“So where’s the Cannes Film Festival being held this year?”  

  ---- Christina Aguilera              

Movie people have a long history of championing social causes.  Some have been less than laudable.

In one of the first successful feature films ever made, D.W. Griffith framed the Ku Klux Klan as the heroes. Leni Riefenstahl used her cinematic talents to burnish and sell the National Socialist agenda of Adolph Hitler. And now Canadian filmmaker John Greyson, writer/filmmaker Naomi Klein, British director Ken Loach and Hollywood stars Jane Fonda and Danny Glover (along with about 50 other artists) have combined their industry profiles to condemn the inclusion of Israeli films in the upcoming Toronto International Film Festival.

The basic tenet of their argument is that by celebrating films set or centred on the city of Tel Aviv, the Toronto Festival is “complicit in the Israeli propaganda machine”, supports an “apartheid regime” and thus becomes an unthinking foot soldier in the oppression of the Palestinian people.

Many might paint the artists taking this position as anti-Semites, self-loathing Jews or artists in favor of censorship, and those monikers may well apply to some who signed their names to a manifesto entitled “No Celebration of Occupation“ which can be found in its entirety here. But I think the truth is that wherever their motivation lies, most of them simply haven’t paused to consider what succeeding in their campaign really means.

Now, I’m about the last guy who’s ever going to untangle the problems of the Middle East. I’m not a Jew. I’m not Muslim. And to be honest, I figure boiling the Israeli-Palestinian issue down to a difference between religions is where any solution starts to get confused in the first place. As the Mayor of Dublin said during “The Troubles” in Belfast, “Ireland’s problem is there are a lot of Catholics and a lot of Protestants and not many people who understand what it means to be a real Christian”.

Arguing who was living where first or longest or why you shouldn’t have to negotiate with somebody who lobs missiles at your kids or blows up buses or ambulances or pizza parlors ends up being just about as pointless. And whichever side you choose to support, there’s a lot of what’s gone on that you might be able to justify or logically explain but you sure can’t be proud of owning.

“I find it a bid sad that there is no photo of me at the museum at Checkpoint Charlie."

--- David Hasselhoff

That said, by picking this particular target, these protesting artists have pretty much made it clear that they think it’s okay if the nations that side with them in their opposition to Israel deny other artists the same rights and privileges they expect for themselves.

John Greyson is a well-respected Canadian filmmaker, who sometimes makes movies exploring Gay themes. And while he could show those films in Israel, maybe even during the “Pride Week” that’s celebrated annually in Tel Aviv, he’d be taking his life in his hands doing the same thing in the Gaza Strip and virtually every other Middle Eastern country. In some of those places, even waving his rainbow flag could see him put in prison, raped and/or beaten to death.

You wonder if Mr. Greyson truly believes what he puts in his films or if it just gets him into a less populous funding stream or ensures his presence at every film festival afraid it may appear politically incorrect were it to exclude him. It would seem that enjoying his lifestyle and the freedom to espouse its values isn’t something he’d like to see available to Gay filmmakers in the countries who most enthusiastically support his anti-Isreal stance.

Jane Fonda’s movies and exercise tapes don’t get shown in Sudan, one of the countries which espouses the destruction of Israel. Forget tights and leg warmers, this week a female journalist there was sentenced to 40 lashes with a leather whip for wearing pants in public. An international outcry eventually had that sentence reduced to a fine. But several women who turned up to show their support for her were beaten by police for their trouble.

Jane didn’t say much about that. Nor have I heard her protest the fact that in many Arab countries men and women are not even allowed to be in theatres at the same time. Even if they’re married.

But that’s not really a surprise. For while she spoke out passionately against the Viet Nam war, Jane refused, despite several well-published opportunities to use her notoriety and perceived influence with the victorious South East Asian leaders, to say one word about the genocide that followed in Cambodia.

“Whenever I watch TV and see those poor starving kids all over the world, I can't help but cry. I mean I'd love to be skinny like that but not with all those flies and death and stuff.”
--- Mariah Carey

A similar kind of hypocrisy or moral relativism seems to reside in Naomi Klein, author of “The Shock Doctrine”.

A friend, who recently returned from working in Saudi Arabia, described he and his fellow office workers being herded into the street one day by a number of police carrying the canes they used to regularly dispense justice to those who contravene various local laws. A bound man was brought into the street and my friend thought he was about to witness another beating. But instead, the man was beheaded.

