, you know what, f*ck the finish line, let me just enjoy the ride. Because at the end of the day what you’re going to remember is the ride. You’re going to remember the ups and downs, and the downs are going to remind you how painful it is, and you’re going to start second-guessing yourself sometimes because you don’t want to remember the pain.” So if people decide they think it’s worth it, what does he suggest people do? “There is no secret to success, no written book, there’s no manual, and to be honest, even if there was one, I don’t think I’d follow it anyway. I wouldn’t believe it, because someone once told me that isn’t what business should be, you know where there’s rules and etiquette. For you guys who have made it already, you want to establish the rules and etiquette to keep those who haven’t made it down. I’m going to put your books and etiquette aside and I’m going to do it my way.”
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Photography by Beyond Fashion Photography
