Welcome to Playback’s annual Year in Review spectacular. This issue, we look back on a year marked by the production industry waiting with quiet anxiety to see if business would recover from a trouble-plagued 2001 and regain the record success of Y2K. The evidence indicates we’re a ways off.

But 2002 was not all gloom and doom. The year had its share of feel-good stories, tales of the underdog, stories of David slaying Goliath. Take Drew Craig, our Person of the Year (see story, p. 17). Craig rocked the Canadian broadcasting foundation when the CRTC awarded his company – and not the well-entrenched competition – with what is considered southern Ontario’s last available conventional frequency.

Canuck filmmakers also told stories of our sneered-at, written-off Everyman. A look at 2002’s Top 10 Canadian Films at the box office (p. 20) shows that moviegoers like such yarns. Les Boys III, about a ragtag group of unlikely Quebec hockey heroes, and Men with Brooms, about a ragtag group of unlikely Ontario curling heroes, grabbed the year’s number one and two spots, respectively.

The Les Boys franchise continues to do brisk business relying almost exclusively on the francophone Quebec market. But the intentions behind Alliance Atlantis’ and Serendipity Point Films’ Men with Brooms were more ambitious. This was supposed to be Canada’s The Full Monty, our international breakout. While it doesn’t stand to become that, as small numbers in the U.S. can attest, it performed well at home, taking in around $4 million.

Distributor Alliance Atlantis should nonetheless get ‘A’ for effort. Backed by a $1.5-million P&A campaign and a slew of well-placed ads airing on broadcast partner CBC, Men with Brooms enjoyed a wide release on 213 screens across Canada. That the film apparently won’t travel suggests that maybe it’s just too much of a Canadian thing, like poutine or beavertails.

What instead could have been our Full Monty was My Big Fat Greek Wedding, hands down the worldwide sleeper hit of the year. Here is a film featuring a script and lead performance by a Canadian, Nia Vardalos, and one that shot in Toronto with a largely Canuck cast and crew. I would go further to say that the film’s workmanlike helming by veteran TV director Joel Zwick, with all due respect, could have been emulated by a number of Canadian talents.

My Big Fat Greek Wedding, a US$5 million American indie copro, has so far reaped US$200 million at the American box office, £12.7 million in the U.K. and $26 million here in Canada for distrib Equinox Films. Just think – the domestic take of this film alone would satisfy the annual share Telefilm executive director Richard Stursberg wants to see from all English-Canadian productions towards reaching the 5% goal by 2006 (see story, p.1).

It would be silly to attack Canadian producers for not recognizing the marketability of one of our own talents or for failing to see how this property – Vardalos’ one-woman show – could have been adapted (on the same budget as Men with Brooms) into a blockbuster success. Hindsight is 20/20, and in the words of legendary screenwriter William Goldman, in the film biz ‘nobody knows anything.’

What we do know from My Big Fat Greek Wedding is that Canada does possess the talent and technical savvy to make the whole world laugh, cry, and most importantly, ring the cash register. Maybe we’ll get it next time.