When Arthur Penn acquired the screenplay rights to the novel Little Big Man from Marlon Brando in the late 1960s, he also acquired the near impossibility of making it into a movie. The book, written by Thomas Berger and published in 1964, presented a big problem for Americans by muddying their glorified saga of Custer’s Last Stand at the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876 with the violence and senseless massacre of innocent Native Americans, many of them women and children.

Told through the eyes of Jack Crabb, the oldest living white survivor of the massacre, who had been raised by the Cheyenne, the story meanders between the two very different cultures and reveals the unchronicled hypocrisy and cruelty of western settlement from a Native American perspective. Crabb conveys admiration for the Cheyenne languages, their spiritual beliefs and their gentle, dying way of life, rooted in the relationship between all living things and depicted as much more honourable than white-centric myths of their own nobility in the classic Western.

A prolific and genre-breaking director, Penn saw his star rise steadily through the 1960s. He was part of a tsunami of young directors such as Francis Ford Coppola, Richard Donner, Robert Altman and Martin Scorsese who ushered in New Hollywood with films made on location and heavily reliant upon realism. These films addressed shifting social values and the unprecedented political upheaval of the times, using the directors’ own opinions as an agent of change.

Penn’s 1967 movie Bonnie and Clyde, the iconic saga of a pair of glamourized criminals and their adventures on the lam during the Depression, changed Hollywood forever. The film condemns the horrific atrocities carried out by Americans during the Vietnam War by introducing graphic and gratuitous violence to movie-making with what The New Yorker called a “frightening power.”

His 1969 movie Alice’s Restaurant highlighted the absurd attempts to persecute and prosecute a group of hippies during their communal Thanksgiving dinner in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Penn received Best Director nominations from the Academy Awards for both movies.

In Little Big Man Penn saw an opportunity to make a movie that revised the typical Western narrative and its glorified white heroes. To examine the history of racism in North America. “American cinema has continually parodied and ridiculed native Indians, depicting them as savage beasts in order to justify the fact that we wiped them out,” Penn said in a 1971 interview. “A mythic and heroic account of the settling of the West might ease some people’s consciences, but I’m having none of it.”

Penn could have made any film he wanted. But every time he found a studio executive willing to greenlight the movie, Little Big Man was sabotaged by unrealistic “false” budgets that would doom the project before production even started. When he finally asked why, he was told: “You can’t treat Indians this way. They gotta be the bad guys.”

Indians weren’t always the bad guys. In the first Westerns, they were most often portrayed as noble savages, primitive people of the Old West wilderness uncorrupted by the trappings of civilization. When legendary filmmaker Thomas Ince, today known as “the father of the Western,” started making motion pictures in 1909, his dramas, comedies, farces and “social problem” movies explored the stories of his times, from cosmopolitan foppery to the merciless march to conquer the wilderness. Ince was obsessed with realism, the radical art of reflecting the world back to movie audiences using natural landscapes to convey settings and characters that embodied the truth of the human condition.

Most of his one- and two-reelers chronicled cagey varmints who bastardize tiny white outposts with their unsavoury ways, lurking along rough-hewn train tracks splayed across the prairies, ready to snatch supplies destined for the hardy pioneers. Occasionally they encounter mystical savages who inhabit the land they’ve come to take, who sometimes help catch the varmints.

A small number of Ince’s films strayed from the noble savage trope to examine the inherent violence of colonization, such as Blazing the Trail (1912), a gory saga of the attacking of a wagon train moving west by “treacherous Indians.” In what has become a standard Western plot device, a young white girl is captured and whisked back to their camp, where she is tortured “by the squaws.”

As Ince flourished, he moved away from directing and began producing, attracting talented young directors (most in their late teens or early twenties and most of them now acclaimed film pioneers) such as Frank Borzage, Reginald Barker, Lynn Reynolds, John Ford and Burton George.

The Western didn’t really become the Western we know today until Ince teamed up with writer/director and all-around authentic man of the West William S. Hart, whose lone-nomad movie persona “flourished on the border, when the six-shooter was the final arbiter of all disputes between man and man,” and who single-handedly and with burlesque-like flair eradicated any hostiles who got in his way.

Their simplistic plots were increasingly coloured with the racism infecting American society, both through government attitudes, agendas and treatment of Native Americans and in the powerful potboiler literature that romanticized and lionized white settlement of the West. In what became the dominant, white-reconstructed narrative of Westerns, noble settlers were brutalized and murdered by hostile and savage Indians as they fought to take and civilize the land for the good and glory of all.

As studios began making their money by churning out formulaic movies en masse, filmmaking was caught in a struggle between artistry and profit. Realism was viewed as too expensive to be feasible, and not necessary.

Ince’s disillusionment with the Western genre became more racist, and he flew against convention by creating Triangle Films with Mack Sennett and D.W. Griffith. He and his stable of young comers made feature-length dramas, Westerns—and an Alberta-specific genre of the Western known as NorWesters (short for Northwest melodramas), which were lavish, artistic, technically masterful and rooted in realism.

Like Westerns, NorWesters were survival dramas set in the last wilderness frontier on the continent at the time—Alberta, which was being heavily promoted as such in government settlement and tourism campaigns. As American landscapes became increasingly depleted by industrialization, Alberta became the embodiment of a mythical God’s country, a Great North Woods, where man and beast lived in beautiful harmony amid the natural powers and wonders of the vast wilderness.

Most early NorWesters were shot against California landscapes around Los Angeles that replicated the Canadian Rockies. But in 1917, in his “search for the natural,” one of Triangle’s youngest directors, Frank Borzage, headed to the Stoney Nakoda reserve at Morley, just west of Calgary, to shoot several authentic scenes of the real northwest for a “tragedy of the land of snows,” Until They Get Me.

The Stoney Nakoda are the only Indigenous people in North America who have a lasting cinematic record of their traditional way of life and culture as it changed over the last century. They have worked with some of the biggest directors of all time, including Penn and Borzage, but also Kevin Costner, Robert Altman, Alejandro G. Iñárritu, Edward Zwick, Raoul Walsh and Walt Disney.

Many movies filmed in Alberta feature Stoney Nakoda involvement as film professionals—actors, musicians, crew members, cultural consultants, mountain guides, location scouts and horse wranglers. These people often speak their own language in the films, a rare indication of the unique relationships and underlying respect from filmmakers coming to this small reserve at the foot of the Canadian Rockies.

Morley lies on a tract of barren, beautiful land between the plains and mountains, with long, sweeping expanses of grassland that rise through foothills to the majestic mountains on the western horizon, perfect for long shots and super-saturated with the cinematic realism Ince and his filmmaker were so obsessed with. The luminescent quality and drama of the natural light on the reserve is particularly exquisite.

Two very different stories of white settlement exist in North America: the sunny, bloody history in the US, and the less violent though just as oppressive confiscation of Indigenous lands
in Canada.

Most movies filmed in Alberta over the next 40 years were variations of the second, marking a return to the noble savage trope, with Indians as heroes or helpful cohorts of white heroes as they struggled to tame the unforgiving wilderness. In Frank Borzage’s 1922 film The Valley of the Silent Men, the Nakoda are filmed in their own clothes and tipis, helping a Mountie find a varmint in the wilderness. The Blood tribes of southern Alberta, once the fearsome, powerful Blackfoot Confederacy, rescue a train being robbed by varmints in Cameron of the Royal Mounted (1921), despite being vilified and accused of the robbery.

As the decades passed, however, Westerns became more racist and many clichés about Indigenous peoples became embedded in American culture with a force that remains almost unmovable. Movies such as Canadian Pacific (1949), filmed on the Morley reserve with Randolph Scott, and the extravagant remake of the Mountie classic Rose Marie, filmed in Jasper in 1953, have appalling displays of gonzo racism and the objectification and sexualization of Indigenous women, leaving horrific ramifications of murder, genocide, rape and disposability to white men for Indigenous cultures that continue today.

But the summer of 1953 also marked change in Hollywood, a very slow shifting from old to new. Westerns in particular were conservative, formulaic, racist and problematic, unappealing to the young hipsters and beatniks bursting out of the suburbs and redefining normal. Two movies shot in Alberta in 1953—Saskatchewan, by director Raoul Walsh, and The Far Country, by Anthony Mann—both a blend of Western and NorWester, helped take the genre from an undeviating glorification of the Old West to a genre that revealed the racism and psychological conflict and trauma inherent in that narrative.

John Ford’s The Searchers, filmed in part at Elk Island National Park in the cold March of 1955, created an even more powerful, unsentimental look back. It gives disturbing insight into the permanent, personal and psychological scarring that resulted from the gruesome struggle to settle the American west and expropriate the lands of a people who had lived and flourished there for thousands of years. In The Searchers there is no single hero but two: a white man, played by John Wayne, and a Comanche chief, each battling with horrifying resolve to preserve their people.

