Montage Magazine 50th Anniversary Issue by Directors Guild of Canada

s p e c i a l i s s u e 2 0 1 3 / c a n $ 6 . 5 0 u s $ 5 . 0 0 p u b l i s h e d b y t h e d i r e c t o r s g u i l d o f DGC c a n50th a danniversary a / w w issue w. d gMONTAGE c.ca

50 years of advancing

WILLIAM F. WHITE INTERNATIONAL

CANADIAN FILMMAKERS’

A COMWEB GROUP MEMBER

economic, creative and workplace rights

Canada’s Leading Provider of Professional Production Equipment and Expertise!

WE SALUTE THE DGC IN CELEBRATION OF

5 2

MONTAGE

DGC 50th anniversary issue

YEARS OF EXCELLENCE!

Partners in Production®

• FIRST ASSISTANT DIRECTORS • SECOND ASSISTANT DIRECTORS • THIRD ASSISTANT DIRECTORS • TRAINEE ASSISTANT DIRECTORS • PRODUCTION ASSISTANTS • SECOND UNIT DIRECTORS • PRODUCTION MANAGERS • UNIT MANAGERS • ASSISTANT PRODUCTION MANAGERS • PRODUCTION COORDINATORS • ASSISTANT PRODUCTION COORDINATORS • TRAINEE PRODUCTION COORDINATORS • TECHNICAL COORDINATORS • PRODUCTION DESIGNERS • ART DIRECTORS • FIRST ASSISTANT ART/SET DESIGNERS • SECOND ASSISTANT ART DIRECTORS • THIRD ASSISTANT ART DIRECTORS • ART DEPARTMENT COORDINATORS • ART DEPARTMENT TRAINEES • LOCATION MANAGERS • ASSISTANT LOCATION MANAGERS • TRAINEE LOCATION MANAGERS • EDITORS • ASSISTANT EDITORS • SOUND EDITORS • FIRST ASSISTANT SOUND EDITORS • SECOND ASSISTANT SOUND EDITORS • PRODUCTION ACCOUNTANTS • FIRST ASSISTANT ACCOUNTANTS • SECOND ASSISTANT ACCOUNTANTS • ACCOUNTING CLERKS • TRAINEE ACCOUNTANTS DIRECTORS

CMY

THANK YOU TO ALL OUR HARDWORKING MEMBERS DGC 50th anniversary issue

dgc.ca 3

MONTAGE

BRI TI SH C O L U M BI A

50year

McCabe & Mrs. Miller / 10 The Beachcombers / 10 The Grey Fox / 11 First Blood / 11 21 Jump Street / 14 The X-Files / 14 Kissed / 15 Stargate SG-1 / 15 Da Vinci’s Inquest / 18

A L BER TA

Days of Heaven / 18 Bye Bye Blues / 19 North of 60 / 19 Lonesome Dove: The Series / Outlaw Years / 21

SA SKATC H EWA N

Editor’s note

by Marc Glassman

Drylanders / 21 Paperback Hero / 23 Who Has Seen the Wind / 23 Love and Hate: The Story of Colin and Joanne Thatcher / 24 Corner Gas / 24

M A N I TO BA

Daughters of the Country / 25 Tales From the Gimli Hospital / 25 My Life as a Dog / 27 Shall We Dance? / 27

O N TA RI O

Viewpoints

by Sturla Gunnarsson PRESIDENT, DIRECTORS GUILD OF CANADA by Tim Southam CHAIR, NATIONAL DIRECTORS

DIVISION, MEMBER, MONTAGE ADVISORY BOARD

Quentin Durgens, M.P. / 28 Warrendale / 28 Goin’ Down the Road / 29 King of Kensington / 29 The Silent Partner / 32 The Kids of Degrassi Street / 32 Boys and Girls / 33 Next of Kin / 33 Moonstruck / 36 Conspiracy of Silence / 36 Thirty-Two Short Films About Glenn Gould / 37 Due South / 37 Rude / 39 Traders / 39

MONTAGE

DGC 50th anniversary issue

CONTENTS

D I R EC TO R S G U I L D O F C A N A D A

published b y the

G D C 50 YR S / S PE C I A L I S S U E 2 0 1 3, M o n ta ge

cover ph otog raph y:

Q U EBEC

Montreal Main / 40 The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz / 40 Shivers / 41 Quintet / 41 The Hunger / 44 The Spiderwick Chronicles / 44

AT L A N T I C

The Rowdyman / 45 The Adventure of Faustus Bidgood / 45 CODCO / 46 The Boys of St. Vincent / 46 Dolores Claiborne / 47 Trailer Park Boys / 47

TH E N O R TH

Never Cry Wolf / 51 Atanarajuat: The Fast Runner / 51

50years

DGC 50 PRODUCTIONS

DGC 50 PROFILES

THE PIONEE R S

Don Haldane / 54 Lee Gordon / 55 Syd Banks / 55 Robert Barclay / 56 George Gorman / 56 Richard Ballentine / 57 Paul Almond / 57 Peter Pearson / 58 Bob Gray / 58 Bob Linnell / 59 Keith Cutler / 59 Don Williams / 60 Justis Greene / 60 Charles Braive / 61

THE GUILD GR OWS Karen Bromley / 62 John Trent / 63 Alan Simmonds / 63 George Chapman / 64 N. Brian Ravok / 64 Marilyn Stonehouse / 65 John Eckert / 65 Seamus Flannery / 66 Grace Gilroy / 66

PEAKS AND VA LLE YS John Juliani / 67 Alan Erlich / 68 Neil Haggquist / 68 Jane Tattersall / 69 John Board / 69 Don McBrearty / 70 John Houston / 70 William (Bill) Fleming / 71 Les Kimber / 71 John Scott / 72 François Séguin / 72 John Blackie / 73 Crawford Hawkins / 73 Arvi Liimatainen / 74 N. John Smith / 74 Mario Azzopardi / 75 Fortner Anderson / 75

THE GUILD T OD AY Allan King / 76 Alan Goluboff / 77 Marc Voizard / 77 George Mihalka / 78 Arden Ryshpan / 78 Tim Southam / 79 Brian Baker / 79 Rob W. King / 80 Nick Kendall / 80 Sturla Gunnarsson / 81

DGC 50th anniversary issue

MONTAGE

DIRECTORS GUILD OF CANADA publisher

Sturla Gunnarsson, president Gerry Barr, national executive director & ceo mail@dgc.ca associate publisher DGC NATIONAL 111 Peter Street, Suite 600 Toronto, ON M5V 2H1 Tel: 416-482-6640 Fax: 416-482-6639 Toll Free: 1-888-972-0098 E-mail: mail@dgc.ca www.dgc.ca

Alejandra Sosa

ATLANTIC REGIONAL COUNCIL 1657 Barrington Street, Suite 408 Halifax, NS B3J 2A1 Tel: 902-492-3424 Fax: 902-492-2678 E-mail: inquiries@dgcatlantic.ca www.dgcatlantic.ca BRITISH COLUMBIA DISTRICT COUNCIL 1152 Mainland Street, Suite 430 Vancouver, BC V6B 4X2 Tel: 604-688-2976 Fax: 604-688-2610 E-mail: info@dgcbc.com www.dgcbc.com MANITOBA DISTRICT COUNCIL The Union Centre, 202B-275 Broadway Winnipeg, Manitoba, R3C 4M6 Tel: 204-940-4301 Fax: 204-942-2610 E-mail: dgc@dgcmanitoba.ca www.dgcmanitoba.ca ONTARIO DISTRICT COUNCIL 111 Peter Street, Suite 600 Toronto, ON M5V 2H1 Tel: 416-925-8200 Fax: 416-925-8400 E-mail: odc@dgcodc.ca www.dgcodc.ca QUEBEC DISTRICT COUNCIL 4200 Saint-Laurent Blvd., Suite 708 Montréal, PQ H2W 2R2 Tel: 514-844-4084 Fax: 514-844-1067 E-mail: cqgcr@cam.org www.cqgcr.ca

MONTAGE

50x50x50

editor

Marc Glassman art director

Alexander Alter copy editor

photo research

Nick Gergesha advertising sales

Merrie Whitmore Directors Guild of Canada mwhitmore@dgcodc.ca Montage is published twice a year by the Directors Guild of Canada. www.dgc.ca montage@dgc.ca Undelivered mail returned to: Directors Guild of Canada, National Office 111 Peter Street, Suite 402 Toronto, Ontario M5V 2H1 Tel. 416-482-6640 Fax 416-482-6639 Please direct all editorial inquiries and letters to the editor to: montage@dgc.ca Letters may be edited for length and clarity. Please include your name, address and daytime phone number. Montage is available free of charge to all DGC members. Copies of Montage are available for $6.50 from the publisher and news outlets across Canada. Canadian subscriptions $12, United States US $15 and International CDN $39 For subscription information or to order back issues, please contact DGC Montage. Subscriptions: montage@dgc.ca All contents are copyright 2012 DGC. All rights are reserved and contents, in whole or in part, may not be reprinted without permission. Points of view expressed in Montage do not necessarily represent those of the DGC. The publisher assumes no responsibility for advertisers’ claims, unsolicited art, photographs, manuscripts or other materials. Printed in Canada by Captain Printworks, Toronto, Ontario

Publication Mail Agreement 40051973

SASKATCHEWAN DISTRICT COUNCIL 2440 Broad Street, Suite #W213B Regina, SK S4P 4A1 Tel: 306-757-8000 Fax: 306-757-8001 E-mail: sk.dgc@sasktel.net www.dgcsask.com

viewpoints

Peter Murphy

Jocelyn Laurence ALBERTA DISTRICT COUNCIL 2526 Battleford Avenue, S.W., Suite 133 (Building B8, Currie Barracks) Calgary, AB T3E 7J4 Tel: 403-217-8672 Fax: 403-217-8678 E-mail: dgc@dgcalberta.ca www.dgcalberta.ca

editor’s note

content manager

DGC 50th anniversary issue

This issue of Montage is dedicated to the talented and hard-working members of the Directors Guild of Canada, who have just celebrated the DGC’s 50th anniversary. In order to look back fondly but accurately at the history of the organisation, we’ve taken the approach of highlighting 50 members who have made a significant impact on the DGC, along with 50 important productions that the Guild has worked on over the years. Let me emphasise that the 50 people and productions, while important, don’t comprise a Hall of Fame list. The Guild’s history is about its membership in total. There’s no room for a Hall of Fame. This is a Guild, which is only as strong as its members. You’ll see that in our notes on productions, we highlight many other films and shows DGCers have worked on or made. There could easily be 150 productions and 100 people in Montage, if we had the space. FIfty years is a long time, particularly in Canada’s comparatively young film and television history. In the early 1960s, the NFB and the CBC dominated this country’s media landscape. Independent producers were making industrials (sponsored films for companies or unions), commercials and the occasional commissioned piece for large-scale events like the then-upcoming Expo ’67. It was in this atmosphere that a feisty group of 18 directors assembled in November 1961 in Westminster Films’ screening room in downtown Toronto to discuss the creation of the Directors Guild of Canada. Leading the discussion was Don Haldane, the director of Drylanders, the first fiction film produced by the NFB, and the Disney feature Nikki: Wild Dog of the North. A spell-binding speaker, Haldane expressed his desire to form a guild in Canada that could protect the rights and advance the cause of filmmakers across the country. Among the 18 in the room that night were Syd Banks, Richard (Dick) Ballantine, Robert Barclay, George Gorman and Haldane’s partners Lee Gordon and Roy Krost. Along with Haldane, Banks, Barclay, Ballantine and Gorman went on to be the first five DGC presidents and the Guild’s true founding fathers. The Guild fought for the creation of the CRTC and the CFDC, which morphed into Telefilm Canada. With financing and broadcasting made available, the independent-filmmaking scene burst into life with such features as Goin’ Down the Road, Paperback Hero, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, Isabel and The Rowdyman. Meanwhile, the DGC expanded its membership, inviting editors, assistant directors, production managers—even accountants. (Why not—they’re all part of the team.) From its roots in Ontario, the Guild rapidly changed into a national organisation. B.C. was the success story of the ’70s and ’80s, bringing in much revenue from American TV and film producers and much needed jobs for new Guild workers. The Prairies gradually became the home for Canadian television and films, while first Alberta and then latterly Saskatchewan and Manitoba provided excellent crews and beautiful locations for big-budget American-financed films. Quebec developed by fits and starts, with some amazing productions in the ’70s followed by a dearth in the ’80s and ’90s and then a major comeback in television and film work in the past decade. The Atlantic region developed its own District Council in the past 20 years and has seen some astonishing work produced recently. And the North has been home to a few highly notable films and shows. Through the years, there have been internal disagreements between directors and the rest of the Guild, and between regional District Councils and DGC National. Those conflicts are discussed in some of the profiles; this is, after all, a history of a passionate group of creators who aren’t afraid to be brutally honest with each other. But the truth is that the Guild has become better by confronting and dealing successfully with its problems. It continues to represent not only its workers but also the growth of film and television production in Canada. It’s been eye-opening to work on this issue of Montage. Speaking as the magazine’s long-time editor, I’ve come to a much greater appreciation of what the Guild has accomplished, for Canada and itself, over the decades. And in assembling, editing and writing the notes on the DGC productions and profiled members, it’s clear that the history of Canadian cinema and television should be written in a far more democratic manner than the auteur approaches used by too many film historians, academics and critics. I’d like to thank the DGC from coast to coast for its support for this issue. Thanks, too, to the team of writers, researchers, transcribers and camera operators that worked so hard and well on this issue of Montage: Nancy Lanthier, Blake Mackay, Adam Nayman, Mark Dillon, Suzan Ayscough, Kiva Reardon, José Teodoro, Angelo Muredda, Marc Basque, Shane McNeil, Maurie Alioff, Simon Rogers, Aaron Friend Lettner, Martin Duckworth, Robinder Uppal, Meredith Wright, Laurel Toews and Paul Boucher. Special thanks to David York, Judy Ruzylo, Nikita Mor and Bryn Hughes. Much commendations and respect to my main collaborators: researcher Nicholas Gergesha, copy editor Jocelyn Laurence and art director Alex Alter. It’s time to celebrate!

Fifty years ago, a small group of Canadian filmmakers got together at the production offices of Don Haldane’s company, Westminster Films, to try to establish a minimum daily rate for directors in the nascent Canadian film industry. The simple principle animating the meeting was that artists are stronger united than they are divided. There could hardly be a more fractious group of people in this world than film directors, who are not known for their humility or love of compromise. Yet that seminal meeting resulted in the creation of a remarkable organisation that has, over the past 50 years, come to represent almost 4,000 artists working in the Canadian screen-based industries and played a major role in turning what was then a cottage industry into a multi-billion-dollar sector. From its inception, the Directors Guild of Canada has recognised that the best way to advance the interests of its members is to build an industry for them to work in. DGC pioneers were instrumental in conceiving, advocating and realising the legislation and regulatory framework that has resulted in the industry we enjoy today, and their talent, vision and drive seized on those opportunities to create this country’s screen-based legacy. They turned us from a nation where, if you watched television or went to the movies, nothing happened, into a nation that sees, interprets and creates its own reality in the most powerful medium of our times. Along the way, they got their minimum daily rate for directors. And more. Today we enjoy a collective agreement that guarantees rates and working conditions, a health plan that is the envy of the industry, a retirement plan and training programmes for people looking to advance their craft. As the DGC contemplated its 50th anniversary, it occurred to us that much of this history and legacy was in danger of being lost. We’re so busy telling other people’s stories that we sometimes lose track of our own. Thus was conceived this 50x50x50 issue: 50 people, 50 productions, 50 years. We hoped that, by telling the specific stories, an overarching narrative might emerge. The selection process was difficult, and there are certainly more people and productions that should have been profiled, but we tried to stay within the 50x50 mandate. I apologise to those many people who helped build this organisation and were not included in this issue. The 50 productions were selected with an eye to identifying seminal events that spawned or inspired bodies of work. The selection is platform- and provenance-agnostic. Film, television, indigenous and service productions are included, as our members work in all those areas. The selected productions are not necessarily artistic classics — though there are many. They were selected for their historical value as markers along the path of this great collective narrative. Consider it a down payment on a larger project, which this issue has generated — an ongoing oral history project that will ensure that, as the DGC continues to evolve, its rich legacy will endure. My sincere thanks to Tim Southam, whose passion, insight and dedication on the editorial board was invaluable. And to Marc Glassman for having had the courage to wander into these uncharted waters and the tenacity to see it through.

Sincerely,

STURLA GUNNARSSON PRESIDENT, DIRECTORS GUILD OF CANADA

This issue begins with humbled congratulations and admiring amends to our members past and present. Your creative output and your dedication to this organisation over the last 50 years have been so formidable that it has been truly impossible to summarise all of it in this magazine. Consider this commemorative issue a celebratory freeze-frame and a work in progress. Why? Because the myriad contributions our members make every day to this organisation escape neat summary. And the genius of Canadian filmmaking is too protean to bend to ordinary categorisation. They are lightning too potent to be caught in a bottle. What’s more, like so much of our country’s story these contributions are also oddly under-documented. So under-documented that our plan to publish a magazine quickly expanded into a mission to create the first and most complete living archive of the Guild’s history, of its many architects and of its many outstanding productions. The Montage team is even now performing video interviews across the country, collecting reams of documents and has begun to restore nearly lost works. We have redoubled our efforts to make our events, the DGC Awards, Montage and its digital offspring speak eloquently of our members’ many achievements. More than any organisation we know that great authorship thrives in every medium and in every genre we represent. In our world creative genius is platform-agnostic — it is as likely to appear on a computer or a TV set as it is on a cinema screen. It is as likely to occur on productions originating within our borders as on productions we bring to life for visiting producers. With this outlook as our guide, we are bound to snap a portrait of Canadian filmmaking unlike any other. The same can be said of the individuals who built our organisation and who are taking it into the future. We come from every conceivable sector, craft, region and political leaning in this country, bound by common goals: to create the fairest playing field, to foster the greatest environment for Canadian filmmaking, to offer our fellow members the greatest dignity, health and prosperity we possibly can, year after year. The adventure never stops. And so while necessarily fleeting and inevitably partial, this commemorative issue comes to you as a celebration of your unending dedication and commitment. To all our members, our elected and our staff, our congratulations and our thanks.

TIM SOUTHAM Chair, National Directors Division Member, Montage Advisory Board

MARC GLASSMAN EDITOR

DGC 50th DGCanniversary 50th anniversary issue MONTAGE issue MONTAGE

50 ACRONYMS

REL

ACFC The Association of Canadian Film Craftspeople

ACTRA Alliance of Canadian Cinema, Television and Radio Artists

AMPTP The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers

CORRECTIONS

PROD

AQTIS Alliance québécoise des téchniciens de l’image et du son

REF. : COOL GRAY 1 CP (4 / 2 / 4 / 8)

REF. : PANTONE DS 1-1 C (0 / 5 / 100 / 0)

INTERNAL APPROBATION

GRA

REF. : COOL GRAY 9 CP (30 / 22 / 17 / 57)

DATE INKS AND COLOUR REFERENCES

CMYK

SIGNATURE

F – PDFX PROOF

CHAMPIONING HAMPIONING CANADIAN TALENT T

CLIENT APPROBATION

AD Assistant director

CFC Canadian Film Centre CFDC Canadian Film Development Corporation, now Telefilm Canada DGA Directors Guild of America DOP Director of photography / cinematographer

50 anniversaire de la Director’s Guild of Canada TITLE

DGC PUBLICATION

Téléfilm Canada CLIENT

24/10/2012 DATE

7814D PROJECT Nº

4,375 in × 10 in FORMAT

7814D_DGC_E_50ans AD Nº

DIRECTORS IRECTORS GUILD OF CANADA ON YOUR 50TH ANNIVERSARY

Cabana Séguin inc. 2055 Peel Street, Suite 900 Montréal, Québec H3A 1V4

CONGRATULATIONS

514 285-1311 514 844-4541 cabanaseguin.com

IATSE International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees

These 50 films and television productions are representative selections from the thousands of works that DGC members have contributed to over the past five decades. They were chosen to give a sense of the diverse and fascinating pieces made by Guild members in every region of Canada. Celebrated here are produc-

NDD National Directors Division of the DGC

tions that range from Canadian indie films to Holly-

NFB National Film Board

wood-financed movies shot here to documentaries and

NIFCO Newfoundland Independent Filmmakers Co-op OFDC Ontario Film Development Corporation, now OMDC OMDC Ontario Media Film Development Corporation PM Production manager SMPIA The Saskatchewan Motion Picture Industry Association STCVQ Syndicat des Téchniciennes et Téchniciens du Cinéma et de la Vidéo du Québec

television series that cross genres from science fiction to comedies to children’s shows to police procedurals and includes one-off TV movies. Another 50 or 150 productions could take the place of this group, such is the distinguished output made by DGCers in the past half century.

TELEFILM CANADA Previously the Canadian Film Development Corporation (CFDC) STORIES THAT BRING US TOGETHER DES HISTOIRES QUI NOUS RASSEMBLENT

MONTAGE

DGC 50th anniversary issue

TELEFILM.CA

DGC 50th anniversary issue

MONTAGE

50 DGC PRODUCTIONS

BRITISH COLUMBIA

50 DGC PRODUCTIONS

BRITISH C COLUMBIA MCCABE & MRS. MILLER (1970)

THE BEACHCOMBERS (1972-1990)

THE GREY FOX (1982)

FIRST BLOOD (1982)

DIRECTOR: ROBERT ALTMAN

PRODUCER: CBC (CREATED BY MARC AND SUSAN STRANGE)

DIRECTOR: PHILLIP BORSOS

DIRECTOR: TED KOTCHEFF

KEY DGC PERSONNEL: PRODUCTION MANAGER JIM MARGELLOS,

KEY DGC PERSONNEL: EPISODE DIRECTORS NEILL FEARNLEY, ALAN

KEY DGC PERSONNEL: EXECUTIVE PRODUCER JOHN BOARD,

KEY DGC PERSONNEL: PRODUCTION MANAGER PAUL TUCKER, PRO-

PRODUCTION ASSISTANTS DON CARMODY, GEORGE CHAPMAN, BOB

SIMMON, RANDY BRADSHAW, REX BROMFIELD, STEFAN SCAINI,

PRODUCERS DAVID BRADY, PETER O’BRIAN, LOCATION

DUCTION DESIGNER WOLF KROEGER, ADS OTTA HANUS, JACQUES

LINNELL, TECHNICAL ASSISTANT JUSTIS GREENE

PATRICK CORBETT

MANAGER MICHAEL STEELE

HUBERT, UNIT LOCATION MANAGER FITCH CADY

Considered the first big-budget Hollywood film shot in Vancouver, Robert Altman’s film focuses on an entrepreneur (Warren Beatty) who teams up with a brothel madam (Julie Christie) to build a new town. Roger Ebert described it as “perfect” and the American Film Institute named it the eighth best Western. Christie was nominated for an Academy Award for best actress.

The longest-running drama in Canadian television history—387 episodes were produced—The Beachcombers popularised Canada’s multiculturalism, majestic landscape and quirky characters to millions of viewers in 39 countries around the world. The seminal show helped lay claim to Vancouver’s title as Hollywood North as it launched careers of most of B.C.’s top film professionals. The directors’ list includes DGCers who would go to work on other productions: National Presidents Don Williams (The X Files) and John Juliani (Latitude 55 Degrees), B.C. Council Chairs Neill Fearnley (The Haunting Hour) and Nicholas Kendall (Cadillac Girls), as well as Brad Turner (24), producers Hugh Beard (Force Four) and N. John Smith (Stargate), director of photography Rob McLachlan (Game of Thrones) and production manager Bob Gray (Unforgiven), to name a few.

The late Vancouver director/producer Phillip Borsos’s elegiac film about an old train robber who is released from jail, only to relapse into a life of crime because he can’t do anything else, won seven Genie Awards, including best picture (a first for a B.C. film), and was nominated for best foreign film at the Golden Globes. As one of the first major Canadian movies to attract serious international acclaim, it helped establish Vancouver as a filmmaking centre on its own terms. Moreover, it was the first B.C. feature film to obtain financial backing from Telefilm Canada.

The first in Sylvester Stallone’s Rambo series, this post-Vietnam War psychological thriller lacks the exploitative violence that would become a trademark of the films. Director Ted Kotcheff (The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, 1974) imbues the film with an intelligent, anti-war subtext. The film topped the North American box office for three weeks in a row, and ReelViews called it “a tense and effective piece of filmmaking.” The film marked the first time that an American major motion picture would hire Canadians for most major positions on a film, including the director, as well as 90 percent of the technical crew. While Kotcheff had been working in the States, his hire was still a symbol of DGC territorial jurisdiction over Canada. More films with key positions filled by B.C. talent soon followed, including Bob Fosse’s Star 80 (1983), Nick Castle’s The Boy Who Could Fly (1986) and Fred Schepisi’s Roxanne 1987). Kotcheff would go on helm more features and television shows in the U.S. but returned to Canada to make Joshua Then and Now (1985) Finch Cady became fixture in the B.C.

