City had just come on air in 1972 and I was struggling to stay afloat, relying heavily on something called The Baby Blue Movie – which ran Friday nights at midnight – to motivate viewers to search out Canada’s First Commercial uhf station (in a vhf world). Channel 79/Cable 7: What the hell is that!!? said the mass of tv watchers who had spent the previous 25 years getting used to channels 2-13.

I’d started the series off with a bang by ‘daring’ to run I am Curious Yellow, a notorious ‘art’ picture from Sweden that offered a little intellectualized nudity and had been the subject of a famous Supreme Court judgment in the usa.

But within weeks I had exhausted my thin stock of such ‘a’ titles in a genre which had yet to see the big-budget erotica of the late ’70s and ’80s and still relied heavily on 42nd Street trash and the occasional ‘better’ piece (sync sound, good-looking actors, some exteriors) from the legendary doyenne of tonier skin flicks, Ava Layton and her Audobon Pictures.

Anyways, I’m grinding through this crap, two projectors going at once, desperately looking for something showable, when in walks this guy Robert Lantos, from Montreal, who had just started a small exploitation film distribution company in partnership with an old McGill chum of mine, Steve Roth.

In his hand is a demo reel from a feature compilation of various short subjects that was then doing boffo box office in nyc – The New York Erotic Film Festival.

So, I watch it for a few minutes and, My God, find it funny, and even witty, with some not bad production values, so I turn to Robert and say, ‘Okay, I’ll buy it.’ ‘What do you mean you’ll buy it?’ he replies. ‘What do you mean, what do I mean? I’ll buy it!’ ‘Don’t you have a program committee to consult?’ ‘Nope. It’s just me and I’ll take it. How much do you want for it?’ ‘$6,000’, he answers. ‘Well,’ I say, ‘the bad news is that the budget for my station is $200 an hour. Whether I buy it or make it, it’s $200 an hour. Even if I knock myself out, I can’t give you more than 600 bucks.

‘But the good news is I’ll give you the money quickly.’ ‘Sold!’ he says, ‘but only if I can have the cheque right now.’

Fifteen minutes later he’s out of our old building at 99 Queen East and I think: Gee, I’ve never seen this guy before in my life and I haven’t actually checked with Steve, and now he’s gone with my money. I wonder if I’ll ever see him or the nyeff again?

The rest, as they say, is history. Lantos took my cheque, went straight back to the airport, bought a ticket to nyc and used the remainder of the money to actually put a down payment on, and so lock up the rights to, the film he had sold me.

That little company was called ‘Derma Communications’ (Derma means skin in Latin for those of you whose classical education was somewhat sketchy), and it was the mother of rsl which begat Alliance Productions which grew to become the Alliance Communications Corporation we know today.

For your next tribute to Robert, which I’m certain will follow on his first Oscar now that he is rededicating himself to the creative business of making movies, remind me to tell you the story of How I Organized A Small Orgy for Robert and I to take Robert’s mind off the imminent collapse of his first picture and his own bankruptcy the very next dayÉ

Moses Znaimer is president of Citytv.