As the 1960s ended, Arthur Penn, like Ince before him, was searching for realism. He wanted to film Little Big Man, the first and most important revisionist, or post-classical, Western in authentic settings with authentic people. Production finally began in July in southern Montana, with battle scenes shot on the Crow reservation beside the Little Bighorn River. Scenes were also shot in Billings, Montana, where the city’s merchants celebrated the filming with “Little Big Man sidewalk sales.”

Penn again used his movie to denounce the horrific violence of the Vietnam war and drew parallels between the massacre of innocent civilians in Mỹ Lai in 1968 and the slaughter of American natives by Custer and his troops at the battle of Little Bighorn.

At some point he decided to shoot on the Morley reserve and with Nakoda actors, because he wanted the superabundance of the naturalism in Alberta landscapes that had attracted so many major directors here. Production of Little Big Man moved to Alberta in the bitterly cold early days of January 1970. Parts of the horrific massacre were shot at “The Bend in the River” on the banks of the Bow in Morley, a location Hollywood has now been using for a century.

In 2015 and 2016 I undertook a communal project with 15 Nakoda Elders, the Stoney Film Project, to capture the community’s largely uncredited history in film and its importance to the industry. When we watched Little Big Man, Elders Clarice Kootenay and Kathleen Poucette said they felt traumatized by the massacre scene.

Their then-15-year-old sister Cecelia Kootenay had played one of Dustin Hoffman’s young wives, who “copulated” with Crabb in a tipi before the massacre (both actors wore nude body suits). Kootenay and Poucette recall how Cecelia (who is no longer living) was always dancing and singing around the living room of their tiny house on the reserve. Their mother had taken Cecelia to Hollywood to film the scene; she remembers being impressed with the respect shown them both at the studio.

Great Chief Old Lodge Skins, the hero in Little Big Man, is played by Salish Chief Dan George. Film critic Roger Ebert wrote in his review that the Chief’s gentle and frequent use of the simple phrase “human beings” evoked a rare empathy and reflection in audiences. “Most movie Indians have had to express themselves with an ‘um’ at the end of every other word: ‘Swap-um wampum plenty soon’ etc. The Indians in Little Big Man have dialogue reflecting the idiomatic richness of Indian tongues; when Old Lodge Skins simply refers to Cheyennes as ‘the Human Beings,’ the phrase is literal and meaningful and we don’t laugh.”

Little Big Man, which Time called “a new western to begin all westerns,” left a powerful legacy. Major filmmakers, many the vanguard of the American New Wave, soon followed Penn to Alberta, as others had followed Borzage in the 1920s, many to make their own films that reconstructed the Western.

Robert Altman came to the Morley reserve in 1976 to film Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull’s History Lesson entirely at the rodeo grounds, with a Nakoda cast, saying he wanted to “stay close to truth and far from myth.” Paul Newman, as Buffalo Bill, is an unhinged egomaniac, driven mad by his quest for power and money. He is constantly upstaged by the stoic, intelligent and artful Sitting Bull, played by Nakoda Chief Frank Kaquitts.

An even more damning examination of western settlement and white self-glorification than Little Big Man, Buffalo Bill was not well received. White viewers were not ready to see themselves this way, to have their heroes appear so openly deranged and ignoble—damagers, not the damaged. “I hope everyone left their grenades at the door,” Newman remarked to reporters in New York after the movie’s cold reception at its first screening. He added: “I don’t think there’s an audience for any kind of pain in this country.”

In 1978 Terrence Malick shot Days of Heaven in southern Alberta, using glorious fields of wheat to elevate the old NorWester into a poetic, beauty-filled homage to the early directors who filmed in the province. In the movie, realism and naturalism come alive in a mystical other-realm. Even the magic hour—the mythical, uber-cinematic light that cracks through the Alberta sky for brief moments at dawn and dusk—is a character in the movie, a flash of time when nature is most enchanting and people more bewitching and alive. Like many of the earliest NorWesters by Borzage and Reginald Barker, Days of Heaven is a story of survival in an increasingly industrialized world, the plot secondary to the visuals.

Perhaps the most brutal version of the NorWesters shot in Alberta is the 2015 survival/revenge film The Revenant, made by Mexican director Alejandro G. Iñárritu. It stars Leonardo DiCaprio as Hugh Glass, an undying fur trapper who endures against the power of the natural world and the odious realm of men. Like Crabb in Little Big Man, Glass moves between white and Indigenous worlds. Crabb takes an Indigenous wife, who with their baby is massacred by Custer and his men. Glass has a Pawnee wife who is massacred by Metis fur trappers, his surviving son murdered by a repulsive trapper whom Glass had saved in a Pawnee attack. The Alberta scenes were again filmed at “The Bend in the River” at Morley, now known to Hollywood as “Revenant Flats.”

Realism dominates the action, moods, visual magnificence and movement in the movie. It is almost a masterpiece. During the Stoney Film Project, one Nakoda Elder told me Iñárritu had insisted that Nakoda extras be smeared with a foul-smelling mixture of dirt and mud. When the Elder protested, saying his people were not a dirty people, the director replied: “History says you were.”

Mary Graham is the author of A Stunning Backdrop: Alberta in the Movies, 1917–1960 (University Calgary Press, 2022).

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The post Reinventing the Western appeared first on Alberta Views.

This is one of Cheryl Foggo’s favourite stories about the man she has been researching and writing about for years. “I believe the magnitude of that event was the beginning of the legend,” she says. Foggo is currently working on the second instalment of a trio of works based on Ware’s life. As a tall Black man he stood out from other cowboys, but Ware earned his reputation from his strength, courage, kindness and skill with livestock. He eventually started his own small ranch, married former slave Mildred Lewis and had a family.

But Foggo’s interest in Ware was sparked long before she heard the blizzard story. As children growing up in Calgary, Foggo and her brother were fascinated by “the Western mystique.” They read dime-store cowboy novels and watched cowboy movies every Saturday afternoon. “As we got older we began to notice there were never any Black people in the stories,” she says. The siblings felt their love of Western culture wasn’t compatible with their African heritage.

Everything changed when her brother went to the Glenbow Museum on a school trip and saw an exhibit about Ware. He came home excited to tell his sister the cowboy they had vaguely heard of was Black. “That was the beginning of a very long and gradual discovery of who he was and the legacy he left,” she says.

Foggo also started digging into her own family and community history, learning about the pioneers who came up to Alberta in the early 1900s and formed the most northerly Black communities that likely ever existed. “That just wasn’t a part of what we learned about in school or in library books,” she says.

Foggo’s career has been dedicated to telling those stories through articles, novels and plays. She also directed the 2002 National Film Board documentary The Journey of Lesra Martin.

In 2011 Foggo bumped into Tunde Dawodu of Calgary’s Afrikadey! festival, who shared her interest in Ware and asked if Foggo was planning to do anything about him for the Stampede’s centennial in 2012. Foggo says she realized it was the perfect opportunity to draw attention to Ware’s significance in Alberta’s ranching history. “I wanted his legacy and his contributions to the values and the events that led to the creation of the Stampede remembered.”

At the time, she was preparing a multimedia presentation for the University of Calgary’s Black History Month celebrations and asked her daughter, Miranda Martini, to write a song for John and Mildred. That eventually led to the first work in her trilogy, the play John Ware Reimagined, which mirrors Foggo’s childhood discovery of a Black cowboy. The play debuted with Calgary’s Ellipsis Tree Collective in 2014 and won the 2015 Writers Guild of Alberta Gwen Pharis Ringwood Award for Drama. It recently ran in Edmonton at Workshop West (Nov 8–19).

Foggo is now in the midst of the second work, a documentary for the National Film Board titled John Ware Reclaimed. The film is about her efforts to not only investigate where the man came from, but also to “illuminate the disconnect” between Canadian and Black history. “Why is John Ware not well known outside of southern Alberta?” Foggo asks. “Why is he not a figure of national significance?”

Filming took place in the foothills last summer with eight-time world champion rodeo star Fred Whitfield as Ware. Foggo hopes the film will be finished by summer and will launch at Canadian film festivals next fall. The final project in the trilogy will be a book—perhaps, she suggests, John Ware Retold.

—Maureen McNamee

The post Cheryl Foggo’s John Ware appeared first on Alberta Views.

“The reality of what a monstrous undertaking it is kind of hit me,” says Balkwill. The Old Trouts were in no position to take over—members were working on different projects in different cities. Instead, he suggested creating a separate entity to run the festival and serve as a hub for local artists involved in “all things animated”—puppetry, masks, animation—including CAOS, the Old Trouts, WP Puppet Theatre, the Green Fools and Quickdraw Animation Society, among others.

