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Jack Darcus: The Offscreen Interview

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METANOIA CONTENTS

A NEW WAY OF THINKING

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY UWE BOLL

BY BRITANY SNIDER

MARGE CALLAGHAN

BY BRITANY SNIDER

GOLDFINGER

BY HANK LEIS

RANT: THE BREXIT PHENOMENON

BY HANK LEIS

ON MEETING STANLEY KRAMER

BY HANK LEIS

HAIR REJUVENATION CGF

BY DR CALEB NG

JACK DARCUS: THE OFFSCREEN INTERVIEW

BY RANDOLPH JORDAN

RICHARD BRODEUR CANADIAN EDUCATION

BY DR JACK WADSWORTH

DAN WALKER CHRONICLES

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MISSIVES

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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Randolph Jordan is a Montreal-based film scholar. He has given Metanoia Magazine permission to reprint his interview of Jack Darcus. Darcus, writer, artist, film producer is a long time friend of Hank Leis, Executive Director of Metanoia- who was also producer of Darcus’s film Overnight.

As well, Britany Snider interviews fireball movie director and restaurateur Uwe Boll, and her own grandmother Marge Callaghan, whose story was the model for the movie A League of Their Own. Hank Leis writes an article on the real life character of Ian Fleming’s novelmade into a movie Goldfinger. As Since the founding of Metanoia Magazine by three well, he writes about movie great Naturopathic Doctors and the Leis family in 2008, we have produced over ninety issues. We have had over one Stanley Kramer and Rants about thousand articles written, including interviews of over 100 actors, 100 artists, dozens of politicians, “Brexit”. philosophers, psychologists, and experts in other fields.

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Uwe Boll

Producer, Writer, Director, Author, and Restaurateur Interview by Britany Snider

You have a doctorate in literature, what did you do your PhD thesis on?

It was a series on novels and on tv, how you can find the root of all television shows in literature. That was basically the main work, which was around 120 pages and then about 600 pages of examples. At that time it was new, because for the first time, I did an evaluation on what tv shows were produced in the last 25-30 years. At that point there was no encyclopedia, so you had to go channel by channel by channel. Then you had to put it together through western shows, crime drama and family, all the different genres. A few things were surprising, like how family shows (comedy or non comedy) were the most produced in the 50’s and 60’s.

Modern times lean more toward crime drama. It was interesting to research and to see these changes.

Was this the gateway for you into the film industry?

What made you want to start producing films?

That was a childhood dream. I have wanted to make movies since I was 10 years old. The literature studies was basically my fall back. I didn’t make any money in movies in the beginning, so I felt like maybe I could never live off of film making. I decided it was better to complete a degree to have something to fall back on in case I ended up as a teacher or journalist or whatever.

With the movies that you have made there have been critics who have been quite harsh. But you

have chosen to deal with it in a different way. Could you expand on that?

I have had four phases as a filmmaker. First I focused on German movies and then I went to the United States. I made three movies that were not based on video games which didn’t get any bad reviews. Then I started making movies based on video games, which I took the biggest chance on and were also the most expensive to make and of course the most watched. I got panned and I think I sort of became a hate figure for a lot of the geeks and the online bloggers. Especially because I answered aggressively. I just didn’t take it.

It was like a boxing fight and I was always outspoken and totally attacked them back. I admitted that The Name of the King is not The Lord of the Rings but why did The Golden Compass get a better rating on IMDB? It’s basically a case of ball-bashing and has nothing to do with the product. The thing is, if you compare the movies that I did with the best of the genre then yes, the movies are bad. Alone in the Dark isn’t Aliens, but a lot of creature and science fiction movies are worse than Alone in the Dark. That is what makes me so upset. Now I have gone back to writing scripts and making more political movies, including Rampage and some more recent movies that I have done in the last or seven or eight years.

Do you have plans of working on any other films?

What made you want to open “Bauhaus”? What Or are you going to stay with restaurants? was the draw to Vancouver?

I came to Vancouver in 1999 to begin filming a movie, and found that I love Vancouver. In fact, I have shot over 20 movies here. I consider it my home, especially since my family is here. For me, Germany has now become just a holiday spot for the summer.

However, I missed the good German food and modern European feel, so I wanted to combine those into one space. The first challenge was that I knew I had to find a Michelin star chef to pull it off, somebody who could do a Schnitzel but also a six-course meal.

I wanted people to feel like they were in New York in a top restaurant, so that was the idea. At the same time, I feel like my career in the movie industry went down the drain. The classical independent genre film is dying, rapidly. It’s not making money and that has to do with the classic revenue of video and DVD. Now everything is online. If you put a movie on YouTube and monetize it, you get $500 if you have a million people watching it. A classic, independent film on the other hand brings you very little of the millions of dollars that have been invested.

That is the problem.

All of my friends here that started making movies, including my crew, are all busy because of the the American television channels shooting shows here because of the weak Canadian dollar. You get the labour tax. That is basically the situation. For people like me who are not tv show people, but who are also not Avengers people with $200 million budgets, it’s impossible to proceed. I felt that if the movie industry ends for me now, I want to have something else that I’m passionate about to proceed with, business-wise. That is why we opened the restaurant, although it has turned out to be more work and responsibility than I ever thought about or wanted.

I finished Rampage 3 in January and have just finished another new movie. At the same time, I feel like I have brought the Rampage story to an end. I don’t know what else I should tell. The thing is, if you make movies where you maybe lose money, then you have to be patient about subject matter and accept that you have lost it. I sell movies from other producers, which I would like to keep doing. However, it seems to be getting worse and worse in regards of getting good movies offered that you can sell. You get crap, where unknown actors are playing. They spend $50k to make the movie and expect me to sell it, but nobody wants it. That is another thing, you put a lot of work in it and I take my fee and it’s an independent movie and it only makes $50k worldwide. It’s almost not worth it. Another big problem is, years ago there were more and more investors putting money in movies.

Where so much money is burned and gone, it’s harder and harder to get private investors. Five million dollars is now $50k, but it needs to be with Christian Slater. They want the cast but don’t want to pay for it.

And all the actors are doing TV now. For Ray Liotta, and tons of other actors, movies are gone and they are now doing tv. They are all so tired of playing in shitty independent movies, where they feel the only person who gets paid is me (the producer) and they are basically working for free. Television shows at least have a good budget.

You are a producer, a writer, director, author and a now a restaurateur. What would you say is the biggest accomplishment so far in your career?

It’s always tough to say. I see myself as a filmmaker, so writing, directing and producing have always

been rolled into one. But the directing job is the most satisfying because I have fun working with the actor and being on set. For me, pre-production and post-production are not so thrilling. I’m not forever sitting in the sound mix room or in an editing room.

Editing is the most boring thing, I don’t understand directors that sit with the editors during the process.

I always watch it and give notes but I’m not sitting there watching how he adjusts his notes or how he is doing his job. For editing, I will spend normally 20 hours and for sound mixing, maybe 8 hours per movie. I think the biggest accomplishment is that I understand. Let’s put it this way; in 20 years, I’ve made over 30 movies as a director and a producer.

That is a lot. I think I have a good understanding of what is doable or how to get a deal closed to finally make a movie. People always think they accomplish something before they actually complete a task. The problem is a lot of people make a short movie and get a prize from a film festival and they think are already stars and the world will wait for them. But nobody gives a shit about them, which is the big problem. A lot of people don’t get that it’s an ongoing industry, always moving and you are way smaller than you think.

It seems like you have always had a fall back plan.

What is next for you? Retirement?

Time goes faster than you think. I know a lot of people that go to Palm Springs and play golf and that sort of thing. I hate that shit; I’m only happy when I’m under stress. Like when I have to fix something,

fight for something or do something from a specific point of view. The restaurant is good for me, it keeps me very busy and it keeps me hungry in a way. Hungry to make something a success, even when it’s not a success from the beginning. In the restaurant business, it’s always a fight. I’ve had four managers stolen from me since we have been opened. It’s really a long and frustrating process to find a good crew and people who you can trust.

I can’t stay there every night until midnight, so I need people I can trust to just give them the keys and say here, you can close this. It’s more work than I ever wanted but at the same time you see and learn a lot about humans, if you are actually a restaurateur.

Most nights I talk to guests and build relationships. You meet a lot of people you would never meet otherwise and at the same time, you see a lot of people’s psychology and how they work. You learn to sell things, like wine or food. It’s interesting.

You have to deal with the different characters too.

For example, some people really want your advice on what to eat and drink and then you have people who totally waste your time. You tell them the whole story about the menu and they totally had their mind made up before they even got to the restaurant. You really learn to read people in that situation. Then you can tell them that whatever they eat, it will be great!

It’s also an interesting thing about other restaurants.

If you run one restaurant that is run flawlessly, you should never think about opening another one. I think we are not in the flawless running yet since we are only 11 months old. We always have our drama. In fact, it could make a good reality TV show. I think the last two years have allowed us to sort out a lot of problems and given us hope that someday I don’t have to be there at all. Then maybe we can say we want to do something else. But Vancouver is tough, it’s not an easy market. The people are used to Cactus Club, which is definitely not cheap. But people think that Cactus Club is less expensive than our restaurant here. It becomes an entry thing where the people are like oh I shouldn’t go to Bauhaus because it’s too expensive, what is absurd especially when you are getting good food. It’s not easy, but that’s why 60% of our customers are business people and tourists.

7.

A glimpse of the All American Girls Professional Baseball League past with

Marge Callaghan

Interview by Britany Snider

When you look at people who are in sports today, even the woman are six feet tall. Do you remember this being the case back when you played?

Most of the people were my size, nobody was ever that big. Maybe they came after I quit. Most of the players on our team were taller than others.

In those days it was easier getting across the border, today it takes a lot for a Canadian player to be able to get across.

I didn’t even know they had a girl’s league in baseball anymore, until they called and asked me to throw the first pitch. Of course when I went to throw, it took one bounce before it hit the plate. I felt kind of stupid.

It’s so nice they asked you to come out and do that.

It was! You know I get asked to do a lot of these things.

One time Tim Raines was there and I didn’t even ask for his autograph. I thought what’s the matter with me? When my son went up to him to tell him about me throwing the first pitch and he said I didn’t think there was anybody as short as me. He’s very small.

Guess the playing field changed.

The ball was bigger and bases were shorter, compared to the men. When I watched them play recently they were doing a great job.

When you played back then and even to this day, females dont get a lot of credit in sports. What was it like back then?

I never felt like lack of credibility of female sports was something that I experienced, and even if I had, I wouldn’t have paid any attention to it. The girls played to the best of their ability, same as the men. I don’t believe in women playing in a men’s league, I don’t care how good they are.

They haven’t got the stamina like the men do. There is also a lot to think about, damage to their bodies from sliding and other things. They will pay for it later.

When I used to play pick up baseball, a lot of the time we didn’t wear gloves and just caught the ball with our bare hands. That was softball but of course you were playing hardball.

When we first started we didn’t use gloves and we are talking about way back in years. The only people who were allowed gloves were the catchers and the first baseman. So we played without a glove, I don’t know how long that lasted for until we were allowed to play with gloves. Now these days I don’t know how they can miss the ball with the size of the gloves they have today.

“I had to get special permission to leave them to go play ball. They considered me essential to war work because I was a squad leader.”

You started playing in 1944, correct?

Yes, halfway through the season. I was working at Boeing building airplanes and I had to get special permission to leave them to go play ball. They considered me essential to war work because I was a squad leader. My sister went at the beginning of the season, because she was just a worker.

The request had to go all the way back to Ottawa, I even have the paperwork to show the permission that I needed.

How were you selected for the league? You were in Canada and the league was down in the States. Were you scouted?

I went down in 1943 for the World Tournament and I got scouted. At that time, none of the scouts had every come out to BC to look at the players. The World Tournament opened the gate for the other girls that made it from Canada.

There were five of us on the team at that time. Helen (my sister) and I were the only ones that decided to go. Some of them were younger and their mothers wouldn’t let them go. One girl only stayed a year because her mother didn’t allow her, she said it was a big regret for her. There were fifty or so girls from Canada, a few from Puerto Rico, and the rest were American. I’m sure there could’ve been a few more Canadians playing if they had wanted to go. It was a good life, we made more money playing ball than we did working eight hours a day, six days a week. I was making $1 an hour at Boeing but made more money playing ball, which is why I went.

So with playing and practicing you must have been a bundle of muscles.

I didn’t have any muscle. I was only about 110 lbs. I was always active in other sports, grass hockey, lacrosse, basketball, baseball, softball and I did some tumbling. I could never do the balance beam though.

There are a couple of things I found really interesting about your story. I think almost every girl had a chaperone. Were there a lot of guys chasing after the girls?

Each team had a chaperone. But how is one person supposed to keep track of seventeen girls when they are in

their hometown?

There were some boys, though you didn’t just go with anybody who came to ask you out. I went out with one of the fellows for two years (his sister-in-law was one of our best pitchers, Dottie Collins, who was a great ball player). You would want to know something about them. You just didn’t go out with different guys. I mean there was one girl that did something like Madonna. There were a lot of them that gambled and drank. They don’t talk about those things though. The girls liked to gamble amongst themselves.

Some of them would lose their entire paycheques. It never made any sense to me.

Men do it, so why couldn’t the woman do it too?

There were some pretty wild ones down there. I wasn’t one of them. People liked the Canadian girls, we dressed differently, we weren’t as boisterous and we were a lot more quiet. We got invited out a lot, to dinners and different things.

The borders weren’t as strict as they are now, right? Did people go back and forth quite easily back then?

Yes, you didn’t need to have a bunch of documents to get across the border. You did need to get a passport to get to Cuba and to get out of the States we needed one. It was a good time in our life.

What was your best memory from playing back then?

Oh heavens, I can’t pick one, nothing in particular.

Probably when we made it into the playoffs but we didn’t end up winning, that was a good memory. There are too many memories to pick the best one.

Dottie Collins

9.

Did you get to travel a lot through the United States?

What is your opinion on current baseball players?

We travelled around a lot, just like the men. There were eight teams in the league. In our hometown, where our team was based we were billeted out and that helped. A lot of the time we weren’t charged a lot of money because they knew what the situation was. The last family I lived with, they were a wonderful family. He owned a business and a lot of the time he would take the whole team out for dinner. I went out for dinner with him and the team one time and he was quite clear that I couldn’t just have a sandwich. All of the other girls had ordered steaks and other expensive things, I felt uncomfortable doing that but he made me. Then, when I broke my leg, I was living in their home. The wife went away and I was doing all the cooking and cleaning for him and his son for a couple of weeks, so they didn’t charge me any rent.

As far as I’m concerned, they are all overpaid. Anybody would go and play if you got money like that.

So these people kind of became your family?

To most of the players, they did.

When we left and we were coming back to play in that city, those people asked us to come back and stay with them. Some of the American girls who were a little bit louder and more out there than us Canadian girls, had to find different places to stay. We didn’t have that problem.

Do you find that going through this and being such a fantastic athlete, that it helped you in your future life?

It was a fun time that you had in your life, however I don’t think it made a huge difference to me. It was a really fun time and I often wished I had gone back and finished out the league. There was only one girl who played the whole league when she was fifteen. She started in 1944 and stayed until 1954, she was a beautiful ball player. She was the one that Casey Stengel said that if she was a man he would’ve given her the big money. She played short stop and I played third, I helped her out a bit in the beginning but she didn’t need my help for long.

“I’m in five Halls of Fame, though not by myself” You seem to be very close to your sister, you played on team after team together. Until they finally broke you apart. Was that a difficult situation?

I think they broke us apart because she was married at the time. She had a ruptured tubular pregnancy Did you ever get the feeling that you Marge Callaghan, holding the glove later donated to the and that put her out of play and were at the forefront of something? Cooperstown Museum thats why Ft. Wayne let her go. Not That this league represented more because of her playing, she was a good player and a good than just a bunch of women playing baseball but it was a hitter, but because of her health. It didn’t bother me, we kind of liberation for women? had played together on teams our whole lives. She lead No I never felt like that, never gave it a thought actually. the league in batting the first year she played, but she was I figured if we were good enough to play, what’s the actually only there for one year. I’m in five Halls of Fame, difference if we are male or female? That was kind of a though not by myself. For the Canadian Championship, message in the movie though, wasn’t it? The movie itself, I’m in Cooperstown. In BC, Helen and I are both in it for a lot of it is phony. It would have to be, in order to be playing in the league in the States, and they also have a good movie, otherwise it would be boring. It was my my glove that I donated to them. I’m also in the Softball nephew who wrote a documentary story on the league League Hall of Fame and the Walk of Fame. Due to and he took it to Penny Marshall. He lost the rights to it doing a lot of coaching, I’m also in the South Memorial through no fault of his, his girlfriend went to one of the Hall of Fame. All of the awards are mainly for playing reunions and messed the chance up for him. They gave it down south. instead to someone else. You can notice in the film credits it does say Kelly Candale, so he did receive some credit. I “Things have changed a whole lot think they got about $40k for bringing her the story in the over the span of my life” first place.

Do you have another reunion coming up?

I don’t know where the next one is going to be. They have one every year, we find out in the summer. There aren’t too many of us old girls left.

You don’t wear those cute little outfits anymore?

Good heavens, no we don’t do that. A lot of the girls have their outfits still but I didn’t keep mine.

After you stopped playing baseball what did you do? Or do you still play?

Well, I got married and I started my family. I went back to playing after that only here in Canada. My boys played fast pitch. Helen had five boys and one of them made it into the MLB, he only hit one home run so they painted the seat that they hit and put his name on it. He now coaches the first base for the Seattle Mariners.

Do you still watch baseball?

I do, if I know that it’s on. If it’s a good game I will watch, if not I turn it off. Same as hockey, I used to really like hockey. Now with all the fighting, I don’t watch it as much. I figure they should use their ability to play the game instead of fighting all the time. I love figure skating and gymnastics, it amazes me what they can do.

Did you go back to Boeing?

No I was down in the USA playing when they declared the war over. I played ball down there until 1951.

What happened to the league?

I guess it wasn’t as pleasing to the public anymore. It was a fill in while the men were gone to war. It just didn’t draw crowds anymore. The only thing I like watching women play more than men now is ice hockey.

Helen Callaghan

A League of Their Own

“Older of the two sisters, Marge was a good defensive infielder. She was the leading 3rd baseman in fielding average in 1944 and 1945, with the most putouts in 1946. A good bunter, with speed to burn, Marge stole eighty bases in 1946.”

- Larry Fritsch Cards Official Baseball Card of the AAGPBL - Player’s Association

After you were done raising your family what did you do after that?

I took in foster children, while my kids were growing up. I took care of babies, then toddlers, then teenagers. In those days, you didn’t make any money on it. I got $50/month for a baby, that didn’t even feed the baby.

So how many children do you really have?

Oh heavens, I don’t know! I know there was quite a few.

I really liked having the babies, but they got adopted out quickly. Having the teenagers was hilarious, at one time I had eight teenage boys in the house for a week and it was a panic. I enjoyed it, it was funny. The only time it was really hard was if there was one with addiction issues. If I got a teenager like that, I asked the adoption agency to take them back, I was on my own and I figured they needed a male figure around. They understood that.

Have you ever run into any of them?

I did for a long time. But I have moved around so many times, different addresses and phone numbers. I felt like somebody was chasing me because I was forever moving around. Things have changed a whole lot over the span of my life.

Marge Callaghan and Britany Snider

Goldfinger

By Hank Leis

When I was 23 years of age, I found a job as an executive assistant to the President of a gold mining company. I became, what we called back then a “jet setter”. I was young, arrogant, narcissistic and stupid, thinking I was actually qualified to the jobs I was assigned. But the real test of my capabilities came when tragedy hit. A miner was killed in a terrible accident in one of the firm’s mines, the mine manager was fired, and I was asked to take charge.

Living miles away from civilization was challenging enough, let alone having the responsibilities of ensuring that three eight hour shifts needed to be maintained to keep the mine operating. The winters were cold and snowy, the mining equipment froze, thirty miles of road had to be plowed whenever it snowed, food had to be brought in, no matter the conditions, truck brakes froze, drunken brawls would break out, miners got injured, employees quit and were replaced (a revolving door of people arriving and leaving), and everything that happened, I was held responsible for.

To say I was in over my head would be an understatement. The jet set life had ended and my new life was being the servant to whatever it took to make the mine continue producing gold.

But all this came with huge rewards. I learned, not just about mining, but the thoughts and mindsets of the people who worked for me (or as I came to believe, people I served). My education came from acknowledging my own failings as a person and the humiliation I felt when they were pointed out to me by my subordinates. And they did not hesitate. And so I learned one day that I was a phoney and did not altogether like myself. “What did they know?” I defensively argued with myself. But they knew. They knew my pretensions and told me I did not like myself and they did not like me at all. This was their life and I was the “know it all” interloper.

In my moment of despair, a young miner my own age, by the name of Jim Schellenberg came to my assistance, perhaps unknowing of my crises. He handed me a paperback entitled The Ninth Wave by Eugene Burdick. I could not put the book down. I read it over and over again and what I learned from it became the philosophical basis for my life.

In 1966 Jim and I started Strato Geological Engineering Ltd., a company that provided services to the mining industry, which continued to operate until 1996.

Later in my life, I went to the campus of Berekley to visit Dr. Burdick where he wrote and taught. Sadly, he had died of a heart attack the previous year while playing tennis.

Much later, my thesis on leadership for my MBA was based on his written theories on voting behaviour and the many novels he wrote (The Ugly American, The 480, The Blue of Capricorn, etc.) I have given out over 100 copies of the book to people (often who did not take the time to read them or some when they did, did not get out of it what I did).

(Gold) and became friends with Pres. Jack Kennedy and the U.S. leaders that followed. He died a young man, but his heirs live on distributing the benefits of his wealth to great causes.

And so it is that Engelhard and I are joined at the hip by gold and the book we both loved to read, The Ninth Wave.

The story may still have not ended. I am trying to contact his heirs and what happens if I do is anyone’s guess.

Today I work with a group of young doctors. They may or may not “get it” but they do know my love for the book.

On June 6, 2016 I received, as a present from them; an original leather bound copy of The Ninth Wave in perfect mint condition. In that moment my cup runneth over with joy!

But that is not the end of the story. Inside the cover was a note that the book had been previously owned by Charles W. Engelhard Jr., the very person who Ian Fleming used as the prototype for his novel Goldfinger. Engelhard, a billionaire, made his fortune in the precious metal business

Charles W. Engelhard Jr.

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7667639

Rant Rant The Brexit Phenomenon

Those of us with University educations have, we believe, become the elite. We have been told by the powerful, all-knowing that a University degree grants us this status, and we believe it- and therefore it is so. Brexit and the success of the Trump candidacy in the U.S. are, the elitists believe, the result of the super charged atmosphere of primal fear and hatred by the ignorant lower classes who do not have the sophistication and clarity of thought to make proper decisions. Their decisions are based on the fear mongering caused by manipulative politicians who are unethically tapping in to these unjustified fears, and thus delaying our natural propensity to evolve or assume the requirements to create a modern, civilized, and brave new world.

Inexplicably, the so-called intelligencia think that their right thinking ways are not based on fears but a rational process that excludes the amygdala’s excesses. They are wrong of course- but their ways and explanations mostly prevail. CNN’s welleducated, gorgeous, articulate talking heads tell us it is so. When they interview the lower class, incoherent folks who are asked to articulate their beliefs, it is evident that their incoherence makes the case that their votes are really unwelcome in this sophisticated world. In Universities,

14.

By Hank Leis

Hank Leis, author of The Leadership Phenomenon: A Multidimensional Model

speakers who do not spout the usual dogma are disinvited and ultimately marginalized. Democracy is for only right thinking people. “Citified” people on the Brexit issue, were horrified that their future should be dictated by the likes of those they openly disdained.

The results of the vote, they determined, should be rejected in its entirety or the process repeated until everyone made the right choice and the current “winners” could be convinced of their errant ways.

The elite had historically encouraged more people to come out and vote but when they did- it was the wrong group because they dared to go against the very ideas that this establishment had hoped for. The shoddy, inarticulate morons were making their voices heard and screwing things up for the generation of futurists who were evolving into the perfect human species that they themselves had envisioned.

Every decision has unintended consequences. So are the unintended consequences in response to the manifestations of the elitists who subscribe to the notion that better education, less conflict and shared values will in fact produce the kind of world that is best for everyone? That assertion by the so-called “thinking people” might be considered by many as extravagant and narcissistic. Understanding the concept of evolution alone should mollify such a grandiose hope because evolution meanders- and mostly to dead ends.

The Bold and the Beautiful Talking Heads

The educated city folks, bundled up in their condos, living their very borderline, existential restricted life closeted by the safety of small spaces, believe that their limitations should be other’s as well, and that open spaces are not about freedom, but about the greed of restricting others from occupying it.

The future of mankind they believe, is in the constant compromises of surrendering individual space to the needs of others. They believe small spaces should replace big spaces- reduced because of the virtues of sharing and caring about the needs of others. Reducing one’s own “footprint” for the sake of the “numerous others” is the object. There is no sociobiological scientific evidence of any kind that attributes survival of any species based solely on altruism.

