Directors Guild of Canada president Allan King says the guild’s basic production policy is to accommodate any and all Canadian projects.

This means adapting rates for low-budget shoots, ‘and finally, if the budget is so low that we can’t handle it, then indeed we allow our members to work it (with deferrals) providing they apply for dispensation to do so.’ On fully budgeted productions, dgc rates vary among provincial councils and are also tied to budgets.

Grievance procedures and production bonds are used to safeguard members’ interests, but King says the industry has matured considerably – even in the past five years – and there are fewer problems than in the past. ‘We are in the midst of intense negotiations (with producers) on residuals that are now five and six and eight years old,’ he says.

The dgc is a consistent and vocal defender of Canadian interests in the production and broadcasting industries.

King says the guild lobbies on behalf of its members in Hollywood and welcomes the American feature and tv production industry in Canada. ‘But it is also important that we preserve a place on the television dial and in the theaters for Canadian works. In the long term, a simple service industry won’t last. If the dollar goes up it will go away.

‘Secondly, if you don’t keep an original production capacity for original work, people lose their skills, they become very provincial and you can only get second-class work here.’

The guild is active on various national industry and regulatory issues including dth and Power DirecTv’s licencing application (‘We want to make sure there is the same broadband of Canadian and Quebec programming on dth as there is on cable’), and has filed interventions to the crtc on new tv licences in Alberta, Vancouver and, more recently, on the tva/CanWest application to convert ckmi-tv, which the dgc opposes in its present form.

‘In Alberta, our support went to that group which offered the most Canadian programming with the most budget attached to it, which in that case was Craig. Nothing against the others, it just seems to us that we serve our members best by making sure that the application which is going to supply the most money for Canadian telecasting is the one that gets the licence.’

The guild is especially concerned with censorship issues, says King.

It strongly opposed the v-chip initiative, and King says the v-chip promoters underestimated the complexity of censoring 100,000 hours of annual tv program production (compared to the 300 to 500 feature films shot each year). ‘How on earth would you screen it all?

‘Censorship is a dangerous thing. I would much rather see and hear the villains so I know where they are,’ he says.

The dgc and four other professional associations are lobbying Ottawa for changes to the Canada Television and Cable Production Fund rules and King says the guild should have a seat on the fund’s board (see brief, p. 23).

The high quality of dgc policy and regulatory briefs is in part due to the widely respected consultants hired by the organization: Paul Audley, who’s writing a new book on Canada’s cultural industries, and Peter Grant, a former crtc official and a communications specialist with McCarthy Tetrault.

Nationally, the dgc has close to 2,000 members made up of directors and their assistants, production managers and their assistants, location managers, editors and production designers.

The guild has councils in b.c., Alberta, Ontario, Nova Scotia and Quebec, with a new council in preparation for Saskatchewan.

King – whose credits include Who Has Seen the Wind? and Warrendale, a 25-year-old doc on disturbed children which tvontario will broadcast for the first time in Canada in January – recently directed an episode of The Inventors (Leonardo da Vinci) produced for David Devine. He has chaired the Ontario District Council for some six or seven years and has been national president for three years.