And while Ms. Klein decries that sort of thing when it’s done by Chilean dictators, George Bush or the fuckwads who work for Blackwater. Her voice seems to go silent when the same kind of “shock treatments” go on in the countries she is helping to demonize Israel. Maybe that has something to do with ensuring that her husband, Avi Lewis, stays employed at Al Jazeera, an Arabic news organization that has often shown beheadings --- including those of terrorist hostages --- to inform and educate their audience.

I don’t know how Danny Glover squares his participation in this protest. I heard one wag suggest he might’ve spent one too many “Lethal Weapon” sequels in the company of Mel Gibson.

But I wonder if Mr. Glover is aware that the “apartheid state” he opposes allows Arabs to vote or that there are elected Arab members in the Knesset, Arab judges in the Supreme Court and Arab professors in its universities. In fact, one of Tel Aviv’s most famous orchestras is almost equally comprised of Israelis and Palestinians. Does that sound like Apartheid to you?

Maybe he’s also unaware that American Congressman John Conyers, who founded the Congressional Black Caucus is on the Congressional record stating that applying the word apartheid to Israel belittles real racism and apartheid.

Maybe he doesn’t know that the slave trade still thrives in many Arab countries.  And while some of the victims are those who share Mr. Glover’s race and ancestry, most are now impoverished women and children. In 2004, the head of Interpol’s Iran Bureau published a report claiming that the sex-slave trade there was one of the country’s most lucrative industries.

“I've never really wanted to go to Japan. Simply because I don’t like eating fish. And I know that's very popular out there in Africa.”
— Britney Spears

Perhaps the member of this group who most disappoints me is Ken Loach. Loach is quite simply a master filmmaker. A couple of his early works, “Poor Cow” and “Up the Junction” had a major influence on my work and my understanding of the power of cinema. More recent pieces like “Fatherland”, “Carla’s Song” “Raining Stones” and “The Wind That Shakes The Barley” have universally been recognized as monumental pieces of cinema.

He’s always been a filmmaker who wore his social conscience on his sleeve. But lately, it feels as if he’s lost the plot when it comes to determining where real injustice is most at home.

While (to the best of my knowledge) he never demanded that American films made during the Bush or Reagan eras not share the bill with his own at other film festivals, he’s begun to do just that with works from Israel. Last month, he pulled his most recent film, “Looking for Eric” from the Melbourne Film Festival over the same issue he’s espousing in Toronto.

Not as politically correct as Canadian Festival executives, the Australians were more than happy to tell Mr. Loach he was quite welcome to tuck his little movie up his air-tight Limey Starfish and stay home. As Melbourne Festival director Richard Moore correctly observed, “"to allow the personal politics of one film-maker to proscribe a festival… goes against the grain of what festivals stand for", adding that "Loach's demands were beyond the pale".

"Is this chicken what I have, or is this fish? I know it’s tuna but it says Chicken, by the Sea.”

-- Jessica Simpson

By their very nature, film festivals program works that are controversial and ground-breaking. They are a forum where filmmakers censored, marginalized or misunderstood in their own countries can find an audience. They are places where ideas are exchanged, debated and shared. They are not places where the film lovers who choose what is to be screened should be pilloried by artists with their own ideological axe to grind.

Within the next few days, the Toronto Film Festival will screen Lars von Trier’s “Antichrist”, a film which will send Rosedale matrons screaming from the theatre and make grown men retch in the aisles, every single one of them scarred for life. There will probably be one or two other films that will offend somebody’s sensibilities, shatter their illusions or insult their core beliefs. Sometimes good films do that. Sometimes films we don’t like do it too. 

But nobody (least of all artists who enjoy such freedom) has the right to say who can make those movies or who should see them. But that’s what happens in Iran and Saudi Arabia and Syria and other countries who have also called Israel an Apartheid or Racist state.

Like the man says, “You can’t fix, stupid!” And it’s almost as tough to combat what’s fashionable or universally agreed as a priority within an ideology. But that doesn’t make it right or acceptable or anything else but beneath contempt.

If only some of those clear-eyed and committed Canadian filmmakers behind this protest were half as concerned with not screening films that were boring…

 

“If, from the many truths, you pick one and follow it blindly, It will become a falsehood, and you – a fanatic.”

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One of the Country DJ’s I listen to recently had a contest to find the song “Guaranteed” to being a tear to your eye. Like everybody who listens to Country music, he’d heard his share of Hurtin’ songs. The genre is simply chock full of lost loves, lost dreams and lost dogs.

Every Cowboy roadhouse has a string of selections on the jukebox you hesitate to play because it might strike the wrong chord in the quiet loner sitting on the stool at the far end of the bar. Many a Wurlitzer has been trucked to the dump riddled with bullet holes to be buried not far from the fool who plugged in its last quarter and pushed B-29.