The evolutionary tree is filled with more dead ends than successes. Adjustments in shape, size, or neurological input have resulted in terminations of many species. Even the evidence of the twists and turns in man’s evolution have results of dramatic ends. The assumed brilliance of today’s brightest and best does not ensure a happy ending- but our arrogance does assure us that well contemplated plans almost always go awry- and that the haphazard approach of nature weaving its way along undefined paths does lead to survival. Sometimes following the smartest and prettiest ends in a “honey trap” leading to extinction. Too often with researchers, the hypothesis becomes the solution absent of the test. Harvard University, where the super brains reside, has the distinction of introducing Russians to democracy and yet not being able to predict the financial collapse in 2008 to protect their own endowment funds. The book The Black Swan by Nassim Taleb is about the unexpected. But in the total number of events that take place, where consequences intended or otherwise- come together, the totality of all of it can only be unexpected. The intellectual elite are great at analyzing the past- but the future is being determined by those of us who admit to knowing nothing. The trap of engrenage awaits those who cannot simplify.

City folks look for salvation by escaping the primitives who occupy the past, then becoming “fearful” of what they have to deal with when they do not get their way. It is as if in our march towards death- we insist on finding ways to get there faster and are upset when it is delayed. This is the era of the dictatorship of the educated and highly opinionatedso let no thought expressed by those who rule be torn asunder. The lower classes have been the subject of judgement and derision by those whose expectations are granted by virtue of their manifest destiny whose

legitimacy to power is created by the authority of their own narcissism.

The exit by Britain from Europe failed because it was not supposed to. It was not supposed to fail because there were too many important issues that required the participation and concurrence of everyone. It was totally unexpected- and those in the know- who could see no alternative- found the Black Swan event descend on them like a hurricane and in retrospect it was all foreseeable to all of us. Those with an agenda to keep it all going lostbecause they could not bully those who had no vested interest in going along- and they made the huge mistake of encouraging those who do not normally vote- into voting. It is not dissimilar to what is happening in the U.S.- and if Trump loses- watch what happens then. The mongrels will not go back to their kennels peacefully. Brexit is the most natural of phenomenons. The E.U. is artificial. In 2008, we became familiar with the term “too big to fail” and now we are learning that whatever is too big to fail inevitably does. The dangerous events that took place in the world economy in 2008 have not been taken care of- they still lurk in the shadows- because those in charge have camouflaged it. Brexit is not the last of it- only the beginning.

The most natural instincts of the British may have saved them from a bleak future- because the artificial and hidden agendas of the powerful have been exposed and they are too frightened to do what is necessary and so prolong the day of reckoning of when to start again. Things that bump in the night take on a greater energy if not addressed- even if addressing them may be excruciatingly painful. Brexit will surely save the British- but who will save us?

Sometimes natural instinct supersedes humankind’s ability to survive better than the meticulous planning of the futurists- (who’s plans are too complicated, too fragile and leave us ultimately to deal with the rubble of collapsing edifices and the monuments to narcissism).

On Meeting Stanley Kramer

By Hank Leis

Then somehow it happened. I was introduced to a thin, wiry, intense man by the name of Stanley Kramer. I do not know who had arranged the meeting- but there I was sitting in a coffee shop in Bellevue, Washington, talking to Stanley Kramer about making his next movie. He was serious and focused, his fierce eyes constantly evaluating me. He did not have the promoter’s vocabulary of trying to entice with promises of wealth, fame, and wild women.

And that, for me, was a good thing as I had brought along my then pregnant wife and 12-year-old daughter Natasha (Natasha still has the signed and original script from one of those meetings). He talked to me about his script and asked for my thoughts. It was difficult for me to comment because I did not have the arrogance to “over� someone I admired.

We talked about the business and how he had financed some of his previous movies, including getting money from fruit pickers in California.

We both had daughters around the same age. We talked about family and our own personal challenges.

Stanley Kramer

There was a time I fancied myself becoming a Movie Mogol- I had been a producer in a movie, had met and hired award-winning script writers in the United States, had many friends in the industry, had written and conceived a TV series and had several projects lined up with major studios and financial backers. Somehow, word got around in the industry as I went from meeting to meeting, that I was looking at projects under development. Of course, what I did not know then was that the movie business is a mugs game and that any newbie interested was welcomed as a potential source for money.

I talked to people in London, New York, Los Angeles, and less exotic places, to the rich and famous, the poor and unknown, and those in between. These were fast and furious times, filled with beautiful, glamourous people in front of the camera and the uglies behind making it all happen. The stars acted like stars, discounting the riffraff who served them or elevating themselves by their condescending approval of their lackies. It was all great for an innocent like me. The actresses often acted as if they more than just liked me but later I found out only because they were told to. But my ego told me it was all about me.

And the feeling was euphoric.

We also conversed from time to time by phone and the project had its ups and downs with rewrites and my being educated to understand the real business side of the business as opposed to the illusion that had first brought me in.

One day while in Las Vegas with my wife, we got a call from Stanley Kramer- inviting us to a film festival in Los Angeles of the movies he had made. However, I had meetings I needed to attend. My wife suggested I cancel them but I did not. The meetings I attended turned out to be nothing- but the regret I have by not attending the film festival is forever.

My wife points out that I have cancelled on two lifedefining moments in our history together. One of course, was meeting with the fiercely intense and proactive Stanley Kramer- the other is the meeting with the great actor/director John Huston, set up for me in Puerta Vallarta by another incredible individual, Mrs. John Muir.

But that is another story. I have warm feelings for these wonderful people- and the sadness for me is that they are now departed and that I did not do what was necessary at the appointed time to capture all they were willing to offer me. It is a sadness of missed opportunities only now appreciated when it is too late.

Filmography of Stanley Kramer (as Producer): The Runner Stumbles (1979) The Domino Killings (1977) Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (TV Movie) (1975) Judgment: The Court Martial of Lieutenant William Calley (TV Movie) (1975) Judgment: The Court Martial of the Tiger of Malaya - General Yamashita (TV Movie) (1974) Judgment: The Trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg (TV Movie) (1974)

The Caine Mutiny (uncredited) (1954) The Wild One (uncredited) (1953) The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T. (1953) The Juggler (1953) The Member of the Wedding (1952) Eight Iron Men (1952) The Happy Time (1952)

Oklahoma Crude (1973)

The Four Poster (1952

Bless the Beasts & Children (1971)

High Noon (1952)

R.P.M. (1970)

The Sniper (1952)

The Secret of Santa Vittoria (1969)

My Six Convicts (1952)

Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967)

Death of a Salesman (1951)

Ship of Fools (1965)

Cyrano de Bergerac (1950)

Ship of Fools World Premiere Party (TV Movie) (1965)

The Men (1950)

It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963) A Child Is Waiting (1963) Pressure Point (1962) Judgment at Nuremberg (1961)

Home of the Brave (1949) Champion (1949) So This Is New York (1948) The Moon and Sixpence (1942)

Inherit the Wind (1960) On the Beach (1959) The Defiant Ones (1958) The Pride and the Passion (1957) Not as a Stranger (1955)

17.

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Hair Rejuvenation CGF

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By Dr. Caleb Ng

Hair Rejuvenation CGF is a revolutionary cell-based treatment that helps to stabilize and reverse hair loss. Hair Rejuvenation CGF works to thicken hair in people who have experienced hair loss from inherited predispositions or medical reasons. Hair Rejuvenation CGF is uses biomaterials sourced from a patient’s own blood to stimulate hair follicles.

This natural therapy is not only safe, it is also effective in encouraging hair follicles to return to a state of active growth.

What is Hair Rejuvenation CGF? The CGF in Hair Rejuvenation CGF is short for Concentrated Growth Factors. Hair Rejuvenation CGF uses the growth factors found in specific cells of our blood called platelets. Platelet cells are mainly responsible for the healing of damaged tissue. When an injury occurs, platelets will stop the loss of blood and start to release growth factors to begin the tissue mending process and promote the growth of functional tissue. In CGF therapies, the naturally occurring growth factors in the platelets are concentrated with stateof-the-art harvesting techniques that create remarkably regenerative product that is rich in growth factors, platelets and stem cells. Stem cells are cells that possess the potential to become different types of tissues of our body. In the presence of certain growth factors, stem cells can be activated to develop new tissue.

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Hair Rejuvenation CGF begins with a consultation with one of our doctors. At that consultation, the doctor will help you determine the cause of your hair loss and address any underlying issues from a holistic standpoint. On the day of your treatments you will be asked to refrain from consuming fatty or oily foods. Hair Rejuvenation CGF treatments begin with a small blood draw. While your CGF, Platelet Rich Plasma and Stem Cells are being processed photos of your scalp will be taken and an anesthetic cream may be applied.

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19.

Jack Darcus:

The Offscreen Interview Interview by Randolph Jordan

Victor Ertmanis, Barbara Gordon, Hank Leis, and Melissa Bell Overnight

John Board, Telefilm Rep, Hank Leis, and Jack Darcus Overnight

I met Jack Darcus in 1985. He was looking to secure financing in order to start production on a movie entitled Overnight, the script for which he himself had written. Darcus and I became friends and I was given the title of producer and spent time on the set in Toronto being driven around in a limo, watching the film being shot and having dinners with some of Canada’s most talented actors. In 1986 the movie was nominated for four Genie awards. The nominations did not garner any awards, however the experience of being involved in producing the movie and later the marketing of it in Los Angeles had a profound effect on my interest in the business.

What follows is an interview of Jack Darcus by the erudite Randolph Jordan who with his questions reveals the many dimensions of the multi-talented artist.

-Hank Leis

The Vancouver Scene and Artistic Inspiration at Home and Abroad RJ: So did you grow up in Vancouver?

JD: I did. I was born here in 1941. My middle name is Winston, which tells you which war I was born in. And I grew up here. I went through university here and launched myself as a painter of pictures, and then went sideways into set design because I was fascinated by theatre too, and then that led me over into the film thing. The first time I saw Eastern Canada was when I took two films to Toronto.

RJ: There have been a number of attempts over the years to try and classify a “West Coast School,” or something like it. Nobody’s really been able to define

such a school, but something that keeps coming up over and over again is a sense of isolation here, certainly from Eastern Canada, but also in many ways from the rest of the world.

JD: Well, I can’t talk about a Vancouver school in the same way that I can talk about Montreal in the 1970s with a bunch of filmmakers trading off subjects. I felt very isolated here. If they were trying to do what I was doing they’d gone away already, you know, like Larry Kent had gone. But, partly because of this isolation, Vancouver represented a great liberating sense that you could do whatever you wanted here. For instance, and I’m going to leap sideways here, Greenpeace could not have started in Ontario. For all the people who were concerned about atomic weapons and the environment, it wouldn’t have

started there. It had to start out here, because of the peculiar connection that we have to California, up and down the coast, the peculiar climate we have. When the Group of Seven come out here to try to paint BC’s trees they can’t do it, they always go away and go back to the Laurentians.

It’s a different place. Spiritually it’s a different place in some indefinable ways. I think it has fed many artists of all media because they’ve been able to say, “Well why not?

Why not do it?” We have the least amount of support for the arts in Canada of any province, therefore there’s no provincial bureaucracy that we have to deal with or suck up to. I mean, I wish we had some more support, I could always use some support, but in some ways it’s turning a liability into an asset. I mean that for the peculiar people who began here like Larry Kent, Morrie Ruvinski, there was just the feeling that there was nobody here to stop us.

You know. And the opportunity is there. Let’s do it!

RJ: Did you have any exposure to some of the local stuff that was going on here before Kent? I know there wasn’t a whole lot happening, but, for example, there was the stuff at CBUT with Stanley Fox, Allan King, Arla Saare, and those folks.

JD: I never had any connection with them. Later on Stan Fox became helpful when I was doing my first film, we borrowed things and got some help there. Allan King I never knew until Toronto, and he was one of the ones who wanted to direct the project I wanted to do so that created some conflict. He was a gentleman about it, the minute I said “no” he said, “Okay, I’m gone.” And he backed away. He wasn’t going to try and rifle his way in there. Or offer me any money. No. When I was finished university, Larry Kent had just made The Bitter Ash with Alan Scarfe, and that was the first [independent feature] film that had been made here. And then Larry made his second film the year after, and by that time I was out painting pictures and doing whatever I was doing. [Kent always did] an improvisational thing where he got his actors together and said, “Alright, you’ve got two girls in a bathroom, here’s what you’re talking about. You guys do it.” They talked, and Larry shot. And this I could understand. I could make a film that way.

And then of course the real inspirations coming down from the sky were the great movies from elsewhere. The major inspiration here was a man called Don Barnes who ran [the Varsity Theatre up on 10th ave. near UBC]. Don was part of Odeon, but he had his own programming going and there was a window in the late 60s / early 70s, you know, he brought in all of the early Polanski, Kurosawa, Bergman, Hiroshima Mon Amour, all of Renais’ films, every Truffaut, every one of those great films, and they

were all happening at one place in Vancouver. It was in the area of UBC so it attracted that audience. Going to see one of those films, a particularly fine one, would make you want to go and make a movie. That was the team you wanted to join. You know, I think that if Don Barnes hadn’t existed, I wouldn’t have had the courage to go and make my first film. It was out there; it was real. And because there was no one else here to turn to and say, “Oh wow, you did that? I’m going to try that.”

