Garth Drabinsky | |
Birth Date: | 27 October 1949[1] |
Birth Place: | Toronto, Ontario, Canada |
Occupation: | Film and theatrical producer and entrepreneur |
Nationality: | Canadian |
Garth Drabinsky (born 1949)[2] is a Canadian film and theatrical producer and entrepreneur. In 2009, he was convicted and sentenced to prison for fraud and forgery. The sentence was reduced from 7 to 5 years in prison, on appeal to the Ontario Court of Appeal, and the Supreme Court of Canada declined to hear a subsequent appeal. In April 2023, a judge dismissed Drabinsky’s defamation lawsuit against American Actor’s Equity for placing him on their ‘Do Not Work’ list, and in July 2024 the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed this dismissal, along with his claim that the union's conduct violated antitrust law.[3] Drabinsky has attempted 3 comebacks all resulting in failure and millions of investor dollars being lost.
Drabinsky got polio at age 3 and had multiple operations until he was 12. Born to a Jewish family[4] in Toronto, Ontario,[2] Drabinsky graduated from the University of Toronto with a Bachelor of Laws degree in 1973, and was called to the bar in Ontario in 1975.[5]
Drabinsky wrote a textbook, Motion Pictures and the Arts in Canada: The Business and the Law, while attending law school.
Entering into the entertainment business in 1978 as an independent commercial film producer (through Tiberius Entertainment Limited, formed with Joel Michaels)[6] and film distributor (through Pan-Canadian Film Distributors Inc., formed with Nat Taylor),[7] Drabinsky produced a series of projects in the 1970s and 1980s. He produced A Broadway Musical, The Disappearance, The Silent Partner, The Changeling, Tribute, The Amateur, Losin' It. However, he stopped producing films due to financial problems at Cineplex.
In April 1979, he and Nat Taylor co-founded Cineplex Theatres, which created a chain of multiplex theatres for the Canadian market. By May 1984, it had acquired the Canadian Odeon Theatre chain, thus becoming Cineplex Odeon and a major player in the industry. It expanded further through the acquisition of several US theatre chains, but he left the company in December 1989.
Other films:
He leveraged his ownership of the Pantages Theatre in Toronto to form the publicly traded theatre production company, Live Entertainment Corporation of Canada, Inc., also known as Livent. The company expanded, building or refurbishing several theatres, including the Oriental Theatre in Chicago, and entered into management deals with others in Toronto, Vancouver, and New York. It became noted for its productions (which earned a total of 20 Tony Awards out of a total of 71 nominations) of: