OR: An Analysis of the Canadian Cultural Dilemma

 
To mark the opening of the 35th Toronto International Film Festival, I am deferring to guest blogger Nick Mancuso.

Nick and I have been friends since we both had to learn Kazak dancing for the original stage production of Carol Bolt's "Red Emma". We worked together several times on stage before he broke into films, won a Best Actor Genie Award in "Ticket To Heaven" and became a Canadian star in Hollywood.

In the intervening decades, we've crossed paths repeatedly, working in films or series I've written or produced, living in each other's homes and shepherding one another in and out of various marriages. I also have the great honor of being Godfather to his son Sasha, named after the character he played in "Red Emma".

Nick has always been a passionate advocate for the rights of Canadian performers and creative artists, often making his case in personal one-on-one meetings with everybody from industry players to Prime Ministers. This is a guy who has never shrugged off the mantle success granted him or forgotten either where he came from or where he was heading.

Like Nick, I have concerns about what the Toronto International Film Festival has become and how it has warped the path and perception of Canadian films in my country. But he makes the case much more eloquently than I ever will.

The following was written pretty much stream of consciousness a couple of years ago as he and his friend Ed observed the Festival from a cafe patio overlooking the scene…

In the I Ching the Chinese Book of Changes, a book that traces its origins into the mists of time, the Oracle talks about the theatre and therefore by extension the cinema in the following manner:

“Music and pantomime (the theatre) exists to create a bridge to the world of the unseen…. He who could wholly comprehend this could rule the world as though it were spinning in his hand.... True fellowship with men must be based upon a concern that is universal.”

A concern that is universal, and ruling the world as though it were spinning in his hands. A strong brew indeed...

In these two ideas, the massing together of people to view and experience the theatre and cinema, there is the recognition that what we call the Culture of a nation at one time was regarded as supremely important human activity. The collection of people within a community to experience something together was not only an opportunity for the community to experience itself but in this enthusiastic gathering of individuals a group understanding was revealed and re-enacted and thus the; “most sacred of human feelings-reverence for the ancestors” and “religious feelings for the Creator" were united.

Reverence for the Ancestors...? Religious feelings? A far cry from chomping popcorn on a Saturday night at the movies. And yet the operating principles, the gist of undercurrent of these ideas remain the same.

The theatre and movies, cinema and performance bring people together under the roof of a common humanity, and by doing so serve an important purpose. They provide purpose and direction.

You don’t know where you are going until you know where you come from and to know something is to have memory. And a society without memory, like a person, is insane.

The movies remind us of who are and who and what we should be. Art, un-interfered with is one of the great goods of a nation. Interfered with it is a disaster.

Aristotle points out that the Theatre, and specifically Tragedy (what we today call Drama or Action-Adventure) is the imitation of an action but it is one in which the imitation elicits in the viewer the purgation of terror (fear) and the creation of pity (compassion for others) and as such Art serves a moral purpose.

There is an ethical undercurrent in operation in all Art and, defining Ethics as Reason, it is always an attempt to restore balance to disharmony. It provides hope for the future. It does not fragment, it unites.

The movies tell us that the universe we live in is all right in the end. And when they’re done right they make us feel better about ourselves and the world we live in.

These ideas vaguely percolate under my Actor's skull as next to me a couple of autograph hounds, backs to me and my pal Ed, eagerly exchange information about which American star was where and who had been sighted. There is a high pitched thrill in their voices, like people undergoing a powerful transformative experience, an excitement that is almost repellent. It irritates me.

“Robert Altman’s in that limo. Look he’s coming out now!

“Look its Pam Drexel and I can see Kim Cattrall!”

A big to-do in the side entrance of the hotel as various American movie stars are hustled through. I can vaguely see protective bodyguards talking into their collars. It’s like an entrance of the President of these here United States.

There is something nauseating about the experience. And I start to feel internally irritated, then angry and finally –- hateful.

“I hate the fucking Toronto International Film Festival!” I blurt out to Ed who is slurping his tall decaf regular. Ed seems surprised, almost as if I had committed a sacrilege of some kind. “It’s not just the sea of backs and traffic jams and crazy pointless flurry of activity. I find it insulting. Personally so! What’s it about?”

“You're just upset cause you weren’t invited.”

