When you read Mordecai Richler’s filmography on the Internet Movie Database, the unintended irony kicks the wind out of you like a lacrosse ball drilled to the shoulder blades.

You have to remind yourself that this is a movie-oriented site, focusing on people and their connections to film. Nevertheless, it still smacks you, this particular page. It has what it calls a ‘Writer filmography’ and here’s some of what it says:

Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, The (1974) (also book)

Joshua Then and Now (1985) (also novel)

Room at the Top (1959) (uncredited)

Life at the Top (1965)

Wild and the Willing, The (1962)

Give us a teeny little brake. Or, even better: LayapatchtothecornerandSCREECHtoahalt.com. It just doesn’t seem right – doesn’t seem sufficient – to have a reference to this film title, based on the author’s masterful novel, and then simply add, with no appropriate qualifiers, ‘(also book)’? ALSO BOOK???

Of course, this was not the site authors’ intention. But it does serve to draw attention to the importance of writers in the whole production mix. Not only did Richler divest himself of some of the finest writing around, but it is crackling, 150-proof, maple red Cancon, from one page to the next. From the delis, taxi stands and zaida wisdom of Duddy Kravitz to the Montreal Forum, production houses, bars and Laurentians of Barney’s Version, his delicious writing served up his neighborhoods like no other. Gritty, honest, uncompromising, and knocks-you-on-your-ass funny. (And you think, ‘Not like lacrosse this time, more like Rocket Richard’s slapshot,’ as if you’d know.)

And, as you can see from the above abridged ‘writer filmography,’ he wrote for Hollywood, too, and not even always for credit, although that ought to have been discouraged since credit is key.

In fact, on July 3, the same day Richler succumbed to cancer and probably started haunting the Main in Montreal, Quebec’s French directors association hung around at Telefilm Canada for an ‘informal’ meeting requesting changes to the Canada Feature Film Fund. They say directors and screenwriters should get a share of the fund’s reserved performance envelope.

In contrast to the Writers Guild of America, which recently jousted with producers in contract negotiations over the issue of the infamous director credit line, ‘A Film By,’ Canada’s French directors say ‘films are made by a team.’ They say directors work creatively with writers and producers, so why does the fund give only distributors and producers access to reserved performance envelopes?

Maybe the fund’s designers think anyone can write a screenplay, or a news release, or a marketing plan, or anything at all, for that matter. Maybe if they wrote Mordecai Richler’s filmography notes, they, too, would have added the pruney parenthetical footnote ‘(also book).’