Showcasing B.C.’s stunning scenery and aided by a soundtrack from Leonard Cohen, the film found an uncanny Canadian angle, and though it certainly earned Vancouver a place on the Hollywood map, it would be several years before another Hollywood film was shot in B.C. Finally, once the B.C. Film Commission was established, George Schaefer brought Orchard Children (1978), followed by John Frankenheimer’s The Prophecy (1979), Ted Kotcheff’s First Blood (1982) and Fred Schepisi’s Iceman (1984). B.C.’s commissioner in those days was the DGC B.C. Council Founding Member Justis Greene (who would become a revered production manager, with credits including Agnes of God, 1985). He recalls taking many trips to L.A. to drum up business. “We figured out who was prepping what by looking in the trades. You could knock on doors. We used the success we had and built on it, and we did it just like we were selling milk or ice cream.” About working with the auteur Altman, Margellos, who would go on to earn a DGC Honorary Life Membership for his work on more than 50 film and TV productions (Police Academy), recalls: “Robert Altman was a great mentor to me and I remember he used to go around saying, ‘This business, it’s not worth getting a stomach ache over.’”

MONTAGE MONTAGE DGC 50th DGCanniversary 50th anniversary issue issue 10 10

As Reel West editor Ian Caddell said, “When the Americans were looking for locations in the early 1980s, they could see that B.C. had experienced crew members, thanks to The Beachcombers. It meant they could shoot here with a low dollar and they didn’t have to bring in as many people, saving them significant money. Our reputation during the ’80s and ’90s was spurred by The Beachcombers alumni who went on to make significant contributions to both local and international productions.”

The Grey Fox’s success inspired other B.C.-based filmmakers, including John Pozer (The Grocer’s Wife, 1991), Mina Shum (Double Happiness, 1994) and Lynne Stopkewich (Kissed, 1996). The film’s producer, David Brady, would go on to produce three more features and write, produce and direct nearly 100 episodes of TV and 60 TV documentaries and docu-dramas (The Pagan Christ). Producer Peter O’Brian (My American Cousin, 1985, and John and the Missus, 1987) ran the Canadian Film Centre before being appointed chair of TVOntario in 2005. Although Borsos’s five movies are radically different, each bears his distinctive vision. “His style was so rich,” says O’Brian. “Everything had to be shot a particular way. He liked a very strong frame, with a very direct angle to the subject. The number-one thing for Phillip was to find the point of true origin. It couldn’t be good unless it was honest. He was faithful to that every day that he worked.”

production scene (Stakeout, Look Who’s Talking Now) and Paul Tucker managed production on Star 80, The Golden Seal and others. Kotcheff, a wunderkind who started directing at the CBC when he was 24, said, “I don’t know if it’s a result of being a Canadian or what, but I do feel a certain sense of responsibility. I think we make personal and interesting films in Canada—and yes, I also feel a responsibility to make money for the producers. But the two are not mutually exclusive. You can say something worthwhile and make money, and I think First Blood was a great indication of that—so was Duddy.”

11 11

DGC 50th DGCanniversary 50th anniversary issue issue MONTAGE MONTAGE

BRITISH COLUMBIA

BRITISH COLUMBIA 21 Jump Street / Directors Kim Manners, Bill Corco-

PRODUCTIONS AMERICANFINANCED TV PRODUCTIONS The Beachcombers / Directors Don S. Williams, Alan

ran, Jorge Montesi /// Wiseguy/ Directors Bill Corcoran, Robert Iscove, William A. Fraker /// Smallville /

Simmonds, Randy Bradshaw /// Da Vinciâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Inquest /

Directors James Marshall, Greg Beeman, Mike Rohl /// Supernatural / Directors Philip Sgriccia, Robert Sing -

Directors Stephen Surjik, David Frazee, Alan Simmonds

/// Robson Arms / Directors Gary Harvey, James Genn,

James Dunnison /// Edgemont / Directors Gary Harvey,

E. Jane Thompson, Anthony Atkins /// Jpod / Directors

er, Kim Manners /// Highlander: The Series / Directors

Dennis Berry, Paolo Barzman, Richard Martin /// Reaper /

Directors Stephen Cragg, James Head, Ron Underwood /// The X-Files /// Directors Kim Manners, Rob Bowman, David Nutter /// Stargate SG-1 / Directors Peter DeLuise, Martin Wood, Andy Mikita, William Waring /// Battlestar Galactica / Directors Michael Rymer,

Mike Clattenberg /// Continuum / Directors Jon Cassar,

Michael Nankin, Rod Hardy /// Andromeda / Directors Jorge Montesi, Allan Eastman, Richard Flower /// V / Directors

Pat Williams /// Scorn / Director Sturla Gunnarsson ///

Yves Simoneau, David Barrett, Bryan Spicer /// The Outer Limits / Directors Mario Azzopardi, Brad Turner, Neill

Little Criminals / Director Stephen Surjik ///

Fearnley, Joseph L. Scanlan /// The Dead Zone / Directors James Head, Michael Robison, Mike Rohl

MONTAGE

DGC 50th anniversary issue

MONTAGE

50 DGC PRODUCTIONS

21 JUMP STREET (1987-1991)

THE X-FILES (1993-2002)

KISSED (1996)

STARGATE SG-1 (1997-2007)

PRODUCER: STEPHEN J. CANNELL

KEY DGC PERSONNEL: CO-EXECUTIVE PRODUCER MICHELLE

DIRECTOR: LYNNE STOPKEWICH

KEY DGC PERSONNEL: EXECUTIVE PRODUCER ROBERT C. COOPER,

MAJOR DGC PLAYERS: PRODUCER BILL NUSS, DIRECTORS BILL

MACLAREN, ASSOCIATE PRODUCER CRAWFORD HAWKINS, 2ND UNIT

KEY DGC PERSONNEL: CO-PRODUCER, CO-EDITOR JOHN POZER, 1ST

DIRECTORS PETER DELUISE, ANDY MIKITA, WILLIAM WARING,

CORCORAN, JORGE MONTESI, PRODUCTION MANAGER N. JOHN

MANAGER BRETT DOWLER, PRODUCTION MANAGER GEORGE CHAP-

AD, LOCATION MANAGER MICHAEL GAZETAS

PRODUCERS N. JOHN SMITH, JOHN G. LENIC, PRODUCTION

SMITH, ACTOR/DIRECTOR PETER DELUISE

MAN, 2ND AD COLLIN LEADLAY

One of the first major U.S. television series to use Vancouver as a filming location, this crime drama had its roots in The Mod Squad, which depicted a group of cops so exceedingly young and hip, they could penetrate the crime world of the young and hip. It sparked Johnny Depp’s nascent acting career, garnering him teen idol status.

More than any other project, The X-Files can take credit for bringing Vancouver to the ranking of third—sometimes second—largest production centre on the continent. Show creator Chris Carter personally endorsed the city and its crews and helped convince other producers to work here. Time Magazine deemed The X-Files the “cultural touchstone” of the 1990s, while Entertainment Weekly named it the fourth-best piece of science-fiction media. It won three Golden Globe Awards for best television drama, and a total of 16 Emmys. It became the longest-running science-fiction series in U.S. television history.

21 Jump Street signalled the beginning of the city’s long relationship with legendary Hollywood producer Stephen J. Cannell, who would bring 15 primetime projects to Vancouver (including Wiseguy, Scene of the Crime, UnSub, and Booker) and helped to build up North Shore Studios, at the time the country’s largest studio. Cannell’s profile drew attention to Vancouver as a television centre, and his year-round shoots provided training for the province’s film technicians. “He established the city as a production centre,” says J.P. Finn, an assistant director on 21 Jump Street who went on to produce The X-Files. “People could make a decent living, and suddenly the whole industry started to spring up like mushrooms in a lush forest.” The show’s producer, Bill Nuss, would go on to executiveproduce more than 200 episodes of television (Raven, The Hat Squad). Prolific careers were also in store for directors Bill Corcoran (Cold Squad, Mutant X and Falcon Beach) and Jorge Montesi (Andromeda, The Chris Isaak Show), who each clocked hundreds of hours of episodic and movie of the week television projects.

MONTAGE DGCanniversary 50th anniversary MONTAGE DGC 50th issue issue 14 14

The latter distinction was surpassed by Stargate SG-I and Smallville, two of numerous sci-fi shows that would subsequently be produced in Vancouver—including Millennium, Sanctuary, V, Dead Zone, Battlestar Galactica, Supernatural, Fringe and Continuum. Sci-fi feature films were also lured to the city, including The Chronicles of Riddick, I, Robot, Fantastic Four, two X-Men films and, of course, the two X-Files movies, among others. “The X-Files really did put us on the map for sci-fi,” says B.C. Film Commissioner Susan Croome. Sci-fi producers are complimentary about Vancouver crews, concurs Pete Mitchell, president of Vancouver Film Studios. “Because The X-Files was done in Vancouver on time and on budget, it convinced a lot of other sci-fi producers to shoot here.” And he adds that the presence of expert visual-effects companies and several large soundstages has given B.C. the edge over most North American cities for sci-fi projects. Nearly all the DGC members mentioned above, along with scores of other X-File assistant directors, including Tom Braidwood, Vladimir Stefoff, Matthew Blecha, Tracey Poirier and Brian Giddens, would go on to work on the sci-fi television series that followed The X-Files’ lead.

MANAGERS RON FRENCH AND MANY OTHERS

Filmed for under $100,000, Lynne Stopkewich’s Kissed is an

eerily beautiful film concerning the irregular sexual habits of a woman (Molly Parker) obsessed with dead things. It won the Best Canadian Feature Film at the Toronto International Film Festival, and screened at Cannes’ prestigious Directors’ Fortnight. The film was picked up by Samuel Goldwyn in the U.S. and enjoyed some commercial success. While the subject matter is unusual, the film’s offbeat edge seems to be a common motif in Canadian movies, including those by lauded directors David Cronenberg and Atom Egoyan. Is it something in the water? “I think, as Canadians,” said Stopkewich, “we’re always trying to discover our identity or to define our identity against Americans. And maybe we’re just that awkward brother or sister of the football star or the cheerleader who really has a rich interior life that leads to strange visions, strange fantasies, strange loves.”

Certainly filmmakers from Vancouver played a crucial role in shaping Canadian cinema. Beginning with Larry Kent’s The Bitter Ash (1963), the renegades include Sturla Gunnarsson, Jack Darcus and Daryl Duke, and later Bruce Sweeney, John Pozer, Mina Shum, Reg Harkema and Stopkewich. Almost everyone has worked on each other’s projects, creating what film historian David Spaner calls “a West Coast Wave.” Stopkewich went on to direct the feature film Suspicious River (2000), then Lilith on Top (2001). She has also directed television episodes of Bliss, Da Vinci’s Inquest, The L Word and others.

The X-Files may have been the first major U.S.-financed TV series, but Stargate SG-1 had more staying power. With 10 seasons and 214 episodes, the series surpassed The X-Files as the longest-running science-fiction series of all time. The show attracted a weekly audience of 10 million viewers worldwide, spawned two hit spinoff series and a cartoon, and was nominated for eight Emmys Awards.

By its 10th season, it’s estimated the series had brought close to $1-billion in production to B.C. Its success built an unheard-of nine soundstages, including the effects stage at Bridge Studios, the biggest sound stage in North America. The show was key in developing what has become a world-class visual-effects industry that now attracts work on features shot elsewhere such as Tropic Thunder and Blades of Glory. Robert Cooper, who started as a writer in the first season, moved his way up the ranks to executive producer and then co-created both spinoffs. He supervised more than $70-million in production on six stages in 2009 when two Stargate shows ran simultaneously. The capital circulated among “local Canadian crews, actors, post-production houses and visual-effects vendors,” Cooper told The Vancouver Sun. “There’s a lot of feeling in the Canadian business that Stargate is the big, bad American show, but really we are a Canadian show. We have an American star [Richard Dean Anderson] but the fact of the matter is that everybody—all the writers, the executive producers, the entire cast, the entire crew, except Richard—are Canadian.” All told, more than 1,000 people earned credits on the Stargate shows, the final of which ended in 2011.

15 15

DGC 50th DGCanniversary 50th anniversary issue issue MONTAGE MONTAGE

BRITISH COLUMBIA

The Grey Fox /// Director Phillip Borsos /// The Bitter

McCabe & Mrs. Miller /// Director Robert Altman ///

FEATURE FILMS

Ash / Director Larry Kent /// Proxyhawks / Director

Jack Darcus /// Emile / Director Carl Bessai /// Double

AMERICANFUNDED FEATURES

That Cold Day in the Park / Director Robert Altman ///

Legends of the Fall / Director Edward Zwick /// Carnal

Knowledge / Director Mike Nichols /// Bird on a Wire / Happiness /Director Mina Shum /// Kissed / Director Director John Badham /// First Blood / Director Ted Lynne Stopkewich /// The Grocer’s Wife / Director John Kotcheff /// Juno / Director / Jason Reitman /// Scary Pozer /// Live Bait / Director Bruce Sweeney /// One Movie / Director Keenan Ivory Wayans /// X-Men: The Week / Director/writer /// Michael McGowan Every-

thing’s Gone Green/ Director Paul Fox 16

MONTAGE

DGC 50th anniversary issue

Last Stand / Director Brett Ratner /// Twilight: New

Moon / Director Chris Weitz DGC 50th anniversary issue

MONTAGE

50 DGC PRODUCTIONS

BRITISH C COLUMBIA

50 DGC PRODUCTIONS

C A L B E R TA

DA VINCI’S INQUEST (1998-2005)

DAYS OF HEAVEN (1978)

BYE BYE BLUES (1989)

NORTH OF 60 (1992–1997)

CREATOR/WRITER/DIRECTOR/EXEC. PRODUCER: CHRIS HADDOCK

DIRECTOR: TERRENCE MALICK

DIRECTOR/CO-PRODUCER: ANNE WHEELER

KEY DGC PERSONNEL: DIRECTORS T.W. PEACOCKE, RANDY BRAD-

KEY DGC PERSONNEL: PRODUCER ARVI LIIMATAINEN, DIRECTORS

KEY DGC PERSONNEL: PRODUCTION MANAGER LES KIMBER, AS-

KEY DGC PERSONNEL: CO-PRODUCER ARVI LIIMATAINEN,

SHAW, ELEANORE LINDO, GIL CARDINAL, RICHARD J. LEWIS, STUART

LYNNE STOPKEWICH, STEPHEN SURJIK, STEFAN PLESZCZYNSKI,

SISTANT DIRECTORS ROB LOCKWOOD, MARTIN WALTERS

CINEMATOGRAPHER VIC SARIN, PRODUCTION DESIGNER JOHN

MARGOLIN, BRAD TURNER, GEORGE BLOOMFIELD, JEFF WOOL-

BLACKIE, PRODUCTION MANAGER TOM COX

NOUGH, ANNE WHEELER

Inspired by her mother’s war years as a musician in a small dance band, Anne Wheeler’s beautiful film was nominated for 12 Genies and won three, including best actress for its star, Rebecca Jenkins. Funded by the Alberta Motion Picture Development Corporation, it’s a noble example of government policy working to build cultural identity, industry and careers (and yet the fund was scrapped eight years later). The evocative visuals—which inspired critic Katherine Monk to write, “You can feel Wheeler’s love for the land through the lens”— were shot by Vic Sarin, who went on to direct Partition, among many other projects. The nostalgic design was created by John Blackie, who now gives Hell on Wheels its distinctive look. The film’s co-producer, Arvi Liimatainen, would turn out awardwinning work on Da Vinci’s Inquest. And production manager Tom Cox handled Brokeback Mountain, The Assassination of Jesse James and many others.

Broadcast on the CBC and eventually syndicated around the world, North of 60 boldly depicted the fraught life in a Dene community, revealing its political and cultural conflicts in a manner never before seen on television. Yet it also depicted the fortitude and complexity of the bonds forged within this tumult. At its height, the show attracted 1.5 million viewers a week. “North of 60 offers a complex but ultimately positive representation of contemporary native life—one with which Native viewers are motivated to identify” (Linda Warley, Painting the Maple).

STUART MARGOLIN

Loosely based on the experiences of Larry Campbell, the former chief coroner and mayor of Vancouver, crime drama Da Vinci’s Inquest peddled in real-life issues such as the plight of the homeless and drug addicted, and the Pickton-like disappearance of sex-trade workers. Helmed by Chris Haddock, “the poster boy for Canadian TV success,” as The Globe and Mail described him, Da Vinci’s Inquest was broadcast in 140 countries and spawned the sequel, Da Vinci’s City Hall (2005-06) and the Vancouver noir show, Intelligence (2006-07). Da Vinci’s Inquest earned the title of Canada’s best television show after winning five consecutive Gemini Awards for best dramatic series. In 2001, Haddock took the Gemini triple crown, winning best writing, direction and series. Called “a Canadian masterpiece” by TV Guide and “a superior drama,” by The New York Times, the series boosted the city’s profile as a centre for domestic production. For episode directors, the show proved a highlight: Mina Shum (Double Happiness) won the DGC Award for outstanding direction; Sturla Gunnarsson (Beowulf & Grendel) and John Fawcett (Ginger Snaps) won Geminis for best direction; Nicholas Campbell (director, Booze Can; also the star of the show) earned a DGC outstanding direction nomination and Anne Wheeler (Bye Bye Blues) has the distinction of having directed the first three episodes.

“Chris Haddock’s just got a wonderful eye—he’s hands on, his scripts speak for themselves, obviously, but it’s the on-set presence that he brings and level of quality that he gently insists on, which is why I think his shows are so good,” says Da Vinci actor John Cassini. “We all know now how unique he is and I’m really incredibly thrilled that [the producers of] Boardwalk Empire have seen it and invited him to their party, because he deserves to be playing in that field.”

DGC 50th DGC anniversary 50th anniversary issue issue 18 MONTAGE 18 MONTAGE

Terrence Malick’s film may have dealt with a love triangle between two farm hands and a rich, lonesome rancher (Richard Gere, Brooke Adam and Sam Shepard) but the real focus of this Alberta-shot picture is the rapturous cinematography, which won an Academy Award for Vilmos Zsigmond. Malick won the best director award at the Cannes Film Festival and the movie has since become one of the most acclaimed films of all time. Days of Heaven marked a turning point for the Alberta film industry. For years afterwards, producers would come to the province seeking its unique look—panoramic shots of shimmering wheat fields and ravishing, expansive skies. The entire 1970s yielded a bumper crop of films in Alberta, including Silver Streak (1976), Little Big Man (1970), Prime Cut (1972),

Buffalo Bill and the Indians (1976) and Superman (1978), all but the first sharing Days of Heaven’s Les Kimber as production manager. The era also saw a boom in locally made movies, including producer Fil Fraser’s Why Shoot the Teacher? and Marie-Anne, Harvey Hart’s Goldenrod and Allan King’s Silence of the North (with Rob Lockwood as assistant director). For the next two decades, the industry would enjoy “a sharp growth curve upwards,” recalled Leon Lubin, executive director of the Alberta Motion Picture Industries Association, with directors and producers like Randy Bradshaw, Anne Wheeler, Arvi Liimatainen, John Blackie, Grace Gilroy, Ben Owens, Rob Hilton, Ehud Ellman, Bill Marsdan and Pete White accumulating substantial credits.

Of her artistic process, Wheeler (whose future films would include Angel Square and Better Than Chocolate) says, “I see myself as the watcher. That’s my greatest role on set as a director. I try to watch everything and get back to everyone who’s creating that image—the actors, cinematographer, designer— and tell them if what I saw didn’t feel real.” Says Blackie: “I knew I was going to have to wait for many years to get a show like that to come around again. And it did take a long time.”

The show was set in the northern boreal forest in the fictional town of Lynx River, Northwest Territories, though it was shot entirely in Bragg Creek, a town nestled in the foothills of Alberta and an area not unfamiliar with tensions and drama within First Nations communities. Other shows followed: The Rez (1996-98, Bruce McDonald), Moccasin Flats (2003-06, Jennifer Podemski) and Moose TV (2007, Tim Southam). Aside from the numerous Guild members that circulated through its crew, the show employed an unprecedented number of actors of Aboriginal descent. “The cast, of course, was mostly First Nations,” remembers Guild member Eleanore Lindo, who directed two episodes. “Some had considerable experience and some had none. It was a unique experience for me as a director to work on First Nations stories with First Nations actors. An eye-opening cultural experience.”

19 19

DGC 50th DGCanniversary 50th anniversary issue issue MONTAGE MONTAGE

ALBERTA Passchendaele / Director Paul Gross /// Why Shoot

TV & FILMS

the Teacher? / Director Silvio Narizzano /// waydowntown / Director Gary Burns /// Fubar / Director Michael Dowse /// Days of Heaven / Director Terrence Malick /// Brokeback Mountain / Director Ang Lee /// Unforgiven / Director Clint Eastwood /// Superman / Director Richard Donner /// North of 60 / Directors T.W. Peacocke, Stacey Stewart Curtis, Alan Simmonds /// Heartland /

50 DGC PRODUCTIONS

C A L B E R TA

LONESOME DOVE THE SERIES/OUTLAW YEARS (1994-1996)

S A S K AT C H E W A N DRYLANDERS (1963) DIRECTOR: DON HALDANE

KEY DGC PERSONNEL: DIRECTORS ALLAN KROEKER,

KEY DGC PERSONNEL: EDITOR KIRK JONES, JOHN KEMENY,

RANDY BRADSHAW, BRAD TURNER, KEN JUBENVILL,

LOCATION MANAGER JACK PONTING

WILLIAM FRUET,

Featuring characters from the original, Emmy Award-winning miniseries, the syndicated, spin-off TV series revolved around the life of a cowboy, who started out as a boy in Lonesome Dove, as he made his way through the American West’s postCivil War years—a mythic era charged with outlaws, revolutionaries and spirited women. Filming took place outside Calgary, and it employed dozens of DGC members, including the above directors, along with assistant directors Tom Eirikson, David Markowitz, Roman Buchok, Ehud Ellman, Jason Furukawa, Bryan C. Knight and Andrew Price, and production manager Tom Benz. What followed was a revitalisation of the Western and the province’s film industry, which went on to produce major Hollywood Westerns: Legends of the Fall (starring Brad Pitt) and Shanghai Noon (Jackie Chan), and TV’s Broken Trail.

After the Boer War, Daniel Greer (James Douglas) returns home, only to leave city life behind to become a wheat farmer. “The film must finally be judged on its ability to move us, to make us feel the hope and despair of the homesteader and farmer in the Great Plains, in this case, the prairie of Saskatchewan” (Prof. Donald Kerr, Saskatchewan Poet Laureate).

Directors Dean Bennett, Grant Harvey, Steve DiMarco /// Lonesome Dove: The Series / Directors Donald Shebib, Sidney J. Furie, Mark Sobel /// Bye Bye Blues / Director Anne Wheeler /// Hell on Wheels / Directors David Von Ancken, Adam Davidson, John Shiban /// Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee / Director Yves Simoneau /// Blackstone / Director Ron E. Scott /// Into the West / Directors Robert Dornhelm, Sergio Mimica-Gezzan, Jeremy Podeswa /// Menace/Mayerthorpe / Director Ken Girotti

It was a heady time for Calgary productions. When Lonesome Dove started in 1994, assistant director Ehud Ellman worked on four Calgary-based productions, including TV cop show Probable Cause; another Western feature film, Last of the Dogman; TV drama Jake and Kid; and The Background, a short by John Blackie, Lonesome Dove’s production designer. Blackie was also working on multiple shows, including yet another Western feature, Road to Saddle River, a series of three Black Fox TV Western movies and the TV movie The Song Spinner. “Almost everything you do in the film business is relationship-based,” says Blackie. “I would say that my relationship with the Americans lately has changed the circles that I travel in. My name is mentioned in different circles now than it was a couple of years ago.”

The National Film Board’s first English-language fiction feature, Drylanders came out of the documentary tradition, based as it was on a rejected one-hour farming documentary for the CBC. Fictionalising the proposal, Drylanders saw DGC Founder Don Haldane turn his camera back on the Prairies, returning to familiar subject matter—small-town labour in the West— broached in his earlier documentary, Saskatchewan Traveller (1959). While Drylanders marked the NFB’s shift into fictional features, the documentary tradition in Saskatchewan continued, with films such as Paper Wheat (1979) and Grain Elevator (1981). Recalling the trials and tribulations of making the film, including being assigned an amateur editor who was replaced at his insistence by Kirk Jones, Haldane wrote: “Among the most satisfying films that I have made, but also one of the most frustrating, is Drylanders…. The film was to be the epic story of the opening of the Canadian West, and the drought that brought the Depression of the ‘30s. It is the saga of a family who left Eastern Canada to stake their future in the prairies…. Despite all that [interference by the NFB, including the imposition of a voice-over narration], it is regarded by many people as a ‘classic.’”

// 100 Days in the Jungle / Director Sturla Gunnarsson 20

MONTAGE

DGC 50th anniversary issue

21 21

DGC 50th DGCanniversary 50th anniversary issue issue MONTAGE MONTAGE

SASKATCHEWAN

TV & FILMS

50 DGC PRODUCTIONS

Who Has Seen The W ind / Director Allan King

Paper Wheat / Director Albert Kish /// Hungry Hills /

Director Rob W. King /// Moccasin Flats / Directors Sta -

cey Stewart Curtis, Rob W. King, Dwayne Beaver ///

PAPERBACK HERO (1973)

WHO HAS SEEN THE WIND (1977)

DIRECTOR: PETER PEARSON

DIRECTOR: ALLAN KING

KEY DGC PERSONNEL: CINEMATOGRAPHER DONALD WILDER,

KEY DGC PERSONNEL: EDITOR ARLA SAARE

EDITOR KIRK JONES, PRODUCTION MANAGER BOB LINNELL

When local hockey hero Rick Dylan’s on-ice prowess begins to fade, his mind begins to wander to dreams of being an Old West gunslinger. As Dylan begins to act on his fantasies and escape the reality of his life in Saskatchewan, his Western dreams begin to get the better of him. Director Peter Pearson, a Canadian cultural nationalist who is the only person to have been President of the DGC and, later, Executive Director of Telefilm Canada, calls the film a metaphor for Canada’s fascination with our neighbours to the south: “It was a movie about the willful Canadian colonisation by American culture.”

