Nat Taylor

Who was Nat Taylor?

Nathan A. Taylor was a Canadian inventor.

Taylor was born and raised in Toronto and began his business career in 1918 selling postcards.

As head of Twentieth Century Theatres, an Ontario branch of Famous Players Canadian Corporation, he built one of the world's first cineplex movie theatres in Ottawa, Ontario at the Elgin Theatre. The Elgin's second screen opened in December 1947 on a patch of land adjacent to the original 1935 theatre. At first, the same program played in both auditoriums, but several years later Taylor came up with the idea of selling tickets to different movies from the same box office, laying claim as the first to do so. He also created one of the first movie theatres in a shopping mall and one of the first in an office building. By the 1970s, Taylor had entirely sold all but a few of his theatres to Famous Players, yet he started a new theatre chain from scratch, with Garth Drabinsky co-founding Cineplex Odeon cinemas. The first location in 1979 at the Toronto Eaton Centre had 18 screens, a Guinness World Record at the time.