Canadian Film Weekly (Apr 10, 1968)

PICTURES Panorama www keid x by Stan Helleur (THANKS TO VETERAN CANADIAN FILM-MAKER Jack Chisholm who has been in Ireland producing a mining documentary for a Canadian client, we are in possession of a recent copy of Business and Finance, “Ireland’s only financial weekly,” which carries a cover story titled “Ireland’s £3 Million Film Boom.” Particular appeal of the : story is the significant parallel it unconsciously draws between the feature film situation in Ireland and that which exists in Canada. The £3 million boom the headline proclaims is in reality only indirectly concerned with an Irish industry. In fact, it represents foreign money spent simply for the use of Ardmore, a studio complex where non-Irish productions such as The Lion in Winter (Peter O’Toole and Katharine Hepburn), and Stanley Baker’s Where’s Jack will be com5 pleted. Another part of the bundle is being spent for location shooting in such places as Kilkenny (Lock Up Your Daughters, starring Christopher Plummer), and over in western Loughrea where next month MGM’s Alfred the Great goes into production with David Hemmings as the star. These productions, like John Huston’s Sinful Davey, shot in Ireland last summer, can be compared—except for the disparity in budgets—to Paramount’s My Side of the Mountain shot around Knowlton, Que., last summer, or to the RogallenMirisch Bros. comedy, The Beginners, starting production June 3 around Toronto. Local and national economies benefit from running production expenditures, local studio facilities are used and appreciable numbers of native technicians are employed. But the productions are neither Irish nor Canadian and do relatively little for either country in their private struggles to develop competitive feature industries * ** ** Huston, who has Canadian ties and has opted for Irish citizenship, stimulated serious thought about an Irish industry, producing for the world market, when he recommended last summer that a state-supported industry be based on an initial six-feature subsidized program in which budgets would not exceed £80,000 per film. These, Huston contended, would be easier to sell than a single big budget film. He also warned that the films would not plow anything important back into the Irish economy directly. But if well enough made, he said, they would establish the Irish film-maker abroad and meanwhile do a worthwhile selling job in terms of tourism and product exposure * % % Three months after Huston’s views appeared in print ,and through the Department of Industry and Commerce, the government set up an Irish Film Industry Committee “to examine the problems involved in the establishment of an Irish film industry and to advise on how they best can be solved” * % % In the © opinion of Business and Finance, however, ‘“‘the weakness of the committee in making recommendations lies mainly in its own lack of experience in the production and financial side of the film industry” (to which Jack Chisholm reacts marginally with: “Like Canada!’). It was this lack of experience, the magazine contends, that cost the Irish Film Finance Corporation, set up in 1960, so much when it backed films “which had little chance of distribution outside Ireland” (which could easily happen through the $10,000,000 Canadian Film Development Corporation). Main function of the IFFC, B & F recalled, ‘was not to finance an Irish film industry, as its title suggested, and some people thought, but to provide money for films made in Ardmore,” a studio set-up with production facilities for any company with “distribution and completion guarantees for its films and ability to pay the rent.” In the last two years, Ardmore’s staff has varied from 120—electricians, painters, carpenters, soundmen and others— to 350; from a weekly payroll of £3,000 to £12,000. Ardmore is currently booked until August. One of the plusses in its favor is that it qualifies for British Eady Plan money »* * * Trying to pin down the basic reason why Irish-made films haven’t succeeded financially, Business and Finance zeroes on an inability to get distribution on the British or American circuits. They could not succeed in Britain, the magazine says, “because the distribution outlets there are monopolized by Rank and Pathe. Today the situation is essentially unchanged. Irish feature film-makers cannot get capital because they cannot get distribution guarantees because of the monopoly situation” (which may be true to a great extent but at the same time suggests a misapprehensicn similar to that obtaining among aspiring Canadian film-makers, many of whom seem to feel that simply because a feature film is Canadian it should be played by Canadian theatres, regardless of its quality or box-office potential) * * * Business and Finance does not recommend directly but implies that Ireland might do well to adopt the Swedish film plan. “The Swedes,” the publication explains, “for their industry have a three-part arrangement for features. The government advances one-third