When you see Polanski’s Knife in the Water and you’re 28 and you know you really want to tell a story somehow, and then you see this amazing film made by this guy with three actors and one sailboat, and you never get off the blinking sailboat once you’re on it, you know, you see this jewel of a story and things begin to become possible then.

Because I can find three people who can act and a sailboat, no problem.

And that kind of inspiration found its way into the claustrophobia of Deserters. The film that really gave me the courage to do Deserters as a film was a Fassbinder film: The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant. It all takes place in sort of a design studio. I mean it’s a clothing design place and she’s a clothing designer and she’s madly in love with this lovely young woman that keeps going off and sleeping with American servicemen and breaking her heart and all this stuff, and it’s a drama but it’s really claustrophobic in the middle of all these clothes and you never get out of the place. And I thought, “Oh, if you can do that, then it can be done.” You can keep a drama airborne in that sense.

And Bergman had, of course, constantly been a HUGE inspiration. There was a play called The Stranger by Strindberg, and Persona had been Bergman’s reaction. That was his homage to Strindberg. And those were my platform for The Portrait in a way. Those were out there, I knew they were out there, and they were great pillars to stand upon. Every artwork is an homage to another artwork. You need your great works that are there to support you and then you go and fool around with the subject that you’re trying to understand. But you’re in a surround of similar great works that have done their own take on something like what you’re trying to say, you know. It’s the same with painting. Every painting is an homage to another painting in a way. And that’s fundamental to originality; shadings of what you’ve been able to make of the inspiration and the help you’ve received from someone else.

Every artwork is an homage to another artwork

RJ: What about the Canadian scene outside of Vancouver? Any inspirations there?

JD: The only part of Canada’s [film industry] that I found immensely admirable was Quebec. When I went to Quebec and I met the communal feistiness of the people who were defending their culture, proud of their language, resting on a very well developed publishing industry, children’s television industry, theatre scene, all of this in French, all of this supported as a reaction against the Anglophone world because they were going to preserve their culture.

You know, if I had been born in Montreal I’d have been very happy. Just because the early films by Jean-Pierre Lefebvre and Denys Arcand, they were light years ahead of anything in English Canada. Réjeanne Padovani for example. When I saw that, I had a screening of Wolfpen in Winnipeg and Réjeanne Padovani played at the same event, and it was hard-edged, tough, it was about the real politics of Quebec. They did outrageous things. They cast a look-alike for the Mayor of Montreal; he was a dead ringer for the Mayor! And, craziness, they shot it in three days. They rehearsed the film for about a month, so they had it all down. And then they did one weekend’s rental of equipment and went in and shot it. So, this was revolutionary, powerful filmmaking. And in Wolfpen, I was trying to do a professional film according to what I was told was the right way to make movies. But what they did in Réjeanne Padovani was similar in spirit to what I was doing with Proxyhawks, you know? So, seeing the two films side by side was such a shock. Because I really wanted to have made Réjeanne Padovani, you know what I mean? So, as I got to know later when I took Deserters back and I screened a couple of films at the NFB in Montreal and met the film community there I felt at home there, spiritually, compared to English Canada where everybody just wanted to make a successful film.

There’s no such thing in English Canada as preserving English Canadian culture. You were gonna put bums in seats. This was the attitude in Telefilm. I mean, there really is not that defensive thing. In certain areas there’s a microclimate, like in Alberta there’s a certain Texan point of view that produces someone like Ian Tyson for instance.

And the folk scene and the country scene. And there’s a microclimate in Vancouver that has a lot to do with First Nations, a lot to do with just the sense of liberation of being here. But it doesn’t mean that there’s a cross-feed in the literature, you know. There’s never that sense of crossreferencing to other filmmakers. So there is no school, as such, that deals up a certain theme, or variations on a theme, in that sense. Whereas in Montreal there is. I mean you can really find it there. You can find that sort of arch, slightly satirical, edge to things that is quite consistent in a bunch of people’s work.

The Canadian Film Industry and the Early Days of CFDC and Telefilm JD: The very frustrating part of Canada’s film scene is that film is a great engine for telling our story to ourselves.

And that has been the justification for Telefilm Canada. And for the effort to preserve our stories in that language. And that has slipped away now. Partly the digital revolution has homogenized it all so that suddenly on the Internet you’re anywhere in the world you want to be. Instantly. So that in itself has laterally spread all the attention worldwide.

Which is a good thing. But at the same time, filmmakers who make a movie now, most of them dream of putting it up on YouTube. Which is a new venue, a new publishing scene. But we need the support for the literature. We need the awareness that there is such a thing as the literature.

We need a cultural ministry that has an idea about this, you know, and I don’t see that happening. I see Telefilm doing its bums-in-seats act, only approving projects that make money. This is insane. In Canada? Forget it. This is their dream, and they keep themselves in office by doing this, by talking that language. But the language is ridiculous and destructive. Because it means that things don’t happen, you know. In many ways here on the West Coast we’re back to the bad old days of the 1970s, before Vancouver had its own independent film office. Because this office is completely tame; they will do whatever they’re told to do. And there is no independence out here, no sense of autonomy about who we are or what we’re doing here.

RJ: Let’s talk about the bad old days and your early attempts to get your films out of Vancouver. I read a great story about your trip to the CBC offices in Toronto to try and sell them Proxyhawks, where you had to screen the film on the back of the acquisition manager’s door, and at the end he replied: “Sorry, we can’t do this to the average Canadian worker.”

JD: That’s true. The door kept opening during the screening as people came in to meet with the guy. And they discussed matters with the film playing on their bellies!

RJ: Was this a major factor in your shift away from the edgier experimentalism of Proxyhawks to a more narrative-based approach in your subsequent films?

JD: No, that was because of the new opportunities offered by Telefilm Canada [then the CFDC], available for the first time as I was developing Wolfpen. I had to write a screenplay that would satisfy their needs. Couldn’t write it on the fly while shooting as I did with the others. We got the funds and made the film, but I didn’t like the experience of working with the producer they attached. Then in 1976 I wrote a screenplay called The Falcon and the Ballerina

for Karen Kain. [That was the one that] Allan King wanted to produce and direct. Everyone wanted the property, but nobody wanted me to direct it. Telefilm refused to let me produce or direct. Meanwhile I discovered that the project was being developed by others without having bought the rights, so when I found out about that everything was shut down. That ate up 4 years. I gave it up and wrote Deserters instead. And then a theatre company wanted to produce it as a play, but with a $50,000 price tag and I could make a film for that money. So I went to Canada Council to pitch an hour-plus “experimental drama,” not a feature: The Canada Council doesn’t do features; they’d send you to Telefilm. So Canada Council gave me $25,000. Then I got some matching funds, sold three paintings, made Deserters, and sold it for the cost of production.

RJ: And here you went back to what you had tried with Proxyhawks, which was to sell the films directly to TV rather than attempt the usual theatrical route, which you had on Wolfpen.

JD: Well, in fact, I was offered theatrical runs on all the films from Deserters onward. But I always refused them because theatrical in Canada only meant you’d get, um, one week in Toronto, one week in Ottawa, and maybe Vancouver. And then they would take the television rights.

That’s what they wanted. It was some part of Telefilm policy. But it was ridiculous. Filmmakers just lost the rights to their films completely. Some distributor would come in and pay $20,000 or $30,000 on some prints and ads, and it would be put in what was known in the exhibition trade as a “death house”, which means that it was sandwiched in, on a one-week only run, between two American films that were coming in. Nobody cared whether it earned a dime or not. The theatres didn’t really want these things but they had to do it. Films never had a chance to gather an audience, because each theatre had a house nut that if each film made a certain amount a week then it would hold over for another week. When the take dropped below whatever that house nut was, then they would move in the next film. And because most all of the theatres in Canada were foreign owned and controlled, they knew that if a film did 8 weeks in Kalamazoo, Michigan, it would do 4 weeks in Vancouver. So they could plan their year way in advance. They knew how many weeks each film was liable to do. And if a film surprised them by not doing the 4 weeks they expected, then there was a one-week window to put a Canadian movie in. That was the way it happened.

And so I never took an offer for a theatre because it was just

I never took an offer for a theatre because it was just giving your movie away

giving your movie away. Instead I would go and sell the licenses to the broadcasters myself. And the broadcasters never cared whether the films played in the theatres or not.

You know, because they never noticed if they did. And it was no advantage to the broadcasters if a film had had one of those ridiculous theatrical releases.

RJ: Some of these frustrations with the Canadian film industry eventually fed into your fourth film, Overnight, which is a pretty biting satire of how things work in this country.

JD: Mordecai Richler said that the dream of every English Canadian businessman was to get big enough to sell out to an American. And the whole film industry was that way. So it was very easy to spin Overnight into what it became, which is a satire. But originally, it wasn’t quite the statement on film production in Canada that it turned into.

The genesis for that film was tragicomic. I got a call from the union saying there was an invitational screening over at Panorama studios. Was I interested in going? So I went over. And um, there was a screening of – I should have known actually – the film was called Sexcula,4 and [laughing] I went not knowing what I was getting into.

And I saw one of the grips from Wolfpen was there, various crew people were there, people I knew from the union who had worked on some of my films. So we all said hello to each other etc. and we all sat down, the lights went down and up came the film. Um, Sexcula had basically, I mean, I’m blurry now on whatever the plot line was, it doesn’t matter. It was just a film about fucking really. It was a piece of pornography that was… well it wasn’t soft-core. I mean in those days it was a little raw, it had a sort of Dracula type basis to it in a way. You know, it was a fantasy. But the excuse for making the film was that the leading lady was going to have her legs open most of the time.

So, we’re all sitting there watching this. When the lights came up at the end there was sort of a stunned silence in the audience because nobody knew where to look or what to say to each other. And we all sort of stood around looking at our shoes, and the grip I knew came over to me, and he started to talk. He had been in the film! There he was.

There was Frank up there on the screen, you see, balling the leading lady, right? And I mean, very graphically balling the leading lady. So he comes over to me and he’s all sheepish and embarrassed. And he started to talk about how there was a lot of cocaine on the set and whatever else, etc. He’s going around and around about this, talking about the leading lady and how she was a bit of a burnout due to the drugs, and then he said, “That wasn’t me up there.” And up until this point I thought he was embarrassed

because I had seen him doing that. But no, he wasn’t. He was embarrassed because he wasn’t really up there. He said, “I couldn’t do it. I thought I could do it. But when they started, I couldn’t get an erection. So they had to cut somebody else’s body in to make the scene work.” And the whole situation had been calamitous to him because he thought, “Hey, gonna do it!” But he couldn’t do it. So here he was apologizing because he wasn’t on screen, not because he was on screen.

I was sympathetic, and then I walked out into the night’s fresh air and that was the end of that. But then I felt very, very sorry for that leading woman. I mean, you know, it was so tawdry, it was such a piece of crap. It used her terribly, and she was probably 27 years old but she looked 43. She was a rather battered piece of person. It disgusted me and so I went away and wrote a story about two people who meet on the set of a hard-core porn film. There’s a real connection between the two people, but they’re in the middle of this chaos of making a hard-core film. And they’re trying to preserve some humanity, you know, and they’re drowning in it but they’re trying to stay above it in a way and stay real with each other. And so that was the original screenplay. It was a short thing, about 60 pages.

But there was good dialogue and it was these two people trying to cope with what was happening to their feelings because they were just being used completely. So it was my reaction against that film that caused me to write the initial thing. But then as my experience with Canadian film grew, [laughs], I kept those original scenes but it started to transmogrify into the whole amazing industry that we had at that time – and still have – which is such a futile gesture in the film world when you stop and think of the level of literature that is almost constant.

RJ: Perhaps my favourite line from so many good ones in the film: “We may be little and dirty, but we’re Canadian.”

JD: When it screened at the Toronto International Film Festival that line got such a reaction in the theatre. Just whoops and cheers and shouts, it was wonderful.

RJ: And then there’s the moment when the lead says, “He does make shitty films but it was a good job and we were working with our friends.” Is that how you felt a bit? I mean, you never wanted to sell out, to get a big American gig the way Alan’s character in the film does?

JD: Never. And in fact when I went initially, I took Deserters to the American film market in LA and I had been through New York screening it, and also I did that with Overnight, and by this time I was learning the ropes.

So my first experience in LA was with Deserters trying

[chuckles] to sell it, and Telefilm at that time was very supportive and they had a suite in whatever hotel it was in, and they had screeners of the film there and what have you. But I met a young filmmaker there who had just done an independent American movie. She had worked for the props department at 20th Century Fox and had borrowed equipment and gone off to some abandoned building in the desert and made a movie. The kind of movie we make in Canada. I went to see the screening of the film, and I learned from her that she was going through all the same struggles as an independent filmmaker in America as I was in Canada. That was one of the big learning situations.