“I was interested in seeing the Calgary festival become its own thing, not unlike its sister festival in Montreal,” he says, referring to the Festival de Casteliers, a larger annual event. Cook, who had previously moved the Calgary event to better align with Montreal’s so that international artists could perform at both, stayed on board to help out.

Cook and Balkwill have been part of Calgary’s puppet scene for years. Cook helped establish the Green Fools in the 1990s before starting CAOS, and Balkwill worked on summer amphitheatre shows with friends who later became the Old Trouts. They were attracted to the art form because puppets have no limitations. “You can dismember them, murder them, make them fly, make them go underwater,” says Cook. “You can shrink them, you can explode them,” adds Balkwill. “The puppet has been around as a vehicle to tell stories since before there were words.”

With a renewed vision for the festival, they joined forces with some like-minded friends to create the International Festival of Animated Objects Society (IFAOS). The new standalone, not-for-profit organization will produce the March 16–19 festival under the management of Gwen Murray, who has experience in arts development.

This year IFAOS scaled back the festival in an effort to consolidate its base before expanding. The all-ages event will include the usual puppet shows, screenings, workshops, lectures and the popular Dolly Wiggler Cabaret, but with a particular focus on local talent.

Calgary has a healthy number of artists to choose from, which Balkwill says is due to trailblazer Ronnie Burkett and his marionettes. “His inspiration and his dedication to the puppet arts, particularly for adults, really opened up the door for other crazies to follow.”

The 2017 lineup includes some familiar Calgary names such as clown and puppeteer Mooky Cornish and the Old Trouts themselves with a remount of their debut show from 1999, The Unlikely Birth of Istvan. That production started the Trouts on a path that has taken them around the world with well-known works such as Famous Puppet Death Scenes.

The festival will also highlight emerging local artists such as Long Grass Studio and Pape and Taper—both have appeared previously in the cabaret, but this is their first time presenting full-length work. “It’s important that the festival give local artists a chance to push their art to the next level,” says Cook. Talent from outside the city includes the Wonderheads from Portland (Loon, Grim and Fisher), a Montreal puppet troupe and a selection of animated films.

Cook and Balkwill will both remain involved in the festival, at least until the society is on its feet. As Balkwill puts it, “Xstine ceremoniously handed me the reins—and I handed half of them back to her.” Cook doesn’t bear any grudge: “With all these amazing people involved we’re going to push it further than it’s ever gone before.”

—Maureen McNamee

The post Festival of Animated Objects appeared first on Alberta Views.

Reel Shorts is an unpretentious, laid-back event. No red carpets, no velvet ropes. No VIP room. Just a chance to see 100 short films from all around the world—not least from our own province. It’s a unique opportunity for residents of Grande Prairie, a fast-growing, young city with a median age of 30 and a hunger for arts, entertainment and culture. Scerbak wants to offer them films that will never be shown at the multiplex. Until Reel Shorts, residents had to travel to Edmonton for such offerings. “Most of the people who come to Reel Shorts haven’t gone to another festival,” says Scerbak.

Albertans have a history of taking things into our own hands and Scerbak has done just that.

She never intended to become a film-festival organizer. She was an aspiring writer in Edmonton who took classes but never considered herself an artist. When her husband’s work brought her to the Peace region, and she found herself with some extra time on her hands, she decided to make her first film.

“I happened to have a script… It got into the Edmonton Independent Film Festival in 2006, in the In Our Own Backyard program. That was the first time I saw a package of short films,” she recalls. Back in Grande Prairie, she told her writing group about the festival. A simple question—wouldn’t it be nice if we had something like that here?—and one thing led to another. The following year, the first Reel Shorts took place, five short-film packages over three days.

This is how local film festivals are made. The Banff Mountain Film Festival began in 1976 when a group of avid outdoorspeople wanted something to pass the time during the off-season. In Edmonton the Third World Film Festival, which eventually became the Global Visions Film Festival, opened in 1983. Alberta’s first international film event, Local Heroes Film Festival, was started by a group of filmmakers and cinephiles in Edmonton in the mid-1980s. The Calgary International Film Festival’s inaugural event was in 2000. Cinephiles in Calgary hungry for more started the Calgary Underground Film Festival, co-founded by Brenda Lieberman and a group of like-minded film buffs in 2003. “We saw the potential to fill a need for more provocative, edgy cinema,” Lieberman says. “To do something really connected to the ground level, the audience level. We wanted to be a festival that was approachable and inclusive.”

Festivals play an important role in the development of local film, and in encouraging and supporting local artists. The festival venue gives local filmmakers a chance to have their work seen by larger audiences and brought to the attention of critics or movie reviewers. Festivals give audiences a chance to be surprised by unusual material, and for critics to discover new talent.

The Calgary International Film Festival’s first opening-night gala in 2000 featured local filmmaker Gary Burns’s waydowntown. The film won the Best Canadian Feature prize at the 2000 Toronto International Film Festival. Gary Burns is now, of course, an internationally recognized writer and director of feature films.

Guy Lavallee, programmer for Global Visions, says festival audiences crave local films over bigger, more commercial work—once they know such films exist. “So the question and the challenge has always been, okay, so how do you engage people in coming to see things maybe they haven’t necessarily heard of or that you want them to take a chance on?”

Local films often don’t have the marketing support to register on the larger cultural consciousness. They depend almost exclusively on festivals for screen time. During Lavallee’s tenure at Global Visions, which began in 2011, he has increased the percentage of Alberta-made films from 20 per cent to 30 per cent of the total shown. The goal, he says, is to continue to increase that number to at least 40 per cent. Crowds showed up for two Alberta-made feature documentaries in 2014—Rosie Dransfeld’s Anti-Social Limited and Ava Karvonen’s Albert Karvonen: Philosophies on Life, Nature and Wildlife Filmmaking, and both films made it into the top 10 of the audience awards. Lavallee also programmed four packages of Alberta-made shorts. It helped that in 2014 the Enterprise Edmonton Film Commission sponsored the first Local Visions Awards, a juried competition with cash prizes for the best Alberta film over 20 minutes and best Alberta film under 20 minutes.

Festivals play an important role in developing local film and encouraging artists, whose work is brough to critics’ attention.

The Alberta government’s support of the film industry has been inconsistent over the years. The Alberta Motion Picture Development Corporation was created in the early 1980s with the intention to woo foreign (i.e., Hollywood) productions to our province to employ Albertans, but also to provide funding and guidance for independent productions, domestic and foreign. AMPDC funding kick-started Edmonton-based filmmaker Anne Wheeler’s internationally acclaimed career: she made Bye Bye Blues and Loyalties during that period, in Alberta.

That program was gutted in 1997 during the Klein-era cutbacks. Film industry spending plummeted from $152-million to $52-million within a year and continued to slide. As a result, in the late 1990s, many of those skilled enough to work on crews—cinematographers, directors, entire production companies—left Alberta for greener pastures in Toronto, Vancouver and even Saskatchewan—anywhere with support for the film industry, which at the time was pretty much anywhere but Alberta. Dave Cunningham, who was making documentaries at the time, remembers the exodus. “Oh, everybody left. When Ralph Klein came, that destroyed everything.” Cunningham was loath to uproot his young family and made ends meet with educational videos and other niches. But bigger-budget productions were lured elsewhere; many filmmakers felt they had no alternative but to leave. In the meantime, independents continued working, at a smaller scale.

While government support for the arts is vital and necessary, the Alberta film world is really about audiences, festivals and artists. One of these factors can catalyze the others. In Grande Prairie, once the idea of a film festival became possible, so did the idea of training local people to make their own films. Scerbak founded screenwriting and filmmaking workshops that have produced 11 short films since 2007 and a 2012 feature-length film. Her festival also runs Frantic 48, in which local filmmakers write, shoot and edit short films within 48 hours. The completed films are shown during the festival.

All this creative activity has given rise to the Peace Region Independent Media Arts Association (PRIMAA), a group of like-minded artists working to develop the production and exhibition capacity of the area. It completes the circle: An audience wanted films; a festival created filmmakers; filmmakers satisfy the audience. That dynamic creates artists and keeps them around.

This is a typical story across Alberta. The Film and Video Arts Society of Alberta (FAVA) is another case in point. In 1982 a group of young filmmakers and would-be filmmakers were grousing about how hard and how expensive it was to make anything here. Up to that point, if you didn’t own the equipment, you had to find someone who would rent (often at high cost) or lend you the gear. (A side note—when Werner Herzog visited Edmonton’s Local Heroes festival in the 1990s, he advocated doing whatever you needed to do, including theft, to finish your film. He also left a pair of his boots at FAVA, one of which has gone missing. If you’ve seen it, please return it.)