But this guy wanted to know which song consistently pushed your own buttons. The one that never made you holler “Oh, get over it!” or “Move on”. The song where you knew what was coming and you still kept listening and took it, aware you were gonna need a hanky before it was done.

The song that won had everything to do with broken hearts and broken dreams. But mostly it was about truckers.

I’m not sure when truckers first became an accepted touchstone of all that is America. But for me, that seed was sown when I first saw the movie version of John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath”. Early on, in the famous “Diner” scene, the kindness of a couple of truckers melts the heart of a waitress who’s seen too much, reminding us that even the darkness of the Great Depression can’t snuff out basic human decency. 

Hollywood, which always knows an emotional winner when it sees one, picked up that theme and ran with it. From “They Drive By Night” through “The Wages of Fear” to “Convoy”, “White Line Fever” and even “Smokey and the Bandit”, there’s always a trucker who instinctively knows what’s right, what’s true and what’s bullshit.

In my own experience, I’ve had two nights in truck stops where a lounge full of drivers told me what shows were going to work and which would fail.

The first occurred on a snowy night in Colorado when Fox debuted hockey. Some of the guys I convinced to watch that game knew a little about hockey. None were fans. But the sight of Fox’s animated blue streak to help viewers follow the puck elicited a simple “The fuck was that?” followed by laughter, followed by my realization hockey might wait a while longer before it caught the attention of Americans.

A couple of summers ago, I traded a six pack for an hour of TV time in Wawa, Ontario to watch the debut of “Flashpoint”. Whatever the strengths and weaknesses of the show, a few minutes in, a couple of the guys commented on the impressive array of weaponry and the cast’s obvious skill in handling them. That attention to detail always let’s you know an audience is also picking up the rest of what’s going on. And I have the feeling if the series’ handlers had given themselves over to a little more “gun porn”, CBS wouldn’t be debating its renewal.

Red Sovine’s “Teddy Bear” debuted in 1976 at the height of the CB radio craze, one of those apparently recurring moments when trucker culture seems to fill a void within our own. It topped the charts within a month of its release, crossed over to the pop charts and stuck around forever.

And that’s odd, because “Teddy Bear” isn’t really a song. It’s just talking with an instrumental backing. The theme is hackneyed and somewhat trite. And once you’ve heard it once – well, you know the story.

In fact, in the first 90 seconds, the piece clearly telegraphs every single button it’s going to push. Like a bad script with a story editor’s red penciled “On the Nose. On the Nose. On the Nose” scrawled all over it, you know exactly what’s coming.

But that doesn’t matter.

Because then “Teddy Bear” twists. And then it twists again. And no matter how often you’ve heard it and maybe because you’re listening for when those emotional turns actually occur, all of a sudden the road ahead is getting a little harder to see and you’re reaching for the Kleenex box on the dash.

Yep. That country DJ was right. Despite all that’s hokey and stupid about it. “Teddy Bear” delivers and in the process makes you wonder if all those people who vet stories for art and relevance and importance have even the first clue about the reactions of the people that work is supposed to reach.

So, grab a tissue, shed a tear and then…

Enjoy your Sunday.

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The two guys who clear the grocery carts off the Costco lot were in a good mood. It was payday and one of them finally had enough money to get his nipples pierced.

He was absolutely ecstatic at the prospect of parading the beach with his newly sparkling pecs on the last long weekend of the summer, exhilarating in how Cool that was gonna be.

My first thought was of how “Cool” might have a different context when he was humping those empty carts across the windblown ice of the same parking lot come February.

But as they went on about whether they should should splurge for a few beers at lunch or pick up one of those way sweet Budwiser knapsack cases on the way home, my second thought was of the inspired Craig Ferguson clip on “the deification of imbecility” that had been making the rounds.

As I finished loading my car and the boys continued their banter, one of them picked up a business card from the pavement and tried to decipher it. His buddy stepped in to help. And it quickly became clear that neither one of these guys really knew how to read.

For too many reasons I’d bore you to death by describing, I learned to read before I went to school. And I firmly believe the stories I read as a kid helped me understand and figure out things my parents, friends and teachers couldn’t. Those stories also gave me experiences and insight I wouldn’t have otherwise had. And they inspired me to strive for what others around me didn’t.

And while somebody much smarter than I’ll ever be once said that “good books are those that reinforce your own prejudices”, I believe even the bad ones help you find your way through the world.

From parables that founded religions and philosophies to Sci-fi novels that inspired scientists to get us to the moon, human history has always been guided by bringing our myths and fantasies to life.