When I went off to England and Europe to sell my films later, I was competing with a lot of people just like myself who were trying to make their own movies in their own domestic situation, trying desperately to sell their films into their own broadcasters. I realized very quickly that I was just competing in a market. The idea was that you could take your Canadian film and sell it elsewhere. But that was fantasy. A large part of it was fantasy. And if I were an American, living in America, trying to do the same subjects, I’d be having the same difficulties and the same hopelessness that I have at home, really. And then I realized that I was immensely lucky to actually be able to do the films I wanted here.

On Writing RJ: So, because you never had the dream of selling out, and managed to navigate the Telefilm strategy from time to time, you had enormous freedom to pursue topics that were true to your heart.

On the other hand, 96% of the art produced is narcotics. It’s basically there not to ask questions, but to put the audience comfortably to sleep JD: The source of my subject matter had always been issues that were troubling me, and that were troubling everybody, like the Vietnam War, that I needed to resolve in some way by making an artwork. The social function of the arts is that kind of sharing, where someone in the isolation of making art, works out a piece of art that says something that can’t be said otherwise, and then other people come and see it and they go, “Ah, I felt that way.” And it’s that kind of social sharing that art really is all about. On the other hand, 96% of the art produced is narcotics. It’s basically there not to ask questions, but to put the audience comfortably to sleep. To give them the world they expect,

you know, with a happy ending. And then they walk out onto the street full of bubbles and fifteen minutes later they’ve forgotten it and it’s gone. So, those kinds of films I didn’t have any interest in at all. I didn’t like to watch them, because they were pointless, and also because I was a young man working out difficult issues for myself about love, relationships, immoral wars, and what have you. I mean, Vietnam was the moral watershed of my generation.

That was the one issue at the time that had huge impact for me. And being a Canadian in the Vietnam years with sympathies very much against the war, and all my friends were American draft dodgers and deserters, and they had all given up on going home to avoid fighting in that war, it really made me reevaluate my position in it all. It was very easy in Canada to be on the side of the angels; it didn’t cost you anything. You know, I didn’t have to give up anything. I could go around with all the right thoughts, but they were really cheaply held.

But for me, art should ask a good question, ultimately. So that’s what I’ve tried always to do.

Art should ask a good question

RJ: And those questions about the Vietnam War fed some of your films directly. In Proxyhawks the issue is presented rather metaphorically, though there are a few overt references to the war that help situate the domestic tensions and the birds of prey within that context. Can you tell me about that very striking scene in which the large-scale pictures from the war go up in flames?

JD: Those were actually blow-ups of napalmed children from Ramparts magazine. Before the film I was part of a demonstration. One of the guys took a motorcycle and went to San Francisco, to Ramparts and got the negs and brought them back up to Vancouver. They used my studio and made these huge trays for developing, and then we developed those things in billboard size on photographic paper using huge long exposures in order to get the picture.

And then we took those out to UBC and set them up and handed out pamphlets about Vietnam and so forth. After the demonstration was over, nobody knew what to do with them so I said we could store them at my warehouse studio downtown. A year later when I was making the movie I thought, okay, let’s do it. They can definitely be part of the film because they were part of the central subject.

RJ: And Deserters deals overtly with Vietnam issues as it tells the story of an American Seargent who comes to Vancouver in search of a draft dodger. In the process he manages to convince another young man to join the military, only to then question his own involvement in the horrors of war. And psychological situations like this

arise often in your films as you write characters who are constantly shifting ideological positions, changing their minds, wrestling with these ideas, starting with one opinion and then taking another. And in many cases, these characters are artists: writers, painters, and filmmakers. Is that born, in part, of your own wrestling with ideas across interdisciplinary boundaries?

JD: You know, again, this is another one of those sweeping pronouncements, but to me drama is always a can’t leave / can’t stay situation. And drama within ourselves is fundamentally that: you can’t stay with the idea and you can’t leave it either. Also, when I’m teaching writing, I’ll point out that a writer subdivides themselves into characters and puts them on the stage and says, “Alright, if you’re this and you’re this then let’s see what happens when you meet.” And often there are discoveries there for the writer that are really profound and unexpected. I think that when Shakespeare wrote Hamlet he was all the characters in that play. He’s everybody.

And he put them all on stage and put this uncertain young man who doesn’t know quite what to do in the middle of it all surrounded by the ghost and everybody else, and the whole thing is Shakespeare’s self-portrait. Now, I’m not presuming to be in the same league as that writer, but at the same time, there’s a great lesson in that. If you’re going to write drama that is going to have a profound effect, then it’s a can’t stay /can’t leave situation. So what has to happen is, peace has to be made, sometimes a very fragile peace between the opposite poles of the drama. In Shakespeare’s day, characters ended tragically. Fortinbras comes in and the kingdom goes on. The great metaphor of all of Shakespeare’s writing is that the kingdom is what goes on and that each of us, each individual, is a kingdom with all these characters at war within it. In the comedies it goes on happily; in the tragedies, the person at the center is in trouble and dies, but the kingdom still goes on. Now, we don’t have kingdoms anymore, and we don’t think of ourselves as kingdoms. Although the metaphor is still very powerful because when you go to a good production of Shakespeare you fall right into it. You’ve still got that sense of identity about being essentially the kingdom. It makes sense to you. But we are much more now, I believe, in the can’t stay/can’t leave situation and so we’re into making complicated fragile pieces in ourselves about irresolvable issues, you know, about relationships that turn out to not be the ideal that we thought they were, or whatever. The impulse to write, for me, is to find myself caught in the midst of this kind of thing. Who’s at war with whom here?

RJ: This kind of mental battling really comes out in a film like Kingsgate, where the main character, played by Alan Scarfe, is a struggling author.

JD: And sometimes things happen in the strangest way.

Sometimes someone will say something to me, just an anecdote, and I’ll think that’s a wonderful subject and away I’ll go. I’ve got a wonderful screenplay I’d love to do now called SVEC, and it was something that somebody said to me on a trip to Prague. And I went, “Wow, what a subject.” Because it suddenly touched the nerve in me, that’s really balancing on two points, if that makes sense.

Every student I’ve had wants to write vampire stories or something, because they’ve seen a vampire film and they really liked it, and then I’ll have to take them and say, “Alright, you want to write a vampire story. But why did you choose this particular vampire story? What is it in your life that’s making you write this subject in this way right now?” And until you can get in touch with what that is, you won’t have a fresh way through the subject. You’ll only have the cliché way. And every screenplay that I’ve started that turned into a pile of clichés is because I lost the thread, the reason that I was writing it. And all of a sudden I started to write stuff like every other thing I’ve ever seen.

But that’s normal.

Collaborative Processes: Shooting RJ: Let’s go back to your first film, Great Coups of History, and talk about how that fit into your creative process as a painter at the time, and what led you into filmmaking.

JD: I had been designing sets for a theatre company, and wanted to direct in theatre. I really wanted to direct a play.

But nobody in the theatre scene in Vancouver would let me go near a play, because I was a painter who was a stage designer who obviously knew that I didn’t know what I was doing as a director, right? So, that was a closed door for me. So at that time, I met a woman that I wanted to paint a portrait of, who was a great raconteur, talked endlessly about herself, and I’m busy doing some drawings of her and she’s yakking away, and at the second sitting she’s telling me the same story again. And I realize that she’s got these stories, and then I thought that she would make a wonderful movie. So that’s how Coups began.

Meanwhile I had to find a way to make it. The Film Society at UBC at the time was a student run organization that had access to a theatre there and they kept all the money. So they had money, and they wanted to make a movie. And here I was with a subject, and I wanted to make a movie. So I went and talked to them about it, because I had friends who were connected with that, and they said, “Alright, if you can pay for the first part, we’ll pay to finish it.” The deal at the time was that they wanted me to use one of their members as a cameraman. Now, I knew I didn’t know what I was doing, so I went out and

said to the cameraman, “Right, let’s you and I go out for a day of shooting and see what happens here.” So we went out and shot a bunch of stuff and I just asked him to do different things. I didn’t know what I wanted, except that I wanted to know he could take pictures. Well it turns out he couldn’t, and then I realized, “Woops, we’re in trouble,” because I’m not going to be able to do this with their chosen cameraman. So I went to Morrie Ruvinksi who had just finished shooting The Plastic Mile, which I hadn’t seen, but the film was in the can and they were editing it. And I said, “I need a cameraman” and he said, “Terry Hudson,” who worked for the CBC as a cameraman. So I went and got Terry and showed him the writing, such as it was (five pages or so), and he said, “You’ve got a really great subject. Okay I’ll do it.” So we struck a deal where I paid him almost nothing for the whole film, and he said, “You don’t know anything about directing but I’m going to tell you the logic of the shots that we’re doing.” And by the end of the first week I knew that if I did this shot then I needed that shot. Shot/reverse shot, etc. The language is very simple. So by the end of the first week I knew what we were doing. And away we went. Terry was enormously helpful. It was like a mentorship thing.

Then I was left alone at the end of the shoot with 22,000 feet of 16mm film work print, and I’ve never edited before. So they gave me an editing room in a closet at the university somewhere in the Student Union Building, and they gave me a hot-splicer that you use for cutting negative, and a set of rewinds, and a moviescope viewer.

With a hot-splicer you lose a frame each time you cut, so when you’re cutting sound with a hot-splicer you’ve got to sacrifice a frame of your sound. 8 months later I had the movie made. And I learned. It was in the editing process that I fell in love with making a film. You could compress time. It was so malleable, you know, in terms of what you could do to make a scene work. All these things were wonderful discoveries. I was completely engrossed and happy with that.

It was in the editing process that I fell in love with making a film

Collaborative Processes: Editing RJ: Speaking of editing: the sequence that really stands out across all your work, with regards to the editing, is the “bird rape” from Proxyhawks, where you use montage to really flesh out the metaphorical connections between your human characters and the birds of prey. This was the moment that most struck my class when I showed it to them as well.

JD: Yes. That movie, I moved up one notch from Coups.

We didn’t have a Movieola or a flatbed to work with, I still had rewinds and a moviescope viewer, but now I was cutting with a guillotine cutter so I wasn’t sacrificing frames. I didn’t have to do all these mathematics all the time with sound. That one it took me the whole winter to cut. We shot it and again it was another 8 months or so of cutting, and then I did the first screening of it. And it was such a strange screening because everyone was quiet at the end. Nobody wanted to say anything to me. They all looked at their shoes. And then they all left. And I went and visited John Gray, a writer from Vancouver, and I said: “What happened?” He said, “Well it was so strong, nobody knew what to do.”

But editing is such a joy, and it was my first love in film really. Later I was very fortunate. Jana Fritsch, who was in Vancouver here, is arguably the greatest dramatic editor, at least in Western Canada if not the whole country. Up until that time I had cut and worked with people to help me polish at the end because I was completely burnt out by what I was doing. So a fresh point of view was really helpful. So Jana, who is Czech trained, and she came out to Canada in 1968, had such a high reputation that I was kind of scared to approach her. I had The Portrait under way, and this time, for the first time, I wanted to have an editor on board cutting while I was shooting so that I could have an assembly happening. I had never had that before. And so I approached Jana about that and she said yes. So she came on and then I started getting these lovely notes on the set saying, “I think you need a reverse on this shot” and other things she thought were required, which was wonderful. I mean I try to keep my wits about me about cutting points but we did so many dolly shots in The Portrait that every time you turn the dolly around somebody you reverse the axis and you can tangle your brain up completely as to which side of the camera the actor should be on when you go into the close-ups. So Jana was keeping me honest that way. But when the shoot was over I was expecting to move into editing and so I was hanging around in the editing room while Jana would continue to cut. And I’m looking over her shoulder and I’m sort of dancing from toe to toe wondering how I can be useful here, you know, because I really want to get my hands on the film. And then I saw her doing things with stuff that I had directed that I could never have cut. I mean she was doing wonderful editing, skill on another level than what I was used to. So very soon I relaxed. I just went into the next room, painted a picture, and if Jana needed me I’d trot in and look at something, and she cut the movie.

Jana is one of those people who’s a joy to work with.

The art of editing is not something that I’m a master at.

I’m a pretty good editor, but I’m not there. Jana’s not a writer; she’s a very good editor. So she’ll work with the material to the script. But if you want to go in later and change the script in the editing, like you want to make a scene say something else, that’s when the writing ability comes in. We did that with the ending of Silence; we spun it into a different dimension during the trial scene. But that was all fabrication. We didn’t shoot it that way.

RJ: Tell me more about that. What had you intended for the end of Silence, and how did that change?

JD: Oh, the ending as written was sweeter than the ending I did. You have the father on trial [for the murder of his brother who sexually abused his daughter]. He won’t say anything. The prosecutor’s on his case, she’s pushing for the worst things that can happen to him. And the only person who can save him is the daughter, and then the daughter steps forward. That’s the way the writing was.