Grade 2 and 3 students at Reel Shorts before the screening of Magic Time. (Beauchamp Photography)

This small group of artists spawned the National Screen Institute (parent of the Local Heroes Film Festival) to foster exhibition of Canadian films and mentorship for aspiring writers, producers and directors, and FAVA. The NSI retreated to Winnipeg in 2002, but Local Heroes continued as the Edmonton International Film Festival and FAVA continued sharing gear, know-how and community connections.

One of the products of this indie system is Trevor Anderson, an internationally recognized short-film maker originally from Red Deer, now based in Edmonton. Like many 21st century filmmakers, he started out making short videos on VHS as a high-schooler. He made his first film on Super 8 through FAVA, and his second, Rock Pockets, won the Lindalee Tracey award at Hot Docs in Toronto in 2007. This was followed by numerous award-winning short films including The High Level Bridge, praised by Roger Ebert as “better, minute for minute, than most of the features at your multiplex.” Anderson’s work has been widely screened. He has had opportunities to relocate, and considers it off and on, but says he finds Edmonton his best option.

“If I were looking to be a director for hire It might be smart for me to leave this market, move to somewhere like Toronto or Vancouver, and hustle daily in hopes of maybe directing that toothpaste commercial. But that’s not my goal,” he says. Edmonton, he believes, enables him to produce his work with top crews. “If I schedule my production carefully, I can often access the A-crew, who, you know, don’t have a commercial this month. It’s pretty good for people who want to be in control of their own work.” And Alberta is again supporting filmmaking through the efforts of Alberta Film, part of the Ministry of Culture, which was created to do the work that the AMPDC used to do.

Alberta’s festival audiences crave local films over bigger, more commercial work–once they know such films exist.

Back in Grande Prairie, the 2014 edition of Reel Shorts took place May 7–11 in two venues and offered 18 program packages plus guest speakers and a filmmaking and screenwriting competition. School groups ensured that 1,000 young people were exposed to short films and introduced to Grande Prairie’s arts community.

A festival to entertain a group of enthusiasts is cultivating the next generation of local film fans and filmmakers. In 2013 Reel Shorts became accredited by the Academy of Canadian Cinema & Television, making shorts screened at the festival eligible for Canadian Screen Awards. There are only four other festivals in Alberta that are so accredited: EIFF, Global Visions, CIFF and the Banff World Media Festival.

“The opportunity to do whatever the heck you want to is huge here,” says Scerbak. “There’s money; there’s talent. It’s an opportunity to learn and create. If you have any kind of talent and drive, you can do anything here. In my opinion, you need to have three things to have a thriving film community: a film school, a festival and filmmakers. We’re basically trying to be all three.”
Terry Scerbak is being modest about her tremendous role in creating a film scene where there was none. She is an important part of the synergy of festivals and independent filmmakers serving a growing demand from sophisticated Albertans for local and less commercial films.

Mari Sasano makes and promotes film in Edmonton. She teaches at Grant MacEwan University and sits on several arts boards.

The post Reeling in Alberta appeared first on Alberta Views.

Movies are the most compelling means of telling the stories that influence the things we laugh at or cry about, that frighten or infuriate us; they can set the tone for what we believe, how we grieve, how we love. They are our most potent transmitters of culture and values. Wonders light the screen when everyone on the crew is making the same movie; any one of us can tell when they’re not.

But making movies is also a business, one of the toughest on the planet. Only two countries, the US and India, have self-sustaining and profitable film industries. All others subsidize movies in the cause of presenting and preserving culture and identity. In Canada, governments—federal, provincial and municipal—devise ingenious, sometimes too-clever-by-half programs to help producers and others advance their craft.

Alberta can claim pride of place. We led the provinces in creating, in 1973, the first film industry association in Canada, the Alberta Motion Picture Industries Association (AMPIA). The first provincial program to support the film industry, the Alberta Motion Picture Development Corporation (AMPDC) opened its doors in 1982, providing a model that other provinces soon followed. Alberta was the first to appoint a provincial film commissioner with a mandate to lure Hollywood producers north.

It all paid off; the province revelled in a golden age of film during the 1980s and into the mid-1990s. Everything changed abruptly in 1996, however, when Ralph Klein, in a cost-cutting orgy, shut down the AMPDC. He told me his government “didn’t want to be in the business of business.” Ironically, records show that the “business” was profitable. Government funding to AMPDC resulted in tax revenues that exceeded the money allocated.

The industry crashed. The value of film production in the province, which had been increasing annually, plummeted from $150-million in 1995 to $50-million by 1997. Two-thirds of production evaporated. Many of our most talented creators moved to BC. Their stories—Alberta’s stories—went with them.

Since the mid-1990s, Alberta’s film producers (those who opted to stay after Klein’s guillotine) have been struggling to rebuild the industry. But there is something about Alberta’s creative spirit. So how are we doing?

You could make the case it all started with Back to God’s Country, produced in 1919 by Nell and Ernie Shipman and reportedly funded by Calgary dentists and doctors. Nell was a Canadian who became a Hollywood superstar. To her husband, dubbed “10 per cent Ernie,” movies were definitely a business. Back to God’s Country, shot on location around Alberta for $70,000, grossed $1.5-million.

The prequel to the modern industry in Alberta came in 1961, when Larry Matanski produced Wings of Chance, based on a story by one of Canada’s most successful short story writers, John Patrick Gillese. The Alberta-born Matanski, a flamboyant character who owned and flew exotic airplanes, also produced The Naked Flame (a.k.a. Deadline for Murder) in 1963, a sexploitation story in which Las Vegas showgirls were brought in to portray Doukhobor women, known for dancing nude as their houses were torched in a protest against materialism.

The modern filmmaking era in Alberta arguably began after Sydney Newman, then Canada’s National Film Commissioner and head of the National Film Board, made a 1973 speech at the Canadian Film & Television Producers Association annual meeting. AMPIA had persuaded the association to hold the gathering in Edmonton, the first time it had met outside of Ontario. Newman, speaking in a hotel ballroom to virtually everyone in the province who wanted to make films, told us that if we wanted to succeed we should move to Toronto, where we could create a critical mass of talent similar to that in London. Newman had enjoyed a remarkable career at the BBC working on The Avengers and Dr. Who. In London, actors, writers, directors and technicians could work on movies one day, TV the next and on the stage the day after that.

In hindsight Newman was probably right about creating a critical mass of creative resources. But many of us Albertans, including me, then an AMPIA director, were raging regionalists. We were going to do it our way, in our place, dammit.

There’s a direct line between Newman’s speech and my getting into the business with Why Shoot the Teacher? To make movies is to chase a dream. First, though, you have to persuade government and private investors to risk money based on a script. Some producers sell their cars, mortgage their houses or sign devastating personal guarantees to raise funds. Most navigate a labyrinth of rules to qualify for grants or loans. You then have to persuade a broadcaster to sign on.

With Why Shoot the Teacher? I spent six months going from office to office in the CBC’s Toronto headquarters. I eventually cut a deal, in half an hour, with CTV program director Pip Wedge. Getting the financing took still more months. I had 32 documents at the closing; it took a roomful of Bay Street lawyers most of a day to sign and seal the paperwork. Only then did I begin the work of casting and producing the movie, which ultimately took two years of my life.

The movie, based on a Max Braithwaite story, tells of a teacher whose first job is in a one-room schoolhouse on the Canadian prairies. It was shot in Hanna on a budget of $1.2-million, and the weather was awful (the movie was set in winter; that March was warm). But there were magical moments. When I called the star of the movie, Bud Cort, he told me he was in Groucho Marx’s bathroom, praying that someone would offer him a role. (Marx, then elderly but still sharp, had opened his home to young actors.) Indeed, it was as much good luck as good management that when Why Shoot the Teacher? was released in 1977, it won Canada’s Golden Reel Award as the year’s most commercially successful movie.

That same year, the Alberta Task Force on Film was launched by Culture Minister Horst Schmid (English Canada’s first culture minister) and Industry Minister Hugh Planche. It led to the 1982 creation of the AMPDC, a Crown corporation whose mandate was to support Alberta producers through a combination of loans, investment and advice.

There followed a virtual explosion of filmmaking in Alberta. Theatrical features, documentaries and educational movies contributed thousands of jobs, millions of dollars to government coffers and a big boost to the provincial psyche. Filmmakers such as Tom Radford, Anne Wheeler, Dale Phillips, the late Allen Stein, Albert Karvonen, Arvi Liimatainen, Gil Cardinal, Francis Damberger, Tom Cox and Doug MacLeod, among others, produced programs for big and small screens. These won international awards (10 alone for Cardinal’s Foster Child), opened the 1988 Winter Olympics arts festival (Wheeler’s Cowboys Don’t Cry) and shared Alberta stories with the world (Karvonen’s films have been distributed in over 100 countries).

