Take One (Dec 2003 - Mar 2004)

Nat Taylor turned to another production company. for his next attempt. Earlier that year, he had presented the premiere of a feature made by the producer/director team of Norman Klenman and William Davidson, Now that April's Here (1958). Despite its obvious Canadian content, which combined three Morley Callaghan-penned dramatic shorts, the film had received only mixed reviews. But Taylor recognized Klenman’s and Davidson’s talent, and in the fall of 1959 convinced them to try a movie in the same vein as Furie’s and Roffman’s films by committing half of the financing. The result was The Ivy League Killers, which centres on a tense conflict between spoiled rich college student, Andy (Don Francks), and a leather-jacketed motorcycle gang known as the Black Diamonds. Andy’s girlfriend Susan (Barbara Bricker) finds herself intrigued with the Diamonds’s leader, Don (Don Borisenko). When Andy finds out, he is furious, advising her that the biker is “uneducated, and probably very dirty.” But all is not as it seems. Andy spent his school year away from home committing increasingly violent crimes and is convinced of his superiority to the two-bit rebel bikers. To prove it, Andy frames the motorcycle club by robbing a dance hall in a stolen Diamonds jacket. When a bystander is killed in the getaway, the cops begin to round up the gang. But after overhearing Andy bragging about his treachery, Susan gets to Don first to help him clear his name. DECEMBER 2003 — MARCH 2004 Roffman’s The Mask The film was plagued by problems from the beginning. Taylor’s funding fell through and Klenman and Davidson were forced to shop an unfinished version to American distributors for completion funds. Allied Artist competitor American International Pictures was interested but refused to advance them any money. Eventually the picture was finished with the help of private investors at a budget of half of what Furie’s films had cost. But by this time the only buyer was American television and it was five more years before The Ivy League Killers finally lit wp a Canadian theatre screen under a new title, The Fast Ones. Filmed on location in and around Toronto, The Ivy League Killers isn’t nearly as bad as its troubled history might suggest. While the production values are almost nonexistent, Klenman and Davidson managed to make the best of a bad situation and ended up with a gritty little juvenile delinquency film that takes the defence of middle-class rebellion seen in the earlier beatnik films to its logical end. The film is a clear indictment of a quick-to—judge society that automatically construes outsiders as evil, as Andy easily manipulates the town’s assumptions about the bikers to frame Don for his own ends. The film’s failure to garner studio attention meant that a breakthrough picture was yet to be made. After The Bloody Brood, Taylor-Roffman Productions announced several different projects, ranging from a series of films based on the works of Canadian literary figures to Cry of the Unborn, a potentially lurid exposé of “the baby—adoption racket.” However, it was The Bloody Brood’s unexpected difficulties with the censors that really determined its next project. With Yvonne ‘Taylor once again acting as co-producer, Roffman started work on The Mask, a tamer commercial film that would offer audiences “thrills without violence, shock without brutality.”