Back Lane Studios

Mark Sunday, March 30, 12:30 pm on your calendar for our next Extraordinary Woman event about actor Marion Davies. She is perhaps  remembered most for being William Randolph Hearst’s mistress rather than the talented comic actor she was, a top box office draw in the 1920s. So what happened? Why is she so little known now?

We are screening a documentary about her: Captured on Film: The True Story of Marion Davies, with film archivist Christina Stewart as our guest expert.  Watch the trailer here.  Buy your tickets on Eventbrite here. (Suggested donation: $16) Read more about the event and our guest speaker here.  

The Toronto City Directories are much more than phone books. In fact, they were being produced decades before people, even the well-off, had phones. Published from 1833 to 2001, they contain a wealth of information. Residents and businesses are listed street-by-street by address;  you’ll  find alphabetical listings by name of  individuals and businesses;  a “Yellow Pages” section also categorizes businesses  by product and service.

You can imagine how big these directories are. Fortunately, Wayne Reeves, Toronto’s former Chief Curator, is here to help us out. On Tuesday, April 22, 7:00 pm, he will present a Zoom workshop offering tips, along with a few caveats, for using the directories for research.  Book your spot on Eventbrite (a small donation would be appreciated!).

Most directories have been scanned and are easily accessed through the Toronto Public Library. You can also look at the actual volumes at the Toronto Reference Library.

Find links here to a YouTube video of  Wayne’s first workshop on researching Toronto photos and to a PDF of the PowerPoint he used.

Our exhibit of photographs and quotes from Lucy Maud Montgomery’s journals and books is on display, once again, for a month until the first week of May. We were inspired to create the exhibit last year to mark the 150th anniversary of Maud’s birth but had to close the exhibit for scheduled art shows. 

Lucy Maud Montgomery spent a lot of time in Toronto, especially during the last seven years of her life when she lived at 210 Riverside Dr. in Swansea. Her ghost is everywhere in this city, with the evidence recorded in her copious diaries. It’s surprising how much she accomplished in the last seven years of her life, despite depression, worries about her sons, money concerns and her husband Ewan’s mental illness. We’ve collected some archival photos, including many taken by Maud herself, and combined them with quotes from her journals.

We’ve also explored some themes that run through her novels and her diaries. One great irony stands out; Her fictional creations represent wish fulfilment, a fantasy of what she would have wanted things to be; her life, on the other hand, was in stark contrast to the world she dreamed of. You’ll learn about some of the challenges she faced and some of the challenges she created for herself at this exhibit.

You will also be impressed by the breadth of Maud’s knowledge: she was interested in so many things — science, astronomy, photography, history. She, truly, was a remarkable woman.

On  Sunday, April 6, 2:00 pm, the Back Lane Film Club screens  Travels with My Aunt,  a whimsical 1972 comedy that gives petty larceny a good name. The late Maggie Smith stars, playing her character Aunt Augusta  from a rather precocious school girl to the flamboyant elderly eccentric, who takes her straight-laced retired bank-manager nephew away from his dahlias on a romp through Europe, Turkey and Morocco. Directed by George Cukor, it’s based on a novel by Graham Greene. Originally, Katharine Hepburn was to play Augusta, but she disliked the script, her rewrite was rejected by MGM and  she was deviously bumped from the project.

Enjoy the trailer for Travels with My Aunt here. 

Our film club aims to screen movies that have been overlooked or forgotten, and deserve to be seen again. At each screening, the film is introduced by one of our members and a discussion follows. We have snacks, thanks to Kirsten Gunter who has been running the club. A membership is $25 for  all of 2025 screenings. Read  how to become a member and the films chosen for 2025  here. 

For our Jan. 26 screening of the documentary about biracial ballet dancer Maria Tallchief, we were joined on Zoom (and on the big screen) by filmmakers Sandra and Yasu Osawa. Also discussing the dancer, recognized was America’s first Prima Ballerina, was Pia Bouman, far left, whose ballet school is a west-end tradition; Kirsten Gunter, a friend of Back Lane Studios who is a student of the ballet and a dance writer, middle, and Ellen  Moorhouse, from Back Lane Studios. The screening was on Sunday, Jan. 26. Maria Tallchief,  was born in 1925 to the Osage community in Oklahoma, where oil wealth opened doors to opportunity but also brought on the “Reign of Terror,” the recent setting for Scorseses’ film Killers of the Flower Moon. Maria’s father was Osage; her mother was white of Scottish and Irish background. Both Maria and her sister Marjorie Tallchief became well known dancers. When the family moved to Los Angeles, Maria and Marjorie were fortunate to  train with Bronislava Nijinska, the sister of Vaslav Nijinsky. Maria was mentored by George Balanchine and later married him.  Her partnership with Balanchine helped create the New York City Ballet and changed the course of ballet in America. The documentary, made in 2007, includes interviews with Maria, who passed away in 2013, Marjorie and their contemporaries. Thank you, Sandy and Yasu for your film and for joining us.

Welcome to OldTO. It’s an interactive map featuring a wealth of digitized historic photos from the City of Toronto Archives.

Are you interested in what your neighbourhood might have looked like? Do you want to revisit downtown before all of the condos went up? Have a look at the map and see. There are thousands of images, some dating back to 1856.

The map was originally created by Sidewalk Labs, the Google affiliate that was planning a downtown development in Toronto’s Portlands. Sidewalk abandoned its project in 2020 and eventually stopped hosting OldTO.org. However, they kindly left the source code freely available.

At Back Lane Studios, we were sad to see OldTO.org vanish. One of our main projects is our Mapping our Memories endeavour. This photo map parallels this interest, and we are thrilled to be able to restore it.

We will be forever grateful to software developer Michael Lenaghan for his terrific work bringing this mapping tool back to life! (Check the browser you use to access oldto.org. Try Chrome if you’re having problems.)

Read the article about OldTO in BlogTO!