In 1980 Bill Marsden became the province’s, and Canada’s, first film commissioner, with a mandate to persuade foreign producers to shoot in Alberta (while training local crews and hiring local actors). An impressive number of Hollywood films were made in Alberta under Marsden’s watch, including Superman (1978), Cool Runnings (1993) and Legends of the Fall (1994). A filmmaker himself, Marsden had a knack for convincing directors to come see our striking landscapes for themselves. A mark of his extraordinary success is the single-card credit (a rare thank you in the film’s closing credits) given by Clint Eastwood for his help in facilitating 1992’s Unforgiven.

The AMPDC was vital to Alberta film through the golden era. The notion of provincial assistance for film was copied by all of Canada’s provinces. The corporation’s mandate was expanded in 1988, with $7-million added to its budget and a vote of confidence given by Minister of Economic Development Larry Shaben. None of this stopped Ralph Klein’s government from killing the agency outright in 1996.

With the death of the AMPDC, and the termination of the film commissioner position, many worried about local film’s viability. AMPDC director Gary Toth expressed hope. “I don’t want to say it’s a total demise of the domestic industry,” he said. And it wasn’t the death of local movies. But productions were cancelled, droves of actors and producers moved away and much of Alberta’s cultural pioneering was undone. It was a new era: the province didn’t even name a Culture Minister between 1992 and 2008. As a replacement to the AMPDC, a private film commission was created. Lacking resources, it struggled even to maintain a film commissioner; Hollywood opted for other locations. “Needless to say,” recalls Marsden in his memoir Big Screen Country, “competing film commissions were delighted.”

The government seemed to realize its mistake by 2001, announcing a Film Development Program under the auspices of Community Development. But the new agency was a shadow of the AMPDC, with an annual budget of $10-million (now closer to $15-million). Alberta, while the fourth-largest movie producer after Ontario, Quebec and BC, lags well behind those provinces in terms of government incentives.

Some strong local films were nonetheless made during this period, including Gary Burns’s waydowntown (2000) and the cult-classic FUBAR (2002), financed for $1-million and $350,000, respectively. Burns has been particularly successful in a tough climate, writing or directing seven local movies including the ultra-low-budget The Suburbanators (1995), which screened at the Toronto and Sundance film festivals.

All the while there was AMPIA. The association started with a dozen or so companies whose owners made a commitment to Alberta by setting up offices and incorporating here. AMPIA kept the torch lit through the Klein years in part by maintaining the local film awards. The first AMPIA awards were held in Red Deer in 1974, part of a province-wide festival of the arts. Edmonton documentary filmmaker Radford won the first AMPIA award (then dubbed a “Horst” after the peripatetic Minister of Culture) for Ernest Brown, Photographer.

Now called the Alberta Media Production Industries Association, AMPIA has grown to a membership of some 2,000, including students. Reflecting the exploding digital world, some members make their living in video games. AMPIA offers a variety of services, including professional development and mentorship. But its main activity is to represent the industry to government, whose policies and funding programs so profoundly affect its members’ development.

Radford was also in that fateful Edmonton ballroom back in 1973, when Newman advised Albertans to move out East. Arguably the dean of Alberta film producers, Radford says he’s concerned about the next generation of filmmakers, not only because of low provincial support but because the local broadcasting industry is in so few hands.

Alberta has no locally owned TV outlets anymore; there are essentially only three doors—Bell/CTV, Shaw/Global and Rogers/CityTV—that producers can now knock on in all of English Canada. In earlier days, broadcasting pioneers such as CFRN Edmonton’s Dr. G. R. A. (Dick) Rice and ITV founder Dr. Charles Allard poured millions into Alberta productions. The Edmonton movie studio Allard built is still in operation.

Yet Radford is unwavering in his advice to young creators. “Fight the fight to stay,” he says. “There are so many Alberta stories that need to be told. We still need the big outlets of movie screens and TVs to reach meaningful audiences.”

Radford’s latest effort, Tipping Point: The Age of the Oil Sands, is an example of the kind of stories Albertans can and need to tell. The documentary was denounced by callers to an Edmonton radio show in 2011, with Culture Minister Lindsay Blackett mounting a weak defence of why provincial funding was granted to what some saw as an attack on Alberta. Many viewers, however, lauded Tipping Point’s thoughtful exploration of the downstream effects of industrial development. The film aired on CBC’s The Nature of Things, picked up a Rosie at this year’s AMPIA awards, and won two Geminis.

Indeed, considering the challenges, the range of Alberta-produced programs being broadcast on national TV is impressive. From the documentaries Ian Tyson: This Is My Sky and Al Rashid: The Story of Canada’s First Mosque to nationally acclaimed dramatic series such as Blackstone and Heartland, Alberta is still making a mark on the national scene.

Between the Albertans who stuck it out and the emergence of new talent, hope abounds. Unlike those of us who were pretty well making it up as we went along in the 1970s, the next wave served their apprenticeships on productions mounted by their forebears. And the newest generation has been well educated in the film schools that emerged at NAIT, SAIT, Red Deer College and the University of Alberta.

Josh Miller, president of the AMPIA board, set the modern example by going to film school in LA before returning to Alberta to set up Panacea Productions, producer of such series as Mentors and such movies as Freezer Burn.

Connie Edwards and her husband/partner, Doug Cole, are now veterans of the business. Connie debuted in my film Marie Anne, as a stunt double for Tantoo Cardinal (she was the better horse rider). She volunteered on other crews and rose to the rank of producer, now making serious, socially conscious films.

Larry Reese went from actor (Hounds of Notre Dame) to program director of RDC’s film school, which offers instruction in performance and production. Applicants need two years in a post-secondary drama program or equivalent. In 1998, on a budget of $30,000, his students produced a highly credible feature film, Naked Frailties.

Don Metz is among the most successful producers of sports programming in Canada, and this year collected three Gemini nominations for Oil Change. A member of the NAIT board, he says the development of post-secondary film and media education in Alberta is creating opportunities for new creators. “They understand the power of social media and the digital arts,” he says. “The schools have relevant curricula that create a great environment for brilliant youth.”

While Miller, Edwards, Reese, Metz and others are the industry’s senior members, the next generation—filmmakers in their 20s and 30s—may yet return Alberta to the foreground of Canada’s movie scene. Rising stars include Cameron MacGowan, whose film Bad Dad was a winner at this year’s AMPIA awards, and Camille Beaudoin, whose wild and quirky comedy series, Caution—May Contain Nuts, won a Gemini.

One of the most successful members of the new generation, Ron E. Scott, broke away from the set of Blackstone, which he created and directs, to speak with me. “There are great things happening in Alberta,” he says. His cast and crew show great promise. “They’re learning and getting good training. We’re constantly giving them greater responsibility.” But he says that Alberta filmmaking is not flourishing the way it could. “Unfortunately, the pool of actors in Edmonton, where we’re based, is still small,” he says. “There’s a good theatre scene, but there’s just not enough film work. We use as many local actors as we can, but have to go outside of Alberta to fill the bill.”

I asked how this province might better support its film industry. “We need more infrastructure, not just the occasional big show,” he says. “It would be great to see some more things coming down the line. But I have to say that if it weren’t for Alberta’s film program, Blackstone wouldn’t have been produced. And Alberta offered more than BC did—it’s both more cost-effective and more satisfying to do the shoot here.”

Indeed, the Alberta government has shown that it can occasionally be persuaded to properly support local film. In 2005 it announced a $5.5-million grant as part of Alberta’s centennial celebrations to Edmonton actor, director and producer Paul Gross. His Passchendaele (2008), shot near Calgary with a budget of $20-million, employed hundreds of Alberta actors, technicians and extras and was lauded by critics.

Passchendaele portrayed the 10th Battalion, Alberta Regiment of the Canadian Expeditionary Force, composed largely of Albertans, which participated in every major Canadian battle of the First World War and whose members won many individual bravery awards. Even Ralph Klein recognized the importance of giving life to our shared history. “The centennial is a time to recognize our past and tell our stories,” he said. “Passchendaele will educate Albertans and all Canadians for years to come.”