“Maybe. But there’s something more that really bothers me." Ed rolls his eyes upwards in a 'here we go again' kind of look. He is used to my rants.

“Why?”

“It’s all this Britney Spears generational thing. This constant blare of activity and screaming over the void. What’s this got to do with Canada? All of it funded by your and my tax dollars. This is the Canadian agenda?” Ed’s eyes glaze over.

“The what? I like Britney Spears. And Paris Hilton…what a babe! Those lips…”

A dreamy far away look overcomes Ed as the ice cream slowly melts on his chin.

“You’ve got chocolate sauce on your face.” I state flatly ,wondering if I will ever get through to this idiot.

“You ever think about what the Festival means, what it originally meant and what it originally represented?"

“Sure.” Ed says, “They show a lot of movies and a lot of movie stars show up and there’s a lot of parties. Good for business.It's made us a world-class city”

I feel a jolt in my stomach.

“What about the Canadian movies? Since the Canadian taxpayer is paying for these cultural events, 15 cents on the dollar. Where are the Canadian movie stars, writers, directors? How come there’s no hoopla for them, unless they’re coming in from Hollywood like a Keanu Reeves or a Jim Carrey? Why is the Canadian taxpayer paying to advertise Hollywood product? Make sense to you?”

“Oh grow up!” Ed licks his cone.

In the early 80’s, Ed had been a gold patron of the festival but quit in disgust as he watched the hustlers and the sleazy operators take over.

“Let me ask you something, Ed. What would Plato have asked 2400 years ago about its nature?"

“Plato would have lined up for popcorn just like every other teenie bopper.” He stares longingly as a couple of Britney Spears type’s stroll by eating gelatos. “Wish I could eat those gelatos “ He mutters.

“The 60’s are long gone, Ed. So are the dreams of a nation that has sold its birthright. We had a Prime Minister taking cash in suitcases in a hotel room, like an episode of "The Sopranos". Canada was sold to the lowest bidder. It's a dead issue!”

The girls rush by excited and squealing. They have spotted a Brad Pitt look-a-like and pandemonium breaks out. I stare flatly into the hot night, getting a headache and wondering what flavor of gelato I would have to eat to wake up.

In his Poetics, Aristotle, (the very first Syd Field) points out very accurately that there were two approaches to the idea of the theatre and by extension the cinema. He understood that the theatre existed to elicit pleasure but that it could also act as instruction for the mature mind. And that it was through this union of the terrible and the pitiable that pleasure was created and information transmitted.

Hence action movies and love stories, in our age.

But the theatre also served the purpose of purgation, cleansing the community of its invisible demons and eliciting the angels.

Catharsis, in which the hidden and unconscious fears of a society are brought to the surface and thereby vanquished. Pity or Compassion was the end product of this process. Humanization. Music that hath the power to sooth the savage breast. "No buziness like show buziness" etc.

“Like nooooo buzinazzzz ahhhh knowwww, everything about it is aaapeealllling....”

It is for this reason the ancient Athenians had a theatre tax for those who did not attend plays. It was a duty, a civic act of responsibility. Perhaps those Greeks knew a thing of two. Canada, in that sense, is very ancient Athenian. It is taxing people for not going to see Canadian film.

“OOONNNN WITH DUHHHH SHOW....”

If the Canadian government was authentically serious about so-called Canadian Culture it might consider such genuine an option. And take that money and feed its own artists.

But it should not be funding Miami CSI (Alliance Atlantis) or the Toronto International Film Festival. Or accepting the Superbowl as Canadian Content because of “Canadian interest”. Fact.

If the Canadian taxpayer is forced on paying his tax dollars into a cultural agenda, amounting to almost 15 percent, the average Canadian deserves to have that money used for Canadian cultural workers. And no restrictions of any kind should be held over those artists as a kind of bureaucratic sword of Damocles. No mandates, no demand for “commercial product.”

Or cut it all off.

In the current situation, Canadian performers receive about 2 cents on the film dollar, with writers receiving about 3. Crews working on film sets in what was at one time a 4 billion dollar industry get 4 times what the Canadian actor gets. In the end about 70 percent supports a bureaucracy and the erstwhile “management teams".

In effect, one man sweeps the floor and 9 men manage his sweeping and receive 10 to 1 what the sweeper gets. How in any way can a system this idiotic pretend that it supports the Arts?

