Cinema Canada (Sep 1975)

recontracting these people which might have been difficult.’’ So Kemeny’s first action film got underway near Tucson, Arizona in February. With a crew of around 50 and a budget of $1,400,000. he was comfortable. ‘People were very nice and helpful, ready to assist you. Making a film in Hollywood is different; the rates change, the customs are different, so you need people around you who are willing to help.” Starting out with a realistic budget, the costs were cut and the film came in considerably under budget. What more could a producer ask for? “I enjoyed the experience tremendously because I was able to act in the best possible way a producer should: in the financing, the production, the packaging and finally, I’m very active in the release.”’ Financially, Columbia has the overall majority. Although Kemeny influenced the financing, he was not responsable for it. The film itself belongs to International Cinemedia Center. “Columbia didn’t care about it. They have a very profitable distribution deal and a profitable production deal. We thought that it can be an advantage for us to own the film.”’ One highly stimulating aspect of White Line Fever for Kemeny is its saturation distribution in the States and across Canada. By early August, Columbia had authorized 500 prints of the film, a sign of faith and hope if ever there was one. “It’s a bad producer who doesn’t get involved in the release. I have seen every piece of promotional material and many of them were initiated by me. When I finished the production I wrote a seven page memo about all the marketing and promotional ideas. The memo served as a basis for discussion. I discussed the release pattern, worked with the company which was doing the T.V. spots and the radio commercials. We also have a featurette about the film and two kinds of theatrical trailers. I worked on all of this and I think that it should be natural for a producer to do so. It’s not enough to put the film in the can... That was one of my main complaints about Kravitz.”’ After Thoughts Duddy Kravitz. The title of the film still evokes painful memories for many. It was a film of great promise. It is a film which is doing well and which will soon begin its second career when Paramount rereleases it in October. But it is also a film which was tough to finance, tough to produce, and which created controversy when it was first turned down by the Cannes Film Festival, only to be awarded Berlin’s Golden Bear one month later. For Kemeny, it is a film which was not released with all the muscle it deserved. Astral Communications Ltd. was the Canadian distributor. “We finished the film and they grab it and think it’s their baby. The distributor is only an agent of the owners of the film, right? They are working for a fee, a commission... It’s easy to be successful with Kravitz in Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal. And its easy to say ‘That’s $1,800,000, what else do you want?’ Well, how do you know it couldn’t make $2 million. Or even $5 million. One can’t take a complacent attitude. If a film can make $2 million in Quebec, who can say that a film can’t make $3 million in English Canada. I’m not stating that Kravitz could have neces sarily made $3 million but I am definitely stating that there was more than $1.8 million. But when you find deaf ears...” 42/ cinema canada THE FILM White Line Fever A film by Jonathan Kaplan. Screenplay: Ken Friedman and Kaplan. Cinematography: Fred Koenekamp. Musie: David Nichtern. Sound: Tex Rudloff and Darren Knight. Editing: O. Nicholas Brown. Performers: Jan-Michael Vincent, Kay Lenz, Slim Pickens, L.Q. Jones, Don Porter. Producer: John Kemeny. Produced in 1975 by International Cinemedia Center Ltd. Colour: 35mm. Running time: 89 min. Distribution in Canada: Columbia Pictures. White Line Fever comes from the partnership of Columbia Pictures and International Cinemedia Center, the Canadian production company headed by John Kemeny. Shot entirely in Arizona with American actors, the Canadian content stops there. Jan-Michael Vincent plays a young truck driver who, returning home from the Air Force to start up as an independent trucker, quickly becomes embroiled fighting corruption in the trucking industry. The film soon reveals its parentage as Vincent is bashed, beaten and abused by the bad guy stereotypes until violent vigilante justice is longed for by the audience and righteously administered by the hero. Walking Tall was the obvious inspiration for White Line Fever and, with the large size of the hero’s truck, Riding Tall would have been an appropriate title for this spiritual sequel. Jan-Michael Vincent is plausible in a role that calls for little more than clean-cut looks, a square jaw, and determined steely stares. His last film was Buster and Billie and his best was Going Home. Kay Lenz, who plays the truck driver’s wife, was the title character in Breezy. In White Line Fever her role ultimately serves the same function as Buford Pusser’s wife in Walking Tall — as a victim who heightens the motivation for her husband’s climactic action. The film is ably directed by Jonathan Kaplan who works effectively within the action drama genre. Kaplan specializes in making films that play out previously established popular themes — The Slams and Truck Turner as black exploitation movies, Night Call Nurses and The Student Teachers as soft-core porn films. There is an attempt to exploit the _halfhearted populist element in White Line Fever with one of the ad lines calling it a movie about ‘a working man who has had enough’. John David Garfield, looking and sounding like his great father who excelled in playing working class heroes, appears as a minor character. Appropriately he plays a bad guy in a film that justifies the ways of violence to man. An American film, with an American theme, made by a Canadian producer, White Line Fever can only be measured with a Fahrenheit thermometer. Austin Whitten