Joe Novak’s Bow River productions focuses on film production, while his 1,400 Months is dedicated to developing digital products. He’s stuck it out in Alberta, but he agrees that the province needs more infrastructure if it’s to have any chance of keeping the new generation. Along with Heartland producer Tom Cox and others, Novak has lobbied for the development of a studio in Calgary focused on digital and 3D production. He touts it as a hub that would serve the whole province through a high-speed digital connection to the Edmonton studio built by Dr. Allard as well as to film schools. The idea gained Minister Blackett’s attention, but he wasn’t able to get a commitment from his caucus. “We have to be ahead of the curve,” Novak says. “We can’t just tread water.”

As the US economy falters, state support for Hollywood movies—designed to halt the “runaway productions” that saw producers take advantage of the lower Canadian dollar—is dwindling. According to Alberta film commissioner Jeff Brinton, a recent surge in scouting should result in more productions in the province next year.

But a recommitment from government to fully support local film would help most. An additional $1.4-million was added in 2006 to the Alberta Film Development Program, bringing funding to nearly $15-million. Blackett, to his credit, managed in a tough political environment to increase funding for the film industry, in particular adding to the money available to writers. The new cabinet announced in October sees Edmonton-Glenora MLA Heather Klimchuk in charge of Culture, with Blackett relegated to the back benches. I’ve met Klimchuk a number of times and find her to be quite culture-friendly. With Doug Horner as deputy premier and president of the treasury board, there are reasons to be cautiously optimistic about the local film industry.

But Alberta is still far from punching above its weight, nationally or internationally, as it used to. A reprise of those golden years depends on whether funding and government priorities continue to fluctuate with each new caucus. Whatever happens, Alberta’s filmmakers will continue to challenge all obstacles to pursue their dreams, to tell their stories—to tell our stories. They’re driven to it. Ask them and they’ll tell you they have no choice, and like the raging regionalists of an earlier era, they plan to do it here.

Fil Fraser is an author and radio, TV and film producer. He teaches a graduate course on film policy at Athabasca University.

The post Quiet on the Set appeared first on Alberta Views.

Mentors mines a universal fantasy. While we face challenges daily, we don’t have a device like the “VisiCron” to summon Einstein to talk quantum physics, Queen Elizabeth I to help us run for student council, or Casanova to help us romance our heart’s desire. But that invention is what computer wizard Simon Cates (Stevie Mitchell) and his new-age sister Crystal (Samantha Krutzfeldt) inherit from their cousin Oliver (now appearing only in reruns) and use to trigger each episode. Complications arise, and they learn more from their mentor than they bargained for. Beethoven is called in to help a friend cope with hearing problems, but a snafu brings him before his deafness, and when he learns his fate, it devastates him. Anne Frank seeks her first kiss from a skinhead. And Vlad Tepes (better known as Count Dracula) upgrades Simon’s bully-scaring request to attempted murder. Best of all, nobody else

“It flies in the face of the dumbing down of North American society. Who else, especially on Canadian TV, talks to kids about what it means to create art?”

has a clue about who these eccentric visitors are. History is unaffected and the mentors must return to their time after 36 hours, but the consequences of their visits linger like prized National Geographics.

“Mentors is the little series that could,” reckons its creator, writer and coproducer, Josh Miller. Having overcome all obstacles to generate the show (see sidebar), he and coproducer Margaret Mardirossian preside over a frenetic crusade to write, cast, shoot and complete post-production work on 13 new episodes each year on a budget of just over $5.8-million.

“Time is money,” asserts make-up maven Prudence Olenik. “Coffee is our friend.”

Olenik is part of a stalwart crew of 80 who have stuck it out in Alberta’s harsh climate for television and film production. Each year, they must decide whether to stay. Soundman Garrell Clark, a 28-year veteran, has declined work in B.C. which would pay him $1,000 more per day. “It’s almost a bad career move to stay here,” he claims, “but I’m a tried and true Albertan. This is my home.”

The prairie pioneer spirit of invention and economy lives at Mentors. Crew members revel in their abilities to make parliaments out of phone booths.

“You dream it up, make it as big as you want, we’ll build it,” affirms propmaster Wayne Jeannotte, whose creations for the series include exploding doughnuts, a talking Venus flytrap and a kissing cod.

Art director Myron Hyrak manages feats like 17th-century boat anchors, burning turkeys and an oversized, Citizen Kane-style fireplace sculpted from Chinese mush- rooms, dog biscuits and day-old bagels. An episode in which Simon and Crystal meet their grandfather during the second World War featured a bombed-out farmhouse, scorched earth and mortar craters. “There’s something fun about getting a .50-calibre machine gun and blowing things up,” deadpans Hyrak.

Ultimately, though, all the dreams and all the money rest on the shoulders of the 15-year-old stars. Labour regulations and the need for on-set schooling restrict their availability and call for highly creative and efficient shooting schedules.

“It’s a huge challenge,” remarks first assistant director Jim Long. “We have to look after the kids because they’re only allowed a 10-hour day.”

“We’ve built a rapport with them,” concurs hairstylist Rose Rimmer. “It’s like having two more kids. We’re a family.”

“They’re such loveable kids, and real professionals,” notes cameraman Wes Doyle. “A lot of crew members go out of their way to chat with them, make them feel at home, and make it as easy for them as possible.”

Mitchell and Krutzfeldt enjoy further support from a sympathetic on-set drama coach, 35-year veteran Patricia Casey. “God knows young people don’t have trouble feeling things, so it’s timing and technique,” explains Casey. “Stevie and Sam are fine human beings first and fine actors second. That order will sustain them. Their heads aren’t turned by all the attention.”

Indeed, the two young professionals express the privilege of learning from the crew and their mentor guest stars. Krutzfeldt speaks equally insightfully on the show’s impact in less liberal countries, the importance of dramatic continuity, and the lost pleasures of sleeping in. “No ordinary kid has the ability to bring back these people as mentors,” Mitchell points out, “but by doing this, we can get people to think about the story and the lessons we’ve learned.”

Their offscreen mothers, Brenda Krutzfeldt and Wendy Mitchell, take it in stride. “It’s a very maturing experience to spend long days in an adult environment, with adult responsibilities,” observes Krutzfeldt. A history major, she loves the way the show translates history into something relevant to kids and families today. Mitchell appreciates the program’s appeal to all age groups.

Several theories explain the show’s appeal. Cast and crew mention its intriguing premise of bringing diverse characters to life in a contemporary setting and seeing a little-known side of them. In the series pilot, Einstein is summoned for his genius, but helps Oliver adjust to his parents’ divorce, Einstein having been divorced himself.

“It’s a universal theme of a kid growing up in knowledge,” says Doyle. “We’re all searching for answers at some point.”

“Mentors is always about more than it seems,” expounds writer Greg Kennedy. “While there are surface problems and challenges, there’s always a soul-stirring, deeper level where personal transformation takes place.”

“The kids think they’re playing God,” muses director Norm Fassbender, “but really, God is playing with them.”

International, national and provincial awards attest to the show’s meaningful, high-quality stories, illustrating universal themes with comedy and poignancy, but never with the cardinal sin of earnestness.

“The idea is king,” declares Miller. “We’ve opened it to pitches by freelance writers, who come up with creative ideas that we might not get in a closed shop. Each show has a point of view, and we’re not afraid to take on what might be considered sensitive topics.” Recent episodes deal with discrimination, homosexuality and teen sex.

“The series is so brave,” opines Casey. “It flies in the face of the dumbing down of North American society. Who else, especially on Canadian TV, talks to kids about what it means to create art?”

“Granted, other series are issue oriented as well,” continues writer David Wiechorek, “but they tend to approach their themes within the frame of a teen soap opera. Like Star Trek or the original Twilight Zone, Mentors can address these issues more creatively in a fantasy format.”

Mentors draws praise for respecting its audience and appealing to all ages, on different levels. “It lacks the pretentiousness and nearer-to-God attitude of some American shows,” says Brian Martel, who, as struggling playwright dad Norm Cates, gets hooked up with the Bard himself. “It deals with real-life issues, not sensationalized or saccharine-filled.” Martel cites the show’s honesty. “It won’t simplify too much or make it juvenile. It never talks down, or dumbs down, to kids. But it doesn’t take itself too seriously. No joke is too cheap unless it takes away from reality.”

Jane Sowerby loves her role as the sibs’ mom, Peggy Cates (she stamps her feet with glee at script read-throughs), and notes that the vivacious abstract sculptor is no stereotypical TV mom. “You really get to play on this show,” she enthuses.

Of course, there are the mentors themselves. Guest stars have included William B. Davis (Cigarette-Smoking Man from The X-Files) as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Saul Rubinek as Napoleon, Margot Kidder as Queen Elizabeth I, Joe Flaherty as basketball inventor James Naismith, and Gordon Pinsent as an aged (cousin) Oliver Cates. Actors play in broad strokes, from the slapstick, Gemini Award- winning performance of Matt Frewer (Max Headroom) as the fame-loathing Dr. Frederick Banting, to Michael Sarrazin’s haunting homage to Edgar Allan Poe.