We’re a species that hungers for stories and maps our progress with them. From kids needing comfort before drifting off to the unfathomable world of sleep to a foursome playing bridge in a Seniors’ home reminding themselves of their history, we are sustained and energized by the stories we share.

But those two guys in that parking lot had had a segment of their deserved humanity withheld from them. And they’re far from alone.

A few years ago, I went to see a much anticipated new Comic book hero movie. The snack bar line wasn’t moving because the cash register wasn’t working. By that I mean, when it tallied your total and you gave the kid behind the counter your money, it wouldn’t then do the math and let him know how much you got back in change.

A half dozen kids in spiffy uniforms were all trying to help each other and equally flummoxed. Older people in the line, those who had never had the luxury of pocket calculators in math class, tried to help, as in “You owe me $2.32.” But even then, the kids couldn’t deal with the lack of certainty the failure of the till had instilled.

And then about halfway through the movie, the pace of the action slowed for what was the only scene of character important dialogue between the male and female leads. Less than thirty seconds into their conversation, a voice from the back bellowed “Either Fuck or Fight!” an admonition loudly cheered by those in attendance.

I needed two slabs of post-movie pie that night to mull over what all this meant to the craft of screenwriting and the kind of audiences writers would soon be asked to engage.

Around the same time as my movie incident, people in other industries began complaining about the lack of high school and even university graduates who had basic skills in reading, simple math and other supposed core tenets of our education system.

Their criticisms went unaddressed and we now have a growing population that haven’t had the benefit of the perspectives to be gained from encountering Huckleberry Finn, Holden Caulfield or even Harry Potter.

A few weeks ago, a High School Board in Brampton, Ontario voted to remove “To Kill A Mockingbird” from their school libraries because it contains the “N” word --- a word their students hear more often in one hour of listening to Hip Hop than they’ll find in that book, while at the same time missing out on one of the most powerful anti-Racism messages ever written.

It’s this same lack of story understanding that caused people to pull “Huckleberry Finn” off the stands when I was in school. Luckily, that happened after I’d already read the book, which left an 11 year old white kid from Saskatchewan, one who’d never even seen a Black man, with the impression that Huck’s friend Jim was about the best friend anybody could ever have.

Not being able to encounter the “N” word and then be masterfully shown the way past it by Mark Twain and Harper Lee would have made me a different person than I am today. A lesser person.

And that same lack of understanding of the true power of storytelling and the “lack of stories” itself has a lot to do with the problems we’re now facing in the TV industry.

Look, don’t get me wrong. I’m not some kind of book snob who thinks you need to appreciate the Classics to succeed in life. But I am a story advocate. And I don’t care if you get your stories from comic books, movies, TV or an XBox. Because that doesn’t matter. What matters is that you have stories in your life.

A crisp Chardonnay is still a crisp Chardonnay whether it’s sipped from a mason jar or fine crystal. Novels (Graphic or otherwise), eBooks from iTunes or Kindle, movies, TV and the Internet are merely the context by which the content reaches you. It’s what’s in that content, those stories, that enriches you.

And when we lose what’s gained by following a fictional character on his journey and applying it to our own lives, we breed the aimless, goal-less, coarsening and porn imitating society anybody being honest with themselves can see burgeoning around us.

And I don’t blame any of the people you see in that lifestyle for any of this. Hell, if I was stuck with an endless string of dead end jobs at minimum wage without having been taught the tools to escape that prison, I’d probably skip the nipple piercing and go right for a Prince Albert.

For an image more accurately related to the above reference, please consult Dr. Google.

I once tried to get the Writers Guild involved in supporting some kind of literacy program. But we’re a small Guild here with not many resources and the general feeling was that if we were going to teach anybody to read, it might be in our best interests to start with those who make programming decisions at the networks.

And I tend to agree with that assessment.

We’ve just come through a decade dominated by “Reality” programming, most of which is actually manufactured reality, an imitation of dramatic elements that are most often not created or programmed by people with any real dramatic skill.  And yes, some of these shows do make a lot of money for broadcasters. But those profits can be deceiving.

This summer “Big Brother 11” and “So You Think You Can Dance Canada” were about the only shows our private networks offered which earned them any kind of audience worth paying their PR flacks to brag about.

Yet, even these successes have not managed to make much difference to their collapsing business model.

Anybody with any kind of profile in the entertainment business will not only tell you how much their continuing failure has affected our own bottom lines and ability to find work. But each and every one us also has a wealth of personal encounters we can relate with gym rats, bartenders and reno contractors who all firmly believe they could be the next reality star, hit show host or Bachelor/Bachelorette winner.