An adaptation of W.O. Mitchell’s Stephen Leacock Awardwinning novel, Allan King’s film unfolds through the eyes of 10-year-old Brian (Brian Painchaud) during the Depression in rural Saskatchewan. “Captivating images of beauty, impeccably acted and directed...the human condition viewed for once through compassionate and caring eyes” (Philip Bergson, The Sunday Times).

Love and Hate: The Story of Colin and Joanne Thatch-

er / Director Francis Mankiewicz /// Corner Gas / Di-

rectors Jeff Beesley, Rob W. King, David Storey /// The

Englishman’s Boy / Director John N. Smith /// Prairie

Giant / Director John N. Smith /// Drylanders / Director

Don Haldane /// Paperback Hero / Director Peter Pearson 22

MONTAGE

DGC 50th anniversary issue

Paperback Hero was one of the first commercially successful Canadian features funded by the CFDC (Canadian Film Development Corporation, now Telefilm Canada), which, under Michael Spencer, would up its annual budget to $25-million by 1976. Pearson’s film built on the initial good will offered to such films as Goin’ Down the Road (Donald Shebib, 1970) and The Rowdyman (Peter Carter, 1972). It set an artistic template for hits to come like The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (Ted Kotcheff, 1974). The film kick-started a legacy of interest in Canada’s national pastime, inspiring hockey narratives from Net Worth (Jerry Ciccoritti, 1995) to recent films like Goon (Michael Dowse, 2011) and Breakaway (Robert Lieberman, 2011). Pearson remembers the efforts of Donald Wilder, a founding member of the DGC, to harness and realise his ambitious filmmaking ideas during the shoot. “He was pretty gung-ho,” Pearson recalls. “I would do long, single-shot masters. He was very good with that kind of stuff.”

President of the DGC from 1970-71 and again from 19932000, King was a renowned cinéma vérité documentarian who transitioned into fiction filmmaking in the mid-’70s at the behest of then CBC drama commissioning editor John Hirsch. His fictional feature film, Who Has Seen the Wind, shot on location in Saskatchewan, was the first major tax-shelter film made in the province. It is a part of a Canadian literary-film adaptation tradition that includes productions of novels by Barbara Gowdy (Falling Angels, 2003, directed by Scott Smith), Margaret Laurence (The Stone Angel, 2007, directed by Kari Skogland) and Guy Vanderhaege (The Englishman’s Boy, 2008, directed by John N. Smith), all of which were shot on the Prairies. It is also a predecessor to such strong Saskatchewan productions as Sleepwalking, Tideland and Hungry Hills. In an interview with TVO shortly before his death in 2009, King said of working in the province: “With Who Has Seen the Wind, I was fortunate to work with colleagues who were especially skilled in explaining face-to-face to each and every member of the community what our objective was, and they were then able to mobilise the entire community to make their stores and facilities available for filming.”

23 23

DGC 50th DGCanniversary 50th anniversary issue MONTAGE issue MONTAGE

50 DGC PRODUCTIONS

C MANITOBA LOVE AND HATE: THE STORY OF COLIN AND JOANNE THATCHER (1990)

CORNER GAS (2004-2009)

DAUGHTERS OF THE COUNTRY: IKWE (1986)

TALES FROM THE GIMLI HOSPITAL (1988)

DIRECTORS: DAVID STORE, ROBERT DE LINT, JEFF BEESLEY, DON

DIRECTOR/PRODUCER: NORMA BAILEY

DIRECTOR/PRODUCER/EDITOR: GUY MADDIN

DIRECTOR: FRANCIS MANKIEWICZ / KEY DGC PERSONNEL: CINEMA-

MCCUTCHEON, ROB W. KING

KEY DGC PERSONNEL: EDITOR AND PRODUCTION MANAGER LARA

TOGRAPHER VIC SARIN, EDITOR GORDON MCCLELLAN, PRODUCTION

KEY DGC PERSONNEL: EDITOR BRUCE LANGE, PRODUCTION DE-

MAZUR

DESIGNER PAUL AMES, PRODUCTION MANAGEMENT LARS DAHL

SIGNER HUGH SHANKLAND, LOCATION MANAGER BILL SOROCHAN

Saskatchewan politician Colin Thatcher—embroiled in divorce proceedings with his wife Jo-Ann—seeks an alternative to the mounting court decisions that are not going in his favour. The solution he arrives at is murder. A trail of evidence implicating him is soon picked up by the Crown and he is swiftly accused of being behind the homicide. This true-crime story was a huge success not only in Canada but also in foreign markets. “The competition for Love and Hate was so fierce that there was actually a bidding war for it,” said Ivan Fecan, then head of CBC programming.

Created by comedian Brent Butt, this much-loved sitcom unfolded in the sleepy fictional Prairie town of Dog River, Saskatchewan, focusing on the humdrum life of gas-station attendant Brent Leroy (Butt). “The history of Canadian television would henceforth be divided into two distinct eras: before Corner Gas and after” (Mark McKinney, the Toronto Star). Premiering in 2003, for six seasons CTV’s Corner Gas cornered the market on Canadian comedy television, breaking record viewer numbers and winning six Geminis. The first sitcom ever primarily produced by CTV, Corner Gas was shot on location in Saskatchewan (its crew won a 2008 DGC Award for outstanding team achievement in a series) and its success inaugurated a rich period in mainstream Canadian television programmes. In contrast to the more niche Trailer Park Boys (2001-2007), Corner Gas’s broad appeal places it in the company of similarly comedic populist show such as Little Mosque on the Prairie (2007-2012), Being Erica (2009-2011), Butt’s follow-ups Dan For Mayor (2010-2011) and Hiccups (20102011), and InSecurity (2011-present), while also harkening back to the regional humour of the classic Canadian series The Beachcombers (1972-1990).

As the first major Canadian TV mini-series, Love and Hate would set a high bar, especially in the noir genre. Mankiewicz and his crew would reconvene the next year for the well-received Conspiracy of Silence. The crime genre would expand by decade’s end with the successful launch of CBC’s Da Vinci’s Inquest. These projects would prove a strong foothold for crime and noir programming on Canadian television. They would lay the foundation for successful crime minis like Dragon Boys as well as series such as Flashpoint and The Border. Editor Gordon McClellan recalls Mankiewicz’s ability to look beyond the small screen on the project. “Francis was terrific to work with—a kind, sensitive director who brought a cinematic approach to his television mini-series,” he said. “With his background in Quebec cinema, his visual treatment captured the broadness of Western locales and the intimacy of a family torn apart.”

MONTAGE DGCanniversary 50th anniversary MONTAGE DGC 50th issue issue 24 24

DGC Saskatchewan Chair Rob W. King directed episodes and recalls working with Butt and the incredible atmosphere on set: “Working out in Regina was great, where the main set was, ’cause it literally sat on the side of a secondary highway that ran from Regina to Moose Jaw. The set looked so good that often people would pull up expecting to get a tank of gas and a hamburger.”

Set in 1770, Ikwe, the first in the four-part Daughters of the Country series and of Norma Bailey’s celebrated naturalist dramas, follows an Ojibwa girl who marries a Scottish fur trader, leaving her home for the shores of Georgian Bay, where a series of hardships lead to the tragic realisation of a prophetic dream. “What shines through…is the strength of the Métis women…to carry on against all odds” (Mary Alemany-Galway, Cinema Canada).

Despite a round of food poisoning and a nearly disastrous stunt performed on cracking ice, Ikwe marked a triumphant first encounter with full-length drama for nearly everyone in the Manitoba-based crew. “We cut our teeth on that series and most of those people are still in the industry, many of them in the Guild,” says Bailey. “I felt as if I was entering into an arena that, although exciting and exhilarating, was also very intimidating. But joining the Guild made me feel as if I belonged in this arena. I developed and produced the entire series and directed half of them. So by the time I’d fumbled my way through, flying by the seat of my pants, I felt I had a pretty good idea of what to do next time someone was crazy enough to let me direct.”

Past and present converge in Guy Maddin’s feature debut. While visiting their mother in a Manitoba hospital-in-a-barn, two children are regaled with tales of wrestling, necrophilia and Nordic grooming techniques from the time of Gimli’s smallpox epidemic. “The flavour of regional antiquity gives the movie much of its eerie charm and feeling of remoteness” (Jonathan Rosenbaum, The Chicago Reader).

Tales From the Gimli Hospital was made under the auspices of the Winnipeg Film Group, an artist-run production, exhibition and distribution centre that has proven instrumental in igniting or sustaining the careers of filmmakers such as Maddin, John Paizs and Gimli’s producer, Greg Klymkiw, who would himself go on to bolster the careers of countless filmmakers during his tenure at the Canadian Film Centre. Maddin’s resourceful employment of antiquated techniques and surrealistic story-telling made Gimli an international critical hit, as well as an inspiration to other Winnipeg eccentrics like Deco Dawson and Noam Gonick. Part of the production transpired in Maddin’s mother’s beauty salon, located on the ground floor of Maddin’s childhood home, which went up for sale before Gimli was complete. “Mother had to show prospective buyers an urban property with a virtual barn included in its storefront, complete with hay-strewn floors, chickens and even cattle where a family business once thrived,” says Maddin. “It was sad enough selling the beloved old home, but watching it biodegrade through my artsy agency was extra depressing for the rest of my family.”

25 25

DGC 50th DGCanniversary 50th anniversary issue MONTAGE issue MONTAGE

MANITOBA Crime Wave / Director John Paizs /// Seven Times Lucky

TV & FILMS

50 DGC PRODUCTIONS

/ Director Gary Yates /// My Winnipeg / Director Guy Maddin /// The Year Dolly Parton Was My Mom / Director Tara Johns /// Daughters of the Country / Director Norma Bailey /// For Those Who Hunt the Wounded Down / Director Norma Bailey /// The Arrow / Direc tor Don McBrearty /// Tales From The Gimli Hospital / Director Guy Maddin /// Throwing Stones /// Director

MY LIFE AS A DOG (1995-1996)

SHALL WE DANCE? (2004)

DIRECTOR: NORMA BAILEY, E. JANE THOMPSON, NEILL FEARNLEY

DIRECTOR: PETER CHELSOM

KEY DGC PERSONNEL: 1ST ADS JAMES RAIT, FERGUS BARNES,

KEY DGC PERSONNEL: 1ST AD MARTIN WALTERS, LOCATION

EDITORS ROBERT LOWER, CHARLES ROBICHAUD, PRODUCTION

MANAGER LOUISE O’BRIEN-MORAN

DESIGNER ANDREW DESKIN

A small-screen adaptation of the Oscar-nominated and Golden Globe-winning Swedish film of the same name, this series followed Eric Johansson (Michael Yarmush) as he came of age in a small village. “‘Charm’ is not the first word that comes to mind when considering much of today’s programming for youngsters, but it works handily enough for My Life as a Dog” (John O’Connor, The New York Times). Working closely with Reidar Jönsson, the author of the original book upon which the film was based, My Life as a Dog was the first major television series shot in Manitoba. Aimed at a teenage demographic, the 30-minute drama aired on Showtime, winning a Gemini for best performance in youth programme for Callum Keith Rennie (who went on to work in Memento, eXistenZ, The Butterfly Effect).

In this remake of the acclaimed Japanese film of the same name, middle-aged John Clark (Richard Gere) signs up for dance lessons on a whim and ends up learning not just new moves but how to love life. “I enjoyed the Japanese version so much I invited it to my Overlooked Film Festival a few years ago, but this remake offers pleasures of its own” (Roger Ebert).

Mario Azzopardi /// The Stone Angel / Director Kari Skogland /// The Diviners / Director Anne Wheeler /// Shall We Dance? / Director Peter Chelsom /// Capote / Director Bennett Miller /// The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford / Director Andrew Dominik /// My Life as a Dog / Directors Norma Bailey, E. Jane Thompson, Michael J.F. Scott, T.W. Peacocke /// Less Than Kind / Directors James Dunnison, Kelly Makin, Shawn Thompson, Bruce McDonald, Henry SarwerFoner /// Stryker / Director Noam Gonick /// Elijah /

When asked about the shoot, director Neill Fearnley recalled not only the challenges that come with working with children, but also the elements in the Prairie province: “The winter is always what stands out in your mind when you’re shooting in Winnipeg. We had a shoot on Lake Winnipeg, a hockey sequence, I recall, and as we were shooting, a hoar frost crossed the lake. Ice formed on everything in what seemed like seconds, everything vanished and I couldn’t shoot anything as I couldn’t see 10 feet in front of me.”

Starring Gere, Susan Sarandon and Jennifer Lopez, Shall We Dance? was the first major Hollywood production shot in Manitoba. Its success marked a turn towards large-scale American productions. After Shall We Dance?—where Winnipeg stood in for Chicago—several Hollywood films came to Manitoba, casting its wind-swept, vast plains as everything from the American Mid-West to sci-fi worlds to, ironically, Eastern Canada. The year after Shall We Dance?, Bennett Miller’s Capote (2005) was filmed there, followed by the likes of Andrew Dominik’s The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007), John Dahl’s You Kill Me (2007), Eric Brevig’s Journey to the Center of the Earth (2008) and Michael Dowse’s Goon (2011). Of shooting in the city, 1st AD Martin Walter recalls: “We were going to film in Toronto and then SARS hit and everyone panicked. We settled on Winnipeg for financial reasons, and there’s an area in the downtown that lends itself to a Chicago look—done deal. The city had never seen anything like us and they really stepped up—tons of assistance, great people. The kindness and effort I remember well.”

Director Paul Unwin 26

MONTAGE

DGC 50th anniversary issue

27 27

DGC 50th DGCanniversary 50th anniversary issue issue MONTAGE MONTAGE

50 DGC PRODUCTIONS

C O N TA R I O QUENTIN DURGENS, MP (1966-1971)

WARRENDALE (1967)

GOIN’ DOWN THE ROAD (1970)

KING OF KENSINGTON (1975-1980)

DIRECTORS: DAVID GARDNER, PETER BORETSKI, JOHN TRENT, DARYL

DIRECTOR/PRODUCER: ALLAN KING

DIRECTOR/PRODUCER/EDITOR: DONALD SHEBIB

DIRECTORS: ALAN ERLICH, ARI DIKIJIAN, PERRY ROSEMOND, RAY

DUKE, KIRK JONES

KEY DGC PERSONNEL: EDITOR PETER MOSELEY

KEY DGC PERSONNEL: DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY RICHARD

ARSENAULT, SHELDON LARRY

LEITERMAN, SOUND ENGINEER JAMES MCCARTHY, ASSISTANT CAMERA TED MCGHEE

A young lawyer from Moose Falls goes to Ottawa to fight racial and moral injustice as a member of Parliament. “Quentin Durgens’ troubled idealist embodied the whole ’60s experience” (Stephen Cole, Here’s Looking at Us: Celebrating Fifty Years of CBC-TV).

CBC’s 1966 season was a watershed year for one-hour series, launching Quentin Durgens, MP, starring Gordon Pinsent, and Wojeck (1966-1968), starring John Vernon as coroner Dr. Steve Wojeck, who fought social injustice while investigating deaths in Toronto. These shows brought Canadian episodic drama to new levels of technical and thematic sophistication and laid the groundwork for later Ontario-shot programs such as period whodunits The Great Detective (1979-1982) and Murdoch Mysteries (premiering in 2008), the comedy/mystery Seeing Things (1981-1987) and cop dramas Flashpoint (premiering in 2008) and Rookie Blue (premiering in 2010). Importantly, Quentin Durgens, MP and Wojeck presented viewers with an Ontario they recognised. “Before that I’d been hiding behind wigs and beards and Mountie uniforms,” recalled DGC member Pinsent, whose career has also included directing several TV movies. The series’ realism and issue-driven subject matter anticipated Da Vinci’s Inquest—also focusing on a coroner, transposed to Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside—more than three decades later. While the DGC was decades away from a deal with the CBC, several notable members directed these pioneering series, including John Trent, who was DGC President from 1968 to 1970 and, like Durgens, dealt with Ottawa cabinet ministers—in his case, looking to solidify a Capital Cost Allowance programme. Daryl Duke, meanwhile, became a DGC Lifetime Achievement Award winner in 2003.

MONTAGE DGCanniversary 50th anniversary MONTAGE DGC 50th issue issue 28 28

Allan King’s masterful, rough-and-tumble vérité feature debut plunges the audience into the titular Toronto experimental rehabilitation home for emotionally disturbed children, essentially chronicling its daily tumult—until Warrendale’s cook unexpectedly dies, prompting a deluge of devastating grief. Employing techniques developed by psychologist John Brown, the seemingly inexhaustible staff is often found trying to hold or simply pin down the more frantic children. The film’s signature scenes feature jumbles of limbs, anguished cries and repeated requests to articulate feelings. Though originally produced for broadcast, King refused to cut the film’s profanity, resulting in its being banned by the CBC and the BBC. But Warrendale won the Canadian Film Award for best feature and film of the year, a special National Society of Film Critics Award, the Prix d’art et essai at Cannes and the admiration of Jean Renoir. “King has evoked those children’s inner selves so powerfully on the screen that he has snared us up there, too” (Stanley Kauffman, The Nation).

King’s unsettling film was the first independently distributed Canadian feature documentary. Its success led to A Married Couple, King’s second feature, which The New York Times’s Clive Barnes called “quite simply one of the best films I have ever seen.” A great believer in Canada’s filmmaking community, King was President of the DGC twice, in 1970-71 and from 1993 to 2000. His work inspired such Ontario documentarians as Jennifer Baichwal (The True Meaning of Pictures, 1984), Sturla Gunnarsson (Gerrie & Louise, 1987) and Sarah Polley (Stories We Tell, 2012).

Cape Bretoners Peter (Doug McGrath) and Joey (Paul Bradley) drive to Toronto looking for a better life, but bad fortune follows good. “Shebib is so good at blending actors into locations that one has to remind oneself that this is an acted film and not a documentary” (Pauline Kael, The New Yorker). There had been few English-Canadian feature dramas before 1970. F.R. Crawley produced a couple: the 1963 bilingual dark comedy Amanita Pestilens, about lawn-obsessed Henri Martin (Jacques Labrecque), and 1964’s The Luck of Ginger Coffey, directed by Irvin Kershner and starring Robert Shaw in a Montreal kitchen-sink drama adapted from Irish-Canadian Brian Moore’s novel. That year also saw Don Owen’s National Film Board production Nobody Waved Good-bye, the realistic story of 18-year-old Peter (Peter Kastner) who leaves home to try to make it on his own.

Six years later, Goin’ Down the Road, the country’s first and arguably best road movie, appeared to great acclaim. “People said it was the first film about Canada they had seen on the big screen,” says Shebib. It was noted for its naturalism, which Shebib attributes to “having no money and a crew of only three,” including director of photography Richard Leiterman, sound engineer James McCarthy and assistant camera Ted McGhee. Shebib went on to shoot the 2011 sequel, Down the Road Again, which was nominated for a DGC Team Award. Shebib later sat on the DGC’s Ontario District Council and credits the Guild with “helping me financially in terms of getting residuals and being able to keep on working and developing projects.”

The variety store operated by

Larry King (Al Waxman), his wife, Cathy (Fiona Reid), and mother, Gladys (Helene Winston), becomes the hub of activity in a multicultural Toronto neighbourhood. “Easily ranks as the single most important entertainment series ever produced in English-speaking Canada” (Antonia Zerbisias, Toronto Star). There had been a few English-Canadian multi-camera sitcoms before—The Trouble with Tracy is a notorious example— but in the mid-’70s CBC struck gold with King of Kensington, which drew a reported average audience of 1.5 million-1.8 million. Alan Erlich began helming episodes in 1978 and became the go-to director. It put him at the forefront of the sitcom genre and he directed later series Flappers and Hangin’ In, both developed by Kensington exec producer Jack Humphrey, Check It Out! starring Don Adams and Learning the Ropes with Lyle Alzado.

Efforts to revive the multi-cam sitcom have begun anew with Thunderbird Films’ forthcoming Package Deal, shooting in B.C. But our laughs more often have come through single-camera comedies such as Twitch City (1998, 2000) and Puppets Who Kill (2002-2006). It wasn’t until the Saskatchewan-set Corner Gas (2004-2009) that we would see a homegrown comedy that connected with audiences to the same extent as King of Kensington. Erlich, meanwhile, became a Directors Representative on the DGC’s National Executive Board and was President from 1984 to 1986 and again in 1988. “You had B.C. fighting and Quebec fighting. It was a small encapsulation of Canada,” Erlich recalls of that challenging era.

29 29

DGC 50th DGCanniversary 50th anniversary issue issue MONTAGE MONTAGE

Quentin Durgens, M.P./ Director Ronald Weyman /// ONTARIO

Nobody Waved Good-bye / Director Don Owen /// I’ve ONTARIO

Wojeck / Directors Paul Almond, George Mc Cowan ///

Heard the Mermaids Singing / Director Patricia Roz -

TV SERIES

The Newsroom / Director Ken Finkelman /// Street Le-

FEATURES

gal / Directors Stacey Stewart Curtis, Stefan Scaini,

Director Clement Virgo / Roadkill / Director Bruce Mc-

Eleanor Lindo / E.N.G. / Directors Art Hindle, Peter

Donald /// Zero Patience / Director John Greyson ///

Rowe, George Bloomfield /// Traders / Directors Alex

Highway 61 / Director Bruce McDonald /// Goin’ Down

Chapple, Reid A. Dunlop, T.W. Peacocke /// Durham

the Road / Director Donald Shebib /// Such a Long

County / Directors Holly Dale, Adrienne Mitchell ///

Journey / Director Sturla Gunnarsson /// Last Night /

Twitch City / Director Bruce McDonald /// ReGenesis

Director Don McKellar /// Dead Ringers / Director David

/ Directors John L’Ecuyer, Ken Girotti, Clement Virgo

Cronenberg /// Away from Her / Director Sarah Polley ///

/// Due South / Directors George Bloomfield, Steve Di -

The Five Senses / Director Jeremy Podeswa /// Fire /

Marco, Richard J. Lewis /// La femme Nikita / Directors

Director Deepa Mehta /// The Red Violin / Director

Jon Cassar, René Bonnière, Brad Turner /// This Is Won-

François Girard /// 50 Dead Men Walking / Director

derland / Directors Anne Wheeler, Chris Grismer, Scott

Kari Skogland /// Monkey Warfare / Director Reginald

Smith /// Flashpoint / Directors David Frazee, Kelly

Harkema /// Siblings / Director David Weaver ///

Makin, Erik Canuel /// Rookie Blue / Directors David

I’m Yours / Director Leonard Farlinger /// Luck / Director

Wellington, John Fawcett, Steve DiMarco

Peter Wellington

MONTAGE

DGC 50th anniversary issue

ema /// Next of Kin / Director Atom Egoyan /// Rude /

DGC 50th anniversary issue

MONTAGE

50 DGC PRODUCTIONS

THE SILENT PARTNER (1978)

THE KIDS OF DEGRASSI STREET (1980-1986)

BOYS AND GIRLS (1983)

NEXT OF KIN (1984)

DIRECTOR: DARYL DUKE

DIRECTORS: LINDA SCHUYLER, KIT HOOD

DIRECTOR: DON MCBREARTY

DIRECTOR/PRODUCER/WRITER/EDITOR: ATOM EGOYAN

KEY DGC PERSONNEL: EDITOR GEORGE APPLEBY, PRODUCTION

KEY DGC PERSONNEL: EDITOR ALAN COLLINS

KEY DGC PERSONNEL: PRODUCTION MANAGER GILLIAN

KEY DGC PERSONNEL: PRODUCTION MANAGERS CAMELIA FRIE-

RICHARDSON

BERG, JEREMY PODESWA, ASSISTANT EDITOR BRUCE MCDONALD

An adaptation of Alice Munro’s short story about 1940s farm girl Margaret (Megan Follows), who begins to understand that men treat girls as inferiors. “An effective, well-produced short with strong performances” (Wyndham Wise, Take One’s Essential Guide to Canadian Film).

Peter (Patrick Tierney), depressed by his chilly WASP home environment, convinces an Armenian family he is the son they gave up for adoption. “The premise of Next of Kin is intriguing…. It is a comic notion and Egoyan exploits it skillfully…. The performances are amazingly natural and effective” (Robert Everett-Green, The Globe and Mail). The mid-’80s saw a boom of director-driven works backed by council grants and the Ontario Film Development Corporation (OFDC), which launched in 1986, adding onto funding from Telefilm Canada. These movies got national exposure at Toronto’s Festival of Festivals (now TIFF) and limited commercial releases across the country and, often, internationally.

DESIGNER TREVOR WILLIAMS, 1ST AD ALAN SIMMONDS, PRODUCTION MANAGER MARILYN STONEHOUSE

Bank-teller Miles (Elliott Gould) hides cash from psychopathic robber Harry (Christopher Plummer), who subsequently chases him down. “A small but wonderful gem…that leaves us marvelling at its ingenuity” (Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times).

