Canadian Film Digest (Oct 1973)

The Canadian Film Digest October 1973 Don Shebib's new film opens in Toronto Don Shebib’s Between Friends had its official world premiere in Toronto on October 12th at the Imperial theatre. The week before the opening a preview was held with members of the film community as invited guests. Produced by Chalmers Adams through his company Clearwater Films, the film was directed by Shebib and written by Matthew Harz. Director of photography was Richard Leiterman,,. music by Matthew McCauley, editing by Tony Lower and Shebib, and art direction by Claude Bonniere. The film stars Michael Parks, Bonnie Bedelia and Chuck Shamata. Also featured are Henry Beckman and Hugh Webster. The theme song of the film, with music by McCauley and lyrics by Daniel Hill, is being marketed by a partnership of Clearwater and McCauley Music. It was cut at Toronto’s Manta Sound Studios. The flip side is Pacific Dawn, ans instrumental piece composed and arranged by McCauley. Between Friends has been seen before the ~ official premiere, though. Over the past several months it has been invited to countless foreign festivals, where it has received favorable reviews. Upon its Toronto opening, the film also garnered favorable notices from the Toronto critics. Adams says that no arrangements have been made as yet with foreign distribution, but srerze tt seen reer ; Producer-director John Trent (left) chats with the producer of Between Friends, Chalmers Adams. negotiations are now on. Clerarwater will distribute the film itself in Canada. The film was financed by the Canadian Film Development Corporation, Famous Players, and, for the first time, direct financial involvement by.a Canadian bank, in this case the Toronto-Dominion Bank. The movie was shot in nine weeks in California, Sudbury and Toronto. It tells of a last chance attempt by two men to obtain the big payoff. i Actor Chuck Shamata (left) ate cinematographer Richard peeaitial of Between Friends chat with director David Acomba. Richler’s Duddy Kravitz. finally lensing in By DANE LANKEN MONTREAL — Montreal's St. Urbain Street, a fashionable residential area in 1900, was by the 1920s an immigrant Jewish ghetto. It remained that way until the early 1950s, when successive waves of newer immigrants — Greeks, Italians, Portuguese — took over the area and claimed it as their own. But in its Jewish heyday, it was The Street, the poor but proud area, with a kosher meat market on every corner. The society was classically upwardly mobile, and today, not a few members in good standing of Montreal’s economic, artistic and social elite trace their origins back to St. Urbain. High among that elite is Mordecai Richler, the writer who has celebrated life on The Street in a series of books, especially in 1959 with The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz. Richler left the ghetto years ago, to spend 18 years in London and then move back to Montrea] — this lime to relatively ritzy Westmount. But in the past month, he has been spending a lot of time up on St. Urbain Street, and parts of the old block have taken on a distinctly ’50s Jewish look. The reason is, of course, the making of the movie version of Duddy Kravitz. At $700,000, it’s kosher item from top to bottom. Richler himself wrote the screenplay, and takes an active part in the movie-making, right down to location searches. Director is Ted Kotcheff, a Toronto product of early days CBCTV, who's known Richler long enough to have shared a London flat with him in the ’50s while he put the last chapter on ‘Duddy’. Duddy himself is Richard Dreyfuss, the endresult of a six-month search that took producer John Kemeny across Canada, to New York, and finally to Los Angeles where Mr. Right turned out to be Baby Face Nelson in the recent Dillinger and the uptight intellectual in George Lucas’ celebrated American Graffiti. Shooting began in mid-September in the Laurentian resort of Ste. Agathe, about 50 miles north of Montreal. The location was the. Montreal Castle des Monts, a rambling summer hotel favored by Montreal’s Jewish community until Miami Beach came along. It is right down the lake from the boarding house Richler’s mother ran in the 1940s. Things began well, with the CFDC’s Michael Spencer and Secretary of State Hugh Faulkner dropping in to say how pleased they were. Pleased, too, was the way everyone seemed with Dreyfuss’ comic depiction of the scheming, ambitious young Duddy, and with director Kotcheff’s artistry. And with Micheline Lanctot, the Montreal actress who, after leading roles in Gilles Carle’s La vraie nature de Bernadette and the current Les corps celestes, can’t seem to do anything wrong. Back in Montreal, bits of St. Urbain Street have been facelifted back to the 1940s, with the Chois Grocery temporarily becoming Moishe’s Kosher Meat Market and the Valente Restaurant reverting to the Melnick Fish Store. Even the walk-up flat looks right, with ’40s clothes and furniture coming from local thrift shops and Jewish Peoples’ School class pictures borrowed from half a dozen attics. Set designer Anne Pritchard has done a dandy job. There were moments of apprehension just before shooting began that props would be a problem. But a last-minute drive (via