Cinema Canada (Jun-Jul 1973)

officer and a juvenile delinquent, calculated to be shot in 3 weeks for about $30,000. And he shot Nobody Waved Goodbye. In five weeks (spread out over a year). For $75,000. | proposed it as a kind of half-hour story film, and on the Original budget it’s a half-hour story film called First Offense. | started shooting and in the first three days we shot almost half our budget of film and | was already into deep trouble because we were doing something that hadn’t been done before, certainly at the Film Board anyway. John Spotton, who was also Owen’s cameraman on Runner, just kept shooting... . . and | kept on ordering more film. It so happened that all the people were away so that in fact there was nobody at the NFB to say don’t send any more film. They kept on sending film and | kept on shooting and the story kept on getting more elaborate and more elaborate, and | added scenes — the great thing about improvising is you're really writing the script while you're shooting — so the thing grew. And when | came back to Montreal four weeks later, | was then something like $10,000 over budget, and | shot 50,000 feet of film instead of 25,000 feet, and | said: | shot a feature. The NFB didn’t fire Owen, and with co-producer Kroiter’s backing, Daly's defense, and encouragement from all of Unit B, they let him finish the film. However, the NFB never did quite know how to handle the 80 minute bastard he gave them, so they slipped their surprise feature almost unheralded into Toronto and Montreal in December 1964. And it died. | was really broken by this. | mean it really shook me. It shook my confidence, terribly. Nobody Waved Goodbye had been shown at the Montreal Film Festival in the summer of 1964, but Gilles Groulx’ Le Chat Dans le Sac won, and the Canadian Film Awards judges refused to name an overall 1964 Film of the Year claiming there was just nothing good enough. However, the film won the CIDALC award in Mannheim, Germany, and the Flaherty Award, the British Academy award for best feature length documentary in London, and in September 1964 Judith Crist considered it the highlight of the New York Film Festival. There was nothing more deadly in 1964 than the word local. And this was a local show. Bob Fulford commented in the Star: “It seems too bad that the National Film Board is bringing its latest feature into town in such an apologetic way... It was made here with a local cast and a local director; it’s subject is middle-class Toronto suburban society and an adolescent's revolt against that society ... But the Film Board is bringing it here in something like secrecy. No publicity campaign that you can notice...” Times have changed, and you have to remember 1964 to recall how disheartening the words Toronto and Canadian were also when Frank Morriss said in the G/obe: “‘It is a sad, dreary, Owen directing Julie Biggs and Peter Kastner in Nobody Waved Goodbye. 32 Cinema Canada ineffectual but sometimes moving little film the New Yorker theatre is showing for Christmas. Nobody Waved Goodbye, a NFB feature movie made in Toronto with a cast of Canadian actors, illustrates the plight of teen-agers...” In the States however, the problems the film dealt with were more common, or at least more acknowledged, and as big broad and superficial films were common-place, so this lean, honest and original work was a refreshing change. In April 1965 Dan Rugoff distributed it through Cinema V, spending $70,000 (almost its original cost) on promotion, and deliberately keeping its low-budget Canadian art-film origins quiet. And the New York Critics loved it. It was hailed as “an exceptionally fine movie” by the New Yorker’s Brendan Gill, “commensurate in the purity of its intentions, and even in the artistry of its execution, with ‘The Catcher in the Rye’. ’ (And oddly enough now shares the fate of Salinger’s book by also being offered in high school courses.) The New York Post found it a film that views ““a contemporary reality with shocking cinematic clarity’ and is “alternatively fine and uncomfortably simple.” Crowther of The Times found it “admirably put forth.” The Daily News liked the ‘‘spontaneous effect’’ of the improvised dialogues. Time’s reviewer found the poetry in the film: it “conquers its simple ideas and tangled verbiage with cool cinematic assurance, turning a problem play into a poem.” And in the Hera/d Tribune Judith Crist declared “it is a film you should not miss... it is a ‘small’ movie — and a universal one...” and put it on her Ten Best List for the year. And so it came back home, and did well, grossing $5,000 a week at the Nortown in Toronto compared to the meagre $3,500 in two weeks it made on its first appearance at the New Yorker. Nobody Waved Goodbye was very important to me personally, because it was the first film that | made that really took off, and was very successful. In terms of style, Owen worked hard on this film to develop the extraordinary marriage of spontaneity and control he desired. | was trying to search for the kind of flexibility that you have in candid films, with the formal aspect that Runner had... a very controlled kind of improvisation. To do this he used his own story outline, wrote an analysis of the motivations of each character in each scene, and took the actors aside individually explaining only their own motivation to them. . . and telling them two totally different stories of what was going to happen, so they often didn’t know when they came together and started to talk that they had two different kinds of information. Peter's surprised laugh when Julie tells him she’s pregnant was Alexis Kanner in the Ernie Game.