Cinema Canada (Feb 1976)

re FILIMINEWS $250,000 going to individuals and $100,000 to organisations. Bill Boyle spoke next, and explained that the focus this past year had been on developing programs to make the Coop a group activity centre rather than a service. Workshops had been started . and the results were disappointing statistically, although participants felt they were definitely useful. The job placement service was going well, and he wanted to further the National Film School idea. The members voted down this last goal. Working groups to program various aspects of the Co-op were organised, with areas outlined including script library, darkroom, public relations, rushes, workshops and administering the production fund grant of $3000 recently received from the Arts Council. And now to the legislators; The CCFM sent a special Christmas card to all Ontario MPPs. On the outside was written, ‘‘All we want for Christmas is” and on the inside was added ‘“‘a film quota and levy’, along with wishes for a merry Christmas. CFTA Another couple of meetings were held in early winter, and this time it was the Canadian Film and Television Association (CFTA). First with Hugh Faulkner and Aides, where the CFTA requested open tenders on government jobs, the transformation of the CFDC into a bank-type operation, and an extension of the tax write-off provisions to shorts and TV films. Faulkner said there is no unanimous voice in the industry. The CFTA also met newly-installed CBC president A.W. Johnson in December. The CFTA proposal for a special fund for developing co-productions will be studied, and the meeting was summed up as 8 /cinema canada “all in all a good start toward re-establishing relations with the current top echelon of the CBC.” Miscellaneous You may have heard rumours circulating, and, not being one to fan the flames, I hereby divulge arumour as fact, and a rumour as pretty certainly fact. First, the fact. Quinn Labs has been rumoured to be in financial trouble. Well, although Mirrophonic Labs isn’t doing spectacularly, Quinn is perfectly solvent. It was the company, a holding conglomerate, that owned all of Quinn’s shares that was in trouble, so much trouble that its assets, i.e., Quinn, were put up for tender. Holding Company, called Vencap, went bye bye, and Quinn’s shares, as Findlay yelled in a Globe and Mail Business Section ad, were acquired in total by a multinational company. Quinn is now among the hundred subsidiaries of Tozer, Kemsley and Millbourn (Canada) Ltd. (continued on p. 11) THE PRAIRIES AMPIA vs. ACCESS During the past year forces have been gathering under the banners AMPIA (Alberta Motion Pictures Industry Association) and ACCESS (Alberta Education and Communications Corp). Confrontation and conflict there has been; total war seems imminent. The issues of the day are moral and prudential matters, guided in the latter case by equal weightings of enlightened and unenlightened self-interest and in the former case by piously invoked principles of altruism. Of course, the AMPIA front is less unified than the ACCESS front, some of its members forming a shadowy underground dedicated to the sinister and myopic practices of self-destruction. The central contention of AMPIA is that ACCESS, a crown corporation founded on October 17th, 1973 and funded by the government is buying men and materials so that it can compete with the private sector. The evidence for this intention to compete, as we shall see, is the present existence of competition. What better evidence could there be? What is wrong with this— howls of “government intervention’’, sighs of “private enterprise’ not withstanding — is that it is an unnecessary and silly waste of public money, another example of the profligacy of bureaucracy. Unfortunately the replies to this contention made by Mr. Larry Shorter, President of ACCESS, do not even have the merit of being straightforwardly false: they are, alas, a mélange of the muddled, the misleading, the misinformed, the evasive, and the false. Let us start with the most reasonable denial by ACCESS to the charge of trespass. When confronted by AMPIA about its acquisition of flatbed editing equipment early in the year, Mr. Shorter claimed that this was necessary because the private sector was already flooded with work. In the light of the fact ACCESS has also added a new film crew to its personnel and engaged in the production of various films, this argument ought to be extended to cover all the capabilities of the private sector. The justification for the burgeoning equipment and manpower, then, is this: the private sector is unable to supply the necessary facilities to ACCESS because it is already working at full capacity; and so ACCESS has to expand its ‘in-house’ production capabilities. This might be a good argument if its premises were true, but that is not the case. It is simply false that all, or indeed most, of the private production companies in Alberta are carrying a full work load. Consequently the increase in equipment and personnel, the production of training films for Grant McEwan Community College and Southern Alberta Institute of Technology, the production of the series, ““Man and His Environment’’, all of this represents work and equipment that could have been provided by the private sector. Hence the claim that ACCESS is in competition with the private sector and in the business of squandering public funds. And this is no small time operation: we are not dealing with a two-man set up working out of a disused garage. ACCESS employs about 200 people — a healthy number this, after only two years of operation — and has an estimated annual budget in excess of six million dollars. It is impossible at the moment to get an exact breakdown of the financial and interior structure of the ACCESS war machine, but here is an educated guess. Suppose that in the year 1975-1976 ACCESS spent $1,000,000 on the radio station CKUA that it runs. (This estimate is very high, but it takes into account some recent capital expenditure.) Now we know that ACCESS purchases about $2,000,000