It’s hard to imagine where films like Titanic, Toronto-filmed Good Will Hunting or The Sweet Hereafter would be without strong publicity and marketing machines behind them. However, for many years in Canada, publicity was viewed almost as a superfluous part of filmmaking. For most producers, working with a skimpy budget, publicity often fell into the ‘Nice-if-you-can-afford-it’ category.

Often, it wasn’t until after the film had been made that the need for a press kit, photos, electronic press kit and someone to pitch the project to the media became glaringly obvious – and usually that was too late.

Fortunately, times are a-changing, and Canadian publicists are pleased – although many still struggle with low budgets and insufficient time to do their jobs right.

In contrast to Canadians, American filmmakers have long known the importance of a strong marketing campaign with the right material to back it up.

Karen Pidgurski, a longtime Toronto unit publicist, chooses to work mostly on American feature films, because, she says, ‘Americans deal with you as a real member of the crew. I’m brought on at least two weeks before production starts and I’m with that production all the way through. They take it very seriously, so it’s a wonderful job.

‘Canadian filmmakers are more and more taking this approach, but still tend to only want someone on staff for a very short period of time – which I think is detrimental to marketing down the road.’

‘Producers now know they have to put money into publicity, which they didn’t know 10 years ago,’ says Genevieve Kierans, a longtime Toronto publicist, who spent the last two years working on FX: The Series. ‘But even now, if they have to cut back on their budget, publicity is where they tend to cut.’

Tight budgets tend to be even more of a problem in television and small independent Canadian films than feature films.

‘Unless a producer knows the importance of unit publicity, they find it hard to justify,’ says Leri Davies, an independent Vancouver publicist who does both unit and broadcast publicity for independent films and television. ‘On a tight budget, publicity is the first thing to go – although with Telefilm projects, some budget for publicity is required.

‘Most Canadian producers can’t afford to pay a publicist full time, so many are juggling a couple of projects at once,’ says Davies. ‘And with publicity, it’s very rare that you’ve done everything you could possibly do – you could work all the time, but you’re bound by the deadline and the amount of money they pay you.’

‘One of the problems is you can’t quantify what your efforts have reaped,’ says Jill Spitz, who has done unit publicity for The Rez, Life & Times and Witness.

‘Especially doing unit publicity, you might not be appreciated. Sometimes it can be almost adversarial on the set because getting the filming done is the top priority. So you have to do your job without being a nuisance.

‘If you come to a project after it’s wrapped [to do launch or broadcast publicity], you’re welcomed because everyone knows they need you.’

In Canada, only b.c. publicists are unionized. Therefore, all iatse projects are required to use only iatse publicists – a situation that has helped b.c. publicists counter the tendency for some American producers to bring their own publicists up to Canada. However, in other parts of the country, u.s. publicists working on Canadian-filmed shoots is still fairly common.

‘I’d like to see Immigration make it tougher for American publicists to work here,’ says Pidgurski. ‘We now have an extremely good base of publicists that have worked on large productions.’

Prudence Emery, a veteran Toronto publicist with 85 films to her credit, including Naked Lunch, Crash and Good Will Hunting, agrees. ‘We can’t work in the States, unless we pay a couple of grand, go through a big song and dance and pay lawyers. But they come up here and Immigration gives them work permits anytime. A lot of Americans come up here to work. In fact, there is an American in town who got a film I would have liked to have done. But I don’t make a fuss because I’m working all the time anyway.’

Another complaint some Ontario publicists have is that with iatse in place in b.c., it can even be difficult for out-of-province publicists to work there.

‘It is strange that Americans can come up here and work, yet within our own country, there seems to be a problem with whether Ontario people are welcome to work in b.c.,’ says Nancy Manoogian, senior publicist with SPI-Special Projects International, Toronto, which has worked on Due South, Road to Avonlea and Once a Thief.

Despite these concerns, publicists outside of b.c. have not reached a consensus on whether a union would be in their best interest.

While some see a union as a positive step, offering strength in numbers, standardized pay and benefits, some hesitate at potentially being limited to iatse projects and possibly being categorically grouped with publicists of different levels of experience.

As the Canadian film industry has been growing, so has the work for publicists – and so has the number of people hanging out a sign saying ‘Publicist for hire.’ Although this has created more competition for work and some publicists do complain of young, hungry upstarts charging as little as a third of the going rate, most established publicists maintain they are unconcerned.

‘There’s a healthy competition right now in Toronto,’ says Kierans. ‘There’s so much work that everyone can be kept busy.’

Joanne Smale, president of Joanne Smale Productions, which does broadcast, film launch and film festival publicity, agrees. ‘Competition is healthy. It means if we’re too busy someone else can do it. There’s a nice camaraderie out there – generally we work together, pass on information to another publicist. Some people enjoy working in documentaries, others features, some might excel at broadcast and others in theatrical sensibilities.’

For broadcast publicists, competition takes on a different meaning as the multi-channel universe continues to expand.

‘We’re all calling the same newspaper and magazine editors all the time,’ says Tamara MacKeigan, a cbc publicist who has also worked in independent publicity. ‘It’s just getting more and more competitive with the growing number of tv channels.’

Amidst the issues and concerns, the business of publicity in Canada, like the film industry itself, is growing and growing up – and garnering the respect that maturation entails.

‘There is so much production going on here and that makes our business healthy,’ says Smale. ‘However, even when a film starts off with a decent publicity budget, as they get deeper into production, they tend to cut it. So, please, to all producers – don’t cut out publicity!’