Beyond the biographical details, these actors add original touches to bringing the mentors to life. “We decided early on with Josh to create our characters rather than rent them,” explains costume designer Jill Concannon, whose workshop suggests a time traveller’s closet.

But in the end, it’s about positive messages and a philosophy of letting kids pursue their own path. “Mentors uses an entertaining medium to help kids learn about themselves and the choices they’ll make,” suggests story intern Deb Chesley. “The main message is, ‘Figure out who you want to be.’”

Appropriately, the idea of mentorship spills into the production itself. “The producers take the idea of mentorship to heart and put it into practice,” notes Michele Boniface, who interned on the show and became an award-winning director of five episodes herself.

So what’s ahead for Alberta’s quiet TV success?

Even though Mentors is seen in markets as diverse as South America, the Middle East and China, it took years to land an elusive American distribution deal. Fox Family and NBC Kids found the show’s winning mix of poignancy and hilarity “too educational” for American audiences. “They’re playing to the lowest common denominator rather than elevating,” sighs Mardirossian “I’m boggled by it.” Then this spring, two seasons of Mentors were sold to the new Discovery Kids channel, which is giving the show top billing on its Internet splash page as of this writing.

Through it all, its creator remains philosophical. “This has taught me that when the time is right for a project, it will happen,” concludes Miller. “And until that time comes, be patient, keep believing in the material and always work to improve it, so you’re ready when your number’s called.

Geo F. Takach is an award-winning screenwriter whose episode of Mentors featuring Emily Carr will air this fall.

The post The Little Series that Could appeared first on Alberta Views.

The shoot, however, was marred by what Ernest described in a letter to a Canadian Photoplays stockholder as “obstacles unprecedented and trouble never dreamed of.” What were presented in jolly press released as minor inconveniences were in fact the mutiny and defection of the crew and carpenters once they experienced one day of -50° temperatures (they fed south en masse to the more civilized climate of California); the frostbite suffered by the production manager as he laboured, with one native helper, to build an entire set, including a ship, under these conditions, which left him with a lifelong limp; and the more than inconvenient death of the leading man from a “severe cold” which turned to pneumonia. But, in show-must-go-on tradition, after the actor’s demise in an Edmonton hospital, he was quickly replaced, and the shoot staggered on under these horrific circumstances. Nell and Ernie were rewarded with international success, thanks to Ernie’s marketing know-how, Nell’s talent before the camera (including one of the first nude scenes onscreen) and—oh, yes—Alberta scenery.

It’s a long haul from an early 1900s silent epic to the turn of the 21^st century. Not only has technology advanced, but an Alberta film industry has been established. It may be small by Hollywood standards but nevertheless, it is earning its place on the world stage. This is an industry which, like many art forms, is politically and culturally intertwined, dependent on patrons, yet possessed by the grand notion that cultural voice is vital, significant, and must be fiercely independent of political constraints.

What is an Alberta filmmaker Whether a quixotic fool or a hardy survivor, an Alberta Filmmaker may simply entertain the notion that a Canadian should be able to ply his or her trade in any part of the country, or may have burning desire to tell Alberta stories onscreen.

Just filming a movie in Alberta does not make it an Alberta film. There is a difference, perhaps not understood by the average Albertan, between location shoots (also referred to as offshore or runaway production) and indigenous production.

The direct and indirect dollars pumped into the Alberta economy by American companies are very welcome, thank you very much. The work for Alberta crew and talent is welcome. Location shooting is a tremendous boon, and we love those Americans to pieces. But—as we have learned—a few quirks in the dollar, a lack of audience interest in westerns, even a temporary absence of a film commissioner—and whoops! Back to the day job.

Indigenous production originates with an Alberta writer and/or Alberta producer. The key personnel are Albertan. The bucks aren’t big. The Winnebagos are regular size. The producers aren’t holding court at the Polo Lounge. They are more likely to be grabbing a java on 17^th Avenue SW in Calgary or Whyte Avenue Edmonton, budgeting for their mortgage, paying taxes like any other Albertan, and wondering how they are going to fund their next production.

Why bother, one may ask?
“We can’t just have foreign cultures reflected to us,” says Josh Miller of Mind’s Eye pictures in Edmonton. “The prairies have a distinct identity, and it is not just any one prairie archetype, like the cowboy hat, boots and horses. If you live here, you know there is also a vibrant urban culture.”

Luckily, the Alberta government, no stranger to western alienation, has had the foresight, again and again, to address these issues and step in to support the film industry. Because of this, films like Bye Bye Blues, Cowboys Don’t Cry and series like North of 60 have been seen by millions of viewers worldwide.

Nell and Ernie Shipman could never have imagined this while they suffered in quest of magic images on a frozen Lesser Slave Lake.

Where did it all begin?
As early as 1910, the Edison Company shot a silent film called An Unselfish Love in Strathmore, Alberta. The romantic drama is a rather touching tribute to both true love and the benefits of irrigating your farmland, sponsored by the CPR as an encouragement to immigration.

After the success of Back to God’s Country, numerous silent were shot in Alberta, the most notable of which, from a western perspective, are The Calgary Stampede (1925), The Canadian (1926) and His Destiny (1928). The Calgary Stampede starred Hoot Gibson as an American rodeo star falsely accused of murder, hiding out from the Mounties on a ranch near Calgary. This entertaining silent contains rate footage of the chuckwagon races, labeled “the roman races” in the film.

The Canadian (1926) was set in “the wheat fields of Canada.” Based on a play by Somerset Maugham, the poignant story of love amid the hardships of farming was shot near Calgary. The unpredictable weather was a boon to the filmmakers: the script required that a wheat crop be devastated by snowfall, and, in mid-September 1926, the southern Alberta skies unexpectedly dropped a blanket of snow onto the location. Although mostly overlooked in its day, The Canadian was unearthed by the American Film Institute Theatre for a highly successful screening decades later.

…the film is heartily Albertan in its point of view, as a cowpoke grumbles, “You’d think this was Ottawa, the way things are slowing up around here.”

His Destiny (1928) was produced as a British quota film by British Canadian Pictures of Calgary Stampede, was the producer, promising the western action film would present “a faithful reproduction of ranch and cowboy life on the Western Canadian plains for the benefit of the people of the British Empire.” American Neil Hart editor directed and played the leading role Calgary Herald editor Daniel E.C. Campbell wrote the script, and the cast included a number of Calgarians, including Mary Cross (later Mary Dover), daughter of British Canadian Pictures president A.E. Cross. Packed with scenery wild horses, a love story, shots of the Stampede and the Prince of Wales ranch, the film is heartily Albertan in its point of view, as cowpoke grumbles, “You’d think this was Ottawa, the way things are slowing up around her.”

In the 1940’s, Alberta served as the occasional backdrop to foreign pictures, sometimes inch-hitting as Norway (Son of Lassie, 1945) or as the Alps (The Emperor Waltz, 1948). The 1950’s were notable for technicolor American productions that took laughable liberties with history and geography.

In the 1960s, Tiger Productions of Edmonton produced Wings of Chance a bush pilot adventure based on a novel by John Patrick Gillese, and Corona Productions of Edmonton produced The Naked Flame, a Doukhobor melodrama.

The Little Big Man shoot west of Calgary in 1969 was a turning point. Insiders suddenly clued in to the economic impact of the film industry. In the early 1970’s, the Peter Lougheed government opened the first film locations office in Canada, which was also one of the first in North America.

The location shoots landed in Alberta hot and heavy: more than 30 in the mid-1970s, including Buffalo Bill and the Indians (1975), Days of Heaven (1976), and Superman (1977). Attracted by long hours of sunlight, crisp, clean air (called “a cinematographer’s dream”) the lack of sales tax, and varied terrain, the visitors pumped direct and indirect dollars into the economy. Now, over 25 years later, nearly every province and state in North American has a film locations office.

Meanwhile, Alberta producers, who at that time were working mostly in documentary and sponsored films, formed the Alberta Motion Picture Industry Association.

Fil Fraser, now President and CEO of Vision TV, had the vision then to produce the bittersweet comedy Why Shoot the Teacher (1977) in Hanna, Alberta, and the historical Drama Marie-Anne (1978) on location at Fort Edmonton, both distinctive for their prairie perspective. Why Shoot the Teacher? set in Saskatchewan, captures the life of a prairie schoolteacher, while Marie-Anne (written by Marjorie Morgan) is the story of the first non-native woman in the Canadian west.