If the Canadian Film industry were a painting on a wall, the size of the frame holding the canvas would be on a 7 to 3 ratio. Some painting.

But then what is to be expected of a nation that forces the Ross Rifle on its soldiers, ensuring their deaths in the trenches of WW1, then dishonors and forgets its heroes?

Canadian governments have never been representatives of the people and by the people. Their orders have always come from the outside. England. France. The USA. So why would Government support the arts, except in name only?

Why should the average Canadian foot the bill so that the children of the ruling class can play dress up for their relatives and friends?

And why should universites, colleges and schools pump out a stream of acting, film and TV graduates with no place to go? Except for Hollywood, which is no longer what it used to be.

Especially since every actor crossing the border is immediately an “illegal alien” if he has “intention to work”, a situation created by Canadian unions when they, under nationalist fervor, separated from their American brothers. SAG and American Equity immediately pushed regulations to prevent Canadian “acting” competition from entering the USA.

The end result,thanks to Mulrooney’s “Free Trade” agreement with Washington, in which no change can be made to the Canadian Cultural mandate without approval from Washington, was the creation of cultural apartheid.

“So you see, Ed, the Canadian artist is a 3rd class citizen and he is the “excuse” for the downloading of his parents and his own tax dollars to which he has little no access, thanks to to his own government."

Ed is distracted by the excitement as yet another 'Star sighting' takes place. 

"The artist in Canada is a scapegoat, a “patsy”used as a method by unscrupulous and ignorant producers and bureaucrats to leverage Canadian tax payer dollars. It does NOT support the artist; in fact, it oppresses him and he foots the bill for the jackboot pushing in his face."

The girls squeal. Flashbulbs flash. Ed's ice cream cone melts.

“The trouble with the movies is..that it is an art form disguised as a business and a business disguised as an art form”

Charlton Heston  - Spoken to me during the shooting of "MotherLode"

All comments to this post will be moderated by Nick Mancuso.

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Will Dixon and I had similar reactions to Episode 7 of this "Mad Men" season, "The Suitcase", wondering if Matthew Weiner was writing not about the 1960's and Advertising but about his own relationship with the show's writing staff.

Certainly the parallels between Sterling Cooper Draper Price and your average television production office are all there. The mix of creativity and commerce, the clash of egos and artistic differences, the collaboration and the very long nights.

The sex and drinking too, but from my experience they're pretty much the norm in any work place.

If we're correct in our assessment and Art ultimately imitates Life, then it seems likely the Season will end with Peggy eclipsing Don, perhaps sharing his next Cleo and departing in the manner Weiner split with his personal assistant turned writer turned Emmy winner Kater Gordon.

I don't know anything about the personal dealings between those two or whether Weiner pulled Gordon into the epicenter of his show out of some level of physical or platonic attraction or simply because he recognized her talent and abilities.

But it got me wondering about the whole nature of Mentorship in our business and what each side of those relationships actually provides the other.

I used to think that young writers sought out the more experienced to get an assessment of their craft from one who's been successful at doing what they want to do. "Read my script. Tell me what isn't working. Show me how to make it better."

And I think most mature writers faced with those requests and knowing they were once in the same position try to respond appropriately. "The inciting incident is weak. Don't fall in love with your dialogue. etc."

But looking back at my own times on both sides of the equation, I realize that each is really after what's mostly unsaid in those story conferences but more often shared in the drinks and anecdotes that usually follow.

Like Don and Peggy in "The Suitcase", we all need reassurance that the work matters and that the sacrifices we've made in our personal lives will ultimately be rewarded. Writers young and old share the same passion for good writing yet are aware that just because something is good doesn't mean it gets made.

I think the young writer I once was had more interest in the inside scoop on how Producers went about screwing you than what was not working in the second act. I knew sticking to craft would fix the script. What I really needed to know was how to make sure the vision survived to execution.

And those characterized as Mentors also know a writer with talent will eventually figure out his script issues and our only contribution comes in shortening the process and lessening the pain by drawing lots of red ink stars and circles on the page he or she most needs to look at.

At some level we know that it's our anecdotes and insights born of experience that are more important. And bleeding off the pitfalls, blindsides and encounters with certifiable buffoons that have checkered our own careers is also helping us maintain the belief that good writing and the best idea ultimately do win in the end.