of the money, the exhibitors or cinema owners a second third, while private capital risks the final third. Distribution through Sweden alone covers their cost of production. From foreign distribution come the profits.” we x Ww WHILE WE CAN SYMPATHIZE with the frustration of private Canadian film-makers waiting for the Canadian Film Development Corporation to become operational, we also find it hard to understand why the English-speaking producers, particularly, seem willing to sit back and wait, indefinitely. It seems to us the only overt action taken by the Toronto-based Directors Guild of Canada in the last two years has been to hold two open forum panel discussions and present honorary membership scrolls to Alfred Hitchcock and Stanley Kramer. Why haven't they been agitating publicly as a group and lobbying in force with the Department of State in Ottawa? They seem unwilling to exert whatever powers of intimidation they hold, or political influences they might be able to put to work. Obviously there’s a communication gap between the English-speaking creators and their French-speaking counterparts in Montreal. The Quebec cineastes aren’t happy either but in their own volatile, Gallic process of organized, subjective, emotional confusion they’re making out much better. Freelance film-makers, on contract, have been making films for the Quebec government but, more importantly, have been turning out feature films, purely and simply, for the National Film Board without a trace of the hue and cry set up by such English. language NFB-CBC coproductions as The Ernie Game and Waiting for Caroline. A current example was reported last week by Wendy Michener in Toronto’s Globe and Mail. She had been on location in Montreal with 26-year-old freelancer Jean-Pierre Lefebvre who is producing and directing a feature called Jusqu’au Coeur. “The closest I could get to a summary of the picture,’ she wrote, “is that it’s a consideration of the things in society that stop a man from being himself, from getting right to the heart of things. It deals, in particular, with the pressures towards war and depersonalization.” %* % ¥ Okay. But is the theme properly within the mandate of the NFB? Doesn’t the project make a mockery of the Film Development Corporation which will lend only a fraction of small-budget financing, while in Lefebvre’s present case the government is donating probably a minimum of $500,000 of the taxpayers’ money, with no strings and absolutely no distribution guarantee or assurance of financial return? And while on the subject of budgets, will the CFDC permit the liberty extended by the NFB to Lefebvre who had stipulated: “This synopsis is subject to changes before, during and after the shooting.”? Like hell it will. Ww Ke DK CLOSING REMINDER: The motion picture industry will join in celebrating National Library Week April 21-27. Take a book to lunch. Toronto, Montreal See New Cassavetes Film John Cassavetes, who at the time of writing was at least a contender for a best supporting actor Oscar for his killer role in MGM’s The Dirty Dozen, was in Toronto and Montreal recently to show and discuss a 16 mm. black and white film he produced and directed cailed Faces. Why Toronto and Montreal for his previewing? He could have gone to London or Paris, Cassa Page 8 vetes acknowledged, ‘but there’s a kind of chi-chi feeling there, a feeling of judging a film for the film archives.” He chose the Canadian cities because since making Flipside for CBC-TV in 1964 he has been “very amorous” of the Canadian scene. Faces, story of middle-class, middle-aged hangups, has not been acquired for distribution. “This film,’ Cassavetes told reporters, “may not come out for a year, two years. It may come out in six weeks. Meanwhile we need people to see it so that we can see what their reaction is.” Freelance publicist Beatrice Fisher organized the Toronto visit of Cassavetes and an entourage, most of whom had participated in the $200,000 film on an if-come, pay-later basis. A preliminary screening was held for the press and at Twinex-Century and a midnight showing was opened to the public last Sunday in Bernard Fode’s New Yorker, after clearing the special presentation with the Censor Board. CANADIAN FILM-TV BI-WEEKLY AFI Sets Pilot Program For Teachers, Scholars A special pilot program to support the development of teachers and scholars in the field of film and television was announced recently by George Stevens, Jr., Director of the American Film Institute. Fellowships of $1,500 for Masters degree candidates and up to $2,500 for Doctoral candidates will be available to graduate students for tuition, research. April 10, 1968 ‘ich, on Fhe enema cap ety tp sat eo. x ® ie . * 4 ; | nee ca at ine ig Fan Sp nem fo a Bae ye Sal is ee = eke sy re ' 7 > A r * t A @ ts seam ra BAG PY Bian Ha at aS Moise Ihara aa heat Rea iB Telecare iae aaa: peat at eo can clio ieetes iit Aas po ee or ay ech uadanees SRR ea a entrar te eset State eae ta an A Ay Si ale Sh * thes a . } ¥ t ‘ Pits fe 4 ¥ * r v