So what is wrong with this picture Wasn’t the industry thriving Yes, it was—but primarily on location shooting. Fil Fraser was an exception, not the norm.

What was missing was the Alberta voice. The Alberta film industry was serving only as backdrop to other cultures, including central Canada. Alberta producers joked about the “thousand dollar cup of coffee,” referring to the plane flight to Toronto for a meeting with a bureaucrat who believed the only projects worth funding came from Montreal and Toronto.

The Alberta government intervened. In 1981, the Alberta Motion Picture Development Corporation, the first provincial film-funding agency in English-speaking Canada, opened its doors for business. Headed by entertainment lawyer Lorne MacPherson, the AMPDC started as a development lending bank, expanded into partial equity financing, and in its 15-year existence, invested $16 million in Alberta projects. Other provinces followed. MacPherson, now an Alberta/Manitoba-based producer, says firmly, “There would be no provincial support for the film industry, had the government of the day not set up the AMPDC. It created an industry. People were able to set up production companies and get things done. The Telefilms of the world accepted that regional production was possible because the AMPDC existed. There is now no significant program, including the Canadian Television Fund, that does not have regional incentives, and that can be tracked back to the AMPDC and Peter Lougheed.” Political Alberta, embattled against central Canada, recognized the frustrations of cultural Alberta.

What made the AMPCD special was its foresight. The results were award-winning dramatic series television and features such as Loyalties (1985), written by Sharon Riis and directed by Anne Wheeler; Bye Bye Blues (1988), written and directed by Anne Wheeler; Primo Baby (1988), written and directed by Eda Lishaman; North of 60 (the highly successful series produced by Doug MacLeod and Tom Dent-Cox); and the Jake and the Kid series, produced by Great North Productions. Loyalties, in particular combined contemporary social issues with the images of a remote community. Where else but Alberta does a Ukrainian dancer spin and leap on a picnic table, in silhouette against a lingering northern sun, at a barbecue.

By 1996, the value of film production in Alberta had grown to $150-million, one third of which was made by Alberta owned and controlled production companies. Alberta writers, directors and producers like Anne Wheeler, Arvi Liimatainen, Pete White, Sharon Riis, Glynis Whiting and Andrew Wreggitt accumulated substantial credits.

Then, in 1996, the Klein government, resolving to remove itself “from the business of being in business,” closed down the AMPDC.

The results were disastrous.

According to the Repost of the Film Development Review Committee in September 1998, total production dropped to $50-million in 1997, and was a predicted paltry $15-million in 1998. Series like Mentors, produced by Margaret Mardirossian of Anaid Productions and Josh Miller of Mind’s Eye Pictures in Edmonton, considered moving to Saskatchewan.

Without provincial support to access national funding broadcasters, the Alberta film industry faded. Now the joke was the scramble to “catch the last bus to B.C.” as producers, crew and talent fled a province that could not sustain them professionally.

AMPIA, headed in 1998 by veteran documentary producer Dale Phillips, launched a massive camping to save the industry. On a hot day in July 1998, MLA Carol Haley, who, the previous month, had been appointed by Ralph Klein to head the Film Industry Review Committee, sat down to a round-table discussion with 50 key industry members. “It was 37 degrees out,” she recalls. “And it was hot inside the room, too. Families were splitting up because people were leaving to take jobs in other provinces. We realized we were still training people (in programs at SAIT, NAIT and MRC) and then they were moving to other provinces to do the work. It was illogical.” The MLA for Airdrie-Rocky View faced a daunting challenges. If any relief was to be included in the February 1999 budget, the recommendations had to be in place by the first week of September 1998.

“We didn’t stop working for 90 days in a row,” says Haley. While Dale Phillips and Doug MacLeod drafted the document, AMPIA board members, producers, writers, performers, directors, unions and related associations rallied. Part of the rationale was the power of personal contact: industry members were urged to meet with MLAs face to face, and share their stories.

Haley quickly understood the nature of the downward spiral. “Why make product in Alberta, if you can save 30 per cent doing it elsewhere?” But she needed to find an approach that would be convincing. “As part of our culture, our heritage and our arts community here, we had to look at ways to assist the industry in a similar fashion to the way in which we assist [the] Glenbow.” Suddenly, film was back in the arts category, after 15 years of being categorized as a business.

The government listened. In October 1998, the new Alberta Film Development Program was announced. The Alberta Foundation for the Arts administers the program, which will use $5 million a year from lottery revenues over a three-year period.

“I predict an explosion of activity here,” says Doug MacLeod of Bradshaw MacLeod and Associates, who soon had two shows shooting simultaneously: Bad Faith, a feature produced by Randy Bradshaw and Tom Dent-Cox for the A-Channel, and The Sheldon Kennedy Story.

“You can make a living here again,” says MacLeod. “The AFA program is not just about creating jobs, but also about ensuring that there is a continuing legacy, that something lives on after the program is shot. The residual value remains in Alberta.”

As President of AMPIA, Josh Miller predicts that the cultural and economic benefits of the AFA program will be apparent in 2000. “But,” he says, referring to the three-year timeline, “now we need to work toward a more permanent program. We don’t want to build up momentum, and fall off the precipice again.”

Why is it important to have a regional film and TV industry?
“We want the opportunity to do more than service work,” says Lance Mueller of White Iron Productions, a prolific production house and editing facility in Calgary. “We want a level playing field, one that would ensure that you are involved with intellectual property that you own, as opposed to being a service provider.”

Wendy Hill-Tout, who wrote and directed The Perfect Man (1992), a romantic comedy set in Calgary, says, “Every time I watch CBC, I see that, despite all the choices in the series that are produced, most reflect Toronto to Canada.”

“It’s interesting that the films that support the stereotype of the cowboy seem to be the ones that tend to get funded by non-western funding bodies,” says Josh Miller.

The Alberta personality is increasingly being represented on screens as something other than the western stereotype. For nearly ten years, Bruce Harvey of Illusions Entertainment has been churning out $2-million contemporary urban thrillers, mostly written by Calgarian David Schultz, and mostly independent of government funding. The last two, Silent Cradle and Question of Privilege, were set in Edmonton, which was perfectly fine with his European distributors. But Harvey is frustrated by the Canadian Television Fund guidelines—“people in Toronto deciding what is culturally significant.”

It’s important to have a local film industry so that we can tell our own stories in our own way. “If you only read the Globe and Mail,” says Governor General Award winner Schultz, “and didn’t have a local newspaper, you would be missing the experience of your community.”

What is an Alberta story?
Andrew Wreggitt, the award-winning screenwriter whose work includes In the Blue Ground, the North of 60 TV movie that drew over a million viewers in English Canada, says Jake and the Kid is as authentic to the region as North of 60. They both represent a regional perspective that echoes the Alberta experience. The Suburbanators, that oh-so-cool film from John Hazlett and James Gottselig of Red Devil Films, is also Albertan, with its images of disenfranchised youth wandering the suburban malls of Calgary. “When we were shooting, we could have turned the camera around and got a shot of the mountains,” recalls Hazlett, “but we were more interested in the parking lot.”

“The issue is not just telling Alberta stories,” says Joanne Levy, head of the A-Channel Drama Fund. “It is also being able to contribute to the body of Canadian cultural work.” Levy, who works closely with Alberta writers and producers, has supported projects as diverse as thrillers, an outdoor adventure (Grizzly Falls) and the provocative Heart of the Sun (1998), which deals with enforced sterilization. Levy has in development several little-known, Alberta-based stories, including a feature about the murders at the POW camp in Medicine Hat during the Second World War.

The A-Channel Drama Fund and the CFCN Production Fund are two sources of script development financing dedicated to the telling of Alberta stories by Alberta writers.

“What’s important about regional stories is that they should be on the national stage,” says Andrew Wreggitt. At the 20^th Banff Television Festival in June 1999 he talked about North of 60 and about his new series. “The characters are uniquely Albertan, but that doesn’t mean it’s parochial. The notion that any series set in Calgary would be about wheat fields is nonsense,” he says.

The cultural voice of a region is its strength, its way of communicating to itself and to others. Ultimately, just as people who know themselves well address others with assurances and authority, so it strengthens a society to have an articulated culture. We Albertans are a distinct, diverse, somewhat ornery breed. We don’t like to be pushed around, lectured, ignored, dismissed, or labeled as cow-pokes or rednecks. And one of the best ways to make sure that doesn’t happen is to share our stories.

Linda Kupecek was a Canadian correspondent for The Hollywood Reporter for ten years, and appeared as national film columnist on the CBC Newsworld Network in 1990. She played a supporting role in Marie-Anne, has served several terms on the Board of Directors of ACTRA, and currently sits on the Board of Directors of the Alberta Motion Picture Industries Association.

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