And the movie’s over. The minute the kid is going to go to the stand you know what’s going to happen. And so the movie died at that point. Because it was a happy ending.

You know, play the violins and go home. And I didn’t want that. There was a scene with August Schellenberg [who played the father] and the kid on a bridge. Augie is having angst about his brother and he’s trying to tell his daughter that his brother isn’t all bad. And the daughter is vengeful and says, “I wanted him dead.” So what I did was, I put the kid in place, and I took that scene with Augie out of the earlier part of the movie and now I went and put it there as a flashback. And what that does is it puts the whole issue on the table again; this is a kid that has been terribly hurt and is terribly angry. And justifiably so. It’s not a kid that’s going to come forward and tell the truth to save her dad; that’s far too thoughtless. That’s too sweet an ending, and I wanted an ending that was a provocation. But for Jana to cut that scene in, and make all the directions work in the courtroom – the positions and directions that people are looking – that’s all fabrication. If I could ever make another movie I would love to work with Jana. She’s so very good.

RJ: Yeah, there’s an elaborate montage sequence towards the end of The Portrait when you’re hearing the painter lecturing, but then you’re seeing him in the studio intercut with what seem like flashbacks to the first time that Barbara, the woman with the fur coat, comes in to visit a lecture. But then what he’s saying is tying in with what’s going on later, and then maybe she imagines that she’s there while he’s in the room painting. And other times it might be his imagination we’re privy to.

It’s very complex.

JD: Really complex. And there’s a dolly shot in there

that’s one of the longest dolly shots that we did. Because Barbara appears and disappears. And every time she appears she’s sort of there, behind him, and he’s hearing her voice, but then we move the dolly so that she disappears, and now she’s running around the set to come in at another point and then the dolly picks her up again. So we establish her unreality by having her appear where she shouldn’t appear, all the time throughout the shot. And that shot went on for something like 7 or 8 minutes of shooting, and with incredibly complicated marks to hit on the floor, and Barbara had to hit her marks and get in on time for each of the entries, and when we finished that shot and got the first successful take the whole crew cheered. They were cheering the dolly operator, Terry. Because what you’re doing is pulling focus like crazy while you’re moving all the time. But I mean those things are in the writing. You can’t do that without planning. But then you work with a really good editor who comes in with a whole different series of cutting points and makes something smoother and truer in your own way. This is what I mean. It’s having another brain whose seeing it all fresh.

Collaborative Processes: Acting (Human and Otherwise) JD: It’s such a high to make a film. I mean you’re working with a circus. It’s a team effort. You’re working with all these really high-powered people, and if you happen to have written the thing, you’ve lost all your objectivity so your actors can teach you so much. They can just say a line in a way that you’d never expected to hear it and suddenly you’re awake! You’re realizing, “Oh my God, there’s another possibility there.”

RJ: You’ve worked with Alan Scarfe on every film from Deserters through The Portrait.

JD: Alan is, I think, and thought always, that he is one of Canada’s greatest actors. When I saw him initially he had just come back from England. He made a film with Larry Kent, The Bitter Ash, then he went to England.

He studied two years at LAMDA [London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art], and then he did repertory theatre in Liverpool for another year, and then he came back to Vancouver because he was burned out with theatre. He came back to Vancouver to go back to university. But Paxton Whitehead was put in charge of The Vancouver Playhouse. Paxton was a fine director and a really great actor too, and that was the highest point that the Playhouse ever reached. He went and winkled Alan out of the university and back into the acting world and then Alan did wonderful productions here. They were just superb stage productions for one season. And then Alan went off

to Stratford, and I didn’t meet him until I went east while working on Falcon and The Ballerina. I initially wanted him as the lead on that. Nobody in the film world thought that a Stratford actor could act in films at all, so that was a write-off for everybody. They didn’t want Alan in a film.

They wanted someone with film experience. I mean, these people were idiots. And then, of course, when Toronto saw the film, they thought, “Holy cow, he can act!” I mean it’s ridiculous. He had been a great actor in their midst for several years. He’s a wonderful actor. If I could do another film with him I’d be very pleased. He was nominated for a Genie award on both Deserters and Overnight.

RJ: Any great moments come to mind about shooting with Alan?

JD: On Deserters, we had shot the scene on the train after all our big location stuff was done. So the scene on the train, when Alan tells the joke, that was either our last or second last day of shooting. So the first time when Alan steps up in the living room at night and tells the joke about the ditch that blew up, no one on the set had heard the dialogue before and it was all done in one shot. And we had a dolly and just went with him until he’s down on the floor and they move into a close-up on him.

We ended up cutting into those things because we’ve got other people looking at him but basically it’s all one shot.

There are turning points in films where all of a sudden everyone goes, “Gasp, my God, we’re into something here we never thought we were into before.” And with what Alan did that night, the whole crew had never realized, you know, what he was capable of. Up until this time they had seen him be the heavy duty Seargent, but not that kind of raw emotion. And so in each film, things have happened where all of a sudden something like that takes place, or an actor does something that causes me to say, “Oh shit I’ve got to rewrite this, I’ve got to add two scenes now, or something,” because that is too good to let go. The story has to go with it. There have always been those times when you have to let go, to abandon and then reform the script, to carry on.

The ending of Kingsgate was that way. His walking out to the cows, that wasn’t in the screenplay. The film was written before the shoot, but I knew going into the shoot that the ending would have to change. And so I rewrote the ending somewhere in the first or second week of shooting.

It’s really such a dynamic process, like you’re riding this horse and you want to keep it going in one direction but it won’t sometimes, and it veers off, and now you’re into a whole different ride and you still have to get it back on course again, but you really have to take advantage of those things because they’re wonderful things.

And while I’m on that kind of a subject, there was a night on Wolfpen, it was one of those amazing nights. We had it set up: the wolves would howl when there was a police siren in the city. I knew that wolves did that from my prior experience; dogs will do that too. So I thought, okay, we’ll shoot the wolves howling and we’ll do that before the drama, so we’ll have that. And that I think was our first night of shooting at the wolf pen [in Stanley Park].

We went and got a siren in a stationary police car down on the seawall, and the police car turned the siren on and the wolves all just sat there looking. No way they were going to howl. And so we’re thinking, what are we gonna do? So finally, I had the bright idea, I said, “That siren is sitting there stationary. Can we get it in motion?” So we put the car in motion and the sirens started to wail and it was traveling. Now the wolves started to howl. So we got our stock footage of all the wolves with their heads up howling and it was a moving siren that was going to trigger them.

Okay. Good. Done. We had a successful night. Now, we had come to the scene where my plan was that Vladimir was going to come up to the wolf pen, he’s going to howl, we’re going to feed in a siren and the wolves are going to start to howl, and then we’ll go cut back and forth between Vladimir howling, wolves howling in the pen, and we’ll have a scene fabricated out of two different nights of shooting. So I didn’t need the wolves howling on the second night, so I didn’t need police cars or anything like that. So we set up for that particular shot and the dolly we had, would you believe, was a spider with four little wheels. We didn’t have a proper dolly, we just had a traveling spider for the tripod, and Terry rode on this piece of plywood with casters on it and the grip pulled him back and parked him where he was supposed to be. So Vladimir comes walking around the corner and up to the wolf pen and then the grip corrects the camera so that we’re now parallel to Vladimir at the fence looking in. A little tweak with the dolly to bring Vladimir into frame. So as Vladimir is coming up, before that dolly move, a siren goes off in the city. A real one. And the first wolf goes, “Awoooooo!” like this. And you see Vladimir’s face light up, because this is synchronicity now.

God is with us; it’s happening. So the siren kept going in the city, and the wolves kept howling, and Vladimir stopped at the fence and did his howl and now we’ve got real wolves howling, a real siren out in the city, Vladimir’s doing this thing, and I

I have a lurking theory about group energy that if everybody wants something and they’re all in the same space, somehow they’ll make it happen

said, “Keep going! Keep shooting!” And so Terry has got the camera, like he’s here with the tripod, and he reaches down and he pops the three legs of the tripod free. And he takes the camera onto his shoulder. This part of the shot isn’t in the film because that’s a whole [jerky motion], and he steps off the dolly and now he’s beside Vlado and Vlado goes over the fence.

Now Terry is going down with Vlado. And then as Terry is taking Vlado over the fence with the camera, now Vlado’s kneeling at the fence, a wolf walks into the shot and howls with Vlado. It’s a two-shot and it’s real. And at that point Terry said, “We’re out.” The film was out.

We’d blown the whole roll. But, everyone cheered. The whole place just went up in pandemonium because all the crew was just whistling and shouting because it was just so amazing that it all went YES. Things like that, I have a lurking theory about group energy that if everybody wants something and they’re all in the same space, somehow they’ll make it happen.

You know. I can’t articulate that theory very well, but film productions, especially low budget film productions where you can’t afford to do things the right way – and you have to invent like crazy and you need something at three in the morning and you know it’s out there and then it turns up – these kinds of things are, to me, the real joys of film. And that’s something. That’s the wonderful part of it. That’s the up side to it all.

RJ: And you came to films like Proxyhawks and Wolfpen with a certain comfort level working with animals from your experiences at the zoo, right?

JD: [At the time of Proxyhawks] I was looking after all the birds of prey [for the Stanley Park Zoo], and I also looked after one ocelot, a moose, coyotes, two monkeys – I became a repository for whatever needed care and attention. But the birds of prey were the center of it all. Alan came to me one day at the property I was on – I had about a quarter of an acre – and he said, “How big a property would you need to keep six wolves?” And I looked at him and said, “Well, this times two I guess.” We talked about it but I didn’t know the wolves were on their way, which, in fact, they were. They had already been given to the zoo and then they built the wolf pen down there. So from that time on I went down there to see them. Two years before [shooting Wolfpen] I did some recording down there, I was thinking of doing a sort of Proxyhawks type underground movie. So we went down and recorded some stuff of the wolves and all of that, and so I was already aware that they would howl with the sirens, for example.

And then I heard a story one day. A young woman

anthropologist told me (at a party) that she had just returned from Northern BC where her First Nations “informant,” a very old man, had recently died. On the night he died, wolves came around the village and howled. This was a remarkable event, as wolves had not been heard there in many years. And the coincidence of hearing this story right around the time that the zoo had acquired their arctic wolves is what gave birth to Wolfpen Principle.

Silence RJ: So, in Wolfpen you dealt provocatively with issues of Native presence in modern Vancouver, and tied this to general feelings of isolation and incompatibility also felt by the white European immigrant character. That film was ahead of its time for dealing with indigenous/ immigrant relations as a complex set of interconnections rather than the more typical dichotomous relationship found in so many other films of the era and even later.

But you didn’t revisit the topic until your very last film, Silence, completed 25 years later. Why did you wait so long?

JD: The big answer is that I’ve written quite a bit on the subject, including a novel, but I’ve never gotten that out into the world at all. So it is a subject that haunts me, but there are two or three big issues here: political correctness and the fear of cultural appropriation are two strong forces in our society. Political correctness, meaning that you want to do the right thing for the First Nations people. And I have incredible respect for them as survivors. One friend of mine, Willard Sparrow, was the chief of Musqueam reserve, and he managed to turn that reserve from what was in those days a pretty typical reserve into something quite amazing. He kicked Indian Affairs off of it, he went and got CMHC[Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation] in and made Musqueam the first reserve in Canada to allow mortgages, rebuilt all the houses and turned a great deal of the politics of being an Indian upside down. And I knew him at the time. He was one of my neighbours when I was looking after all the birds of prey, because I lived right on the edge of the reserve. And the kids from the preschool used to come and look at the animals every Thursday.

RJ: Where was that exactly?

JD: That was at the foot of Dunbar and 49th.

RJ: And that was where you shot Proxyhawks?

JD: Yes. But knowing Willard – who died tragically at 42 years of age – was a real education for me about the survivability of these people whose culture was decimated. I mean they went through genetic decimation by measles and what have you, but they have rebounded

in a startling and amazing fashion, and I’d want to be very, very careful before going anywhere near that subject. It’s so easy to screw it up. So when Hank Shachte brought me the screenplay for Silence, that was the first subject that I thought had real power and was potentially good.

Then there were some big influences on that script because George Johnson of the NFB read it. At first there was sort of a wise old Indian Shaman type man, and George said you better get rid of him because he’s a cliché, so I said that to Hank and he got rid of him. Then actor Tantoo Cardinal read it and at that point the woman in the screenplay was a very docile, obedient, following Johnny 20 feet behind him type of wife who was slightly dimwitted so she didn’t really understand what Johnny was doing. And Tantoo said, uh, “You want me to play that?” I said, “Why don’t you have a talk with the writer.” And so by the time she finished with Hank [laughing]… I just stood back and stayed out of it and that character became something else again. Very much something Tantoo would want to play now. And she’s a wonderful actress, and was wonderful in the part.