The Capital Cost Allowance (CCA) introduced in 1974 enabled backers of Canadian feature films to deduct 100 percent of their investment from their taxable income. This incentive attracted many investors—unfortunately, many of whom were solely concerned with the tax benefit, not about producing a hit film. The volume of production skyrocketed by decade’s end, but many of these tax-shelter movies were forgettable. The Silent Partner, executive-produced by Garth Drabinsky and written by Curtis Hanson, was an early exception—a wellreceived thriller with an A-list cast. Subsequent CCA successes include Ivan Reitman’s Bill Murray comedy Meatballs (1979), Bob Clark’s Sherlock Holmes mystery Murder by Decree (1979), Louis Malle’s Oscar-nominated Atlantic City (1980), Peter Medak’s horror flick The Changeling (1980), David Cronenberg’s Scanners (1981) and Jean-Jacques Annaud’s prehistoric Quest for Fire (1981). Production manager Marilyn Stonehouse gives much of the credit on The Silent Partner to Drabinsky. “Garth did a number of pictures and he didn’t make one I didn’t like,” she says, remembering the film. “For me, it was one of the best of the early ones, working with people like Christopher Plummer. It was a great learning curve. That picture still carries well today and I’m very proud of it.”

MONTAGE DGC 50th issue issue 32 32 MONTAGE DGCanniversary 50th anniversary

Child neighbours in Toronto are faced with moral dilemmas, shifting family structures and other daunting aspects of adult life. Starring Stacie Mistysyn, John Ioannou and Sarah Charlesworth. ”The Degrassi series…revolutionised young people’s TV programming by allowing kids to be themselves” (Stephen Cole, Here’s Looking at Us: Celebrating Fifty Years of CBC-TV). At a time when most TV for adolescents was cartoons, The Kids of Degrassi Street offered live-action drama featuring actors their own age in relatable situations—and an international cultural phenomenon was born. The CBC series was followed by Degrassi Junior High (1987-89), Degrassi High (1989-1991) and, finally, Degrassi: The Next Generation, which went to air on CTV in 2001 and currently plays on MuchMusic, simply titled Degrassi. As of its 10th season, it is produced in a telenovela format. The series have sold into 151 territories.

Other successful teen dramas followed, including Ready or Not (1993-1997), Madison (1993-1997) and Radio Free Roscoe (2003-2005). Epitome Pictures, keeper of the Degrassi brand, branched out with teen music-biz drama Instant Star (2004-2008) and The L.A. Complex (2012), about young Canadians finding their way in Hollywood. “Despite the challenges of small budgets and crews, it was a great time to be making television,” recalls The Kids of Degrassi co-creator and executive producer Linda Schuyler, also Epitome CEO. “I don’t know where we would be without our DGC members. Our talented directors, assistant directors, artdepartment members and post department bring a richness, professionalism and passion to Degrassi that has ensured the series’ longevity.”

Atlantis Communications—producers Seaton McLean, Janice Platt and Michael MacMillan—brought the half-hour project to McBrearty for their CBC anthology series Sons and Daughters, which went to air in 1984. The film won an Academy Award for best live-action short film and established Atlantis, which produced about 50 shorts in the first half of the decade for other anthologies, including The Ray Bradbury Theater (1985-86, 1988-1992) and, later on, The Outer Limits (1995-2002). Other production companies kept the anthology tradition alive in the new millennium, notably Shaftesbury Films with The Atwood Stories (2003), The Shields Stories (2004) and Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures (2010). Atlantis went on to produce episodic series including Psi Factor: Chronicles of the Paranormal (1996-2000) and Earth: Final Conflict (1997-2002). In 1998, it was part of the merger that formed Alliance Atlantis Communications, which backed the CSI franchise, Cold Squad (1998-2005) and The Eleventh Hour (2002-2005). Recalling Boys and Girls, McBrearty notes that Atlantis “at that point was hands-on with the filmmaking and a great group to work with.” McBrearty became DGC President in 1990, after the unexpected death of President Harvey Hart, and served until 1993. Among his proudest memories is being “part of a group that launched the health plan—one of the great benefits of being a Guild member.”

Prior to the OFDC, Atom Egoyan garnered attention for his first feature, Next of Kin, made with like-minded filmmakers who became notable directors in their own right, including Bruce McDonald, whose Roadkill (1989) was an explosive punk-rock film shot guerilla-style with some Super-8 footage, Peter Mettler, whose documentaries include Gambling, Gods and LSD (2002) and Jeremy Podeswa, who scored with his sexy, sophisticated 1994 first feature, Eclipse. The media in Canada often linked McDonald, Egoyan, Mettler and Podeswa with Patricia Rozema and Don McKellar, each of whom won the Prix de la Jeunesse at the Cannes film festival, Rozema for I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing in 1987 and McKellar for Last Night in 1998. Though perhaps overly hyped as young filmmakers, all have gone on to fine careers in television and film. And their work helped to focus much-needed attention on directors operating in Canada during the 1980s, ’90s and beyond.

33 33

DGC 50th DGCanniversary 50th anniversary issue issue MONTAGE MONTAGE

ONTARIO ONTARIO Meatballs / Director Ivan Reitman /// Porky’s / Director Thirty-two Short Films About Glenn Gould / Director

AMERICANFINANCED FEATURES

THE ARTS

François Girard /// Slings and Arrows / Director Peter

Bob Clark /// The Brood / Director David Cronenberg

/// Moonstruck / Director Norman Jewison /// Chicago

Wellington /// Long Day’s Journey Into Night / Direct or David Wellington /// Dido & Aeneas / Director Barbara Willis Sweete /// September Songs / Director Larry

/ Director Rob Marshall /// Cinderella Man / Direc -

tor Ron Howard /// The Silent Partner / Director Daryl

Weinstein /// Boys and Girls / Directors Don McBrearty /// The Atwood Stories / Directors Lori Spring, Lynne Stopkewich, Norma Bailey, Francine Zuckerman, Marni

Duke /// Hairspray / Director Adam Shankman /// The

Banack, Stacey Stewart Curtis /// Yo-Yo Ma Inspired by Bach / Directors Atom Egoyan, Niv Fichman, François

Incredible Hulk / Director Louis Leterrier /// Mean Girard /// Billy Bishop Goes to War / Director Barbara WilGirls / Director Mark Waters 34

MONTAGE

DGC 50th anniversary issue

lis Sweete /// Satie and Suzanne / Director Tim Southam DGC 50th anniversary issue

MONTAGE

50 DGC PRODUCTIONS

MOONSTRUCK (1987)

CONSPIRACY OF SILENCE (1991)

DIRECTOR/PRODUCER: NORMAN JEWISON

DIRECTOR: FRANCIS MANKIEWICZ

THIRTY-TWO SHORT FILMS ABOUT GLENN GOULD (1993)

DUE SOUTH (1994-1999)

KEY DGC PERSONNEL: 1ST AD DAVID MCAREE, ART DIRECTOR

KEY DGC PERSONNEL: EDITOR RALPH BRUNJES, PRODUCTION

DIRECTOR/CO-WRITER: FRANÇOIS GIRARD

BARBRA MATIS, LOCATION MANAGER BETH BOIGON

LEWIS, PAUL HAGGIS, JERRY CICCORITTI

DESIGNER ARTHUR HERRIOTT, ART DIRECTOR CATHERINE

KEY DGC PERSONNEL: LEONARD FARLINGER / ASSISTANT DIRECTOR

DIRECTORS: GEORGE BLOOMFIELD, STEVE DIMARCO, RICHARD J.

BASARABA, 1ST AD JOHN PACE

Loretta (Cher), an Italian-American from Brooklyn, becomes involved with eccentric, one-handed baker Ronny (Nicolas Cage), the brother of her fiancé Johnny (Danny Aiello). “Reviews of the film tend to make it sound like a madcap ethnic comedy, and that it is. But there is something more here, a certain bittersweet yearning that comes across as ineffably romantic” (Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times). In 1978, after directing Hollywood’s In the Heat of the Night and Fiddler on the Roof, Norman Jewison returned to Canada—and his productions followed. He shot 1985’s Agnes of God in Montreal, and then Moonstruck in his Toronto hometown. The film’s success—$92-million at the North American box office and three Oscars—reinforced Toronto’s service capabilities and ability to stand in for an American city. Foreign-location shooting in Ontario grew to $561-million in 2001-02. Hollywood titles produced in the province included The Santa Clause (1994), Good Will Hunting (1997), Jewison’s The Hurricane (1999), X-Men (2000), Chicago (2002), A History of Violence (2005), Cinderella Man (2005), The Incredible Hulk (2008) and Total Recall (2012).

“Over 70 percent of Moonstruck was shot in Toronto—all the interiors were built and shot here,” Jewison recalls. “It was a totally integrated film and I was extremely proud of my Canadian crew.” His legacy also includes founding the Canadian Film Centre in 1988, the country’s top film-training facility. “I’m very proud of that place,” he told Playback. “It’s probably one of the best things I can leave behind.”

MONTAGE MONTAGE DGC 50th DGCanniversary 50th anniversary issue issue 36 36

Cree teenager Helen Betty Osborne (Michelle St. John) is abducted and murdered in Manitoba in 1971 by Lee Colgan (Michael Mahonen) and his three male friends, who are shielded for years by their town. “Far better than most stuff that appears during prime TV months” (Craig Tomashoff, People magazine). The two-part CBC miniseries, produced by Bernard Zukerman, got picked up by CBS for U.S. prime time and won seven Gemini Awards. To some, it marked the Canadian TV movie’s coming of age, allowing as it did director Mankiewicz to shoot the script—adapted by Suzette Couture from Lisa Priest’s novel—with his own cinematic artistry.

It ushered in a heyday for MOWs and miniseries plucked from the headlines, including Sturla Gunnarsson’s prostitution drama The Diary of Evelyn Lau (1997), murder tale Scorn (2000) and kidnapping yarn 100 Days in the Jungle (2002); Jerry Ciccoritti’s Trudeau (2002); Tim Southam’s One Dead Indian (2006) about protest victim Dudley George; T.W. Peacocke’s Summit Series recreation Canada Russia ‘72 (2006); and Ken Girotti’s Mayerthorpe (2008), about slain RCMP officers. Mankiewicz, who established himself with Quebec films including Les Bons débarras, died at age 49 in 1993. “He was such a talent and when he passed away it was such a loss to the entire Canadian film industry,” recalls editor Ralph Brunjes. “We all felt as we started watching the dailies for Conspiracy of Silence that we were working on something quite special and telling an important, tragic story.”

Dramatic vignettes and interviews shed light on the titular idiosyncratic piano prodigy, portrayed by Colm Feore. “Definitely in a high class of its own, it is one of the few pictures to capture the nature of the artist and his craft” (Leonard Klady, Variety). Girard’s avant-garde film, co-written with Don McKellar, places the performing arts and cinema in perfect balance. It won four Genies and was picked up by The Samuel Goldwyn Company for theatrical distribution in the U.S., where it earned US$1.6-million at the box office.

Girard and McKellar regrouped for 1998’s The Red Violin, an episodic feature strung together by a centuries-old fiddle, that won eight Genies and a best-score Oscar. Both films were produced by Rhombus Media, which has backed other performing-arts-inspired films, including dance drama Le Dortoir (1991, also by Girard) and the award-winning Yo-Yo Ma Inspired by Bach series (1997). In 1996, Rhombus produced David Wellington’s filming of the Stratford Festival’s interpretation of Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night, which won four Genies. Rhombus partners Niv Fichman, Larry Weinstein (September Songs: The Music of Kurt Weill) and Barbara Willis Sweete (The Planets) remain active in the arts genre. “Thirty Two Short Films, despite its formalist, art-film conceit, is a really emotional film at its core and that’s why it was a hit,” says Leonard Farlinger, who went on to direct The Perfect Son (2001) and All Hat (2007). “It’s proof audiences worldwide can be enthralled by uniquely told, original Canadian stories.”

Mountie Benton Fraser (Paul Gross) and his wolf, Diefenbaker, team with hardened U.S. cop Ray Vecchio (David Marciano)— and later Stanley Kowalski (Callum Keith Rennie)—to fight Chicago crime. “This show is sly, sexy, exciting and perceptive—all those things we say TV so seldom seems to be” (Diane Werts, Newsday). Comedy-drama Due South, produced by Alliance Communications, started as a MOW on CTV and CBS. Ratings were so good that both networks backed a series spinoff that aired for four seasons between 1994 and 1999. CBS backed away after season one, came back on board and then stepped off again. Nonetheless, Due South was the first Canadian series to air in U.S. network prime time, building on Alliance’s crime series Night Heat (1985-1989), which CBS ran in late night. It also represented a major step forward for creator Paul Haggis, Oscar winner for 2004’s Crash. Other homegrown series followed onto American network TV, including cop shows Flashpoint (premiering in 2008), The Bridge (2010) and Rookie Blue (premiering 2010); telepathythemed The Listener (premiering 2009); the sci fi Defying Gravity (2009), and medical dramas Combat Hospital (2011) and Saving Hope (premiering 2012).

But it started with Due South. “Haggis was an inspiring general to his army of Canucks who were breaking down the 49th-parallel sales wall,” recalls Jerry Ciccoritti, who won a Gemini Award for directing the 1994 episode “Gift of the Wheelman.” “His show balanced the American need for clear action and emotional stories with a Canadian sense of irony and humour.”

37 37

DGC 50th DGCanniversary 50th anniversary issue MONTAGE issue MONTAGE

ONTARIO Net Worth / Director Jerry Ciccoritti /// Sunshine

TV MOVIES

Sketches of a Little Town / Director Don McBrearty ///

50 DGC PRODUCTIONS

RUDE (1995)

TRADERS (1996-2000)

DIRECTOR/WRITER: CLEMENT VIRGO

DIRECTORS: REID A. DUNLOP, T.W. PEACOCKE, KARI SKOGLAND,

KEY DGC PERSONNEL: EDITOR SUSAN MAGGI, SOUND JANE TATTER-

JOHN L’ECUYER, GORDON LANGEVIN, ALAN GOLUBOFF,

SALL, PRODUCTION DESIGNER BILL FLEMING, 1ST AD TOM WILLEY

ALAN TAYLOR, HENRY SARWER-FONER, MICHAEL DECARLO, STEVE DIMARCO, SCOTT SMITH

Torso / Director Alex Chapple /// Canada’s Sweetheart /

Director Donald Brittain /// John A. / Director Jerry Cic-

coritti /// Conspiracy of Silence / Director Francis Mankie-

“Pirate radio prophet Rude’s…butterscotch voice caresses and provokes the collective soul of Toronto’s Regent Park... [as director Clement] Virgo weaves three tales into a parable of hope, resurrection and transformation” (Canadian Film Encyclopedia). “The genesis of Rude,” says director/writer Clement Virgo, “was in the CFC’s [Canadian Film Centre] Filmmakers of Colour initiative in 1991, when they brought in directors like myself, Mina Shum and Stephen Williams. You had to apply with a script and I had written a draft of Rude, which they liked, so that’s how I got in. I was working as a window-display dresser at the time and taking night courses at Ryerson. I remember we all looked up to Srinivas Krishna, whose film Masala was hot, and Deepa Mehta, who had made Sam and Me. “The CFC asked me to come back and be in their regular programme. I spent a year there and made a short, Save My Lost Nigga Soul, which won the best short film award at the Festival of Festivals [now TIFF] and travelled around the world. I knew I had a window of about a year, during which time they were patting me on the head, to make a feature.

wicz /// Life with Judy Garland: Me and My Shadows /

Director Robert Allan Ackerman /// Chasing Cain /

Director Jerry Ciccoritti /// One Dead Indian / Director

“Between September 1993 and April 1994, I hustled to fix any issues people had with the script. The CFC at that time had started a low-budget Feature Film Project, which gave you about $250,000 plus post-production services at Deluxe and other places. Colin Brunton was running it for Wayne Clarkson. So we made Rude that summer of 1994. When it was finished, Colin and Wayne said we should apply to Cannes, which seemed crazy, but we did and it got in. “The Directors Guild helped out Rude with crew. I had Susan Maggi as my editor and my sound, production design and 1st AD were all from the DGC. I joined the DGC after Rude and suddenly I was getting television work.”

Intrigue and power plays rule at an investment bank, where characters include Sally Ross (Sonja Smits), who’s in and out as head of the firm, the seasoned Adam Cunningham (Bruce Gray), who’s often at odds with Sally, and risk-taking head trader Marty Stephens (Patrick McKenna).

Prior to the CRTC’s 1999 Television Policy, which removed private broadcasters’ Cancon expenditure requirements, network television was home to a healthy number of homegrown scripted shows, and Global’s Toronto-shot Traders was one of the biggest successes. It followed CBC’s Street Legal (19871994), which balanced the personal and professional lives of law-firm partners and also starred Smits, along with Eric Peterson and C. David Johnson. Airing contemporaneously was CTV’s newsroom drama E.N.G. (1989-1994), starring Sara Botsford, Mark Humphrey and Art Hindle. These shows boosted Ontario talent. Traders counted among its staff creator Hart Hanson (who developed Fox’s Bones), showrunner David Shore (creator of Fox’s House) and director Kari Skogland (Fifty Dead Men Walking, 2008). Alan Goluboff also got a break. “It was a show I had AD’d, then a year later I got to direct four episodes,” he recalls. “I certainly appreciated the opportunity.” Goluboff was Chairman of the Executive Board of DGC Ontario prior to his Traders stint and currently occupies that role. He was President of the DGC National (2000-2008) and is pleased with the progress. “Members of the Guild are better served because the organisation has matured,” he says, “but we have lots of room for growth in strength and representation and remaining a positive, meaningful force to them.”

Tim Southam /// White Lies / Director Kari Skogland 38

MONTAGE

DGC 50th anniversary issue

39 39

DGC 50th DGCanniversary 50th anniversary issue MONTAGE issue MONTAGE

50 DGC PRODUCTIONS

C QUEBEC MONTREAL MAIN (1972) DIRECTOR: FRANK VITALE KEY DGC PERSONNEL: AD AND ACTOR ALLAN MOYLE

THE APPRENTICESHIP OF DUDDY KRAVITZ (1974)

SHIVERS (1975)

QUINTET (1979)

DIRECTOR: DAVID CRONENBERG

DIRECTOR/WRITER/PRODUCER: ROBERT ALTMAN

DIRECTOR: TED KOTCHEFF

KEY DGC PERSONNEL: EDITOR PATRICK DODD,

KEY DGC PERSONNEL: 2ND AD CHARLES BRAIVE, ART DIRECTOR

KEY DGC PERSONNEL: AD CHARLES BRAIVE, ART DIRECTOR ANNE

ART DIRECTOR ERLA GLISERMAN

WOLF KROEGER, PRODUCTION MANAGER JIM KAUFMAN

A Montreal island apartment complex falls prey to an epidemic of parasites, spread courtesy of the residents’ ravenous sexual appetites. “Shivers is notable even now for its intense preoccupation with the visceral and the sexually violent, and it set a benchmark for physical disgust that has arguably never been surpassed in Cronenberg’s work” (William Beard, The Artist as Monster). The first major Quebec tax-shelter film, executive-produced by genre mavens John Dunning and André Link, Shivers was also one of the earliest expressions of Cronenberg’s idiosyncratic brand of horror. Its modern setting and predilection for bodies in disarray would define Cronenberg’s later films like Videodrome, and inspire countless Canadian genre filmmakers, among them George Mihalka (My Bloody Valentine), Paul Lynch (Prom Night), Roger Spottiswoode (Terror Train), Vincenzo Natali (Splice), John Fawcett (Ginger Snaps), Bruce McDonald (Pontypool) and Andrew Currie (Fido).

Set in some future ice age, this strange, spectral, sinister gem from Robert Altman’s prolific, late ’70s period was filmed in and around the cavity of the Expo ’67 site during one of Montreal’s coldest winters. Quintet follows Paul Newman’s seal hunter as he infiltrates the mysterious, high-stakes game of the title following the murder of his pregnant wife. “To those who have never forgotten the sheer brutality and ruthlessness of the kid getting shot off the bridge in McCabe & Mrs. Miller…Quintet is filled with such moments, and if the climax is a testament to Newman’s Yankee willpower, it’s also a testament to the awe-inspiring idiocy of manifest destiny. We all die in the end” (Jeremiah Kipp, Slant).

PRITCHARD

A Bohemian artist in his late twenties (director Frank Vitale) befriends a teenage boy and finds the relationship challenged by both the boy’s otherwise liberal parents and the gay community on the Main to which the artist belongs. “Montreal Main is an extraordinary film. Naturalistic in appearance, it has the air of making itself up as it goes along” (Peter Harcourt, Take One).

Duddy Kravitz is a masterpiece. Based on the book and script by the legendary Mordecai Richler, Duddy is a post-WWII Montreal story about a sassy Jewish teen on the make. Ted Kotcheff recently said of Duddy: “He is the archetypal man who uses his wits to succeed and survive, and will do practically anything to achieve his end. Duddy has a double standard, though, and that’s what makes him a very interesting man.”

With its cast of non-professionals—mostly Vitale’s friends, like director Allan Moyle (New Waterford Girl)—and its largely improvised screenplay, the picture announced a bold new wave of micro-budget independent filmmaking in Canada. Vitale’s lyrical film pulled from his life, his city and his limited resources, namely a modest $20,000 budget bolstered by a CFDC grant. Other low-budget films followed, some sponsored by the NFB: Larry Kent’s Keep It in the Family (1973), Mort Ransen’s Running Time (1974), Robin Spry’s Drying Up the Streets (1979) and Derek May’s Mother Tongue (1979). “Montreal Main came out in an era full of hope for the Canadian film industry, recharged at last with Ottawa funding and the unbridled creative energy of the iconoclastic babyboomer generation and the sexual revolution,” writes Concordia film studies professor Thomas Waugh. “It’s one of the sharpest, boldest and saddest love stories in Canadian cinema. It is also one of our greatest sort-of autobiographies and the model for the personal, independent, docu-flavoured cinema that had already become our forte in 1974.”

”Casting Richard Dreyfuss [as Duddy] was a coup. He had just come off his first starring role in American Graffiti and was about to become a household name in Jaws,” notes Michael Spencer, then head of the CFDC, which backed Duddy. It garnered U.S. studio distribution (Paramount) and won prestigious international awards, including Berlin’s Golden Bear. Richler and Kotcheff proved that Canadian stories can have a national and international audience. Other films followed, most notably the Harry Gulkin production of Lies My Father Told Me (1975) and, a decade later, Joshua Then and Now (1985). “When I left Canada in 1957, there was no film industry and also no Directors Guild of Canada,” says Kotcheff. “When I returned to Canada in 1972 to make Duddy, the DGC was in existence. From then on it played a part in every Canadian film director’s life, protecting his or her creative rights, giving him or her a priceless security, that the aesthetic control of every film he or she was making would always belong to them.”

MONTAGE DGC 50th anniversary issue MONTAGE DGC 50th anniversary issue 40 40

“It was a totally natural thing for me to work within the horror genre,” Cronenberg told Critical Quarterly in 2001. “A few years later it seemed fabulously calculated, because to go the low-budget horror-film route became the standard underground railway into movie-making for a lot of people.” That wasn’t yet true in Canada, Cronenberg noted. “Stories about fishermen and farmers on the Prairie and the difficulty of their lives—those were accepted in Canada as legitimate movie-making. It was like the schizophrenia of Méliès and the Lumière Brothers, it was either documenting or fantasy, and the fantasy aspects were not very congenial to the Canadian character, let us say.”

Born and raised in Montreal, Guild member Charles Braive was 2nd AD on Quintet. He remembers both the production’s excitement and its punishing conditions, which inspired art director and fellow Guild member Wolf Kroeger to contribute to some of Quintet’s most memorable images. “It was brutal,” says Braive. “All of the exteriors were real exteriors—and all the interiors were exteriors too! The sides had been ripped off all the old Expo pavillions, so the snow came in, the ice came in. Every night when we wrapped, a four-man art-department crew would spray the set with fire hoses all night long, producing these huge, fantastic, gorgeous sculptures, cascades of ice falling from all the walls. It was an unbelievable shoot to work on.”

