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INDEPENDENT TV PRODUCERS
‘(MOVING AHEAD
by Bruce Malloch
When the 100 percent Capital Cost Allowance was introduced as an incentive toward establishing a viable Canadian production industry, everyone assumed its greatest beneficiary would be the feature film industry; almost as an afterthought, the write-off was applied
to television and non-theatrical produc-’
tion. Yet the feature film industry on a whole has not lived up to expectations, struggling with a one-step-forward-twosteps-backward approach to creating both an indigenous, recognizably Canadian product and to returning money to its investors, while the independent production community has used the CCA to produce some exciting, quality films that are selling abroad. One of 1981’s most successful productions was not a feature film, but a half-hour children’s drama produced by Atlantis Films’ youthful triumvirate of Michael MacMillan, Seaton McLean, and Janice Platt, The Olden Days Coat, which won the Bijou Award as best Canadian independent production and sold to virtually every available market.
Perhaps it’s time some people in the industry stopped considering films produced for television as somehow secondclass citizens to films produced for theatrical release. While industry sour ces estimate that one in25 features has returned money to its investors in the past two years, nearly all the independently produced television and nontheatrical films have generated returns.
While features disguising Canada as California, New York, or Boston have failed at the box office, a Canadian
produced children’s series, The Kids of
Degrassi Street, which makes no excuse its kids are from Toronto, received a distribution guarantee from an American non-theatrical distributor simply because it was good. In terms of steady, ongoing production, the companies outside the «mainstream of feature film — the makers of television films, documentaries, shorts, children’s, educational, and industrial films — are this country’s film industry. Janice Platt speaks for many small independents when she
says, ‘Feature film is not the pot of gold
at the end of the rainbow, the be-all and end-all of filmmaking.”
Broadcast structures around the world are generally not made to accommodate independents, and most Canadian independents quickly learn their own country is no different. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, which buys less than 5 percent of its programming from independents, is virtually the only domestic television market at the moment (Canadian pay-TV will be licensed later this year). Non-theatrical producers must compete with government-funded film groups like the National Film Board and the Ontario Educational Communications Authority, whose total budgets exceed any amount an independent can reasonably hope to
Bruce Malloch is the Toronto staff reporter for Cinema Canada.
dea ener ee
Cinema Canada March 1982/19