We know the young writer will likely never encounter the exact brands of imbecility and malice that have occasionally beset us, because imbecility and malice have a way of evolving at studios, networks and government agencies like bacteria mutate to overcome penicillin.

So we try to teach them to be true to themselves, loyal to their material and as honest in both work and Life as they can possibly be. If you do all of that you can at least depart any eventual train wreck intact enough to carry on.

But we also know the most helpful wisdom we can instill is that it's all a fucking crapshoot so don't take it personal and we really don't know why we were successful and others more talented weren't beyond maybe being able to sense one of those predators in the underbrush before he pounced.

Like hoary old cavemen we try to teach the young the moves they never thought the wily Mammoth had in him.

Somebody once asked Tab Hunter how he'd managed to elevate himself above the crowd of pretty boy actors who populated Hollywood in the 1950's and become a major movie star. He attributed his success not to hard work, luck or talent but to the mentorship of an agent who taught him how to dress.

The agent called Tab one day with very specific instructions on what to wear to an upcoming audition, insisting the actor put on a white T-shirt, pressed chinos, penny loafers and two pairs of athletic sox.

After the audition, Tab called the agent and said his reading had gone well enough to get him a call back but wearing those two pairs of socks had pinched his feet and made it hard to walk.

"You idiot!", the agent snapped, "You wear one pair, roll up the other one and stuff it down the front of your pants!"

Tab followed the advice on the call back, got the part and the rest, as they say, is Hollywood history.

No matter how much you might think your talent got you where you get, more often than not it's just what keeps you there once you've arrived.

So, whatever happens between Peggy and Don or wherever she goes from here, I know she's going to be okay. Because she's got a Mentor who's teaching her what she really needs to know.

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Apparently, Rogers Communications, unable to get its corporate rocks off by gutting CITY-TV and erasing one of the only truly unique brands ever created in Canadian broadcasting, has now decided to drive fans away from the country's only remaining Major League baseball team.

If ever one company epitomized a Capitalist scorched earth policy as well as everything that's been allowed to go wrong in Canadian Broadcasting, it's this pitiful specimen. The children of their employees must be so proud.

"Daddy, tell me again how you took the fun out of everything! Remind me that nothing matters in Life except money. Especially when you can make it at the expense of everybody else."

 

When I was about eleven and going to Grant Road Public School in Regina, we were hit by an obsession with playing marbles. Within days, every recess and all the hours after school would find dozens of guys my age carving circles in the dirt, laying out handfuls of spherical glass and playing for "keepsies".

Those of us adept at the skill swaggered around with our winnings slung from our hips in one of those gold tasseled purple felt bags that our fathers' Christmas bottles of Crown Royal came in.

Every Thursday afternoon back then, the curriculum required us to trek to the next nearest school, Vincent Massey, where the girls studied Home Economics and we went to Shop, learning to hotwire cars and sever our fingers with a band saw.

We knew Massey had gone marble crazy too and polished up our best shooters, ready to come home pockets brimming.

That first hour of shop dragged past as we flexed our thumbs and debated whether the prairie topsoil in their playground was any different from the surface we were used to playing on.

When the bell rang for recess, we charged into the school yard, ready to wreak havoc and brought up short by the chaos that greeted us.

Somehow Massey had evolved past mere circles in the dirt and a dependence on keen aim and rebound strategy. The place was like the red light district of the Barbary Coast on a night miners rolled into town with pokes of Gold dust.

Every inch of the yard had been staked out by some pint-sized Carnie barker with a pitch and a plan to acquire every marble available. There were hand-made Skeeball slides, teetering wooden labyrinths and balsa obstacle courses, all designed to swallow Aggies whole and impossible to beat.

Each and every one of these set-ups had two or three guys running it. One attracted the rubes while the other two scooped up their losses by the handful, dumping them in plastic buckets big enough to hold a whole case of Crown Royal.

We watched dumbfounded as kids were fleeced of their precious orbs as fast as they could put them into play. Fortunes changed hands faster than getting into a card game with four guys named Doc.

It was like watching Goldman-Sachs being born.