We were looking for a place to shoot it, and I went to the Musqueam friends I had on the reserve and I asked if we could shoot down there and one of them said, “No, don’t shoot down here, they’ll make a meal of you. Go and talk to the Tsawwassen people.” So I drove into the Tsawwassen reserve and spoke to the business manager and said I’d like to shoot a movie here etc. And I had already driven around the place and said, “I’d love to use this house and that trailer etc. and we’d like to rent your hall” and I explained the whole deal and asked if they’d consider it. So they had a business meeting about it and I came back for another meeting and yeah, they were interested.

So I said that I’d like to meet the people whose houses we’re thinking of using and explain to them what’s going to go on. So I, and I believe Hank, the writer, and a couple of other people went to meet one of the women whose house we were going to use. What we found was that, not only were we meeting her, but we were meeting half the reserve. I mean the living room was just packed with people. And so we all got in and introduced ourselves and somebody there said, “So, what’s the story about?” And I thought, “Uh-oh, sink or swim now.” So I said, “Well it’s about a man whose daughter has been sexually abused by his brother, and he murders the abuser and swears his wife to silence because he’s not going to have his brother’s reputation destroyed. He’s put on trial for the murder and he still won’t open his mouth.” And I stopped right there.

You tell the story and then shut up and wait for the reaction.

And a voice said, “Sounds like real life.” And I knew then that we were in and we were okay. But I told the bluntest version of the story I possibly could just so that nobody would have any illusions; we’re not here to make a fun film, you know, etc. And that worked. But it was like one of those cliffhangers. You tell the story and then shut up and wait for the reaction.

And from there on in we were treated so well by that reserve. We were completely looked after by them. We used the hall for our catering and we all had our lunches there and everything else. It was a pretty big rig, we had something like 25 or 30 trucks, ‘cause I mean people don’t know what’s going to happen when a movie arrives. They saw one car arrive and four people get out. And we had a chat with them. But then all of a sudden this whole thing arrives, and that’s often a shock to people. But no, it all went down well, they all went with it very well. Mind you, we had enough of a budget – that was 1.3 million – so we paid a good rent and I made sure everyone got copies of the film on VHS later and all that. So yeah, it was a really good time.

RJ: So how was that film received? You didn’t do a theatrical release for that?

JD: No, I sent it to Sundance and it was accepted there but we didn’t have a 35mm print because I went to Telefilm to try and get a print made but they went “nope” and wouldn’t do it. So we showed it digitally. And this was just the start of digital projection in theatres, and Sundance had one all set up. So it was up there on the screen and it went well.

There was a big meeting for Sundance out at the ski resort. We were part of the First Nations film programming there and before the film we were invited to this First Nations meeting at the Sundance Resort. Robert Redford was going to be there. But I was amazed at the political anger of the Native American people. I mean, rude! They weren’t impressed with Redford, or with anybody. They just had their own agenda and they knew what they wanted.

It was strongly political. Redford made a very nice speech, I mean he was the host – he was the one who put the festival together for Christ’s sake! But the Native Americans were on their own turf. They weren’t on his turf. So I thought, “Holy shit, what’s going to happen when the film arrives?”

And there was a great discussion afterwards. I was able to tell the story of Tantoo tweaking the woman’s character, because everyone there loved Tantoo very much, and she received a huge accolade when she was there for the film.

Augie drove up from Texas with his wife and they were there too. But it’s like another culture. Native Americans have had a hell of a lot harder time than the Canadians

have. A really bitter time, and they’ve got huge cause for anger you know.

So to go back to your question as to why I hadn’t revisited the subject: it’s a really, really difficult subject, because you have to tell the truth of what’s happening. When I was asked why I had done the film, I said it was brought to me by a writer whose daughter was sexually abused. And the reason he wrote the screenplay was because when his child had gone through this, at the same time, on the nearby reserve, a boy was sexually abused and the father had killed the abuser. That was going on when the writer was dealing with this in his own family. He put two and two together and came up with a First Nations story. And that answer satisfied everybody. I mean it was real experience that was coming out here.

RJ: That’s the first script you’ve done that wasn’t your own.

JD: That’s right. And that was great. Well I mean I had done some directing in Toronto at the CBC, but Silence was a good experience. It was a good piece of writing. And Hank did have to go through some fairly steep learning curves to deal with some very powerful people who were not going to do anything they didn’t want. Writing a screenplay anyway is such a thankless thing to do, Jesus Christ, nobody wants you on the set even. But for me it was a subject that, when I read it, I thought it should be done. And Hank had gotten to know me because he was an observer on the set of Portrait, because his girlfriend at the time was an assistant on the set. She was an Emily Carr student who was somehow connected up with the crew.

But she was also his girlfriend so she actually brought him and introduced him to me. And it was about the time of that shoot that I read Silence and knew that would be the next one.

I sent it to Augie, after we had the script in final good shape and he sent me back a note saying, “Nope, not interested.” Okay. So I thought, “Dead issue.” If I don’t have Augie, I don’t have a movie. Then about three months later I got a note from Augie saying he’d changed his mind.

And I thought, “Okay, we’re in business.” So then I went after City TV and told them I’ve got August Schellenberg, and whoever the buyer was at City TV at the time said, “If you can guarantee Augie then we’re in.” And I said, “Oh yeah, no problem, we’ve got a letter from him.” So from the minute Augie said “yes” the film started to happen. But up until then there was literally no one else in Canada that could catch the attention of the broadcasters. Not another First Nations actor that would make the broadcasters take note. And Augie is a great actor.

RJ: This was ’96 when you were shooting? Because North of 60 had been running for a while by then.

JD: That had been running for a while and I did think of the man you’re thinking of who was part of North of 60.

RJ: Tom Jackson.

JD: Tom Jackson. But he wasn’t right for Johnny. He’s a nice actor, a nice entertainer too. But I saw Augie first on stage doing Ecstasy of Rita Joe back when it was first staged here in 1968. And Augie was about 34 years old and had just come out of the National Theatre School and he did an equally electrifying performance to anything Alan Scarfe had done on stage. So I knew I wanted to work with him. And I was fixated there. That was it. So when I read the script, he automatically became Johnny. And then I really didn’t look anywhere else.

Storytelling is model building, in a way. And storytelling can oddly penetrate some unplumbed depths in our lives

RJ: He’s certainly perfect for the role.

JD: Oh yeah. And the way he carried the actor who played his brother, who had never acted in a film before this… Augie was there for the readings when I was casting the part, and after the brother read, Augie caught me at the door and said, “You’ve gotta use him.” And I said, “But Augie, he’s never been in a movie before” and Augie said, “No, no, I’ll work with him. I’ll work with him. You gotta use him.” So I said “fine” and we did. And he did a beautiful job, and it was Augie who was always taking him aside and saying, “Okay, when you do this, think of that” and coaching him and that. Augie was a very generous man. He died tragically in the Fraser Canyon three or four years ago. He came out of a tent at night and fell off a cliff.

They were up there at a fishing camp.

What’s Next?

JD: I’d love to make another film, but again, it’s the bloody economics that makes things so difficult. A film has to make its money back. Or, it’s a hothouse plant that has to be very strongly supported. I mean, finally, as an artist these days your address is your website. That’s publishing. So I’m looking now to try to get the whole thing up on the platform and then give it away and see what happens [laughs]. Because it’s another whole game.

In some ways we’re very lucky to be living in times when all this is becoming possible.

Storytelling is model building, in a way. And storytelling can oddly penetrate some unplumbed depths in our lives if people are looking for that kind of thing. Now that remains my interest. It’s only worth telling a story if you’re going to try to say something that couldn’t be articulated in any other way other than a story. But that narrows the field; every language has had to fight a rear-guard action for survival in order to combat incoming languages. So when the camera happened in 1850, painting suddenly went into spasm because all of a sudden most of the business of painting had just been taken off the table. And this flurry of isms that happened – impressionism, cubism, every ism – all of those different and quickly revolving schools were the language of painting trying to discover what painting could say that no other art could say. And when television happened, the same thing happened to films.

Film suddenly went into an identity spasm. What could films say that TV couldn’t? And so the language changed again. And we’re into another one of those now where, with all the information out there, what do stories count for? And stories told in film in particular? These are really vital questions that we really need to share. Because I go to film festival screenings and see a film by, I don’t know, an Iranian filmmaker who happens to be working in Japan right now or something like this, and I’m saying, “Wow, you know, there’s a whole other take on storytelling here.”

And this is a subject that really needs to be assembled and put up there for young people to watch and see that this is where stories can take you. It isn’t just entertainment. It has a really serious point underneath it.

Randolph Jordan is a Montreal-based film scholar, educator, and multimedia practitioner. He earned his first and second cycle degrees in philosophy and film studies respectively before completing his Ph.D. in the interdisciplinary Humanities program at Concordia University. His ongoing research examines the intersection between acoustic ecology and film sound theory/practice, and Randolph Jordan and Jack Darcus he has recently completed a postdoctoral research fellowship in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University where he was investigating geographical specificity in Vancouver-based film and media by way of sound studies and critical geography. His research has been published widely and his photographs, films and sound works have been exhibited internationally. He is now writing a book for Oxford University Press provisionally titled, Reflective Audioviewing: An Acoustic Ecology of the Cinema (expected 2016). He has been covering Montreal film, music and new media festivals for Offscreen since 2001.

Source: Jordan, Randolph. 2014. “Jack Darcus: The Offscreen Interview.” Offscreen Vol. 18, nos. 11-12. http://offscreen.com/view/ jack-darcus-the-offscreen-interview

Richard Brodeur

Richard “King Richard” “Kermit” Brodeur was born on September 15th 1952 in Longueuil, Quebec and was raised in Montreal, Quebec. He is a retired Canadian ice hockey goaltender, originally drafted in 1972 Early Draft to the New York Islanders but chose to begin his professional career in the World Hockey Association with the Quebec Nordiques, playing with the team from 1975-1979. Brodeur was then traded to the Vancouver Canucks and played with the team from 1980-1988, including five consecutive years of playoffs before eventually ending his career in Hartford with the Whalers in 1989.

He earned his nickname of “King Richard” when he backstopped the Canucks to their first Stanley Cup final playoff game in 1982.

After he retired from professional hockey, Brodeur opened his own hockey school in Vancouver and took up painting. In 2002, at the age of 50, he decided to pursue his secret life-long passion of painting and is now a successful, full-time artist, living in the lower mainland of British Columbia and often showing his work in various galleries in Vancouver, and is part of the Birthplace of B.C. Gallery in Fort Langley. His art is a mixture of oils, acrylics, and water colours that create abstract paintings as well as images of ‘Canadiana’ including fishing villages in Haida Gwaii, lakes and orchards of the Okanagan, and ports and coves of Nova Scotia. He has a very popular series entitled, “My Childhood Hockey Memories” which allows him to combine his two passions of hockey and art.

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The Institute is pleased to publish this exploratory approach to the analysis of Canadian educational policy.

Mr. Wadsworth brings to his subject the point of view of an observer outside the organized structure of education. From this vantage point he examines policy in education from three distinct but overlapping viewpoints, which he describes as the rational, the pragmatic, and the research approaches.

Such an analysis is of particular consequence today. Education costs have reached the point where the taxpaying public is questioning the entire educational structure, and at the same time, many within the structure have expressed profound discontent. The need for fresh analyses of our schools and school systems is paramount.

Mr. Wadsworth’s study is being published in order that his ideas and recommendations may receive attention.

R. W. B. Jackson, Director.

The Ontario Institute for Studies in Education Toronto, June 1971

Continued from previous issue The paradox of equal opportunity. The touting of equal educational opportunity as a panacea for all social and economic disparity is an invitation to a demonstration that all men are not equal. The scenario that Young has presented in his brilliant Rise of the Meritocracy is very convincing- to the effect that the attempt to propagate socialistic egalitarian principles via the provision of universally equal educational opportunity results in providing substantial support for the rise of a meritocracy and the subsequent demise of such an ideal method of dispensing equality.

The myth that the educational system, particularly the higher educational components, is capable of raising the economic and social status of any individual or group has arisen on account of the selective practice of education and superficial economic analysis.

Contrary to the arguments for or against selection, selection is widely practiced to varying degrees, especially in higher education. The result is that only students of higher than average innate ability and motivation are exposed to the educational process.

When the subsequent output from higher education performs well in the economic or social system, the educator sings the praises of his educational process.

If a higher educational institution has fortuitously gained a reputation for good output, a vicious circle is established whereby the selective filter may be made finer (because of increased competition for places) and hence the reputation of the institution is further enhanced by turning out the products who are even more successful.

