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Ticket to Heaven, even turned away about 60 silver passholders who had paid $500 for their Festival admissions.
The pass sales for the Festivals all reached new highs, with 180 gold patrons (at $1000+), 150 silver patrons ($500), and an estimated 900 Straight passholders ($85-100). -.
Clarkson said at a mid-Festival press conference that he was seriously considering either eliminating the passes for the 1982 Festival or restricting their numbers and raising the price. Nothing succeeds like excess.
The trade forum
There was really only one issue at the Trade Forum this year pay-TV. At a day-long seminar chaired by feature producers Peter Simpson and Bill Mar shall, a large number of the regional, specialized and national applicants presented their cases and ripped at each other. :
The regional applicants were a fairly unified group, for they had little conflict of interest and a common enemy -— the national applicants. Wendell Wilks, representing one of the Alberta applicants, tore into the cable industry,
saying that “people think that pay-TV is something new. We have had pay-TV for years, only we call it cable. I don’t see any reason that the cable industry, which has contributed nothing to the production industry over the years, should get even richer from this new industry,”
All the regional applicants disliked the idea of a national monopoly, but sidestepped questions on the possibility {or necessity) of a purchasing consortium to deal with national and foreign purchases of materials.
The national applicants attacked: each other with much greater relish. Jack McAndrew of Performance referred to Canadian Premiere as the “cable company application” (the cable companies hold a 27% equity interest in Premiere). Moses Znaimer of Premiere accused TeleCanada, the universal subsciption system, of “being. wrong, because it assumes that Canadians will not buy Canadian programming unless it is forced upon them.”
Chairmen Simpson and Marshall had perhaps the best perspective on what the cable hearings were about. They
had the national applicants speak in order of financial promises to the Canadian: production sector.
Marshall also voiced a sentiment that must have been on the minds of many. ‘I have dealt with many of these people as a producer, and despite their promises, I have about as much faith in their commitment to Canadian production as I do in Attila the Hun’s commitment to day-care centres,”
The Bar Association’s two days of seminars were highly technical and, on occasion, impenetrable even to the
lawyers in the audience. When Beverly
Nix, a lawyer from Warner Brothers in L.A., spoke on contracts and residuals, you could see eyes glazing all over the room.
The Bar Association also threw a luncheon at which the sandwiches were served with the crusts cut off. This reporter felt about seven years old.
The most interesting panel outside the pay-TV seminars was that of accountant Richard M. Wise, who talked at length and with passion on how to read a prospectus from the point of view of an informed investor. It was a breath of fresh air to hear him lace into the
high-budget pictures loaded with “soft costs” — financing, guarantee kickbacks, allowances, overhead fees — that have become so high in this era of 25% interest rates that one can often see a $5 million-budget film that has only $2.8 million on the screen.
Yet aside from Wise and the dress rehearsal for the CRTC hearings, one has to wonder about the value of the Trade Forum. Surely there are few businesses as concentrated and inbred as the film industry. (In a way, it reminded me of nothing so much as Rick Salutin’s famous observation that in the afterlife, as the souls make their way toward heaven they encounter a fork in the road, with one path labelled “Heaven” and the other, “Panel discussion on Heaven.” You can tell the Canadians because they always choose the discussion over the real thing.)
The parties
It is an axiom of film industry parties that they are too crowded, and that no matter how early you get there the food is already cold. If the Chariots of Fire party at Gracie’s proved it beyond a shadow of a doubt (Overheard in the street : “God, they should give this party an award for worst food.” “Yeah, but you end up eating it anyway because it soaks up the booze !”), the Cutter’s Way party at the Blue Angel was a partial disproof. If there were fewer big names this year, there were more interesting character actors around — Robert Carradine, R.H. Thompson, Saul Rubinek, Jennifer Dale, SCTV’s Catherine O'Hara, Buck Henry, John Heard and Winston Reckert, to name but a handful.
The films
If there was a theme this year running through the films in almost every series, it was desperation. It was like having a ringside seat at the decline and fall of Western Civilization. David Overbey’s Critic’s Choice series was loaded with these pictures, particularly the German films like Asphalt Night, Angels of Iron, and Desperado City. It even seemed to infect the comedy series programmed by Ted Riley and Stephen Cole. The yukfest included such comic moments as The Apartment (with the most stunning scene of sexual humiliation in the American cinema), Mickey One (the first truly paranoid movie), Lolita (murder
and more sexual humiliation), Shoot the Piano Player (death and romantic loss), and Macunaima (cannibalism).
It is interesting that the audiences at the Festival, in their voting for the Labatt’s Most Popular Film award, largely ignored the despair for the nostalgic stuff of Chariots of Fire, the eccentricity of Diva, and the comedy of Heartaches. Strong showings were made by the jazz documentary Imagine The Sound, and the films Cutter’s Way and Prison for Women (which was so popular that Pan-Canadian opened it at the Interna
‘ional Cinema while the Festival was
still in progress).
The Canadian films at the Festival this year were extremely encouraging, with all three of the galas (Ticket to Heaven, Heartaches and Threshold) attracting full, attentive houses and at least respectful reviews. Heartaches, despite an antipathetic review in the Globe & Mail (which sent a food writer), was especially welcome, as it hailed the return of Don Shebib-at-his-best to the ranks of Canadian filmmakers.
In the other events, Canadian films were well received, with Harry Rasky’s Being Different drawing sellout crowds, a distribution pickup for Prison for Women, and some fine reviews for Gilles Blais’ Hare Krishna documentary, Les Adeptes. Virtually the only Canadian film to draw universally negative review was Bonnie Klein’s Not a Love Story: A Film About Pornograplty;~. which was cleared for a single Festival screening by the Ontario Censor Board.
This was also the first year in which nota single film was cut by the Board. As a special screening facility, the Festival underwent classification by documentation, and the Board only requested to see 11 pictures — some of them controversial, like Not a Love Story, the Brazilian film Pixote, and Makaveyev’s WR: The Mysteries of the Organism (screened uncut for the first time in Ontario), and some which were set for commercial release following the Festival.
It would seem that the Board has finally recognized that the “community standards” which govern their rulings are not necessarily those of Agincourt or. Tilsonburg. ;
By and large, the films this year seemed better. There were no galas as embarrassingly awful as last year’s Loulou and Deathwatch (although Neige came Close), and if there was no Les bons débarras tucked away in a sidebar series, there were such discoveris as Raoul Walsh’ 3-D Gun Fury ina crystal-clear new print from the Columbia Archives, and the British Film Institute print of Fritz Lang’s German-Indian productions, The Tiger of Eschnapur and The Hindu Tomb in the Buried Treasures series.
The future To compound the serious moviegoers’ problems for the 1982 Festival, Clarkson has promised the most comprehensive series of Canadian films ever — over two hundred pictures to be screened in five theatres across Toronto. “Quick, Gladys, the Murine.” The series will be, according to Clarkson, definitive, and will produce eight to 10 major publications. There are also rumours from informed sources that 1982 will be Clarkson's last year at the helm of the Festival of Festivals. The question is not what will happen to the Festival, but where will Clarkson go after running the largest publicly-attended film festival in the world? @
November 1981-Cinema Canada/2?