But two memories of that afternoon remain above all. The first was seeing all those marbles being scooped and dumped with such disdain that they transformed from cherished diamonds to worthless pieces of glass.

And second -- nobody was having any fun.

It was all about greed and acquisition with no thought to the pleasure of competition or the pride of winning fair and square.

That's the thing about Greed. It not only robs the victim of everything he's got; but whatever the winner gains comes at a cost to his own reputation and self-respect that no amount of wealth can re-purchase.

It also quickly devalues whatever he was selling, turning it into something people either decide to find elsewhere or simply do without.

In the end, the Gordon Geckos of the world may lounge on a private beach with access to all the finer things in life. But even they know they're hollow Charlatans mostly surrounded by other Charlatans assuring them "Yeah, that really is the going price for Champagne these days".

Last week, Rogers Communications, the fine folks who invented the "Negative Billing Option", "Unlimited Data Plans" and "Net Traffic Shaping" decided it was time to go for all the marbles in Sports television, using their corporate reach to get a stranglehold on both the competition and their subscriber base.

Never mind that the goal comes at the expense of cheapening their only asset with access to people's hearts and imagination -- the Toronto Blue Jays.

The idea the Rogers brain trust came up with was this…

1. Get a license from the CRTC for a new Sports Channel called "Sportsnet One".

2. Wait until their baseball team is finally attracting viewers by playing like the world champions they once were.

3. Move most of the Jays' games in the final month of the season onto said "Sportsnet One", which is currently unavailable to most of the country.

4. Tell the fans they can only watch those games if they subscribe to or pressure their Cable companies to find a spot on the dial for the new channel.

5. Make Bell, Shaw, Cogeco and other Cable operations look like the bad guys for not making the new service immediately available by paying through the nose for it.

In other words, the Rogers concept was to take what people were already paying for on one Sportsnet channel and charge them more so they could see the same thing on another Sportsnet channel.

It is the equivalent of putting "Lost" or "The Sopranos" on one channel and then creating an entirely new one requiring an additional fee in order to get the final episodes.

But Rogers felt this was the best way of getting competing cable companies over a barrel. Because not only does Sportsnet One have exclusive control over the Blue Jays, they have deals with several Canadian hockey teams for an average of 13 games each in the coming season. Included on that list are Calgary, Edmonton and Vancouver, cities where Rogers doesn't have a cable monopoly or even much of a corporate presence.

Local fans in Vancouver thought they had found a new friend when the company ponied up big bucks to slap their name on the city's hockey arena. Little did they know that money would be coming from them in the end.

Despite the risk of angering not only baseball fans but rabid hometown loving hockey fanatics, Rogers was confident the competition would have to cave and pay whatever Rogers wanted for the new channel. And if the price was too high? Well, it was no skin off Rogers if the competition had to pass those costs on to their customers.

How does a company get the right to conduct this kind of rampant consumer pillage?

With the help of the CRTC, of course.

Despite the number of sports channels already on the Canadian dial, whenever a broadcaster walks into his office, Commission Chair Konrad von Finckenstein whips out a tube of lube and bends over in the hope he can make them happy.

Sorry...

That's a picture I don't even want in my own head.

But how else do you explain the licensing of a channel nobody needs for any other reason than the creation of a new revenue stream for a semi-monopoly that already rakes in billions?

I know there are people out there who hope KvF doesn't get his pandering ass fired anytime soon because "He really is coming around to our way of thinking".

You poor babies!

I hope your awakening isn't as rude as it has been for the thousands of Canadian TV viewers who couldn't care less about Canadian drama but thought buying a sports channel from the guys who owned the team would assure them access to their home town heroes.

And if the CRTC isn't a broadcaster rubber stamp with absolutely no interest in following its consumer protection mandate, wouldn't you think they'd have noticed that all the sports channels we now have don't really broadcast sports and ask what exactly was the purpose of the new one?

There are hours and hours of poker, darts and panel discussions with ex-jocks no more informative than your average guy in a sports bar on the channels we already have.

Last week, Rogers replaced the first shifted Jays game with one between two American teams barely anybody in this country follows and which they would have never broadcast under any other circumstances.

How's that for giving your audience what it wants?

Days later, as the Jays played the Yankees, 3/4 of the country got to watch a British airplane race.

