Marshall revisits Academy’s birth

I enjoyed reading about the 15th anniversary celebration of the Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television in the June 20 issue of Playback. The Academy has had a powerful role to play in the industry in Canada and has compiled an impressive list of accomplishments. The people who have run it these many years are talented and industrious professionals who deserve congratulations and gratitude from all of us.

Perhaps one of the ways we could show this gratitude is to improve the Academy’s Health Plan to cover treatment for group amnesia which has apparently stricken the leadership of the organization.

Anniversaries are for celebrating and for remembering. Wouldn’t it be a good idea to remember why we have an Academy? Wouldn’t it be useful to recall how we got an Academy? I don’t want to play the Ancient Mariner – or the albatross either – but let’s at least try to remember how we built the boat in the first place – and why we bothered.

When we first started making independent films and television in Canada (think 1976 and the Canadian Film Development Corporation starting to hand out actual production funds to people who didn’t work for the government institutions – truly a radical concept), a handful of us ponied up a few bucks for letterhead and called ourselves the Canadian Association of Motion Picture Producers and proceeded to learn how to produce while pretending we’d been doing it all our lives.

After a couple of years some of us had actually made a picture or two and thought so highly of the work we had produced that we wanted to get dressed up and get some ritzy awards. Maybe not real Academy Awards (although the performances Canadian producers delivered for potential investors were often Oscar-worthy) but something. Well, anything actually. So what about a Canadian Film Award? That would be pretty good. There actually were Canadian Film Awards. Big banquet every year in the Royal York Theatre. Wear a tux. Read a bilingual program and everything. Bit boring though.

Anyway, these Canadian Film Awards were given out by a jury chosen by a committee of soi-disant industry leaders. And they weren’t going to give it up. Why would they? Nobody ever does.

I made speeches about most other free countries having Academies which were run by the artists and crafts folk who actually made the shows, not the hangers-on or hangers-up. Juries of peers. Reckless, elitist ideas like that. No dice. Thanks for your thoughts. Not ready yet. Blah blah blah.

So the year rolls around to 1979 and the night the Academy was born. I sat there with Henk Vanderkolk, Richard Benner, Craig Russell, Hollis Maclaren, Paul Hoffert and George Appleby.

Our picture, Outrageous, had been a triumph in the u.s., won the most popular film award at the Berlin Film Festival and was on Variety’s weekly top-grossing film chart. Pretty big cheddars, we thought. Gonna take home a truckload of Canadian Film Awards.

The only thing we were worried about were our pals at the next table, the gang that had made Who Has Seen The Wind – Larry Herzog, Silvio Narrizano, W.O. Mitchell and their cast. Oh well, sharing a truckload with this crowd.

Right. Zip. Nada. None for them. None for us. I’m not going to tell you who won. Pretty good people. But not who you would have voted for. You could look it up.

That’s the night I went home empty-handed, having been well and truly butt-kicked by the Canadian Film Awards committee. I must confess that in those days I was less patient, less kind and more arrogant than I am today.

Vanderkolk and I were producing pictures and also the Festival of Festivals (Toronto International Film Festival to you now). So began a year of back-stabbing, coercion, threats, skullduggery and sleight of hand. And the other side wasn’t all that nice either.

But we got actors like Al Waxman and Michael Wincott, directors like Julieus Kohanyi, Allan King and Don Shebib, pros like Richard Leiterman, Paul Hoffert and George Appleby, all the producers and a bunch of friends of the festival, and one year later we had an Academy and control of the industry’s accolades, in the hands of the artists and professionals for the first time. And that was worth doing. Mind you, I still never managed to win an award, an Etrog or a Genie.

william marshall,

toronto.