local newspapers) turned up more than enough momentos. And extras, Literally, everybody’s mother and great aunt has apart in the movie, which, in the Jewish sector, has brought out the kind of enthusiasm normally reserved for bond drives. Even real estate whiz Gerald Schneider, who usually keeps a good distance from film projects, chucked in half the budget for ‘Duddy’. The fact that he’s another product of The Street — one school grade behind Richler — evidently helped him make up his mind. In fact, there were rumors on the set that this one and same Schneider is the real-life model for Duddy. But Richler is non-committal. “There are 300 people in Montreal,” he says, ‘who think they’re Duddy Kravitz.” Page Nine 16mm fest in Montreal The Third Montreal International Festival of Cinema in 16mm, will be held in the auditorium of the Quebec National Library, 1700 St. Denis Street, from October 23 to 28. Main program “mes will be screened at 7:30 and 9:30 p.m. daily. Special informative sessions are scheduled on Saturday, October 27 and Sunday, October 28, at 2:00 and 4:00 p.m. Meetings, conferences and open sessions will be held on October 24, 25 and 26 at 4:00 p.m. As a non-competitive, cultural -and_ informative annual event, the Festival is dedicated to the discovery, exhibition and promotion of outstanding recent productions by young filmmakers from around the world. Films are chosen for their qualities in terms of cultural, social and aesthetic advancement of the medium and the progressive ideas and tendencies displayed through them. Fifteen features and forty short-subject films will be premiered during the Festival week, representing a participation of seventeen: countries. The entire programme has been chosen among three hundred submitted entries, previewed by the Festival’s selection committee. Its programme will include films from Australia, Belgium, Canada, England, France, Greece, Holland, Japan, Spain, Switzerland, Turkey, U.S.A. and Yugoslavia. For the first time this year, the Festival will pay tribute to the emerging socially-oriented cinema of Latin America, dedicating a con siderable part of its programmes to films from Argentina, Bolivia, Chile and Colombia. Under this year’s theme of ‘‘The Cinema of Tomorrow”, the Festival will present impore examples of “‘alternative’’, ‘‘parallel”’ “independent” cinema in the 16mm format, produced during the last two years. This cinema forms a singular means of expression for individual artists and social groups whose ideas and views do not coincide with those generally held by the established film industries. The Festival’s main objective is to serve asa centre of information providing exhibition and the possibility of public and critical acclaim to cinematographic contributions which would, otherwise, have remained largely unseen. In addition to the unique opportunity it provides to audiences in the Montreal area to view and appreciate those films, we also hope that a more extensive, subsequent circulation will be possible through television, educational institutions, film societies and. the noncommercial distribution circuits. The Montreal International Festival of Cinema in 16mm, is organized by the Independent Filmmakers’ Cooperative with the support and collaboration of the Department of the Secretary of State, the Arts Council of the Metropolitan Region of Montreal, the Department of External Affairs, the Ministry of Cultural Affairs of Quebec and the National Film Board of Canada. Astral, Bellevue-Pathe ~ The merger of Astral Communications and Bellevue-Pathe film processing labs is now virtually complete. Approved in principle by the boards of directors of both companies, the Official completion of the deal awaits Astral shareholder ratification. Martin. Bockner, president of Astral, said that Astral shareholders will be asked to ratify the merger on November 12. “‘The mechanics of the merger are still being worked out, too. But we have determined a quarterly closing date of August 25th in order to obtain figures to ’send to shareholders, and this information is now being mailed.” The two companies concerned are, in the Q2Z2—-HAZmoOomIWVG The Winner | -—— for Best Yearbook to merge case of Astral, a major Canadian distributor and sometime investor in films and BellevuePathe, one of the country’s largest labs, with facilities i in Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver. Bellevue also invests in films. No decision has been made as to the various executive positions of the new company. Bockner is now president of Astral, and Harold Greenberg is president of Bellevue-Pathe. The Bronfman family of Montreal are at present large shareholders in both companies with representation on the boards of directors. The new company will be called AstralBellevue-Pathe. oui tions: 1974 YEARBOOK OF THE CANADIAN FILM INDUSTRY PRODUCTION DISTRIBUTION. EXHIBITION | = Canadian Film Award winners, ass0cauons, college programs in tim, and more. r | The reference source for of the Canadian Film induce for 1974... THE 1974 CANADIAN FILM DIGEST YEARBOOK The reference source for production, distribution, exhibition and research in the Canadian film industry. To order yours, just fill out the coupon on page 15 NOW AVAILABLE!