It’s all part of an “I know my life would look all right if I could see it on the silver screen” syndrome that’s as false as the lengthy careers experienced by “Canadian Idol” winners. There isn’t one person at any broadcaster who honestly believes their next/latest “SYTYCD” champion or “Triple Threat” winner will even be in the business a short distance down the road.

And that cynical, devoid of talent manipulation of a mass audience that already doesn’t have a lot going for it is killing television.

I don’t think I go out on too flimsy a limb in predicting that 2009 will be the last or at best next to last, season of television resembling anything the industry and its audience have previously known.

The 2009 – 2010 TV season will have fewer hours of drama than ever before. NBC has entirely wiped the once highly valued 10 o’clock show from its schedule. In Canada, even the CBC has stopped pretending it’s the bastion of Canadian drama as it endlessly promotes a pointless exercise involving retired hockey goons and past their prime ice dancers.

What will anyone learn from “Battle of the Blades”? That some semi-famous people have a sense of humor about themselves? So….?

Nobody in Canada wants to produce Drama anymore because making it is “hard” and “time-consuming” and “expensive”. But the truth is that our networks can’t afford not to endure that (painful for everybody) “Development Hell” process. Because more and more people are going elsewhere to find the stories their lives and their very souls need and they’re not coming back.

In the ten years since our networks began depending on non-dramatic programming, their audience has declined by 35%. Last season they experienced an overall loss of 10% from the numbers they had enjoyed only one year earlier. The drop in the coveted 18-49 demographic was 17%. 

You don’t need to be a business genius or even only smart enough to work at CanWest to know that continuing to follow a cheap programming business model is hastening the day when you have to turn out the lights for good.

It wouldn’t take someone with a much higher IQ to realize that the people who have been in charge of program development at almost all of our networks have a track record that would have seen them taken out behind the barn and shot if they had four legs instead of two.

And it’s not that these people have never had the time or the money to bring their chosen projects to fruition. In Canada, development lasts an average of SIX TIMES longer than it does South of the border. Meanwhile, channels that will NEVER broadcast the finished product chip in on somebody else’s development slate in order to meet their own mandated “development spend”.

What’s standing in the way of more successful dramas coming out of this country? To my mind it’s simply that the people in charge of development are not themselves story tellers. They don’t instinctively know what works, what inspires and which tweaks will evoke which emotions.

They understand how much the audience enjoys “The Sopranos” or “Mad Men” or “Arrested Devewlopment” because anybody even halfway human can experience and appreciate a finished product from any culture. Creating shows that original themselves, however, is simply far above their pay grade.

Babble about marketing trends and audience taste and the zeitgeist all you want. When a script works, it works. When it doesn’t, it doesn’t. And the majority of Canadian development executives can’t spot the difference at the outline stage.

So how do we solve this? How do we find people who know how to make good television in this country?

Once again, the answer is simple. We already have a bunch of them.

Just quickly perusing the membership of the Writers Guild of Canada, I can find a couple dozen writers with a hundred or more individual script credits to their names. These people know story. They know the craft backwards because they’ve had to create or fix the scripts that gave them all those credits.

These people are almost all approaching the age at which, if they wrote novels, they’d be considered for Nobel and Giller prizes, their next stories eagerly anticipated for the life experience and craft skills they have acquired along the way.

But in the film and television business they are considered mostly unemployable at 40 and not even worth talking to at 50. At a stage in their lives when they’ve pretty much heard all the excuses, seen all the games, savored every flavor of bullshit and know why what worked on “Desperate Housewives” won’t work on “Wild Roses” they are usually just turned out to pasture.

But like good Scotch, most writers actually improve with age. There isn’t one who looks back on a script he or she wrote at 20 and doesn’t long for the chance to turn it into what it could have been.

These people are story tellers. They have dedicated their lives to learning the ways you connect with an audience. And most of them already mentor the writers with less experience who populate the current network wish lists.

Having people who understand story from the inside actually on the inside means the entire development process suddenly becomes streamlined, faster, and cheaper with less emotional angst for all involved. Combine these people with showrunners who write and you suddenly have a network/studio team capable of bringing stories to our screens that will attract and inspire an audience.

Continue in the “cheap programming” direction we’re heading, continue to rely on people who can critique but not create and we not only lose an industry, we create more aimless, lost people who measure their achievements in piercings and body ink and one night become so hopeless and lost they carve somebody up for an iPod or take that one drink or hit too many.

Since the dawn of time, Story tellers have been our healers. If we’re going to save Canadian television, it’s time we let the ones we have do their job.

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