41 41

DGC 50th DGCanniversary 50th anniversary issue MONTAGE issue MONTAGE

QUEBEC Rabid / Director David Cronenberg /// Atlantic City /

Montreal Main / Director Frank Vitale /// The Rubber

Director Louis Malle /// In Praise of Older Women /

Gun / Director Allan Moyle /// Shivers / Director David

TV & FILM

Director George Kaczender /// My Bloody Valentine / Director George Mihalka /// Quintet / Director Robert

Cronenberg /// Lilies / Director John Greyson /// Lost and Delirious / Director Lea Pool /// The Hunger / Directors Russell Mulcahy, Darrell Wasyk, Erik Canuel

Altman /// Confessions of a Dangerous Mind / Direc /// Largo Winch / Directors David Wu, Susanna Lo /// tor George Clooney /// The Whole Nine Yards / Direc Empire, Inc. / Directors Denys Arcand, Douglas Jackson tor Jonathan Lynn /// The Fountain / Director Darren /// Naked Josh / Directors James Allodi, Tim Southam, Aranofsky /// The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz / Director Ted Kotcheff /// Lies My Father Told Me /

Jim Donovan /// Bon Cop, Bad Cop / Director Eric Can uel /// Being Human / Directors Stefan Pleszczynski,

Director Jan Kadar /// Barneyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Version / Director Rich-

Paolo Barzman, Charles Biname /// The Trotsky / Direc -

ard J. Lewis /// Tale of Teeka / Director Tim Southam

tor Jacob Tierney /// Goon / Director Michael Dowse

MONTAGE

DGC 50th anniversary issue

MONTAGE

50 DGC PRODUCTIONS

C AT L A N T I C THE HUNGER (1997-1999)

THE SPIDERWICK CHRONICLES (2008)

THE ROWDYMAN (1972)

DIRECTORS: ERIK CANUEL, DARRELL WASYK, JASON HRENO,

KEY DGC PERSONNEL: SET DESIGNER FRÉDÉRIC AMBLAND, ART DIRECTOR ISABELLE

DIRECTOR: PETER CARTER

THE ADVENTURE OF FAUSTUS BIDGOOD (1986)

PATRICIA ROZEMA, KEY DGC PERSONNEL: EXECUTIVE PRODUCER

GUAY, JOSETTE PERROTTA PRODUCTION MANAGER, BUCK DEACHMAN 1ST AD,

KEY DGC PERSONNEL: WRITER-ACTOR GORDON PINSENT, EDITOR

DIRECTOR/WRITER/PRODUCER/ACTOR: ANDY JONES DIRECTOR/

ROBIN SPRY, PRODUCTION DESIGNER SYLVAIN GINGRAS, ART

DESIGNER, SIMON GUILBAULT, SET DESIGNER, DAVID GAUCHER ART DIRECTOR

MICHAEL MANNE

WRITER/PRODUCER/CINEMATOGRAPHER/EDITOR: MICHAEL JONES

BETHAN MOWAT 2ND AD, FRÉDÉRIC AMBLARD SET DESIGNER, MARIO CHABOT SET

DIRECTOR DONNA NOONAN, EDITOR PHILIPPE RALET

JEAN-PIERRE PAQUET, ART DIRECTOR

From vampires and witches to strange mystics, The Hunger presented tales from the seedy, sexy underworld in a series of original half-hour episodes. “I realised monster movies were sometimes a metaphor for societal fears,” series creator Jeff Fazio told Playback magazine in 1997, “so I thought, ‘Why not do something similar in television?’” The Hunger came on the heels of a push to improve Canadian prime-time content. “We were intensely concerned with Canadian content, making sure there was money going into Canadian production through the CRTC,” said then DGC President Allan King. “We greatly improved the amount of money being devoted to and required by the broadcasters to be put into production. We worked towards an increase in the number of hours of Canadian drama and other representative programming in prime time, and towards a better definition of prime time.”

After the Grace family moves to the rundown Spiderwick estate, the youngsters are pulled into a world of magic and faeries. “A pleasing mélange under the direction of Mark Waters, who, after Freaky Friday and Mean Girls, is becoming the goto auteur of traumatised youth” (Richard Corliss, TIME Magazine).

Based on Tony Scott’s 1983 cult vampire hit, The Hunger helped Quebec establish itself as a popular destination for service production serials. It spawned a growth in supernatural-themed projects such as Being Human (Paolo Barzman), Vampire High (Jim Kaufman) and Largo Winch (Joe Scanlan). International productions from Quebec production houses can also trace their roots to The Hunger, including numerous titles from Muse Productions (The Kennedys) and the wide-ranging catalogue of Rodney Gibbons (The Hound of the Baskervilles).

MONTAGE DGC 50th anniversary issue MONTAGE DGC 50th anniversary issue 44 44

Only three years after the cultural sensation that was Mean Girls, Mark Waters took The New York Times best-selling series to the big screen, shooting on location in Montreal. While the city had seen major American productions before—Catch Me If You Can (2002), The Bone Collector (2004), The Notebook (2006)—this was the first one in Quebec that employed many DGC members. A veteran of the business, set designer Frédéric Ambland (Day After Tomorrow, also shot in Montreal) recalls creating the Spiderwick Estate: “On Spiderwick much of the set design was done in Los Angeles. But the designer, Jim Bissell, didn’t like them. So he went scouting in Quebec and found a house that fit exactly what he had in mind, in Stanstead, near the border with the U.S. We went on site and brought back the house’s measurements and tried to replicate it [in Montreal]. The owner of the house didn’t want to rent it. [But] we used a lot of special effects in the movie, so in the end his house would have been quite destroyed!”

KEY DGC PERSONNEL: ASSISTANT EDITOR DOMINIQUE GUISSET

Will Cole (Gordon Pinsent) is a small-town Newfoundlander whose freewheeling ways cause grief. Charles Camplin of the Los Angeles Times hailed the gritty film as “well-made and better than well-acted, sexy, adult and intelligent.” The first major portrait of working-class life in Newfoundland, whose rugged landscapes Peter Carter captures in loving detail, the film is a product of industry-builder Michael Spencer’s foundational work with the Canadian Film Development Corporation (CFDC). Along with Goin’ Down the Road and Paperback Hero, it’s one of many seminal CFDC productions about charismatic anti-heroes. The script was written by Pinsent, fresh off his television work in Quentin Durgens M.P. and The Forest Rangers (also directed by Carter). “It was a special thing to do for us,” recalls Pinsent, who later became a director and member of the DGC. “Everyone believed in it and had a good time with it.” Government backing was essential to the film’s success but it did not come easy. “At that time, Canadian investors and the government found the whole film industry a bit strange. You went around, cap in hand, and tried to introduce them to what would become the industry.”

Pinsent remembers being on the verge of securing American money before the CFDC got involved, to his relief. “How else were you going to get a chance to do your own thing in your own backyard, with people you knew and trusted? But I’ve often thought of the other version, in the backlot of some studio, with Steve McQueen in a leather jacket.”

The first feature produced entirely in Newfoundland, The Ad-

venture of Faustus Bidgood could also be regarded as exemplifying a sense of humour unique to the province. The brainchild of Andy and Michael Jones, this deliriously imaginative black comedy follows a government bureaucrat who has grandiose fantasies of leading his province towards secession and becoming president of an independent Newfoundland.

Faustus Bidgood was the first feature made under the auspices of the Newfoundland Independent Filmmakers Co-op (NIFCO). “The whole idea,” says Mike Jones of NIFCO’s origins, “was that we were film artists, we were going to pool our resources and we were going to support each other.” The camaraderie that helped NIFCO come into being only grew when it came time to make Faustus Bidgood. “We used hundreds of people,” says Jones, “and they were all very happy to work for nothing on Newfoundland’s first feature film. It was exciting. And it was fun.” It took a decade to complete. At one point 40 hours of footage sat in a freezer for three years while the filmmakers looked for the money for processing. The film was born of pride, frustration and ambition. “As young artists,” says Andy Jones of himself and his Newfoundland brethren, “we realised we had brought something incredible into Confederation: our culture. Sometimes we were just angry at the way we’d become Canada’s joke people.” As it turned out, those joke people could craft some pretty inspired jokes themselves. Faustus Bidgoodscored three Genie nominations and has since become a cult classic.

45 45

DGC 50th DGCanniversary 50th anniversary issue issue MONTAGE MONTAGE

50 DGC PRODUCTIONS

CODCO (1987-1992)

THE BOYS OF ST. VINCENT (1992)

DOLORES CLAIBORNE (1995)

TRAILER PARK BOYS (2001-2008)

DIRECTORS: DAVID ACOMBA, JOHN BLANCHARD

DIRECTOR: JOHN N. SMITH

DIRECTOR: TAYLOR HACKFORD

DIRECTOR: MIKE CLATTENBURG

KEY DGC PERSONNEL: EDITOR CHRISTOPHER COOPER

KEY DGC PERSONNEL: EDITOR WERNER NOLD, 1ST AD PIERRE

KEY DGC PERSONNEL: 2ND AD CHRISTOPHER BALL, PRODUCTION

KEY DGC PERSONNEL: EDITOR JEREMY HARTY, 1ST AD JASON

PLANTE, PRODUCTION DESIGNER REAL OUELLETT, LOCATION

MANAGER JOSEPH BOCCIA, ART DIRECTOR DAN YARHI

SHIPLEY, ART DIRECTOR ANDY MILLER

Dolores Claiborne is a domestic servant accused of murdering her employer. Her estranged daughter arrives, reopening old wounds and prompting speculation that Dolores might have murdered her husband 20 years earlier. The Stephen King source novel unfolds in small-town Maine, but Dolores Claiborne was the first major U.S. service production filmed in Nova Scotia, whose windswept isles and coastal light imbued it with a desolate, brisk atmosphere. “This is a horror story, all right, but not a supernatural one; all of the elements come out of such everyday horrors as alcoholism, wife-beating, child abuse and the sin of pride” (Roger Ebert, The Chicago SunTimes).

Lower-class warriors Ricky, Julian and Bubbles allow a documentary crew to follow their lives in the trailer park between prison stints as they try to keep their noses clean and The Man off their backs. James Keast of Exclaim! called the show “Canadian content brought to you old school—the world of April Wine and Helix, not the big-city stuff the CBC tries to foist upon us.”

MANAGER HELEN HENSHAW

Founded in 1973 as a theatrical troupe satirising “Newfie” ste-

reotypes, Cod on a Stick starred an ever-evolving group of talented performers including Andy Jones, Cathy Jones, Bob Joy, Greg Malone, Diane Olsen, Tommy Sexton and Mary Walsh. During a reunion tour a decade later, producer Michael Donovan of Salter Street Films approached them to create a sketch comedy series. The result, CODCO (1987-1992), garnered the group collectively seven Geminis over the series’ six seasons. “I have a new-found appreciation for CODCO based on other skits that take down Canadian sacred cows…. Really funny stuff” (Kevin Chong, The Globe and Mail). During the late ’80s, CODCO ran after Kids in the Hall, creating a nonpareil double bill of primetime Canadian sketch comedy. With its focus on political satire, CODCO paved the way for CBC’s spoof news programme This Hour Has 22 Minutes (which furthered the careers of Cathy Jones and Mary Walsh and made Rick Mercer famous) and Made In Canada (1998-2003), a brilliant series that devastatingly skewered this country’s television industry.

“The first director on CODCO was John Blanchard,” recalls Andy Jones. “We had asked for him because he had directed SCTV. We were lucky to be in Halifax. The general feeling was that Toronto [CBC’s head office] wasn’t really paying much attention to us, so we got away with a lot of stuff that was sort of cutting edge. I’ll say this about Michael Donovan. He never wanted to stop us. He wanted to push the edges like crazy. If someone said to him, ‘You can’t do that on TV,’ he would say, ‘Who says you can’t do that on TV?’”

MONTAGE MONTAGE DGC 50th DGCanniversary 50th anniversary issue issue 46 46

Based on the true story of sexual abuse that transpired in the late ’80s at a Catholic orphanage in Newfoundland, The Boys of St. Vincent is a classic Canadian docudrama. “The Boys of St. Vincent offers a sensitive, illuminating look at a tough subject” (Janet Maslin, The New York Times). In the turbulent ’90s, Canada faced a recession and domestic and international conflicts like the Oka Crisis and the Gulf War. While the industry was struggling at the time, The Boys of St. Vincent stands as an exception. A mini-series masterpiece, the programme ignited not only a freedom of speech debate (which went all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada) but also an upsurge in high-quality TV movies and series.

In 1996, the federal government launched the Canada Television and Cable Production fund, which further supported stellar television films, paving the way for October 1970 (McBrearty), the Trudeau series (Ciccoritti and Southam) and Canada-Russia ’72 (Peacocke). John N. Smith said, “I spent a tremendous amount of time researching in St. John’s, spending time with victims and priests. The atmosphere of the shoot was absolutely extraordinary, because a surprising number of the crew members had had similar experiences themselves [of abuse] in the institution [of the Catholic Church]. So at one time I was making a film on the subject and at the same time becoming a kind of father confessor to a number of the crew members. It was an incredibly harrowing experience making that film.”

Dolores Claiborne marked Toronto art director Dan Yarhi’s first time working in the region. “There was no infrastructure,” he remembers. “The day before I arrived, National Sea had laid off 3,000 people. The whole fishing fleet was at anchor. This was the time of the cod crisis. The province was really depressed.” Yet the economic lull seemed to bring out the crew’s resourcefulness. “We used hockey and curling arenas for soundstages,” says Yarhi. “Our construction co-ordinator was a house contractor. The scenic artists were all house painters. Nowadays they’re all the top-dogs in the regional film industry, smart, talented guys all of them.” In the years since, many of the Toronto-based Guild members wound up moving to Nova Scotia. “Things have really changed there,” says Yarhi. “But it’s still a magical place. One moment it’s sunny, the next it’s so foggy you can’t see across the street. An incredible place to capture an atmosphere.”

Trailer Park Boys both lowered and raised the bar for episodic TV in Canada. The car-salesman sleaze of Call Me Fitz (Sheri Elwood) owes a direct debt, but the show also upped the ante on the quality of the product, allowing for the likes of Snakes & Ladders (Wayne Grigsby) to be made. The show left a cinematic footprint with its own films and paved the way for the low-budget hit Hobo with a Shotgun (Jason Eisener). Of course, the irreverence of the Boys wasn’t for everyone. Canadian Television Fund boss Jim Shaw once famously asked what his organisation’s money was going towards: “Am I just getting shows like Trailer Park Boys with all those guys running around half-naked, swearing and smoking weed?” Director Mike Clattenburg shot back at Shaw through The Globe and Mail’s John Doyle in 2008. “Comedy is subjective, but no one can argue that Trailer Park Boys wasn’t a hit. I guess Jim Shaw never saw thousands of people lined up to meet the boys when they made a personal appearance somewhere.”

47 47

DGC 50th DGCanniversary 50th anniversary issue MONTAGE issue MONTAGE

ATLANTIC

Wonderful /// Director Daniel MacIvor /// The Rowdy-

TV SERIES

/// This Hour Has 22 Minutes / Directors Stephen Reyn -

man / Director Peter Carter /// Marion Bridge ///

olds, Henry Sarwer-Foner /// Made in Canada / Direc-

FEATURE FILMS

Life Classes / Director William D. MacGillivray /// Wilby

Director Wiebke von Carolsfeld /// Rare Birds / Direc tor Sturla Gunnarsson /// New Waterford Girl /// Director Allan Moyle /// The Bay of Love and Sorrows

Trailer Park Boys / Creator/director Mike Clattenburg

tors Henry Sarwer-Foner, Michael Kennedy, Stephen Reynolds /// Call Me Fitz / Directors Scott Smith, James Genn /// CODCO / Directors John Blanchard, David Acomba /// Snakes & Ladders / Directors Chris Grismer,

/ Director Tim Southam /// Buried on Sunday / Director Sturla Gunnarsson, Stephen Reynolds /// Haven / Di Paul Donovan /// The Adventure of Faustus Bidgood / Director Andy and Mike Jones /// Young Triffie’s Been Made Aw ay With / Director Mary Walsh /// Poor Boy’s Game / Director Clement Virgo /// Margaret’s Museum

rectors T.W. Peacocke, Lee Rose, Robert Lieberman, Tim Southam /// Republic of Doyle / Directors Stefan Scaini, Keith Samples, Steve DiMarco /// Living in Your Car / Directors Paul Fox, David Steinberg, Shawn

/ Director Mort Ransen /// The Hanging Garden / Direc-

Thompson, Henry Sarwer-Foner /// Black Harbour /

tor Thom Fitzgerald

Directors Ken Girotti, T.W. Peacocke, Peter Rowe

MONTAGE

DGC 50th anniversary issue

MONTAGE

ATLANTIC Trudeau & Trudeau II / Directors Jerry Ciccoritti &

TV MOVIES

Tim Southam /// October 1970 / Director Don Mc-

Brearty /// Canada Russia ’72 /// Director T.W. Peacocke

50 DGC PRODUCTIONS

C THE NORTH NEVER CRY WOLF (1983)

ATANARAJUAT (2001)

DIRECTOR: CARROLL BALLARD

DIRECTOR/PRODUCER/EDITOR: ZACHARIAS KUNUK

KEY DGC PERSONNEL: 1ST AD JOHN HOUSTON, ART DIRECTOR

KEY DGC PERSONNEL: EDITOR, PRODUCER, CINEMATOGRAPHER

GRAEME MURRAY

NORMAN COHN

This stirring adaption of Farley Mowat’s beloved memoir of survival and reconnection with the natural world follows a government biologist sent to the Arctic, where he comes face to face with the grievous decline of wildlife populations, the environment and Inuit culture. “Ballard and his masterly crew of filmmakers have reimagined a corner of the natural world…. They leave us awed” (Richard Schickel, Time Magazine).

An epic, supernatural cine-poem chronicling an 11th-century blood feud, Atanarjuat marries conventions familiar from classical tragedy with a dazzling parade of cultural details drawn from its Inuit milieu: visions of sky and tundra, bodies and rituals, the likes of which the movies had never seen. “The film…tells a story of elemental passions, a mythic tale of courage and mendacity, of undying love and corrosive lust that can’t help but hold our interest” (Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times).

/// Above and Beyond /// Director Sturla Gunnarsson

/// Sea Wolf / Director Mike Barber /// Moby Dick /

D ire ctor Mike Barber /// Shattered City: The Halifax

Explosion / Director Bruce Pittman /// The Boys of St.

During pre-production, the young John Houston went from a casting position to 2nd assistant director, partly due to his obvious resourcefulness, partly because Ballard, under pressure from the Vancouver office, needed a Guild member. Houston had no idea what the role would demand, but he rose to the challenge—rose so gracefully, in fact, that Ballard made him 1st AD before the production’s end. Houston still regards Never Cry Wolf as a milestone. “It stands as an example of the highest level of collaboration between the known capabilities of Hollywood and the capabilities—at that time much less recognised—of the Canadian film industry,” he says. “The DGC believed in our abilities as Canadians and made sure DGC members filled all eligible positions on that film. Because if we don’t believe in our own, who’s going to believe in us? As a result of films like Never Cry Wolf, today producers and directors in the U.S. and abroad see the DGC as creative partners in the realisation of their respective visions.”

This is a story of many firsts. The first feature ever made in Inuktitut, Atanarjuat was also the first feature to emerge from Igloolik Isuma, Canada’s first Inuit production company, founded by Kunuk and Cohn in 1990. Atanarjuat won the Caméra d’or at Cannes and six Genies, including best picture. It was Canada’s top-grossing release of 2002 and was later included in TIFF’s Canada’s Top Ten Films of All Time. The accolades prompted a radical re-examination of how our national cinema is defined. By any conventional measure, Kunuk and other Inuit filmmakers are working far outside of the industry, yet their accomplishment now stands as one of our industry’s crowning achievements. Kunuk is famously reticent, yet he’s perfectly articulate about the singular nature of his project. “Seems I’m far from being in the loop, working way up in the Arctic,” he says. “I feel I’m just doing my job, telling Inuit stories, because it’s my culture and I live here. What more could I say?”

Vincent / Director John N. Smith 50

MONTAGE

DGC 50th anniversary issue

51 51

DGC 50th DGCanniversary 50th anniversary issue issue MONTAGE MONTAGE

50 The Guild is only as strong as its membership. The 50 people profiled have given of themselves remarkably to create and grow the DGC nationally and regionally. Montage is pleased to present the unimpeded voices of this stellar list of artists and committed Guild staff members. In the case of a few who have passed away, we offer biographies

Imagine Imagine your world Panavision your world in in Panavision

Congratulations DGC on 50 years of movie making.

that use their words and those of their colleagues as much as possible. DGC Presidents, provincial District Chairs, key Guild employees and selfless, hard-working artists comprise this list, which could be easily doubled since the DGC has grown, thanks to the work of its generous and passionate membership.

INSPIRED BY THE PAST. FOCUSED ON THE FUTURE.

MONTAGE

DGC 50th anniversary issue

MONTAGE

50 DGC PROFILES

T HE PIONEE R S Don Haldane

Lee Gordon

Syd Banks

Don Haldane’s career included more than 30 films at the NFB, including its first drama feature, Drylanders (1963), about a family that settles in the Prairies at the turn of the century. He spent time making industrial movies in New York before returning to Canada in the late ‘50s to launch the production company Westminster Films with his then wife, Lee Gordon, and British filmmaker Roy Krost. This account of the inception of the DGC is from his autobiography, A Kid from Olds.

“Another dimension [of Westminster Films] is what Lee showed with a sensitive adoption film in 1972. The title was A Way Out and shortly after it was produced, Lee got letters from the Bernardo Home in Britain stating that it was ‘the best adoption film ever’” (Don Haldane). “In 1959, Don [Haldane] and Roy [Krost] and I set up offices for our company [Westminster Films],” recalls Lee Gordon. “We started making industrial films for mining companies and films for Labatt’s. Before we knew it, along came Disney. They were looking for a producer in Canada and they chose us. Suddenly we were right into Nikki, Wild Dog of the North [1961]. Did we ever have to hustle to get ready for them. To say the least, there were really big challenges, tons of them, including animals—they’re not easy.

“Sydney Banks fittingly became our first President. Syd had started his career as a child actor in radio. Then he also became a writer and a stage director. By the time we started the Guild he had also amassed a vast amount of experience directing and producing in the film and television industries” (Don Haldane).

D G C / FILM D IR ECTO R , D G C FO U N D ER , 2N D PR ESID EN T

“I decided to take the bull by the horns and convene a meeting on the premises of Westminster Films…. [Among the] directors who had gathered were Robert Barclay, Don Wilder, Syd Banks, George Gorman, Jim Swackhammer, Roy Krost, Bob Rose, Johnny Foster, Bob Anderson, Lee Gordon and myself…. It was Syd Banks who voiced the gut feeling of most of us in the room: that our Guild should be an entirely Canadian one, not a mere appendage to an American one. That was the night the Directors Guild of Canada came into existence…on Balmuto Street in November 1961. “Then we had to get into the nuts and bolts of establishing the organisation by creating a constitution…. Robert Barclay, George Gorman and I were selected to go to a separate room where we could work undisturbed to produce the wording…. I believe our group captured the full thrust and intent of the objectives, and we carefully detailed the obligations of membership, the fees, the fines and the benefits in our submission. “The evolution of the Guild, from its rudimentary beginnings in 1961 to what it is today, occurred under a succession of remarkably talented and dedicated individuals whose creative leadership and dogged determination nurtured our growth into one of Canada’s most important and impressive labour organisations. And I am especially proud that the Directors Guild of Canada… helps to tell Canada’s story and give the world a rich and vivid expression of our national identity.”

MONTAGE

DGC 50th anniversary issue

DGC / FILM DIR EC TOR , PR ODU C ER

“We brought people in from Montreal, we brought people from New York and then, of course, there was the big fight about our crew. One of the unions in Los Angeles claimed that since the film was being shot in Alberta, it was their jurisdiction. Chicago thought it was theirs and Montreal thought it was theirs. “Don and Roy were both part of the Screen Directors International Guild in New York. They figured it was a good idea to have a Canadian one. I certainly thought so. They invited me to the first meeting, which was held in our screening room. There were 18 people at that meeting. We packed them in somehow. Don presided. He had a lot of enthusiasm and he could motivate people. Everybody was in agreement the Guild was needed and that’s what should be done.”

DGC / FILM DIR E C T OR , FIR ST DGC P R E S I D E N T

Toronto-born Syd Banks was an early TV producer with S.W. Caldwell Ltd. and the Rank Organisation’s Queensway Studios, and is credited with launching the first Canadian TV-commercial production unit and founding the first film producers’ association. Under his own production shingle he made music-related shows for the CBC, as well as Cross Canada Barndance (1961-62) for CTV affiliates. He co-founded and was an executive producer at Global Television Network and a founder of Ontario cable distributor CUC Broadcasting. After serving as the Guild’s first President (1962-63), Banks performed many roles in the Guild, including 1st Vice-President, Chairman of several committees and National Executive Board Member (1973, 1979). He again served as President in 1980-81. He was a champion of Canadian productionfunding support. “We really did not have a film industry per se. We had to grow. The only way to grow was to get some kind of assistance,” recalled Banks, who passed away in 2006. Of the DGC’s initial motivations, he said, “Our goal was to build the strength of the collective, set pay structures, protect the directors from being shoved aside and also to try to stop the influx of American collectives.”

DGC 50th anniversary issue

MONTAGE

50 DGC PROFILES

Robert Barclay DGC/ FI LM DI RECTOR, DGC PRESI DENT

“In 1965 I’d gone to Robert Lawrence Productions. They did the Circlevision film for Expo ’67’s Bell Telephone Pavillion. It was the most seen by anyone in Canada. Bob Barclay directed that” (John Board).

“The official meeting that started the Directors Guild—to hammer out the constitution, to hammer out the bylaws, all that sort of stuff—if I’m not mistaken, it was something like the 4th of June, [1962],” correctly recalls Bob Barclay. He goes on: “The first sort of document would be the charter itself. The next [major] one would be the Guild’s response to Lester Pearson’s Secretary of State, Maurice Lamontagne’s, question whether there should be a feature-film industry in Canada. It was a 35-page brief that said why we should have a Canadian film-development corporation in Canada. Because we don’t have a Bank of America to finance films, right? By ’67, a bill on the Canadian Film Development Corporation, now Telefilm Canada, was put through Parliament. “Also in ’64, I wound up co-writing the Guild brief to the Fowler Commission, which was also a huge success. This led to the CRTC [then called the Canadian Radio and Television Commission]. We had to give a quasi-legal, sort of vetting quality to the CRTC in order that their decisions would be taken seriously by the broadcasters. But it included the CBC as well as all the other broadcasters, which was one of our recommendations, and we referred to it as an honourable trusteeship. The Pearson government just picked that up and said, ‘This is how we’re going to do it,’ and according to the people on the Fowler Commission, they said our brief was the one that was the key as to how to set up the CRTC. “You can see that within the space of two years after the charter meeting, a hell of a lot went on. It doesn’t happen like that any more, unfortunately. You can’t get much done. It’s like elephants having tea, meeting the government these days. It used to be that you could pull things off.”

