What would happen today if an English-Canadian filmmaker made a feature that not only wowed the critics but was also a hit at the box office? Would they declare a national holiday? Throw a ticker-tape parade on Parliament Hill? Rename the Film Centre in his honor?

Well, Ted Kotcheff made just such a film 30 years ago, yet the aftermath was nowhere near as celebratory. In fact, the director had to leave the country just to earn a living.

The Toronto-born Kotcheff was the helmer behind The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, recognized as the most popular English-Canadian feature of the 1970s.

The film represents a model that today’s producers should take to heart: great Canadian story + Canadian director + international cast = hit.

In adapting Mordecai Richler’s classic novel about a young man growing up in a Jewish Montreal neighborhood in 1948 who will stop at nothing to succeed, even at the expense of those closest to him, Kotcheff was able to assemble a top-flight cast. It included Americans Richard Dreyfuss, Randy Quaid, Jack Warden and Joseph Wiseman, along with Brit Denholm Elliott and Quebec’s Micheline Lanctot.

Kotcheff had been Richler’s flatmate in London in the late 1950s when both were 24 years old and the author wrote Duddy. Kotcheff thought it was the greatest Canadian novel ever written and bought the film option from his friend for $1.

The film, budgeted at $910,000, was produced by Montreal’s International Cinemedia Center with the participation of Welco United Canada, the Canadian Film Development Corporation (now Telefilm), Famous Players and distributor Astral Films. Private funds were also assembled from members of Montreal’s Jewish community.

The movie went on to snag the Golden Bear at Berlin and the special jury prize in Atlanta. Richler and Lionel Chetwynd were nominated for an Oscar for best screen adaptation, and producer John Kemeny was presented with an Etrog, the awkwardly titled ‘film of the year’ citation at the Canadian Film Awards.

And last year, the Audio-Visual Preservation Trust of Canada recognized Duddy as one of its Masterworks for its ‘unique cultural value.’

But, most importantly, audiences loved it. Kotcheff pegs Duddy’s domestic box-office haul at $2.5 million (1974 figures), and it also enjoyed runs in the U.S. and Europe. Although Kotcheff was paid a salary of only $20,000 to direct, he still receives a percentage of revenues from home video and DVD sales as well as TV airings.

The director, who already had five features under his belt as an ex-pat in England, Australia and the U.S., believed his future as ‘Canada’s Fellini’ was secure.

‘I thought, ‘Certainly when people see they can make money off me, they’re going to ask me to do another film,” Kotcheff recalls. (He was recently in town for the screening of a restored version of Duddy at the Toronto International Film Festival, and sat down with Playback on the 30th anniversary – to the day – of the first day of shooting on Duddy.)

So what happened when Kotcheff tried to mount his follow-up to Duddy?

Well, nothing.

Richler had written a script based on his Governor General’s Award-winning 1971 novel St. Urbain’s Horseman. The film was budgeted at US$4 million and Kotcheff had persuaded George Segal, hot off A Touch of Class, to star at a reduced salary.

The director recalls that he could have gotten public funding through the CFDC, but the problem lay in that the system required him to match that money with private investment. Harold Greenberg at Astral was again in his corner, but that wasn’t enough.

‘We could not raise the money,’ Kotcheff laments. ‘We had our begging bowl out and we went everywhere.’ He also approached England’s public funding agencies in the hopes of making the film a copro, as some of the action takes place in the U.K., but met with no success. The whole frustrating process continued for a year. Kotcheff was at a loss.

”What’s the matter with Canadians?” he recalls thinking at the time. ‘It wasn’t a question of supporting Canadian art or culture. It was strictly as a business. They could make money.’

Kotcheff then received an offer to go to Hollywood to direct Fun with Dick and Jane with Segal and Jane Fonda. He could hardly have turned the offer down, as it had been a while since he had collected a cheque.

And in the U.S. he would, for the most part, remain.

In the director’s estimation, the problem is simply that Canada does not have sufficient private sources.

‘In [the U.S.], you can go to the distributors – Warner Bros., MGM or Paramount,’ he explains. ‘When they give you the money, they give you the money, then they get the film. Here, it’s all paper chasing – a little bit of money here, a little bit of money there… And everyone struggles all the time.’

Kotcheff’s Hollywood career went on to include the popular features North Dallas Forty, First Blood, Uncommon Valor and Weekend at Bernie’s. But he would return to the Canadian system again in 1985 to make Joshua Then and Now, written by Richler from his own novel. Working with producers Robert Lantos and Stephen Roth on the $11-million feature showed little had changed.

‘Every time I was available, the money was not available, and when the money was available, I wasn’t available,’ he recollects. ‘The paper chase lasted for months.’

Yet Kotcheff still believes the industry here can only sustain itself through subsidies. The key, he says, is to back enough projects to keep craftsmen employed until a director with a potential commercial hit comes along.

‘You don’t have an industry unless you have cameramen, costume people, makeup people, props – [people who do] all the other crafts and trades that go into making a film,’ Kotcheff says. ‘You’ve got to have work for those people. If they don’t work, you’re finished. That’s what happened to the British film industry. [It] collapsed because all those people couldn’t get work. They all came to America or went somewhere else.’

Turning 72 this year, Kotcheff has not slowed at all, as he currently calls the shots as executive producer on the successful cop show spin-off Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. He says he is too busy overseeing scripts to do much hands-on directing, but he does plan to helm the series’ upcoming 100th episode.

And he has hopes to reenter the feature realm. He is very interested in directing the film version of Richler’s Barney’s Version, the rights to which are held by Lantos’ Serendipity Point Films. He and Richler had worked on a script before the author passed away in 2001.

Kotcheff reports that talks with Lantos have been on and off. But isn’t that the Canadian way?