Cinema Canada (Jun 1978)

It’s a small town crowd — maybe fifty people in the house and the promoter has already worked out his percentage of the take. He chews his lip nervously and worries because the bouts have been slow tonight. This crowd has seen too many midgets; they’re even bored with the black man who the promoter calls the Banker (“everyone hates bankers”). Now it’s time for the main attraction and the audience still hasn’t got off their seats screarning for blood. Tonight, although the promoter doesn’t suspect it, theyll get what they came for. The main bout features Dandy Dan O’Neill, the fighting Irish gentleman in a grudge match against Jungle Boy who has stolen away Dandy Dan’s mate. That’s how the promoters wrote the story. But this time it’s for real. In the ring, Dandy Dan struts about shaking his curly golden locks and posturing haughtily. But when the bell sounds, his eyes grow cold, he flings away the wig along with the posturing: Dandy Dan is out for blood. That sets the stage for a key scene in Blood and Guts, a film about basic needs, basic struggles, basic sorrows: the hard times that come from living on the road. The film is an intimate character study of wrestlers in the small town circuit who never connect with the main chance, who never get booked into the big cities. It’s also a story about personal dignity, and the underdog who thumbs his nose at the corrupt and the powerful. Paul Lynch, the 32-year-old director of Blood and Guts doesn’t, however, treat these small town wrestlers as losers in the time honored tradition of Canadian films. Instead he respects the cultural milieu out of which the wrestlers work and tries to convey their hard times without implying they are destroyed by it. Lynch understands the kind of people he is projecting on the screen. He knows the small towns of Ontario intimately, having started his career in Canada as a newspaper photographer in places like Oakville, Georgetown and Brantford, Ontario. Though Lynch eventually left the small towns for the more lucrative call of Toronto and Hollywood, he has never forgotten the ordinary people that live in those Southern Ontario communities. In a sense, Blood and Guts is linked thematically and atmospherically with Lynch’s first feature film, The Hard Part Begins. In that film, an ageing country and western singer, who is tired of the smoky small town bars where he plays, is forced to contend with an up-and-coming singer who threatens to steal the limelight from him. In Blood and Guts, Dandy Dan (played by an American actor William Smith) is a wrestler past his prime who watches as the new kid (Brian Patrick Clarke) is transformed into the star attraction. Paul Lynch emigrated from England in 1960 and, after his stint with small town papers, came to Toronto to find fame and fortune as a cartoonist for the Toronto Star and as art director for two ad agencies and three publications. In addition to a burgeoning career as a graphic designer, he also worked as a photographer for Macleans Magazine. His first television film grew out of one of his photo stories. “While at Toronto Life,” he explains, “the staff photographer David Street and I decided we wanted to make a film out of a photo story I had done on teenage marriages. The CBC agreed to buy the story if they liked it so David and I got Gunter Ott is the editor of Photo Life Magazine, Canada’s photography monthly. 22/Cinema Canada some money together, found two likely kids and shot what we thought would be the ‘ultimate documentary’ over a period of three months working mostly evenings and weekends. We accumulated a lot of footage and luckily I met a former film editor for CTV named Bill Gray who offered to edit down the original 1 1/2 hours to 16 minutes. We eventually sold the film to Thirty Minutes, a CBC show, and that’s how I started making films.” “At that time (1968), it was a terrific time to make films in Canada,” Lynch remembers. “There were all sorts of shows that purchased materials. I quit my job at Toronto Life, went freelance as a graphic designer and made films. Up until I made The Hard Part Begins in 1973, I guess I filmed about 22 television films for the Corporation, just freelancing for Telescope, Gallery, Man Alive and To See Ourselves.” In those heady days when there was great enthusiasm for developing real Canadian movies, Lynch and Bill Gray, who writes as well as edits film, started talking about a feature film. Lynch had always been fascinated by B-movies and wanted to work on a motorcycle film. “We put a script together and sold it with one condition imposed on us that the guy who bought it would direct. “] agreed, figuring it was simpler to do one, sell it outright, make a little money and do another one. Then I got interest _ed in country music and met John Hunter who had been a freelance writer for the CBC. He offered me an idea of his about an ageing country singer. That was in April of 1972. John wrote the story during the summer. The CFDC’s low budget program liked it so we arranged some independent money through a friend and started on the production of The Hard Part Begins in 1973. John wrote the script, I directed and Bill Gray edited,” explains Lynch. The film was released in 1974 by Cinepix and received surprisingly good notices for a low budget ($95,000) first feature. In a review in the trade paper That's Showbusiness, I wrote at the time: ‘“‘The film possesses a rough-hewn honesty (which) explores the workings of human nature in a direct way that cuts through the usual slickness and corn of films about country music.” The film was later sold to the CBC for what was at the time, the highest price ever paid for television rights to a Canadian movie, (reportedly $38,000). It was also sold to the Ontario Educational TV network, the BBC and a number of international markets. Unfortunately, Lynch’s career at the CBC had come to an end with the clean sweep inaugurated by John Hirsch. “When Hirsch came in with all the theatre people, film went out. All the shows I had worked on were brought to a close, so I decided to go back to the drawing board,” Lynch recalls. While freelancing, and editing The Hard Part Beings, Lynch added to his reputation by making a film on Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione. Penthouse liked the work so much that they asked Lynch and producer Hugh Curry to transform the short into a feature-length industrial film about the flamboyant publisher. “I went around the world for two years shooting footage for Penthouse,” he says. “Since there were a lot of tricky opticals involved in the filming, we ended up in Los Angeles where we had four months to edit and finish the film. While there, I began directing shows for American network television series. There too, I met Joe McBride, a Variety reporter who proposed an idea for a story about small town wrestlers.” McBride worked out a first draft of