Schulich alum Gerry Remers (MBA ’83)  toiled in near-obscurity for 10 years as an advocate for digital movie projection. Now his moment has arrived — and he’s at the forefront of a cinematic revolution, wrote the Financial Post on Tuesday, July 27th.

The real story behind the revolution in digital-movie projection has much humbler roots than James Cameron’s breathtaking foray into high-tech three-dimensional effects in his 2009 hit film, Avatar. Specifically, it began with a mid-sized Kitchener, Ont.-based company called Christie Digital, its president and chief operating officer, Gerry Remers, and the projection technology it has been developing for the past 10 years.

Chances are most movie-goers have never heard of Christie Digital. Up until a few years ago, it didn’t carry much weight in the movie business, either. That’s changing quickly. The company expects to ship 8,000 projectors this year, up from a mere 300 in 2004, including 40 to a client in the tiny, troubled country of Lebanon. Remers, just back from a June convention in Europe where he sold another 400 units to a European client, sounds incredulous when he talks about the rush. “It took a long time to convince the cinephiles in Hollywood that digital was, in fact, better film,” he says. But now the demand for digital projection — which, in addition to improving picture quality, is also the foundation of the new, high-tech trend to 3D film production — has hit a tipping point. “Demand has become explosive,” Remers says.

For proof of that, look no further than Christie’s bottom line. Total revenue is expected to hit $600 million this year at the 520-employee firm, a 30% jump over the year before.

Not all of the company’s growth can be attributed to digital movie projection.Over the last decade, Christie adapted its technology for other markets to keep the company afloat, including business and other forms of public exhibition. For example, Christie projection technology was used at the opening ceremonies of the Beijing Summer Olympics in 2008, and another product, the mini-screen MicroTiles, is featured on The Comedy Network’s top-rated Colbert Report.

Gerrry Remers (Schulich MBA '83); Photo Credit: Peter J. Thompson, Financial Post Magazine

Now, however, the market for digital-movie projection is rising quickly as the company’s main revenue driver and Remers is happy to ride the wave.  “Every market is recognizing the advantages of digital,” he says, “and realizing that if you are late to the 3D game, you’ll lose out.”

Remers is an anomaly in the technology corridor based in Kitchener-Waterloo. He’s neither an engineer nor a physicist. The son of German immigrants, he studied philosophy at university before starting a career in sales and marketing that included a seven-year stint at Nortel Networks Corp.

The seeds of his passion for digital projection, however, were sown in 1994, when he joined Electrohome, an electronics firm. He was assigned to the company’s projection division where he boosted revenues from$4 million to $120 million in just five years.

At the time, the power of digital technology was emerging as a driving force across many industries, and Remers was captivated by its potential in the projection business. But Electrohome had neither the will nor the means to make a long-term investment in the technology. In fact, it was uncertain about its position in the projection business, period.

In 1999, Remers was tasked with finding a buyer for Electrohome’s division. He found one in a U.S. subsidiary of the Japanese firm Ushio Inc., called Christie Digital, headed by Jack Kline, an executive who shared Remers’s passion for digital projection.

With the deal done that year, and Remers on board as president of the company’s Canadian division, Christie invested $10 million to buy rights to a chip manufactured by Texas Instruments, an optical semi-conductor that would form the basis of Christie’s projection technology. Between 2000 and 2004, the company invested a further $30 million to $40 million on research and development to perfect its system.

But the company and its technology were too far ahead of their clients, the cinema owners — the cost to convert to digital was exorbitant and few Hollywood studios were making digital prints — so Christie had to focus on other product lines, making bigger and better rock and roll light shows and then moving on larger events.

But Remers never took his eye off the cinema screen. In 2005,  he hatched a plan with digital-cinema vendor Access Integrated Technologies (AIX), under which AIX would buy projections from Christie and retrofit cinemas at its own expense — provided that movie studios agreed to give it a share of the considerable savings from distributing digital prints. “We worked with AIX (now Cinedigm) to sign up five studios in 2005,” Remers recalls. “Over the next two years, Christie installed 3,715 units at theatres across the U.S. It was the first massive deployment of digital systems.”

The experiment was a success. Through its partnership with AIX, it had established itself as firstmover in the U.S., Canada, and even Asia.

Christie may not be the biggest player in the digital cinema market today, but it still punches above it weight. For starters, its sales now account for 40% of Ushio’s revenue, up from 10% in 1999.

After years in the dark, Remers is happy to bask in the glow of long-awaited success, at least for a moment. His grand plan to take Christie Digital to new cinematic heights continues to unfold. With a new production plant opening in Shenzhen, China this summer, Remers is confident that Christie Digital will grow to a billion-dollar business. Having won fans in North America and Europe, Christie Digital is now tackling Asia. “We were probably 10 years ahead of our time with digital projection,” says Remers. “But the world sees it now.”