Cinema Canada (Apr-May 1974)

CANADIAN FILITINEWS CFDC going ahead with low-budget programme Several new projects were announced by the Corporation following the March 8th meeting. Me?, a play written by Martin Kinch, has been turned into a screenplay by Kinch and Barry Pearson. The film version is to be directed by John Palmer, who also did the stage play at Factory Theatre Lab in Toronto. The production company involved is Muddy York Motion Pictures Ltd., set up two years ago by Chris Dalton, Peter O’Brian and Steven Stone. Preproduction should begin in April, and principal photography is slated to commence sometime in May. No cast or crew credits are as yet available. The CFDC puts up 60 per cent of the production cost for these low-budgeters, with total expenses not to exceed $115,000. Ted Rouse, the Corporation’s Toronto representative, emphasized that this programme is continuing, despite some rumours to the contrary. Peter Bryant’s The Supreme Kid is still going ahead on the west coast, although Leonard Yakir’s The Mourners has hit some snags in Winnipeg, and it looks like that film won’t be made for quite a while. Two other projects approved recently in this programme are David Cronenberg’s Orgy of the Blood Parasites and Brian Damude’s The Fury Plot. Cronenberg’s is to be produced out of Montreal by DAL Productions, with Ivan Reitman as producer. Cinépix will distribute this “straightforward horror film,’ as the director describes it. It took a bit of convincing on Cronenberg’s part to get the CFDC to invest in Orgy of the Blood Parasites. He even flew down to Los Angeles to study the Roger Corman organisation first hand and found that Corman is turning out genre movies like Orgy almost on a weekly basis, for a lot less than $115,000 (more like $50,000) ... and they’re making money with them. In fact, genre films have been and still are the mainstay of Hollywood’s production community. Cronenberg thinks that we should definitely get into this kind of filmmaking in Canada on a large scale, to enable our young directors to practice their art and learn the tricks of their craft. (We have: Pleasure Palace, Diary of a Sinner, Dream on the Run, Cannibal Girls, Proud Rider, Race Home to Die, and now Feast of the Cannibal 6 Cinema Canada Ghouls, have all been produced in English Canada. — ed.) Cronenberg himself hasn’t shot a feature since Crimes of the Future (1970), a weird, rambling, narrative film, peppered with esoteric voice-over talk, about a bunch of freaky futuristic folk oozing black blood in a locale of York University-type architecture. He feels that Canadian directors just don’t have enough films with which to hone their directorial senses. It is well and good now for some of our best feature directors to be doing a few Collaborators episodes for CBC, but it is not enough, says Cronenberg. The Fury Plot is being produced by Ben Casa, who teaches at Ryerson Polytechnical Institute. Neither Casa, nor director Brian Damude, who has worked on films for the CBC, have done a feature before; nor has Ryersonian Jim Kelly, who is slated as cameraperson. The plot of the film concerns an automobile accident, which turns out to be the murder of an unfaithful wife by her husband. Before long a seemingly innocent passerby is involved, and other crimes are perpetrated. Casa is confident about having raised the ‘other 40 per cent’ in private funds, and the production is planned for June in Ontario. In Québec, two low-budget features were given the green light: Jos Carbonne, to be directed by Hughes Tremblay and produced by Les Productions Prisma, and Alain Chartrand’s La Piastre, to be produced by |’Association coopérative des productions audiovisuelles (ACPAV). More about the latter in Pierre Latour’s Québec produc tion news in this very issue. The former will be covered as soon as details are available. Ted Rouse went on to defend the continuation of the low-budget programme by saying, “frankly, they’re the most active of our filmmaking ventures right now. As you can tell, we’re announcing more and more of them all the time. We have no reason to stop this programme. John Wright’s The Visitor, which wasn’t specifically part of this programme but was produced as a lowbudget film, has opened in Vancouver to very good reviews and ran for two or three weeks. Followed immediately by Wolf Pen Principle, which is going to tun for at least two weeks. Montreal Main is going to open in the Vancouver City Lights, a 16mm house out there. The Hard Part Beings has a 35mm, major distribution arrangement with Cinépix. Killing Time (Saviours Are Hard to Find) looks very good, it’s going to be a very interesting movie and we know we’re going to get significant distribution on that. There were some disappointments (Moss Tarts and Peep), but if you consider that most of these films are first efforts by young directors, it’s not a bad ratio to have so many of them reach the public. Why should we want to stop the programme?” We agree that the CFDC’s low-budget productions are very important and hope that rumours of their discontinuation were unfounded. What about major features? Rouse could name only two definite over half-a-million productions: Black Christmas, a thriller presently being directed in Toronto by American Canadian Hollis McLaren makes her impressive feature debut in Quadrant’s Sunday in the Country, directed by John Trent ‘ Pi i a