MONTAGE

DGC 50th anniversary issue

George Gorman

Richard Ballentine

Paul Almond

One of 18 founding members who attended the DGC’s first meeting in Toronto in 1961, the late George Gorman served as the Guild’s fourth President (1966-68) and was re-elected again in 1983. During his presidential terms, two ground-breaking developments occurred: Guild members helped pass Bill C-204, establishing the Feature Film Development Fund, and IATSE relinquished jurisdiction over ADs. As for his career as a director, Canadian kids growing up in the 1960s can thank Gorman for directing the popular television series The Forest Rangers, Royal Canadian Mounted Police and Adventures in Rainbow Country.

Founding DGC member Richard Ballentine produced and directed films for more than 20 years, his best-known film being The Most (1962), a

“I’m the last living fossil from the golden years of television of the ’50s and ’60s,” says Paul Almond. “I joined the CBC in about ’53 or ’54 and then did jobs in Hollywood because, ‘Oh lord, if he succeeds in Hollywood, he’s good.’ So I had to go down and do the odd one there, which I hated. I went to England to do shows from time to time. When I did Seven Up [1963] it was one of the first documentaries in England made without a script. “I never went to live in England like all those guys who left Canada. I came right back and went on at the CBC. I loved Canada, it’s my home, so, no, to hell with that. I did the very first colour-television drama in Canada, The Puppet Caravan [1967]. I decided to have a bilingual cast, with Geneviève Bujold, and we shot it in Montreal. That was a bit of a landmark.

D G C/ FILM D IREC TO R, D G C PRESID EN T

“The paramount task of the Guild executive that first year,” Gorman once said, “was to establish a schedule of rates of pay and working conditions that would form the basis of an agreement the Guild was determined to sign with all the producers in the Toronto-Montreal-Ottawa triangle.” When these figures were settled, Gorman noted, “This marked the first time that minimum rates of pay had been promulgated for freelance directors in Canada.”

DGC / FILM DIR EC TOR , DGC PR ESIDENT

short documentary about Playboy founder Hugh Hefner. He served as DGC Executive Board Member and Chairman of the Membership Committee in 1963, then took over as National President (1964-1966). During his term he battled the CBC, which refused to air his film Mr. Pearson, a cinéma-vérité look at the then prime minister. He spearheaded the Guild’s brief in favour of government support for a Canadian film industry and enlisted opposition critic David MacDonald to voice the DGC’s concerns in Parliament. These actions contributed to the creation of the CFDC. Ballantine received the DGC Distinguished Service Award in 2003 and passed away in 2010. Another major accomplishment was getting recognition for his members at the insular Canadian Film Awards (CFAs). “There were two big factions winning everything at the CFAs: the NFB and the CBC,” recalled former DGC National President Robert Barclay in a Playback interview. “In 1966, Dick introduced a Guild award [at the CFAs] for directors. That was the first DGC award, even though the atmosphere was tangled up with the CBC and NFB hammering each other over the head. The Guild slid through the middle and made a success of its awards presentation. Dick was incredibly bright. He was an intellectual, but he was a television guy.”

DGC / FILM DIR E C T OR

“I had been trying to make movies for about 10 years. So we went to New York, Geneviève and I. Our agent said, ‘You’ve got to stay at a big posh hotel.’ We stayed in the Hotel Pierre, one of those big ones. I phoned Paramount and said I’d like to meet with the chairman. The secretary said, ‘He will see you at 3:00.’ Cripes! I put my hand over the receiver: ‘Geneviève, he’s going to see us! Over in his office.’ She said, ‘No. Tell him to come here.’ And he came over. We told him about the film we wanted to make and he gave me the money. True story. And I went off and made Isabel [1967]. “1967, I think that’s when I joined the Directors Guild. I seem to remember those early years, going to meetings. It was very ad hoc when we got together. As soon as I started making pictures, Geneviève and I moved to Montreal. I remember talking to French Canadian directors. I knew them all, of course. Claude Jutra is dead but a lot of the others are alive. I was talking to them about joining the DGC. But they had their own little group—Association des…. It’s a hell of a long name [Association des réalisateurs et réalisatrices du Québec]. OK, come on, just join the DGC. I’ve always said that.”

DGC 50th anniversary issue

MONTAGE

50 DGC PROFILES

Peter Pearson

Bob Gray

Bob Linnell

Keith Cutler

“Joan Finnigan had written this poem and [the NFB’s] Ian McNeill thought it was an absolutely glorious poem, right? And so I was assigned to the project—The Best Damn Fiddler from Calabogie to Kaladar [1968],” recalls Pearson. “Well, you can’t make a movie out of a poem. I had Margot Kidder—it was her first movie—and I had Kate Reid, who was a world-class shit-disturber, plus there was me. We knew all about la nouvelle vague in France, so we just improvised. I got more shit than you can imagine. I mean, the NFB was screaming blue murder.” The film went on to win eight Canadian Film Awards, including best picture and director. “In ’73, I was left to run the Guild. I was like 31 or so—and I was the President. I had nothing whatsoever to lever any kind of negotiation. The CBC wouldn’t even meet with me. They said, ‘Why should we sign a union contract with you? I mean, who the hell are you? We don’t need you.’ “One of the things I knew was that if you’re polite, if you have a nice blue blazer and a tie, you can get in to see people. So I started to court Hugh Faulkner, who was at that point Trudeau’s Secretary of State. My driving force in all this was jobs, jobs, jobs. It was trying to figure out how do I get jobs for this membership, you know? I went and saw David Lewis, who was then head of the NDP. He said, ‘How many people are in your organisation anyhow?’ I said 80. He said you couldn’t even swing one part of one riding with that number. “So I proposed to the Directors Guild that we merge with ACTRA. It was a big debate. And directors, being very haughty people by nature, they said, ‘Why do we want to become a branch of ACTRA?’ And so I then thought, ‘Well, we’ll grow the Directors Guild.’ So we went after the Editors Guild. And then we went after the art directors. The modern configuration of the Guild came out of that.”

A DGC Life Member and a pioneer of B.C.’s film industry, the late Bob Gray was exceedingly active in the film and television community during his nearly 40-year career. Starting in the 1960s, he worked as production, unit or location manager and/or assistant director on dozens of television shows, such as Cariboo Country, The Beachcombers (for nearly 100 episodes) and The Love Boat (which took him around the world), as well as feature films, including Clint Eastwood’s The Unforgiven and Jean-Jacques Annaud’s Wings of Courage—the first feature produced in 70mm 3D. He also co-produced Look Who’s Talking and its first sequel. In 1978, he became the B.C. Film Development Officer.

“Have you seen Larry Kent’s High [1967], by any chance?” asks Bob Linnell. “I was the PM on that one and I have to tell you my favourite story. About 10 years ago, the TIFF had a little sidebar where they were showing High. Piers Handling wrote a very nice thing about it, how Kent was using black and white for some sequences and colour for others, really innovative filmmaking.

“I was working at CanWest Film, a division of Acadia West, in the early ’80s,” recalls Keith Cutler. “Jim Margellos said, ‘We would like to start a Guild in the West, a division of the Directors Guild. Your name came up and you’re in the business.’ “The West had always had a closer relationship with Los Angeles than Toronto. We were relating to the Mecca of the film industry in the States. We had the odd thing out here, but very few American pictures came up at that time. McCabe & Mrs. Miller [1971] was crewed mostly by hippies out in the area where they built the village. Certainly they had to bring a sizeable crew in for Carnal Knowledge [1971] and that was the beginning of the big time in B.C.

“I went up to him and said, ‘Piers, really what we would shoot basically depended on me going to the back door of Sonolab and speaking to the shipper and saying, ‘What have you got for me tonight?’ ‘Oh, I got some nice colour reversal.’ Then we shot colour that night. ‘What you got?’ ‘I got some black and white.’ Oh cool. Precisely what I could buy for 10 bucks. Great artistic decision it was. True story. “In 1970, during the making of McCabe & Mrs. Miller [1971], there was only IATSE out in Vancouver. Warner Bros. was basically tied into the DGA in terms of agreements. Jim Margellos was the production manager on that. He was a member of the DGA but wanted to try and establish the DGC there. “We had a meeting with IATSE and basically they said they could understand why we production people, as few as we were, might want to join the Guild. They said, ‘Go away with our blessing. But if you don’t like it, you know, in a year’s time or what have you, you can come back.’ It was marvellous, sort of far-sighted and generous on their part. So basically that’s how the B.C. chapter started. We were inventing the Guild as we were inventing the film industry.”

“John Juliani, myself and a couple of others went down and talked to the DGA. There was a great hue and cry. Canadian directors were up in arms that we made a pact with the DGA and this could be the ruination of the Canadian film industry and so on. “You have to remember that the reason the Western Council was formed, and the reason DGC was formed in the first place, was actually as a bulwark against the DGA, because the Directors Guild of America considered the world their oyster. So we did have to have some protection against that sort of tactic. And it’s worked. “Within the Guild, the problem was they felt we were letting the DGA come in the back door when we’d set the Guild up in the first place to form a barrier against the DGA. Communication was bad. Vocal instructions became pretty dictatorial from Toronto. That’s where I think the difficulties between the West and the National started. “Believe it or not, the fax machine saved the day. Here was a written record that came across, could be read by various people and the tone was not the same as the telephone. So we began to repair the damage but it still remained. I think it’s a Canadian thing.”

DGC/ FI LM DI RECTOR, DGC PR ESID EN T

D G C/ PRO D U CTIO N M A N A G ER , A SSISTA N T D IREC TO R

In a tribute published by the DGC, veteran production manager Warren Carr said Gray “is one of the reasons Vancouver was placed on the international production map. He created a legacy of great management and lifetime friendships. Bob would never think of himself as a founding father of the film industry or even as being important. The truth is, he was essential because he was a wise, great teacher.”

MONTAGE

DGC 50th anniversary issue

DGC / PR ODU C TION MANAGER

DGC / PR ODU CT I ON M ANAGE R , DGC PR ESIDENT

DGC 50th anniversary issue

MONTAGE

50 DGC PROFILES

Don Williams

Justis Greene

Charles Braive

As an original member of the B.C. District Council, Don Williams was instrumental in developing its first constitution. He went on to serve the National DGC as President in 1984, and latterly as 1st and 2nd Vice-President, Director Representative and as chair of several committees. Williams once said that it was his grandfather (an Alberta Social Credit supporter) who led him to believe that if you don’t like the political situation, you have to get involved in the political system. He received the DGC Distinguished Service Award in 2003. Williams’ career as a producer, director and actor included directing and producing The Beachcombers in the 1970s, and acting in such programmes as Neon Rider and The X-Files. He was a founding member of the Canadian Television Producers and Directors Association.

“I went to work on Carnal Knowledge,” recalls Justis Greene of Mike Nichols’ 1971 film. “That was my very first IATSE 891 permit job. It was sort of a shock. Whatever work there was, we got. In those days B.C. was probably doing in the neighbourhood of $1.5-million in film. “Being an electrician was heavy work and, like so many young people, I had blown my back out. So I came into production as a PM and was taught how to do it on some very large projects. All of a sudden I was a producer because somebody offered me a job and I’ve been doing it ever since. That’s how I started in the Guild. I just rolled into it.

“The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz [1974] was my first major shoot,” recalls Charles Braive. “It was also the toughest shoot ever in my life. We had 60 days of shooting—six days a week for 10 weeks in a row. It was really physically exhausting, because we didn’t have the resources that a normal big period feature would have. But the picture got made. I had a breakdown afterwards, and for a week I couldn’t even move or get out of bed. “I joined the Directors Guild of Canada in 1972. There were probably three or four members in Montreal—maybe one or two directors and myself. The first AGM I went to was really an eye-opener. I was the only person from outside of Toronto, literally, at the AGM. There was a big argument—I think it was about whether or not the Guild was ever going to get into the CBC working as directors. At one point, one of the directors—I think it was Al Waxman—got in a real rage and went charging at, I think it was John Trent, the Guild President. Some other directors pulled them apart and calmed everybody down, but I thought, ‘What is this?’ I went back to Montreal pretty disillusioned with the whole Guild scene, but I still continued to run the Montreal office for the DGC.

DGC/ FI LM DI RECTOR, PRODUC ER, A C TO R, DGC PRESI DENT

Of his colleague, Keith Cutler comments, “Don brought to the early DGC West a deep understanding of process. He knew how to get results from a discussion even if the participants tended to be exasperatingly random. His version of the first B.C. constitution was audacious and precisely what was needed to reflect the frustrations of the West at that time. “His term as National President would have been made difficult by the fact that Toronto members were not quite ready to give up their founding dominance of the Guild. But Don continued to exert his skills, paving the way to the development of an effective National Executive Board and moving it into the leadership position it enjoys today. “Although Don was honoured for his work at the National, I don’t think he was truly appreciated in B.C. for his strong commitment to our needs. However, I rather doubt Don worried much about recognition. He was more interested in results.” (Editor’s note: Mr. Williams was too ill to be interviewed for this article.)

MONTAGE

DGC 50th anniversary issue

D G C / N ATIO N A L PR O D U C TIO N M A N A G ER R EPRESEN TATIV E, N EB D G C / PR O D U C ER

“I got a call saying that Grace McCarthy—the Deputy Premier of B.C.—wanted to come to the set and meet with me. There was a new thing in the world called film commissions and at the time, there were two in Canada. We sat down on the set and talked about how we would go about that in B.C. She made a deal with me that we’d start and try it for six months. She said, ‘We need results.’ “Our approach was pretty simplistic. The first year, I concentrated on the only thing I could do as an individual. I went and I met with people. “In the five years prior, B.C. had done $5.5-million worth of business. We did $17.5-million in the first six months. The next year we did $37.5-million. The third year we did $105-million. We quickly became the number-one film commission in the world. “Nationally, the Guild has done a phenomenal job of negotiating very strong agreements with AMPTP [the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers], which benefits every single member. We have a solid contract and very good working conditions. We have a strong pensioncontribution plan and an incredibly strong health plan. Those things are so meaningful to even a minimum-wage member. You’ve got these things that, as a freelance person—and I’m over 40 years freelancing now—you never had. You went to work and you got a pay cheque by the hour. I think that’s a huge accomplishment.”

DGC / ASSISTANT DIR EC TOR , PR ODU C TION MANAGER , QU EB EC DISTR IC T C H AIR

“Then I got a tax-audit notice in 1975 or ’76. Basically they were denying that I was selfemployed—and I was pretty much broke at the time. Bob Barclay was then President of the Guild. Bob decided to foot my expenses himself. We went to tax court and I gave testimony. And Bob Barclay gave his testimony. I was very grateful for that. We were fighting for a principle, that people who work in film are freelancers who deserve tax consideration. “The decision went down, Braive vs. National Revenue. I didn’t get the decision until 1982. I won it thoroughly. It was like a 30-page decision. I think it’s a lot easier now to maintain a proper tax status. The fact that the Guild helped me out really helped procure more members. I told people in Montreal what was happening. People knew I was being supported and were impressed. I was getting more applications to join the Guild, to the point where we began to consider ourselves pretty healthy.”

DGC 50th anniversary issue

MONTAGE

50 DGC PROFILES

T HE GU IL D G R O W S Karen Bromley

John Trent

Alan Simmonds

“Some of the ‘Hundred Thousand Dollar Miracles’ [Canadian features made during the taxshelter years of the ‘70s and ‘80s] were decent films,” says Karen Bromley. “Some of them were excellent films. It aggravates me no end to listen to people say pompously, ‘Oh the horrible crap we made trying to be American in the capital cost allowance years.’ “We created an acting talent base, we built an infrastructure, we built studios, we grew equipment houses and, more importantly, we learned our craft. The creation of a film industry in Canada was what we were on about.

John Trent was born in the U.K. but he adopted Canada as his home and, in a sense, as his cause. As a Guild President (1968) and First Vice-President (1970), and as a dexterous director, writer and producer who worked steadily right up until his untimely death in a traffic accident in 1983, he was an aggressive advocate for the development of a competitive commercial film industry in Canada.

“In 1964 I became a member of IATSE 873 as a studio director,” says Alan Simmonds, “and was subsequently asked to apply for the job as 2nd AD on The Forest Rangers. I got the job and found myself working with the talented Peter Carter, one of the few 1st ADs in Canada at that time. “The Forest Rangers was an important series not only for my education but also for many directors—George McGowan, George Gorman, Paul Almond, Don Haldane, Eric Till, Ron Weyman, Francis Chapman, the list goes on—from among the original 60 DGC members. It was adventurous times on a large backlot and studio at the Circle M ranch in Kleinburg and we learned how to shoot film.

D G C / A RT D IR ECTO R , PRO D U CTIO N MANAGER

“In the early ’70s, when you came out of the CBC you joined IATSE. While I was working on the second season of Police Surgeon [1971-1974], I was starting another show that had nothing to do with IATSE and an IA painter came up to me and said, ‘You can’t work on that show.’ ‘What do you mean?’ I said and he replied, ‘You’re a member of IATSE so you can’t work on anything that isn’t IATSE.’ “‘Wrong,’ I thought, ‘I’m not standing for this.’ So I started to explore. I asked [veteran art director] Jack McAdam, ‘What do we do about this?’ And he said, ‘Let’s explore the DGC.’ It was in fact his idea. He wound me up and sent me in. “The DGC Secretary, said, ‘We can’t raid another union. If you’re a member of another union, you have to get out of that union. And if we’re going to take in a group of people, then everybody has to leave IATSE.’ So I approached every single person who was a member and said, ‘We need to leave IATSE. We need to go into the Guild so that first of all, we have the freedom to work on any show we want.’ It took a while, a couple of years, before we finally got everybody. I had to chase people down. It meant a great deal to me. “But then, of course, a number of directors were very upset. Because it’s called the Directors Guild, not an art directors guild. ‘We’ve got PMs in here and we’ve just added assistant directors, and where’s it going to end?’ some said. My response was, ‘In strength.’ Eventually it came to a vote at a meeting. And we were accepted.”

MONTAGE

DGC 50th anniversary issue

DGC / FILM DIR EC TOR , WR ITER , PR ODU C ER , DGC PR ESIDENT

Sid Adilman’s Toronto Star eulogy emphasised Trent’s energizing anger, his rage against bureaucratic roadblocks at the CBC or timid cable network executives who refused to back a project without the approval of colleagues in the U.S. “I mourn his death,” wrote Adilman, “and I can hear him arguing, ‘Why say all this about me now? Write these things about Canadian directors when they’re alive. They need the publicity.’” But for such an ostensibly angry filmmaker, Trent made a surprising number of nimble comedies, two of which—1975’s It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time and 1976’s Find the Lady—featured a friend of Trent’s, a rising Canadian star by the name of John Candy. Trent was taken from us while still waiting for the truly big break he so clearly deserved, which is maybe just another way of saying he died with his boots on—handsome cowboy boots to be exact, his signature footwear.

DGC / 1 S T A D , DI R E C T OR , P R ODUC E R

“I was one of the four independents—the others were Peter Carter, Gordon Milligan and Phil Hirsch—who were given permission by the executive of IATSE 873 to decertify the category of Assistant Directors from the union in order to join the DGC and align ourselves with directors. In 1965 the four of us joined the DGC, along with Frank Phillips from the CBC, to form the original five AD members of the Directors Guild of Canada. It was a celebratory occasion for us. Toronto was becoming a production centre; people were actually making a living in the film business. Everybody jumped back and forth between series, television-commercial production [which was becoming an art form], small, independent production [union and non-union], a sprinkling of NFB films and documentary houses [Allan King Productions]. Guerilla activity was also on the rise. “I was a 1st AD for 16 years, working in series, movies and pools of television commercials before becoming involved in the early ’80s as a producer on Ticket to Heaven, Head On and Harry Tracy Desperado in the tax-shelter period of Canadian feature film production. Following my foray into producing I broke the AD mold and finally got a break directing The Beachcombers. That’s how I began the directing phase of my life for the next 25 years—lots of episodic television, some movies for television and some more service producing. It’s been a ride and I loved every minute of it.”

DGC 50th anniversary issue

MONTAGE

50 DGC PROFILES

George Chapman

DGC/ PRODUCTI ON MANAGER

“I started production-managing way back when,” George Chapman relates. “By the early ’70s I was a member of IATSE. I’d been doing production-manager work primarily on commercials, docs and sponsored films during the ’60s and ’70s. In the early ’70s, production managers and assistant directors were represented by IATSE. The DGC had formed in Toronto about 10 years prior. They came to IATSE and asked if we would relinquish our production managers and ADs. We rightfully said, ‘Yes.’ Every province should be properly represented in a national organisation. And that was the beginning of the Directors Guild in B.C. That was about ’71.

“The DGA considered Canada to be the 51st state. They used to roll into Canada complete with crew—DGA members, IATSE members, Teamsters and actors and all the rolling stock. Everything you saw in terms of hair, makeup and wardrobe facilities they used to bring in from Hollywood. “One of the highlights in my life here in Western Canada was when Les Kimber was production manager on Buffalo Bill and the Indians [1976]. Warner Bros. was going to arrive in Calgary complete with everyone, but I’d already signed a written contract in B.C. for us to service the show with Calgary people. It was a major step forward for Canadian people behind the camera. We closed the border. “All of those people and all of that rolling stock and all of that equipment for Buffalo Bill was turned back at the border and it allowed Canadians to work in their own country. That was a big moment. In terms of a union, that’s as big as it gets, I guess, closing the border to a major studio. And that’s essentially how we grew. Otherwise we’d still be carrying water for Americans doing our jobs.”

MONTAGE

DGC 50th anniversary issue

N. Brian Ravok DGC/ EDITOR

“The Editors Guild had been around since 1967,” says N. Brian Ravok. “Basically, it was established as an informational social organisation so members could keep in touch with what was happening. But members wanted more than just the social aspect. Gradually we became more politicised. We began to see what was happening in the film community in general. A lot of American—heck, even Canadian—production companies were bringing in American technicians. We saw the same battle going on in the Directors Guild; they were fighting this as well. “We were trying to get the government to wake up to the fact that we were professionals. To sit up and take notice, and stop handing out work permits to the foreign editors, cameramen and directors who were being brought in on the pretense that Canadians weren’t up for the job.

“The merger of the Editors Guild and the Directors Guild took place on August 19, 1984. It had been under discussion for quite a while. It was something that needed to happen, and something that helped everyone, especially in the editing field. Despite the fact that we had a contract before the merger, we weren’t very successful in getting producers to sign it. There used to be infractions, a lot of legal wrangling. It was a lot easier when the industry realised we were now firmly associated with the DGC.”

Marilyn Stonehouse

John Eckert

Marilyn Stonehouse says, “I was asked to become a member when I did Police Surgeon [1971-1974]. The Guild was quite young. And at that point, I don’t know that I believed in what I considered to be unions and so forth. To my mind it was optional and I elected not to. The DGC was very smart about the whole thing. They went to my producer, who was an American, and said they wouldn’t object, but any members of the DGC working on the show wouldn’t be able to work on the show, since I was a non-member. So the producer came to me and said, ‘Look, you’re joining, we’ll pay the initiation fee.’ I thought, ‘OK, I can join.’

“I got involved with the Guild just after doing The Rowdyman [1972] and I started working as a PA and 3rd AD,” recalls John Eckert. “That would have been in the spring of ’72. I did one of those $100,000 low-budget features. I had already done one at $95,000 as a unit manager. This one was $100,000—$5,000 more.

DGC / PR ODU C TION MANAGER , PR ODU C ER

“I have to admit that, since that point, I’ve never had regrets. Once you knew the people and the efforts they were putting into it, it didn’t take long to see that they were not out for individuals, they were really out to improve the industry. “I got involved in the Guild and was Secretary on the Executive for a number of years. In the early days, before the Guild had a lot of staff, I did whatever was needed—and I wasn’t the only one. “One of my proudest moments was being the recipient of the Donald Haldane Distinguished Service Award. Don was there to give it to me. He and his wife dined with me. He was a great guy.”

DGC / ASSISTA NT DI R E C T OR , P R ODUC E R

“Then I got hired by Sam Jephcott as 1st AD for Lions for Breakfast [1975], which had a budget of $210,000. Another $10,000! But there was no PA. There was nothing. Well, there was myself and two Teamsters. If I needed something, I’d send one of the Teamsters in the station wagon and they’d just turn a blind eye and I’d drive the Winnebago to get whatever we had to have for the shoot. “We did Rituals [1977] up in Wawa. It was a six-week shoot. Five weeks we shot up there. One week—well, four days—in Kleinberg Studios. And that was it. It was great. There was no Ontario northern incentive programme then. We just lived in cabins. We’d be shooting in daylight so the generator operator could be sent back to light up all the BBQs so we could have dinner. “Regionalism came about mostly in the ’80s, and I still don’t know whether or not it was good. Clearly Manitoba can’t support itself. Nova Scotia’s currently having a hard time supporting itself. Alberta was having a hard time supporting itself. So while we’ve sort of balkanised the country into all of these regions, it doesn’t really seem to work. “I remember when Bob Linnell would come to town for the annual DGC meeting with the Western votes from Calgary and Vancouver. If we didn’t have a large turnout, basically they’d control the meeting, even though they’d complain about Toronto being the headquarters. One year we had something we were trying to get through, so Karen [Bromley] and I spent a week phoning up people, asking them to show up to the meeting. And if they couldn’t show up, we asked them to please assign their proxy to us so that we had a proper forum and we didn’t get blindsided. That was one of the few occasions when Bob came in expecting to run the meeting and we actually had 15 percent more votes than he did.”

