Master of The Movies'

By RICHARD CORLISS

The manager patrols the lobby in a tuxedo; you half expect him to murmur, "Good evening, m'sieur," as you stroll by. Paintings of the High Tasteful school adorn the walls. Tea is being served -- 14 different blends -- on Rosenthal china. Perhaps madame would care for carrot cake, or a latte macchiato, or some nice kosher chocolates. Perhaps m'sieur and madame would also like to walk through the doors at the back of the lobby and catch Eddie Murphy Raw. For this is not the Stork Club or the Waldorf in a scene from some posh old Hollywood romance. It is a movie house in Toronto or New York City or Los Angeles. It is surely a clue to the way Garth Drabinsky -- the dynamic, disputatious boss of the Cineplex Odeon theater chain -- wants you to see movies.

For decades, film exhibition was, as Industry Analyst Paul Kagan notes, "essentially a Rip Van Winkle business." Exhibitors let their urban theaters decay into rancid zoos, with crummy projection and that mysterious glop that makes your shoes stick to the flypaper floor. Or they sliced handsome old palaces into tiny tenement cinemas, where SRO could mean not standing room only but single-room occupancy. In the suburbs the exhibitors moved into malls, where their "plexes" had all the charm of welfare clinics. The malls may have saved movies, bringing picture houses into bustling new neighborhoods, but the salvage job was short on pizazz. No wonder the studios, legally barred since 1948 from owning theaters, were exploiting the laissez- faire mood of the Reagan Administration to buy up theaters and get back into exhibition. The exhibitors couldn't hack it.

And then out of the north rode one who could. "Garth Drabinsky is both a showman and a visionary," Kagan says. "There were theater magnates before him, but none who radiated his charisma or generated such controversy." In 1979 the Toronto native co-founded Cineplex with 18 theaters. Today it is the largest chain in North America, with 1,643 "screens" (nobody calls them theaters any more) and 14,500 employees. Revenue has quintupled in five years; profits have doubled in a year. Drabinsky did it with street fighting and upscale smarts. In his first Los Angeles venture, for example, he reversed the usual trend and created a mall around his theater: restaurants, night life, more business. Good business.

With all these profits, and all those restaurants, the man is still hungry. Last year Cineplex Odeon expanded into distributing such films as Prince's Sign o' the Times and Paul Newman's The Glass Menagerie. A TV production arm will make 41 episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents. The company's Northfork division will finance five films produced by Robert Redford. In partnership with MCA Inc., which owns 49% of Cineplex Odeon, Drabinsky will help run Universal's proposed Florida theme park. Hollywood, star struck by the 39- year-old whiz kid, is whispering that Drabinsky may succeed Sidney Sheinberg, another tough customer, as president and chief operating officer of MCA. "I'm not saying we don't have run-ins," says Sheinberg, "but it's the pushing and shoving of brothers."

Drabinsky's Cineplex is a one-man marching band. No one can speak for the company but the boss. He logs half a million miles a year, inspiring the troops and scouting new acquisitions. The guy never rests, and when he does, he pays for it. Three weeks ago, while on a rare vacation with his wife and two children in Antigua, Drabinsky broke his arm, "totally, right through." A quick bone grafting and plate insertion, and he was back in business. "It hurts, sure," he says, "but I like to get on."

Cineplex Odeon has fulfilled Drabinsky's promise to "upgrade moviegoing to the greatest extent possible and ask the customer to pay for it." You will pay for the tuxedos and the yuppie snacks and the crisp Lucasfilm THX sound system. In Manhattan Cineplexes, you will pay $7 -- a price tag that has stoked public and official outrage. This week the New York State Assembly is expected to pass a measure that would require exhibitors to print admission prices in all newspaper ads and thus encourage theater owners to keep their costs down. Drabinsky is unmoved by the hubbub. The alternative to the $7 ducat, he says, is "to continue to expose New Yorkers to filthy, rat-infested environments. We don't intend to do that."

In an effort to create an image of Cineplex Odeon as the class act of exhibitors, Drabinsky has spent $30 million spiffing up his 30 Manhattan venues. But he has earned at least that much in negative press with the ticket hike and with last September's shuttering of the Regency, the city's treasured revival house. There was a rally and a petition with 30,000 signers. To Drabinsky, the protesters were "publicity seekers" and their pleas "absurd." He plans to showcase revivals at a smaller midtown theater. "We made the Regency a lot newer, and it will gross almost four times as much in its first year." Not a man to be convinced that the Regency was the stuff that dreams are played in. The visionary showman sounds here like an old-time movie villain -- a Darth Grabinsky -- or an urban-renewal slumlord wondering why the family inside doesn't want its home bulldozed.

Drabinsky has never shied away from a fight. As a child with polio, he had to fight for his life; he still walks with a limp. In Cineplex's early days, he barely averted bankruptcy when Canada's reigning circuits, Famous Players and Odeon, pressured distributors to withhold first-run films from the fledgling company. But in 1983 Drabinsky, a lawyer who had written a standard reference on Canadian motion-picture law, convinced the courts that Famous and Odeon were engaging in restraint of trade. A year later he bought the Odeon chain, but his battle with Famous still rages. Recently, he purchased half of a '20s Toronto movie palace and restored his section to its original rococo splendor. Famous owns the other half; through legal maneuvering Drabinsky has kept that portion shut. One day, to enforce his will, he dispatched several armed guards with Dobermans.

Will Drabinsky's pit-bull perseverance play in Hollywood? Already he has tangled with one of the major studios, canceling 140 play dates of Columbia's Leonard Part 6 after the studio "broke its commitment to us" and pulled The Last Emperor from Cineplex theaters. The air thickened with threats, and as of now, Drabinsky says, "the two corporations are not doing business together." Viewing all these skirmishes, one industry solon is impressed but skeptical. "Drabinsky is very bright and articulate," he says, "but he's also very arrogant. Other exhibitors watch from afar as he builds his Taj Mahals. The next few years will be the telltale heart. Can he handle theater expansion, film and TV production and distribution, and run the theme park as well?"

Hollywood -- and America -- may be faint of telltale heart. Drabinsky isn't, though. He knows that his toughest competition is himself. Ah, but what if a younger, hungrier showman comes along? No sweat. "If there's a young Garth Drabinsky out there," says Drabinsky, "A) he's welcome to try, and B) I'd probably hire him."

With reporting by Elaine Dutka/Los Angeles, with other bureaus