Therefore, the educators propagate the virtues of a so-called “good” education, but omit to stress that it was dispensed to “good”

37.

input. As one ascends the levels of higher education, the mesh of the selective net gets finer and the achievements of the products are more amplified as examples of the efficacy of education, rather than the results of finer selection. Furthermore, as the levels of higher education are ascended, there is less and less opportunity to demonstrate in a convincing manner that so-called equal opportunity for education has any relevance at all. Hence, educators are responsible for propagating the myth that anyone, given the opportunity, can obtain a Ph.D. in business administration from Harvard, and this propagation contributes to the increased demand for education.

The other contributor to the paradox of equal opportunity has been the now-classical economic analysis of the social rate of return to education, which has superficially inferred that it was of the order of magnitude of a few tens of percent. Such analysis, of course, provided positive decisional material to boost public support of all aspects of education.

That such analysis could be branded as superficial stems from the omission of the consideration of selected student input. These students would have performed well in the social and economic system, in spite of their education, by virtue of their innate ability and high motivation; these characteristics both allow their selection for higher education and provide their motivation for seeking it; and the higher educational qualification serves merely as a union card to enter their professions. (This union card does not assure productivity in the job. That is still a direct function of innate ability and motivation.) These two considerations of innate ability and the barrier effect have previously been discussed .

In summary, examination of the conflict-generating paradox of equal opportunity in education would suggest that, although the implied objectives of dispensing equity and supporting economic growth could be obtained more effectively by alternative noneducational methods, the political feasibility of removing formal educational processes as instruments for contributing to the achievement of these implied objectives depends heavily upon the alternative methods themselves. It can readily be argued that more overt methods of equitable redistribution of income (transfer payments, welfare payments, taxation, etc.) are preferable to dependence upon the provision of universal equality of opportunity in education. Also, it can readily be argued that nonformal education (on-the-job training, learning by doing, etc.) is more effective than formal education in determining actual productivity in the economic system.

However, these two alternative methods imply that the motivation of individual monetary return resulting from the career or vocation would be reduced (because of the greater dependency upon

overt methods of equitable income redistribution), although this perhaps could be replaced by higherorder motivations. Also, the formal educational process would be replaced by some sort of apprenticeship system (whereby the cost of education becomes more a private- sector rather than a public concern). And some sort of selective basis (intelligence, achievement, meritocracy, etc.) would have to be maintained in order to preserve the essential barrier effect (that is, the Canadian working population cannot consist solely of lawyers, engineers, and economists).

The school as competitor with the family. It is not too facetious, in the light of what has been discussed to this stage, to point out that education would seem on balance to be an effect rather than a cause; education does not produce a rich society, but the converse- only a rich society can afford the luxury of education. The acceptance of this view of education naturally leads to a search for any possible virtues of education in a rich society. Since the inception of compulsory primary education was closely related to the introduction of social sanctions against child labor, one obvious function that the primary and to some extent, the Secondary systems are providing is that of babysitting. This is accomplished at the remarkable sum of less than fifty cents per hour per student. Therefore, for six hours or so per day the family delegates to the school some of its responsibility for rearing the child. Precisely how the school substitutes for the family, both in intent and practice, is a source of much conflict.

The general nature of the conflict is simply a divergence between what the school wants to do and does not want to do, and what the parents want the school to do and do not want the school to do.

There is a tendency for the parents to want the school to perform distasteful tasks such as discipline, sex education, etc. The particular detailed nature of the delegation is, of course, a function of many minute parochial factors and hence there is bound to be an abundant supply of discord.

Of greater interest, however, is the empirical evidence of any effect in the child-rearing area that the schools may have. Significantly, the empirical evidence provided by Coleman at the low levels of the educational system would seem to reject the possibility of the school‘s having any effect overriding the influence of the family on the child.

At the higher levels of education, Astin points out that student behavior expressed through activism is heavily dependent upon family background.

Permissivity would seem to have been imposed upon the educational system by the family. (A startling example is the issue of boys’ long hair, initially resisted by the educational system but now widely accepted.)

It must be conceded that the effect of the mass

media was perhaps powerfully responsible for the propagation of permissivity in the family. In short, although very little substantial statistically significant evidence exists, there is a growing body of anecdotal material that suggests that the effects of lower levels of the educational system do not outrank the effect the family has upon the child. This is not to say that the mass media do not outrank both the influence of the family and that of the school. However, until statistically significant evidence is produced to the contrary, the educator will indubitably continue to promote the importance of the school‘s function, in relation to the family’s in the rearing of children.

In summary, disregarding the facetious extreme view of the lower levels of education as babysitting facilities, the fact that there is an implied delegation of family function in child-rearing to the lower levels of education generates justifiable and perhaps unjustifiable conflict. Even though much research and analysis will be needed to determine what part of this conflict is justifiable, it is difficult to avoid the substantive issue as to how much public involvement there should be in family child-rearing functions as opposed to the pure dissemination of the existing stock of knowledge- which is education. The implied objective of child-rearing cannot escape some connotation of socialization tending to indoctrination.

Theory versus practice. Conflict between the theory and practice of education arises simply because of the non-coincidence in time of the development of educational philosophy, theory, and psychology, and the widespread practice of education. The development of the theory of education ranges over many centuries when its actual practice was not statistically very significant; the actual substantial widespread practice of education is a very recent phenomenon occurring only within the last very few decades. Therefore no opportunity has existed for any significant feedback to be established between theory and practice. It is thus not too surprising that contemporary theoretical pronouncements on the direction or design of education would tend to be somewhat anachronistic, and somewhat oblivious to the sudden shock of widespread implementation and practice. The Hall-Dennis Report must be presented as such an anachronism, since it appears to be an attempt to translate nineteenth-century educational concepts into the latter part of the twentieth-century practice.

One extreme implied objective that may be derived from the recognition of the conflict between theory and practice arises from the simple inference that education has been provided, regardless of its possible effects, merely in response to demand. Therefore, the implied objective of the educational process is the provision of a consumer good. The fact that there has

been no time to consider why this consumer good should be supplied, but only the need to meet the excessively increasing demand, allows the extreme analogy that the educational system is not very different from General Motors- except that public support of education is analogous to providing a public subsidy to GM. Education becomes a consumer good that is publicly subsidized, the extent of the subsidy varying from almost 100% at the lower levels up to the order of 60% at the higher levels.

A study of the contemporary conflicts in education is a productive method for deriving some of the implied objectives of the system. It must be concluded, however, that these implied objectives can only be derived by pushing inferences to the extreme and do not perhaps represent the true state of the ongoing activity; but they are considered to be useful as a means of identifying areas where further careful study or research is needed. A candidate set of implied objectives of the educational process is therefore listed below:

-A study of the politics of education suggests the objective of maximization of own interest (governments’ maximizing their own interests- i.e., getting re-elected- rather than maximizing a social welfare function or the common good).

-A study of the paradox of equal opportunities suggests that neither the dispensation of equality nor the promotion of economic growth are convincing implied objectives of education.

-A study of the conflict between the school and the family suggests that indoctrination may be an objective of the lower levels of the educational system.

-A study of the conflict between the theory and the practice of education suggests that the objective of the educational process is the supply of a publicly subsidized consumer good.

Left:The late Dr. Jack Wadsworth Centre: Julie Yap Wadsworth with daughter, Jackie Wadsworth Right: Hank Leis and daughter of the late Jack Wadsworth, Jackie Wadsworth Jackie Wadsworth was born on Jack Wadsworth’s birthday, 70 days after Jack Wadsworth’s passing.

To be continued in the next issue of Metanoia

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The Dan Walker Chronicles Mt. Changbai to Qiqihar

Monday, June 25, 2012

Brooklyn saw us to the train station this morning and because he was not allowed onto the platform, he found a university student who spoke some English to show us to our correct coach. Like many Chinese, she has chosen an English name - Crystal.

The mass of people at the station was amazing, but well organized. Each train has a long waiting area under signs with the train number and track. Once we got close to our coach, a train attendant shooed Crystal away as her coach was fourteen cars away from ours and she would have to run to make it there in time. He made certain we were heading in the right direction - we had to get on two cars ahead of ours as the train was pulling out, but eventually arrived at our seats. The train was very modern, with a streamlined design. The ride was smooth and quiet and the airline style seats were comfortable. A display indicated speed, outside and inside temperatures, next station and so on. We cruised at 150 kph (94 mph).

At Harbin we were met on the platform by our guide Hank, who we followed through a massive crush of people into this city of almost eleven million. A car and driver were waiting to crawl through heavy traffic to our hotel, a Holiday Inn this time. It made up for a fairly bare lobby by having a well appointed room, but once again the air conditioning didn’t work. Incredibly, the city has almost no air pollution - the skies are blue. Hank attributes that to the local governor who is very strong on environmental controls on industry. Harbin was founded as a fishing village in 1880. When an extension of the Trans Siberian Railway was built through the city by the Russians to give a shorter route to Vladivostok and Pacific naval bases, it began to boom. They built the original station in 1896, and within a few years far more Russians lived here than Chinese, plus thousands of nationals from thirty-three different countries who set up industrial, banking, and commercial companies. The Japanese invaded in 1931,

holding the city until the Russians took over in 1945.

Many of the residents were White Russians who opposed Communism, and they were shipped back to Siberia where most disappeared. Eventually the area was handed over to the Communist forces of Mao. We arrived earlier than expected so nothing was planned out for today, but Hank agreed to put in extra time to take us on a walking tour of the old consular district on this hot, sunny day. When China was being fought over by various colonial empires, Zhongyang Ave was the foreign district with consulates from over sixteen countries. The original government and commercial buildings are still in use and well maintained - new buildings are not permitted in the district. At 1.45 km (0.9 miles) long it is China’s longest pedestrian street, lined with restaurants, shops, sculptures, and floral arrangements in a form I’ve seen nowhere else - internationally or in China. A wire mesh used to form fanciful designs and statues is coated with mud, then two colours of plant, bright green and a darkish brown, are rooted in the mud to fill out the design. In November the plants are removed and they become snow and ice sculptures. Hank says that for 180 days of the year, the temperatures are below freezing. The biggest tourist season is two months in winter when the city turns into a fairyland of huge illuminated ice and snow buildings and sculptures. Russia once again has the largest foreign presence for investment and foreign workers.

Our hotel is well located at one end of Zhongyang Ave, and the Songhua River is at the other end. This large, navigable river is 1,434 km (891 miles) long and flows into the Amur River in Russia. There is a cable car crossing the river, and a wide embankment has walkways, flower gardens, recreational docks and restaurant/pubs located along it for miles. The excellent Harbin beer makes the pub stops well worthwhile.

We had several at the English style pub in the hotel when we returned, where we met a crew Dan Walker is an adventurer, a of engineers who are more than businessman, and raconteur. He has visited every country in the world. tripling the output capacity His trusty Rolls Royce has taken him many continents. He includes of the Canadian company across his grandchildren in some of his travels allowing them to select the McCain’s frozen potato destination. Originally, he hails from Victoria, British Columbia, but now products plant. resides in Costa Rica. We are pleased to present the Dan Walker Chronicles.

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MISSIVES FROM DONALD J BOUDREAUX Economist Robert Higgs - who calls the problem highlighted by Mr. Ip “regime uncertainty” - explains that the Great Depression was made “Great” largely because of F.D.R.’s unprecedented, unprincipled, and wild intrusions into the economy. According to Higgs, “the insufficiency of private investment from 1935 through 1940 reflected a pervasive uncertainty among investors about the security of their property rights in their capital and its prospective returns. This uncertainty arose, especially though not exclusively, from the character of federal government actions and the nature of the Roosevelt administration during the so-called Second New Deal from 1935 to 1940.”* Sincerely, Donald J. Boudreaux Professor of Economics and ......................................

Martha and Nelson Getchell Chair for the Study of Free Market Capitalism at the Mercatus Center

Editor, Wall Street Journal

George Mason University

1211 6th Ave.

Fairfax, VA 22030

New York, NY 10036 Dear Editor: Greg Ip is correct that entrepreneurs and investors dislike policy uncertainty, especially the kind now unleashed by the electoral successes of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders (“How Sanders, Trump Threaten Market Confidence,” Feb. 17). Industrial and commercial activities are inevitably diminished by threats to radically restrict trade flows, to upend labor markets, to dramatically raise taxes, and, more generally - each candidate in his own way - to weaken the security of property rights.

But Mr. Ip is mistaken to assert that F.D.R. was not guilty of the same sort of reckless meddling and rash restrictions that are now promoted by Trump and Sanders. Mr. Ip errs in claiming that F.D.R. “got the big questions right.” Has Mr. Ip forgotten that the Great Depression lasted at least the full length of F.D.R.’s first two terms in office?

* Robert Higgs, “Regime Uncertainty: Why the Great Depression Lasted So Long and Why Prosperity Resumed After the War,” Independent Review, Spring 1997, Vol. 1., pp. 561-590. The quotation is from pages 563-564.

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