And Sunday night, instead of doing something remotely sports-like such as replaying what had been a pretty exciting Jays afternoon win over New York that nobody got to see, Sportsnet Pacific was running a 30 year old movie.

As a result of all this, ratings for Jays games have dropped 94%.

Do we need much further proof that Canadian broadcasters have no interest in ratings, let alone trying to do the best they can for their sponsors?

Why would any owner treat an asset, its paying advertisers and the fan base this way unless they were completely oblivious or insensitive to the value of anything but their own selfish agenda?

Given the 29 times more Rogers Communications spends on US programming than Canadian product and this move, its safe to say that this is not a company that prides itself on customer service or business ethics. It's all about the arrogance of being a privileged monopoly who doesn't have to care to make money.

Only it appears that the strategy isn't working this time…

Unlike the hot house flowers who whine to Rogers' collaborator (the CRTC) for relief, Jays fans are skipping the monkey and taking the fight right back to the organ grinder.

Already tickets to games are being unceremoniously dumped at the "will call" windows. One group cancelled a booking of 250 seats it has annually purchased for decades.

Others have announced an intention not to renew season tickets and gone to the stadium to give away the seats they own to rob the team of earning additional revenue for their greedy ownership.

It's said that Jays manager Cito Gaston held a closed door meeting with his players to let them know that they need to play the remainder of the season for personal pride since nobody will be watching them.

Cable and cell phone subscriptions are being cancelled. Boycotts are being organized to make the Rogers Dome as empty as possible for Home games to embarrass Rogers at the League level. And a move is under way to target Sportsnet advertisers until they withdraw their contributions to the company's coffers.

Leading this charge are not the beer swilling young bucks Rogers lusts after to attract brewery Ad dollars while buying even more mobility and internet bells and whistles, but Seniors. Those on fixed incomes and with the free time to enjoy watching a ball game on almost every summer evening one is available have been the first to cry foul.

This is a disaster in the making. And it didn't have to happen.

If anybody at Rogers had stepped out of their private corporate box and wandered the stadium during the team's recent lean years, they could have easily seen that Seniors and people in low wage categories were their most loyal supporters. Even though the team sucked, they still cared enough about what baseball brought to their lives that they bought tickets.

That Rogers exec only had to venture to the cheap seats of the outfield, past the shuttered hot dog stands and cob-webbed beer wagons that had ceased bringing in money to find sections filled with folks in their declining years who enjoyed a sport that allowed them conversation during its progress and maybe wanted to take home a score card they'd filled out themselves.

Such an observant Rogers employee might have glanced across the field to the empty hundred dollar seats and realized that their real fans didn't have a lot of extra cash and maybe there needed to be a change in strategy to keep their business instead of chasing some phantom demographic.

But the guys who run Rogers aren't that smart about television.

They don't seem to realize that they've bought into an industry which, like the airlines, only has a small window of opportunity to make a profit on live or one time events. Once the plane leaves, those empty seats are worth nothing and it would have been smarter to take whatever offer came your way.

And once a game has been played, its value has been diminished as well.

That lack of understanding couldn't be any more obvious than by observing the position Rogers now find themselves with Bell, Cogeco and Shaw.

With a consumer backlash in full swing and the current value of the Sportsnet One package diminishing with every game that becomes history, the competition is under less and less pressure from its subscribers to make the kind of deal Rogers wants.

Some say Rogers had to make this move now, hurting Jays fans in order not to enrage hockey fans in Western Canada where Shaw dominates the cable landscape if they did it later. Unfortunately for them, Jim Shaw is a guy who has never heard of lube.

The lesson here for all us Creative types is clear. The CRTC and broadcasters like Rogers will never side with either us or our audience. They're more than willing to allow their own credibility to suffer before doing anything that is good for the country or its culture.

If we are to realize our own dream of a vibrant Canadian production industry, we need to make the public realize who is really preventing it from happening. We need to consider where we buy our phone and internet services as well as how we access television.

Jays fans angered by the Sportsnet One play are already posting dozens of web sites and links to streaming software that will deliver the games they want to see for free.

Maybe we don't need to go that far. But it might be worth calling up our cable companies and letting them know that if they're not going to be there for us, then we have no reason to be there for them.

If enough of us do that, it might make them realize that owning all the marbles isn't really going to be worth much in the end.

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