DGC 50th anniversary issue

MONTAGE

50 DGC PROFILES

P E AK S & VAL L E YS Seamus Flannery

DGC/ PRODUCTI ON DESI GNER, A RT D IREC TO R

“I worked with Syd Banks in Toronto in the late ’50s on commercials and documentaries,” says Seamus Flannery. “He had Queensway Studio, which was an old storage barn that had been used to ship out booze to America during Prohibition. Syd was eager to start a Directors Guild here and kept on asking me about IATSE. I had helped to form a local when I was at the CBC. He wanted to know how I did it and I said it was because an art department needs carpenters and electricians, real people doing manual labour. And I wasn’t sure how Syd could form a Guild if there were only directors. “I was in England for the swinging ’60s. I got an offer from producer Terry Linwood. ‘Seamus, we got this little picture made by a couple of shysters. They run a sleazy movie house in Soho and it shows tits and bums.’

“I turned up and there was this Polish guy, very short. I realised this guy—Roman Polanski—really knew what he was talking about in a way that I loved. Repulsion [1965] was the hardest film I’ve ever worked on in my life. I came very near to saying I don’t want to go on doing this for a living. I worked day and night for three months. “In the early ’70s, I came back to Canada. I joined the Guild because by then they purported to represent production designers. At that time they did a lousy job of it. I thought, ‘Well, I should get active. It’s the only way to deal with it.’ So I became a member of the executive. “I wanted to make sure designers had a living wage, and their conditions of employment weren’t as awful as they had been when I started out. It didn’t come easily. I pointed out to one person that I had done something like 40 feature films. Wasn’t it about time that I got maybe five bucks more than minimum wage?”

MONTAGE

DGC 50th anniversary issue

Grace Gilroy

John Juliani

“In the early ’80s there was always an East and a West going on in the Guild,” notes Grace Gilroy, “and there probably is to this day. ‘The West’ was often a phrase used at Guild meetings to describe regional feelings. That was also during a time that Ontario’s membership was trying to break away so they could form their own council. It was always difficult.

An eclectic visionary, John Juliani was National Guild President (1986-87) and spent 10 years as Chair of the B.C. District Council. He also served as President of ACTRA from 1998 until his death in 2003. He was an actor, writer, producer, director and educator in a career that spanned various media, including radio and theatre. His 1982 feature, Latitude 55 Degrees, which he wrote and directed, earned six Genie nominations and won for best art direction. A tireless champion for artists’ rights, he was also seen “as a kook, a dilettante and a street fighter” (The Globe and Mail).

“John [Juliani] and Keith Cutler were the two Western chairs so they always brought the Western view to the table. When you think back, it helped unify the members and the country as much as it was fractious. Because the industry was starting to grow, there were a lot more members travelling back and forth across the country, and you dropped into your Guild’s office when you were working in another city. That was sort of automatic. Or at least I like to think it was automatic for me. “The one thing that happens when you sit around the National Executive table, you come in there as a PM rep or you come in there as a council rep or a category rep but you leave your hat at the door. You have the moment where you’re dealing with just your category and then you’re dealing with the Guild as a whole. I think that in itself is one of the most important things about the National Executive—you’re working for the whole membership, not just your category. “I’ve been extremely fortunate at the Guild. It’s brought a lot of energy to me, even though some things have been very difficult.”

After winning the DGC presidency, he told Cinema Canada, “I may have won on the wave of whatever success we achieved in B.C. Certainly there was a perception that we were getting things done. And I think that’s what carried us through. I didn’t expect to win.” His goals for the Guild depict a leader focused on finance, autonomy and communication. “My concerns are that the Guild has grown into an organisation that has $1-million going through its coffers per year—a lot of money. I want to ensure that our financial controls are in place. I also want to keep a centralised organisation but on a decentralised mode, so that every regional council can function on its own. “My main thrust, though, is to try to get everyone talking. There is so much fighting going on, so many factions. It’s time we all communicated. The model is a B.C. one. They get Teamsters, IATSE, ACFC, ACTRA, the B.C. Film Commission, all these camps, and everybody discusses problems. It’s good to talk and get some kind of solidarity. So within a week of taking office, I met with everybody.”

D G C / FO R M ER V ICE PR ESID EN T, N EB D G C, PR O D U C TIO N M A N A G ER

DGC / FILM DIR EC TOR , W R I T E R , AC T OR , DGC PR ESIDENT AND B .C . D I S T R I C T C HAI R

DGC 50th anniversary issue

MONTAGE

50 DGC PROFILES

Alan Erlich

D G C / FI LM DI RECTOR, DGC PR ESID EN T

“What was it like directing King of Kensington [1975-1980]?” Alan Erlich asks rhetorically. “Thursday was like a dress rehearsal with an audience, and then there were two shows on the Friday with different audiences. And yeah, it was fun but it was difficult, too. With comedy, it has to work, especially in front of an audience.

“I was elected President in 1985. At that annual general meeting, our auditors had said the National Guild had $1-million in the bank. About a month later I went to sign some cheques and they said, ‘Well, we have to borrow the money from Ontario [Provincial Council’s account].’ And I said, ‘Where’s the $1-million? Why can’t we do it from that?’ I think what had happened is that somebody had hidden the cost of the new computer system. That’s when I found out we had a $1-million deficit. I had to phone all the chairs. John Juliani [then head of the B.C. Council] got upset and said, ‘It’s all off. We’re gonna separate.’ I wasn’t gonna take their money. I mean, democracy doesn’t work that way. You have a meeting and you say to people, ‘What should we do?’ That was the beginning of a lot of problems. Ontario came through. We actually borrowed money in the end from some fund, which had to be paid back. It was just awful. “When we had the strike against the CBC, I was also President. Juliani refused to let his members take part in it. Ivan Fecan had just taken over at the CBC. And his first action as head of programming was to bring in an American director. Not only did they bring him in, they signed the DGA contract, which they weren’t allowed to do. “So we let the rest of the Guild across the country know we had voted to strike in a general meeting, and why. B.C. said, ‘No, we’re not gonna honour it.’ That was it. We stopped all directors and in fact I think the ADs helped as well and wouldn’t do any CBC work. The CBC had refused to deal with the Directors Guild. But by stopping, they were in a bit of a pickle. “And actually we won. We negotiated ourselves a huge increase for our directors. So it worked. The CBC thing was big for the DGC.”

MONTAGE

DGC 50th anniversary issue

Neil Haggquist

D G C / B . C. D G C BU SIN ESS A G EN T

“Ontario always thought we were too friendly with the Americans. They thought we should be more militant. When I’m negotiating with someone, the last thing I’m going to do is piss him off because I want his next two shows! So we had a whole different approach. I mean, I was not ever allowed to yell at a producer. Ever. “So there was always friction around that. Ultimately, when push came to shove, we’d say, ‘Look, if you’re not going to respect our right to negotiate our own agreement on our own terms for our own specific situations, it’s not like we want to leave the house, but you’re pushing us out.’

“I’ll be candid. The reason I left is because I didn’t like going back to the National AGMs. There was too much animosity. There was too much finger-pointing and there was no objective judgement. I mean, for me to sign 150 collective agreements in a year, I’m literally busting my ass. The last thing I need are people taking pot-shots at me. “The National would say, ‘I want you to do this.’ And I’d say, ‘Then you talk it over with Juliani.’ I’m not going to be the meat in the sandwich. I can’t have 10 people telling me things. Juliani had to live with the politics. Honestly, I didn’t care. If they sent me to a meeting in Ontario and a guy threw a chair at me, as long as they weren’t throwing chairs at me in B.C., I didn’t care. I was focused on one thing. More jobs. “I had a guy start a fight with me in the washroom. I had guys saying to me, ‘You know, one way or another we’re going to get you guys.’ I never understood it. But it wasn’t like there wasn’t friction with the guys from Quebec. You’d think they were still fighting the Plains of Abraham. “Ontario got up in arms about bringing in overtime, bringing in a flexible work week, bringing in French hours. I mean, these were all horrifically criticised. They were made personal, to me: ‘How dare you do this?’”

Jane Tattersall

John Board

Jane Tattersall says, “I joined the Guild because I wanted to be part of the film community in Toronto. Also there were certain films I wanted to work on that were Guild projects. I definitely became part of the community thanks to joining the Guild. I was allowed to work on productions that were bigger and had higher standards and reasonable schedules. And I got to work with people who were real professionals, which had been my goal. I was paid properly and if I worked overtime, I got paid for it. I really appreciated that.

“My career started in 1961,” remembers John Board. “I was an assistant stage manager at the Summerstock’s Straw Hat Players. By 1964 I was stage manager of the National Ballet. Then, out of that, I got into film, not because I knew anything but I was fast and attentive and tried to be ahead of things. When IATSE gave up the 1st ADs, I moved to the Guild. “I wanted to be involved. I was somebody who was really interested in the Guild. I became the Ontario Chair and sort of a fighter. We were having big fights with the producers and I don’t have a brain in my head but I was a guy who could fight. I was just an AD who had been to private school and could dress in a suit.

DGC / SOU ND EDITOR

“Within the first year that I was a member, I ran for Secretary in the Ontario caucus, so I did that for a year and went to the meetings on a regular basis. I remember spending most of my time listening to Sturla Gunnarsson and others on the Board. “After that, I had paid my dues and I was glad to be a member. I guess the only functions I would have attended would have been, probably, a meeting once a year, and then I would have gone occasionally to the parties, which were quite famous. Then I got involved with the Guild again in the late ’90s because there was a desire on the part of the community to get all sound editors to become Guild members. “I’m an owner of a business, a post-production facility, and we found over the last, say, 10 years, the rates have gone down extraordinarily, driven by competition. It’s not exactly a race to the bottom, but it’s people undercutting each other— that’s par for the course in running a business. But the Guild has protected the salaries, so when I work as a sound editor or a sound supervisor, my salary’s protected. And I appreciate that. “I have some favourite films that I’ve worked on: Long Day’s Journey into Night [1996], Mr. Nobody [2009]. which I did in Europe, and, more recently, Midnight’s Children [2012] and Sarah Polley’s Take This Waltz [2011], which tried to catch the sounds of Toronto from the Island to the mixture of voices from many cultures downtown.”

DGC / FILM DIR E C T OR , 1S T AD, ONTAR I O DISTR IC T C H A I R

“There was a huge rift, when I was there, with Vancouver. John Juliani was continually trying to take B.C. out of the Guild. I was just the Ontario guy. I didn’t want to fight with him and he didn’t want to fight with me but he wanted to fight Ontario. He felt Ontario was too powerful and it was running the Guild and they were sucking hind tit and they were paying money into it and what were they getting for it? “Juliani was right in certain ways. Ontario’s membership was top dog but they didn’t recognise it as honestly as they should and didn’t share it as groups should. They didn’t know how. Egalitarianism was there but it was somehow only lip service. “We’re a perfect example of something trying to be national but having trouble because we see national as being Ontario and a few other little dribs and drabs. National isn’t that. National is an organisation that is across the nation, if you can do that. It’s hard to do. Juliani was brought to heel a little bit. I left and it all got nice. I wasn’t fighting with B.C. I was just trying to hang on. “I think the greatest achievement of the Guild is that it’s been able to bring in some of the best directors in the country. In fact most directors who are directing features of any quality are all members of the DGC. And that’s come over many years, with lots of fights, lots of dissidence.”

DGC 50th anniversary issue

MONTAGE

50 DGC PROFILES

Don McBrearty

John Houston

William (Bill) Fleming

Les Kimber

“Boys and Girls [1983] was one of those films you always cherish,” says Don McBrearty. “I’ll always remember the night we shot the last scene of the picture. It was late at night, involving two child actors—Megan Follows, who was brilliant, even at 12 or 13, and this young boy. And we just nailed it. We had three takes, got exactly what I wanted out, of the young boy especially. And I remember having a beer in my hand as we were wrapping up in the dark and feeling like...this was special. Shot at the perfect time of year, in the fall, all the muted colours. I didn’t even know how Atlantis [the producers] entered it, but suddenly it was up for an Academy Award and we were down there in L.A., having terrific parties. It won for best short fiction film. It was an amazing experience.

“I joined the Guild really young,” says John Houston. “I got called to do some Inuit casting for Never Cry Wolf [1983] and I did this epic casting trip, 13 weeks across the Arctic. But once I brought the Inuit, the producers said, ‘Whoa, what are we going to do with these guys? Can you just stay on and be a minder or something?’ I had some ambition. I wanted real industry credits, so I said, ‘I don’t think that’s a credit, a minder.’ They were getting very frustrated until somebody happened to mention—maybe I did, inadvertently—that I was a member of the Directors Guild. Everyone turned and looked at me like I had sprouted three heads and eight sets of horns or something. ‘What? You’re in the Directors Guild?’ ‘Well yeah, I’m member number 1720.’ And they’re like, ‘You being a Directors Guild member, you’ve just saved the day.’ They needed to hire a DGCer and there I was. Can you imagine? The show before that, I was the PA driver. By the end of this show, I was the 1st AD. Everything seemed to flow from there. “That gets us to Nova Scotia. I started noticing there weren’t any safety standards. If I have resigned 11 times from jobs, 10 of those times it was over safety or human rights. Never over money. I started to think a lot about terms and conditions of contracts.

“I worked on my first film when I was 18,” recalls Bill Fleming. “It was a low-budget feature and I did a bit of everything: loaded the camera, ran cables, set up lights, grip stands, stopped traffic on the street. But in the meantime I had been working in the theatre with people like Murray Laufer and had gone more into scenic art and stuff like that. I was working with people in the theatre who were film designers or in the film art department. They would ask me to assist on projects. “Peter Rowe was doing a movie called Lost [1986] about an upside-down boat. He came to me and said, ‘We need to push the show and [art director] Tony Hall can’t do it any more, so you’re doing it.’ That was my first art-directing gig. It was really kind of appealing. I designed a boat for the show that we would use as sort of an upside-down set. And two-thirds of the movie took place on this thing. There I was on a Peter Rowe movie.

A legendary figure in the Calgary film and television industry, the late Les Kimber was a founding member and long-time Chair of the DGC’s Alberta District Council and sat on the National Executive in 1988 and 1992. He was known as a staunch regionalist who often butted heads with national members. During his 30-year career, he worked on such features as Days of Heaven (1978), Superman I (1978) and III (1983) and Why Shoot the Teacher? (1977), along with TV shows Lonesome Dove and North of 60. In 1993, he won the David Billington Award for his contribution to Alberta’s film industry.

DGC/ FI LM DI RECTOR, DGC PRESID EN T

“I became President of the Guild because Harvey Hart died and I was his VP. I was really there just to help him. And suddenly, there I was, heading up the DGC. One of my major focuses was to try to convince the councils that I didn’t have an agenda. I just wanted the Guild to work. To stop the in-fighting and start looking outwards, as we had with the CBC after the Guild strike. One of the first things I did was to go out to B.C. to address their annual general meeting. I really made an effort to reach out to the directors there and say, ‘Let’s get the Guild back. Let’s try to communicate. We’re not out to crush your dreams. We’re out to build something together.’”

MONTAGE

DGC 50th anniversary issue

D G C / D IR ECTO R , A SSISTA N T D IREC TO R, C A STIN G

“I wasn’t the only one. There were other people, including Bill Fleming. Bill and I and a whole bunch of like-minded individuals got together about 18 years ago. We thought we’d form some kind of an association. So we came up with some utterly unmemorable acronym, the MPVFIA, you know, the Motion Picture something, blah, blah, Video blah of Nova Scotia, whatever. I said, ‘Before we go ahead and put this organisation together, you know what this sounds an awful lot like? The Directors Guild of Canada. I’m just wondering whether we are reinventing the wheel.’ All the stuff we believed seemed to match up really well with the Guild. So Bill and I thought we would approach DGC National and ask if the Guild could become a coast-to-coast organisation, and could we bring in the Atlantic? We formed the chapter, which became the Atlantic Regional Council. I came to realise the aims and goals of the Guild were the only way to go.”

DGC / PR ODU C TION DESIGNER , PR ODU C ER , DIR EC TOR

“Although the bulk of my work has been as a production designer, the thought in my mind has always kind of been that of filmmaker. What will make the film work? What will make it collectively work, when all the elements are together? And what can we do to engender a situation so we can do more work? When we wrap, what’s the possibility of doing other things? So, be accommodating to some service work but at the same time create a structure across the board that’s going to allow indigenous movies. “There was a body of people out in Nova Scotia interested in having their own District Council. I was working a lot out there and continue to do so. I’ve worked on Life with Billy [1994], Margaret’s Museum [1995], Marion Bridge [2002] Call Me Fitz and others. Everybody else from all across the country was pretty much focused on whatever kind of region they were based in. I was sitting on the National at that point as an art director from Ontario. It was useful to have a voice that could at least speak directly to the community that was in Nova Scotia. So I spoke on behalf of them and the DGC accepted their application to join up.”

DGC / PR ODU CT I ON M ANAGE R , AL B E RTA DISTR IC T C H A I R

In the early years, Kimber was one of only a handful of Canadians working on American productions. At the time, he noted, the problem was lack of qualified people. One of his first goals was to establish training programmes. “We need more people and better training in every department,” he said. “It seems to me the unions should try to help the industry more in this country.” Later, in 1996, Kimber told the Calgary Herald, “The whole world is competitive today. We had one of the first film commissions in North America, but now every state in the United States has one. You go to the location seminars and you have all the states and different countries, such as Australia, represented. It’s very damned competitive.’’

DGC 50th anniversary issue

MONTAGE

50 DGC PROFILES

John Scott

François Séguin

John Blackie

Crawford Hawkins

“I doubled for Roy Rogers,” says John Scott. “That was one of the highlights of my life because as a kid, I idolised him. When I met him in real life, it was no letdown. He seemed to be just as big a hero as the cowboy I saw in the pictures when I was a kid.

“I’ve been a member of the DGC for at least 25 years,” says François Séguin. “A long time ago, I was a member of a union in Montreal but designers were excluded. They said, ‘This is a management job.’ So I was without a union. When I came to work in Toronto, I joined the DGC. When I went back to Montreal after the movie, people would say, ‘You’re not union?’ And I’d say, ‘No, I’m not union, I’m a DGC member.’ ‘But we don’t recognise the union here’ And that was the beginning of the big struggle for a few years to try to establish it.

“It was like living in the wilderness out here in Alberta back in those days,” recalls John Blackie of the early 1980s. “Not too many people were all that worried about anybody out here. They were just trying to maintain jurisdiction. I don’t know if I could even remember when I joined the Guild. I had an application in with IATSE because in Alberta, it was a district that was always in dispute, and I think the Guild was waiting for a portfolio review or something. So it was holding up my membership. Not intentionally. When [B.C. DGC President] John Juliani came to Calgary and presented me with an award, that was finally the magic number to get into the Guild. “When the Alberta Motion Picture Development Fund was created it opened up the business. There was a lot more investment, a lot more projects going on. That’s when [director] Anne Wheeler started getting projects off the ground. It was the golden day of television for Alberta. That spirit of invention and discovery is in Alberta and part of that is the old pioneer spirit. “We didn’t have everything but we were making movies like Bye Bye Blues [1989]. We were almost making paint by grinding berries for that film. We invented a lot of techniques for Wheeler. It was beautiful, actually. I sort of knew at the time that it was one of those things that was going to be an anomaly. I knew I was going to have to wait for many years to get a show like that to come around again. And it did take a long time

“I’ve been a member of the DGA since 1965,” recalls Crawford Hawkins. “I first became part of the Directors Guild of Canada in 1982. I’d go to meetings, though not all of them all the time…. The Chair then was John Juliani. In 1986, I became the BC district chair. “When I came on the scene, the National was broken into District Councils. In hockey terms, the teams own the league, the league does not own the teams. And that’s the way it is today. Some people would like the league to own the teams but the horse has left that barn and there’s no way you’re going to put it back again. “We were just a collection of people, labour and suppliers, who got together and decided they wanted to bring more business in. The break came with MacGyver [1985-92]. It had been shooting in a place north of Los Angeles. Because of the nature of the production—they did a lot of explosions and special effects and things like that—they were relegated to an area called Indian Dunes. Their ratings were about the middle of the numbers. They were like 79 out of 150 television shows. They were told by ABC that if they didn’t vary their look—Indian Dunes is exactly what it sounds like: crab grass and sand dunes and potholes and stuff—they were going to get cancelled. So they started looking all around North America. They went into Duluth, Minnesota, trying to find a location to shoot the show where it could have a different look almost every week. Then we arrived on the scene and we were able to put together a bid and a process that brought them to Vancouver.

DGC/ PRODUCTI ON MANAGER

“I actually taught Brad Pitt how to ride a horse. He was great, such a perfectionist. Julia Ormond had never been on a horse and we helped her a lot. Aidan Quinn was the same. They were great to work with. Another great guy was Jackie Chan. He’d never been on a horse in his life. After 12 days of being around us, it looked like he’d ridden all his life because when he works at something, he really works. The same on The Unforgiven [1992]. Clint Eastwood was a very good rider but Morgan Freeman hadn’t ridden too much. But he wanted to learn. He wanted everything to be perfect so he’d spend all the time in the world with the wranglers, cleaning the barns out, harnessing the horses and riding and putting a lot of effort into it. These guys are perfectionists. We’ve had five Academy Awardwinning pictures made in Alberta. I don’t know if any other province can say that. “I became a member of the DGC a long time ago, probably 35, 40 years ago. Alberta didn’t really have a Council back then. There just was the DGC across Canada. All our ‘cheque-off’ money was going to other places and there was none staying in Alberta. There were things we needed to try to expand and promote the business. “I had done location work on some pictures in B.C. And then I believe it was Grace Gilroy and Randy Bradshaw who sort of got the Alberta District Council going. Later on, Les Kimber and I were on the Council together. By forming an Alberta Council and buying the house that we did, that helped retain the money in Alberta so we could help promote the business in Alberta. And that’s when things started to take off.”

MONTAGE

DGC 50th anniversary issue

D G C / PR O D U C TIO N D ESIG N ER

“I was one of the few DGC members in Quebec. In the beginning our meetings had only four or five people, but after a while, we became 12 and then 18. Slowly I convinced a few of my colleagues. I said, ‘Those guys in the technicians union and craftsmen, they have some benefits. Why don’t you? You know that if you don’t go to the DGC, nobody’s going to provide a welfare and pension plan.’ The other union in Quebec woke up, but I think it was too late. “In Quebec there’s a very strong producers’ organisation. Very strong. And at one point they had a published policy stating that they wouldn’t accept the DGC. Not at all, no members. I remember very clearly we were doing Million Dollar Babies [1994], with Bernie Zukerman as a producer. I tell Bernie I’m DGC. For him it’s OK, he was from Toronto, so it was an easy thing. I start working—this is Thursday and we are starting shooting Monday. I hadn’t yet signed my contract and they were still working it out. “The lawyer for the production company calls and says, ‘I’m very sad but we can’t sign your contract. It’s against the policy of our organisation.’ I said, ‘If you have an organisation, I can have one, you know. It’s fair trade. The policy of my trade group says I should not work if I don’t have a contract with the DGC. Should I wrap now? Or Monday? It’s up to you. Since I don’t have a contract, I can legally walk away.’ She put me on hold for 15 minutes and then said, ‘OK, we’ll sign.’ This happened a few times.”

DGC / PR ODU C TION DESIGNER

. “Back in those days there was a group of people who were very committed. There was a ton of people who were actively trying to make the business happen. And they’re all still in the business. They’re just all in B.C. now, for the most part.”

DGC/ EXEC DIRECTOR B.C. DGC DISTRICT COUNCIL, FORMER FILM EDIT. & TV PROD. EXEC

“Now, all of a sudden, eyes turned to Vancouver. After that came Steve Cannell and Spelling came up after that. It was the heyday of the major network movie-of-the-week night. One night a week they would run movies. Movies on the weekend. We were up as high as over 100 movies-of-the-week per year being shot here. In today’s markets, these were substantial budgets: $4-million to $8-million. That’s what built the industry here. You don’t see those kinds of movies now, but you do see TV series.”

DGC 50th anniversary issue

MONTAGE

50 DGC PROFILES

Arvi Liimatainen

N. John Smith

Mario Azzopardi

Fortner Anderson

“I joined the DGC at least 25 years ago, if not more,” says Arvi Liimatainen. “It seemed necessary to surround myself with people who had the same ambitions. I was looking for community and a networking opportunity. In Edmonton, at the time, it meant that you were a director, an assistant director, a production manager—you had to be versatile. I found myself, as I do now, working mostly as a producer. So I’ve gone to the dark side, I guess. I mean that very facetiously. “I find myself as a producer on the other side of the table from people who are members of the same organisation. And sometimes it’s a bizarre position. As a producer, I like knowing ‘Here are the boundaries. Here’s what you can do, here’s what you can’t do. Here’s an industry-standard rate of pay for this kind of work.’ So everybody is on a level playing field. And as a producer who makes the whole world spin a lot more harmoniously than it would without.

“The early days? I wasn’t really in the film industry other than being behind the scenes doing boat stuff and boat stunts,” recalls N. John Smith. “We were really busy in those days and I had great guys working with me. We just did it. It was fun. After 16 years running boats on The Beachcombers [1972-88], I was asked to production-manage Sea Hunt [1987-88], a remake of the old television series. The director, who was in the Guild, knew I might be interested in doing something like that.

“As a filmmaker in Malta, my work had been controversial,” admits Mario Azzopardi. “I decided, ‘To hell with being a socialist, I’ll become a capitalist pig instead.’ I thought all I’d have to do is show up in Canada and start working. I had already directed my first feature film, but that didn’t really carry much weight in Canada. Two years later, I was still unemployed and willing to accept anything. “About three years later I got to direct my first feature in Canada. Deadline [1984] still does the rounds of midnight showings at campuses all over the United States. It’s a cult movie. Students see it zonked out of their mind. From then on, I was doing the rounds, directing TV series like Littlest Hobo [1979-85] and eventually Night Heat [1985-89]. We in Canada owe a lot to Sonny Grosso, because he was responsible for bringing American television to be shot in Canada.

“The Directors Guild in Quebec was beyond death’s door,” says Fortner Anderson, recalling the dire scene in the mid-’80s. “It had died and been kept as a museum piece, I guess, for almost a year before I came on. Membership had been reduced to below 20. Technically, we were bankrupt. We were living off the largesse of the National Association, and we had almost no sway within the Quebec community. There was no working part of the organisation, you could say

DGC/ PRODUCTI ON MANAGER , PRO D U CER

“My career highlights in Edmonton are producing Bye Bye Blues [1989] and Jake and the Kid, the TV series [1995-99]. Now I’m an independent producer who had the glorious opportunity of getting to work on Da Vinci’s Inquest [1998-2005] and Intelligence [2006-7] with Chris Haddock. “Before Da Vinci’s Inquest, Vancouver was an incredibly busy hub of production activity. That was because of the amount of American production that was up here. But what Da Vinci’s Inquest was able to do was take advantage of that foundation. It showed that it was possible to do a Canadian-originated, Canadian-performed, Canadian-everything production of incredibly high value and to have that show be as popular as anything else and, in some cases, more popular. You didn’t have to import creativity. And that’s a big thing for me.”

MONTAGE

DGC 50th anniversary issue

D G C / PR O D U C TIO N M A N A G ER, PR O D U C ER

“In those days there weren’t a lot of people in the DGC in Vancouver. There were probably five or six other production managers. Once I did Sea Hunt, I never stopped working. Most of the time I was doing two or three projects at once. “Actually I was pretty lucky. I got involved in the production end of things at a good time. I found that, hour-wise, I’d never get tired because I’d been used to putting in horrendous hours all my life in my working career before that, being on set for 12 hours a day. I always wanted to be first person on set when my crew arrived and I was always the last to leave because I thought that was how the job should be done. “Stargate went on for 14 years with the three franchises. I produced two of them at the same time. For two years we shot the two series at once. We did 44 episodes of television at the same time, overlapping sound stages and actors. We had nine sound stages we were sharing between the two shows. It was a bit of a deal. Stargate SG-1 had to be out of one sound stage by noon because the other one was coming in. We had to shut a stage down because we had to build, and you can’t shoot and build at the same time because of the noise. It was very challenging but I have to say the management—which is the Directors Guild, my ADs and even the directors— were very versatile. Looking back on it, I have no idea how the hell it all came off but it did. And it was fun. At the end of the season you were pretty worn out.”

DGC / FILM DIR EC TOR

“I joined the Guild within a year of arriving in Canada, when it was still a very small organisation. Once Sonny came in and one American show after another started, the Guild suddenly found a much more serious raison d’être. Many years after Sonny, our shows were being rerun. Years and years of reruns were supposed to generate millions of dollars. These residuals were never collected. “I sued the Guild, saying that it was not performing its duty mandated by its constitution. I think it caused a lot of tremors. I dropped the suit once the DGC promised to take action. Unfortunately the Guild settled. They did not go after what we were owed. Instead of fighting for us, they settled for about 20 cents on the dollar. “I did not get what I was owed. I was always disturbed by the fact that we always wanted to take the silent way out. Being afraid to ruffle the waters, being afraid to insist on our rights because of fear of making the producers not want to use us. And so we decided that the DGC should be divided into different segments. The NDD, the ADs caucus and others were formed. I think that was an extremely positive effort because finally we could sit down and, as directors, talk to only directors.”

DGC / B U SINES S AGE NT, DGC QUE B E C C OU NC IL, PERF OR M E R , P OE T

. “There were a number of fundamental problems that had to be addressed immediately. One was finding new members. Another was convincing professionals in the business that the DGC could protect their interests. And we had to figure out how to attract francophones to the Guild. “I knew the major players in the unions. I had been part of the STCVQ, the francophone technicians union, first as an on-set carpenter and then I moved up the ranks. I knew the regulatory terrain that framed union relations in Quebec at the time. “Quebec was slowly working through the status of the artist evaluation of the unions and I knew if the DGC stayed organised, we would stand a chance to represent all English-language directors in the province. “Thankfully, there were producers who wanted to work with the DGC. Tom Berry and Franco Battista at Allegro Films always signed contracts with us, not only for directors but also for production designers, accountants and PMs. Robin Spry was an ally and his company, Telescene, worked with us on several projects. Nicolas Clermont also worked with us. All of them—and a few others— had a maverick approach to film work and were open to discussions and making deals with us. So English-language production was saved and the Guild became stronger again in Quebec. “And, of course, the government eventually did rule that the DGC had the right to represent all the English directors in the province.”

DGC 50th anniversary issue

MONTAGE

50 DGC PROFILES

T HE GU IL D N O W Allan King

Alan Goluboff

Marc Voizard

Allan King (1930-2009) was a tireless participant in the Directors Guild of Canada. It’s arguable that his last presidential stint energised King creatively, since it was in the 2000s that King made several of his most enduring documentaries, including Dying at Grace (2003). The film had the same unflinching gaze as his early masterpiece Warrendale (1966)—two peerless exercises in direct cinema separated by decades.

“I joined the Guild in 1976, during my third year at Ryerson,” recalls Alan Goluboff. “Allan King was gearing up to shoot Who Has Seen the Wind [1977] in Saskatchewan. I was a Prairie boy and hustled Allan for months leading up to the shoot because I wanted to be there, working on the film. Finally, Allan and his PM, Gwen Iveson, said I could go if I joined the DGC. I paid my $90 and happily became a member. And all of a sudden I was holding an arc lamp next to Allan King during harvest time in Saskatchewan, working on a Canadian classic. I was in seventh heaven.

“I was part of Quebec’s Generation X, who had to go and direct American movies and work with Allegro Films and earn a living,” recalls Marc Voizard. “It was tough. I had three kids who had to be fed. I had to work. Through the Guild I got security with contracts and benefits. It was darn helpful. I directed very commercial pictures and I got caught there. ‘A poor little rich kid’ is what Bob Dylan would say. I was still doing very well. “It’s too tough to make movies just for money. That’s the life of a director and that’s where the Guild came in with the directors’ rights.

“People often ask me, ‘Alan, why are you spending so much time at the Guild?’ ‘Why?’ I reply. ‘It’s the Tommy Douglas gene, people from Saskatchewan are politically active.’ “When I became the DGC President, I was determined to try to make things better, to build closer relationships with members and District Councils because I think the organisation was perceived to be run from on high. And it wasn’t working. The friction was divisive and causing great division within the Guild. “Today that’s not the case. The Guild is a vibrant, financially stable organisation that is strong regionally and nationally. If we have to fight on any front, we can do so any time we choose. Everybody in the industry knows the Guild is a major player to be reckoned with, and we weren’t a couple of decades ago. “I wanted to see our membership’s work recognised and am pleased to have helped to create the DGC Awards early in my tenure. The contributions of past leaders of the Guild had never been recognised and I’m proud to have instituted the Distinguished Service and Lifetime Achievement awards. “The DGC is only as strong as its membership and I stressed that philosophy throughout my tenure. The first all-elected gathering, the meeting of all members serving the membership, came together during my time at National, which helped and continues to unite us. “The NDD was put in place under my presidency. It was created to give a stronger, more vibrant voice to directors. It worked, and the result is a Guild that represents directors at the bargaining table in every important negotiation.”

“Putting together the NDD was very complicated. I just thought it made no sense that, in the DGC, an important motion for directors presented to the general assembly could be voted down by people who weren’t directors. There were more PAs and drivers and whatnot in the Guild than there were directors. More assistant directors and more production managers. And that was also absurd, because production managers didn’t want to hear about rights at all, let alone for directors. I believe in democracy but it was truly a real Canadian situation where everybody had to get along. And everybody was going to vote on everybody’s trade. So we—George Mihalka and Alan Goluboff and I—worked on creating a division for directors to advocate for our rights. “Then we worked on the directors’ collectiverights agreement, to make sure directors after their prime can still collect what is owed to them for residuals on TV productions and films. That’s very important. I was advising the Guild on how rights were claimed and how the policing of rights was done because, being from French Canada, I was more up to date on these questions. I’m still getting cheques from the directors’ collective-rights agreement, which is a good thing. That was the biggest change we brought to the Guild. A few of us worked our asses off to make that happen.”

D G C / FILM D IR ECTO R , D G C PR ESID EN T

“Allan took the helm in the aftermath of the B.C./Ontario wars and found himself president of a DGC divided by regional strife,” says Sturla Gunnarsson. “He brought moral and personal authority to the presidency and achieved a degree of peace, in large part through devolution of powers.” Allan King wrote in 1997: “The primary task of the Guild is to serve its members’ individual and collective interests. Before I came into my current presidential role in the Guild, membership meetings were bitterly conflictful, dissatisfaction was rife, finances were chaotic, regional distrust was intense and lobbying with government ranged from non-existent to ineffectually feeble. I would like to see management in five years as effective as it is now. “What would I like the following groups to say in five years about the Guild? “A. The members: the Guild looks after my interests and serves my professional purposes well. I am proud to be a member. “B. The International Film Scene: what a host of brilliant Canadian feature films as well as television programs we see on our screens now—fresh and distinctive with a voice of their own (eh?). The Guild could provide funds to publicise them. “C. The government would say that the DGC continues to provide the best policy papers and the most even-handed and disinterested perspectives as to the public interest in cultural matters. It is a good guide to useful policy. “D. The general public would see writers, performers, directors, designers, editors and composers vibrant in Canadian films; it would be proud of them and feel well-served—by celebration, investigation and criticism, as it deserves to be.”

MONTAGE

DGC 50th anniversary issue

DGC / DGC PR ESIDENT, DIR EC TOR , 1 ST AD, ONTAR IO DISTR IC T C H AIR ,DGC PR ESIDENT

DGC / FILM DIR E C T OR

DGC 50th anniversary issue

MONTAGE

50 DGC PROFILES

George Mihalka

Arden Ryshpan

Tim Southam

Brian Baker

“Why did I join the guild?” For George Mihalka, it’s clearly a rhetorical question. He answers it, though. “I was a 27-year-old director who just finished shooting My Bloody Valentine [1981], which was my second film. And I realised I had the required credits to be able to join the Guild. It was an honour to be able to become a member. Just the idea of being a member of a pan-Canadian organisation where my heroes were—to be part of that community—was an incredible honour for me.

“The directors, I think, were feeling marginalised in their own associations,” says Arden Ryshpan. “It’s nobody’s fault. It was just the nature of the work that was dominating the landscape at the time. So a decision was made to create the NDD. It’s a separate structure within the organisation that looks after the directors’ needs. It was clear to me that Sturla Gunnarsson [who ran the NDD from 2001-2007] had a vision for what the NDD could and should do. And that he was really passionate and articulate about it. So over a period of time, we began to shape and craft the NDD and try to carve out a place for it.

“I’m a media brat,” says Tim Southam. “I’ve explored every platform—print, features, television, web. Some of my films have been very well received and I believe some of them have had a positive impact on society. I’ve directed productions seen by 80 million viewers and others where we had to work every screening to muster just a few. “In the last decade television has emerged as an exciting creative platform for many directors. It’s been important to me to find ways to see that reflected in our compensation and our creative rights. The challenge is that although many directors are migrating to television, the civilised customs that traditionally secured our creative rights in cinema have often failed to migrate with us, leaving us wondering what hit us when we step onto a TV set. With web production around the corner, the Guild has a crucial role to play. “Directors became frustrated with the Guild near the end of the ’90s. District Councils were busy and were having trouble chasing buy-outs through a maze of shell companies. The collective agreement seemed to be geared to keeping everyone but the directors working. There was a strong feeling that the Guild had forgotten where it all started.

“I’m a gaffer by profession,” says Brian Baker. “I started in the business in the late ’70s, working on a full-time basis in the industry. I moved to Quebec and got involved in the local technicians union, which was called the STCVQ. I was president of the union for four years while being a technician. They asked me to be their Executive Director and I orchestrated a merger between the Quebec film union and video union. “The DGC was not very well developed in Quebec and that’s why Fortner Anderson hired me as an organiser. I gave him my contacts, my background. We actually did much better than our wildest dreams. We had hoped we could make some inroads in Quebec—the art departments and maybe the assistant directors. And we got a lot more.

DGC/ FI LM DI RECTOR, QUEBEC D ISTRIC T CH A IR

“As the Guild grew, the directors’ numbers weren’t growing at the same level. A council would have 400 members and 10 directors, especially in Ontario, where the modern film industry was just kicking into high gear. What the directors felt was that in most cases, specific problems—work or contractually related—were handled to the benefit of all the other categories. And we, as directors, felt our problems were not simple. They weren’t a question of time-and-ahalf or overtime. Our concerns were much greater in terms of the director’s role, creative input, story-telling, the actual creation of the audiovisual piece. It’s as close to counting angels on the head of a pin as you can get. We also realised quite a few business agents didn’t really understand what we do for a living. Even though it was the Directors Guild of Canada, we were sort of tolerated. And humoured. “Marc Voizard and I basically said, ‘Look, the directors need to have their own house.’ So we came up with the NDD. We wanted to have somebody who knew about directors’ issues. We said, ‘Look, we understand that the councils still take care of the actual negotiations and all the contracts.’ But we wanted to have a directors’ rep there as a consultant to those negotiations, who would handle our agenda. “We had a big vote. I did a great deal of backroom persuasion and arm-twisting. Basically I left it that a vote against the NDD is a vote against the founding members of this organisation. It’s a vote against the Directors Guild of Canada. It’s a vote against the directors. So having placed it in those terms, the, the NDD resolution passed unanimously.”

MONTAGE

DGC 50th anniversary issue

D G C/ EX EC U TIV E IN CH A RG E O F D IR ECTO R S A FFA IRS, D G C N ATIO N A L

“It was a bit bumpy. There were some folks who were unclear as to what it meant. Or what kind of power the directors were going to exert on the entire association. It took a little bit of moving around until the NDD finally found its role, established itself and gave the directors back a voice in the structure at the board of the DGC in a way they had felt they had lost in the years before its establishment. “Directors are primarily concerned with their artistic rights. It’s not a question of overtime or turnaround or any of those kinds of things that obviously have a significant impact on other members. They were much more concerned about the larger issues that affected them. It was important for the directors’ voices to be heard in a different way at the table, so the Canadian producers—never mind the American producers— understood the directors were a creative force to be dealt with. “It’s really interesting. Directors are the only people on a film set where there’s only one of them. Everybody else, there are multiples in a department. But there’s only ever one director, so getting the directors to work together as a group was kind of an interesting exercise because they’ve never had the experience of working with others of their kind. Some of those meetings were quite interesting because, of course, these are the alpha dogs. It’s really interesting when you get a whole bunch of alpha dogs together in a room and try to get them to work as a single pack.”

DGC / DIR EC TOR , WR ITER , NATIONAL DIR EC TOR S DIV ISION C H AIR

“The NDD really changed things. We speak for directors at the national board. We landed firstever collective agreements for NFB doc directors and for Quebec directors. The District Councils have mandated NDD’s Brian Baker to negotiate the Directors Schedule of the 2013 Standard Agreement. We made membership more accessible to emerging directors. We advocate for feature films. We advocate for rights and fee enforcement. We fight for Canadian production in Ottawa. We struck an agreement with the Writers Guild of Canada, defining writers and directors as co-authors of audio-visual work. We program special conferences on filmmaking. We help formulate National’s strategic plan and consult on Montage magazine. We believe in directors speaking with one voice across the country. “Our collective agreements enshrine the directors’ contribution as craft, captured by the basic fee, plus authorship, captured by the residuals buy-out. All of our thinking flows from these two notions. The director is responsible for every aspect of filmmaking, from prep through delivery, in some instances directly, in others in a consultative capacity. It’s what the Guild fights for every time a director steps onto a production. It’s a major, ever-evolving responsibility.”

DGC / DIR EC TOR , NAT I ONAL DI R E C T OR S DIV ISION

“We got the art departments, we got assistant art directors, we got art departments’ co-ordinators, we got the location department. These people came to us. They were looking for another union because they weren’t happy with AQTIS in terms of American productions. We did a really good job; members were truly happy. “I’m quite conscious that I work for a memberbased organisation. I’m very respectful of the fact that the electorate decides the direction of the Guild. They’ve asked me to take on certain challenges and I’m up for it. I find it’s very stimulating. I love film. We have a lot of talented people in the industry and in this Guild. And I love my role as being a support so the creators can do what they do. The logistics, the negotiation—I think we have a really important role to support our creators. And I love being part of that.”

DGC 50th anniversary issue

MONTAGE

50 DGC PROFILES

Rob W. King

Nicholas Kendall

Sturla Gunnarsson

“I first become involved with the Guild back in the late ’90s,” says Rob W. King. “I had just come off of being President of SMPIA. Somebody at our DGC called and asked, ‘Could you be the Directors Caucus rep?’ I remember thinking, ‘OK, I’ll do this for a year or two and then I’m going to focus on my career.’ It didn’t work out that way. “Corner Gas [2004-9] was here for its entire run and I got to direct a couple of episodes. It was a lot of fun. The main set was about 20 minutes outside of Regina. It literally sat on the side of a secondary highway that ran from Rouleau to Moose Jaw. The set looked so good that often people would pull up expecting to get a tank of gas and a hamburger.

“I’ve noticed, being Chair here in British Columbia and then sitting on the National Board, how much the DGC is like a microcosm of the country,” comments Nicholas Kendall. “Sometimes we talk about the bad old days, when there was a lot of tension between the different parts of the country. Historically there were real issues between B.C. and National. We’ve come a long way in that regard, and I’m hopeful it will continue to be good.

“It never actually occurred to me that I could make a living as a filmmaker,” says Sturla Gunnarsson. “It was never part of my plan. “I made a student film that got lucky and won some awards. After that I made a couple of little independent films where we sort of scraped together the money and begged and borrowed the equipment and got the lab to process for free. Then I had the opportunity to make a film for the NFB and got lucky again—it was nominated for an Oscar. I was very young and had very little experience, but it was sort of getting near the point where people were actually starting to call me and ask me to make films. I was not a careerist, I was just making films, me and my friends making

DGC/ FI LM DI RECTOR, SASKATC H EWA N DI STRI CT CHAI R

“Since 2008, when this government [Brad Wall’s conservative Saskatchewan Party] came into power, it’s been a slow strangulation for film and the arts. Our tax credit, which was helping to fund a lot of local production and new filmmakers, got pulled in the last budget in the spring of last year. When all the shit hit the fan, it was a matter of trying to get the membership to stick with us and not move too soon—and hang onto their memberships. “We got involved by putting some of our money into an ad campaign and so did DGC National. A war chest of $130,000 was put together. Several members became really actively involved. We ended up producing TV commercials, radio commercials, we got stuff out to newspapers. We were taking on the government and, one way or another, refuting their numbers. I think the government realises we’re not going away. They claim they’re going to announce something before the end of the year, and the rumour we hear is it’s going to be a rebate program, sort of like what Alberta has. “I ask myself and the people around me, ‘Why do you keep doing this?’ I just don’t want to leave the place in bad shape. And when you look around at the faces, you don’t see a lot of people confused or angry—they’re hurt. I have to say, ‘Guys, we’ve been down this road before, one way or another. We’re a team, right? We have to keep moving the boat along.’ And hope that something good will happen.”

MONTAGE

DGC 50th anniversary issue

D G C / FILM D IR ECTO R , B. C . D ISTRIC T CH A IR

“I wouldn’t say B.C. is at a standstill at all, but the business is changing rapidly so it’s unclear how it’s all going to end up. There’s the economic situation, which worldwide is very difficult at the moment, and there’s the whole tax-credit situation, which has moved a lot of production to Ontario because its credit system is very hard to beat at the moment. “Filmmaking is a business and it’s an industry but it tends to be looked at as something that the government has to support financially. TV and film make a lot of money for this province. We’re not seen as an industry; we’re seen as culture. If you look at how the oil industry is supported and regulated by the government, or the logging industry in B.C. or any of those things, this is where it gets very frustrating. When you get right down to it, it’s a matter of what the priorities are. It’s clear that working in the screen-based industries generates a lot of employment and it generates a lot of money in spin-off areas as well. “I would argue that we’ve demonstrated Canada can produce and distribute world-class film and television that we are selling internationally very well. But if there isn’t an incentive to keep it going, you have a problem. The National organisation is constantly looking at federal legislation that covers how films are financed, broadcast policy and the CRTC—all of those issues that determine the framework we’re working in. And I don’t think the average member is aware of that.”

DGC / FILM DIR EC TOR , PR ESIDENT OF TH E DGC

films. And so I thought, ‘Yeah, if I could scrape together enough money to join the Directors Guild, that would be just another step towards saying I am a director.’ “I am political, I come from a political perspective. I grew up in a CCF household. Tommy Douglas came to my house when I was a kid, that had a big impact. One of my early films was called Final Offer [1985], which was a film about Bob White and the United Auto Workers. I got to watch up close and personal how a trade union works and how a real master negotiator and a kind of a righteous political leader of a labour organisation functions. It had a big effect on me. When I first flirted with the Directors Guild, I saw it in a similar way. I saw it not just as an indus-

trial organisation that was about collective agreements, which are very important, I saw it also as a force for socially progressive ideas. I saw it as a vehicle for advancing the rights and the ideas of those of us who actually make the films. “It isn’t until you’re President that you really understand the inner workings of the organisation. And you know, the Directors Guild is like a little microcosm of Canada, politically. The National exists as the governing body, but of some very independent and powerful Councils. At the end of the day, like Canada, the only way you can really move forward is with a good idea that you can bring everybody on board with. You can’t really do anything without consensus at the Directors Guild, which is our strength and our weakness. It’s very enriching but the centrifugal forces are powerful.

“When I first became President, we realised we had to deal with some fundamental issues. So we brought all of the elected members from the whole country together in one place, and we set about to re-imagine the organisation. “The strategic plan that emerged resulted in some of the most profound change that the organisation had seen since its inception. We set about it by getting buy-in from all of the Councils and all of the caucuses. And we did it, not without a few battles, not without a few casualties, and we didn’t win every battle. We brought National and Ontario back together, under one roof. We’ve created an administrative core that handles both organisations and is now providing administrative support to the smaller councils. We’ve taken big steps towards becoming more nationally coherent, but we’ve done it in a way that didn’t violate any of the councils’ sovereignty. “Part of the mandate I set for myself was for the organisation to become an effective advocate when it came to public policy and regulatory affairs, which I think we’ve done. We influence the direction of events. And I think that the filmmakers’ voices are strongly represented at the national level, politically. That’s what I take most pride in.”

DGC 50th anniversary issue

MONTAGE

Film & Television Relief Program

Emergency Financial Aid for Film & Television Workers

Years of Advancing the Rights of Canadian Screen-based Creators CFC_Montage:Layout 1

11/16/12

9:56 AM

The National Directors Division:

THE FILM & TELEVISION RELIEF PROGRAM provides emergency financial aid to entertainment industry professionals who work in all aspects of film & television production.

· increases the profile of Canadian film directors within the national and international film industry

· ensures that directors, along with screenwriters, are

properly recognized as authors of the audio-visual work.

This year hundreds of your colleagues and their families will receive assistance with rent or mortgage payments, grocery money, utility payments and other basic living expenses when their health, housing or ability to work are at risk due to an illness, injury, sudden unemployment or other personal financial crisis.

· supports the interests and needs of screen-based directors in their myriad milieus

For more information on the NDD, please contact: Hans Engel DRCC and NDD Manager Tel: 416 925 8200 x 225 / hengel@dgc.ca

Page 1

The program is funded by Canada’s film and television unions and guilds and personal support from industry members.

CFC PROUDLY SUPPORTS INDEPENDENT FILMMAKING

You can do your part to help a friend bounce back by raising money on set through the Film & TV Charity Challenge and joining the Reel Friends Plan weekly payroll donation program.

For more information visit: www.emergencyrelief.ca SUPPORTED BY OLD STOCK Directed by: James Genn Written by: Dane Clark Produced by: Geordie Sabbagh Filmed in Toronto, 2011

MOLLY MAXWELL Written and Directed by: Sara St. Onge Produced by: John Nadalin, Aeschylus Poulos and Mark Van de Ven Filmed in Toronto, 2012

CRUEL & UNUSUAL Written and Directed by: Merlin Dervisevic Produced by: Matthew Cervi Filmed in Vancouver, 2012

RHYMES FOR YOUNG GHOULS Written and Directed by: Jeff Barnaby Produced by: John Christou and Aisling Chin-Yee Filmed in Montreal, 2012

Application deadline: May 31, 2013 To learn more about our CFC Features program, visit cfccreates.com/features

MONTAGE

DGC 50th anniversary issue

The Film & Television Relief Program is a program of the Actors’ Fund of Canada. The Actors’ Fund is the lifeline for Canada’s entertainment industry and is a registered charity. www.actorsfund.ca. DGC 50th anniversary issue

MONTAGE

introducing

A new TIFF Industry programme designed to take mid-career content producers and filmmakers to the next level. Participants will develop their creative and business skills and have the chance to interact with Canadian and internationally recognized industry professionals. To meet the 2012 STUDIO Candidates and find out more about our programme and guest speakers, visit TIFF.NET/INDUSTRY/STUDIO

PRESENTING PARTNER

PROGRAMMING PARTNERS

TIFF Industry is a registered trademark of Toronto International Film Festival Inc.

速

MONTAGE

DGC 50th anniversary issue