Pierre DesRoches, one of the accomplished elder statesmen of Canadian public service, has surprised and saddened many in the production industry by announcing he will resign as head of Telefilm Canada June 1.

DesRoches, appointed executive director of Telefilm for a first five-year term in June 1988, had his contract extended by two years and it was to have run until 1995.

At the apftq, the Quebec producers association, executive director Louise Baillargeon says she was surprised to learn of the resignation. She says her members liked DesRoches: ‘Pierre stood up to defend private producers in Canada. We’ve had some disagreements with him, of course, but overall he was very, very committed to his job.’

DesRoches also found a ‘fairly big fan of Telefilm’ in Andy Thomson, president of the Alberta Motion Picture Industries Association, who says the news of DesRoches’ departure left him ‘saddened and disappointed.’ He gives DesRoches high marks for his work and says he found him responsive and approachable. ‘It’s been as well-managed and well-run an organization under Pierre as it’s ever been. I’m going to miss him.’

Although many media and industry observers link the timing of DesRoches’ resignation announcement to the fact that the agency has just dealt with administrative cuts of $1.3 million, DesRoches says the timing is coincidental. ‘I’ve been in many positions to manage cuts – I think I’ve done that all my life,’ he says, noting that a couple of jobs back, he served as executive vice-president of Radio-Canada. Furthermore, he was not expecting the Feb. 22 federal budget would slash Telefilm’s federal appropriation.

(Measures announced in the December 1992 Progressive Conservative budget translated into losses of $110 million to Telefilm over the five-year period following that budget. As Playback reported last spring, those cuts ‘carve deep into the corporation’s funds, programs and administrative expenses.’)

Specialty channels

DesRoches’ June exit is likely to coincide with crtc announcements as to which of 47 specialty, pay-tv and pay-per-view (??see Spicer speech) applicants will receive licences. With digital video compression set to galvanize the cable industry by year end and with the advent of interactive tv and technology convergence, the job of running Telefilm may evolve quickly.

He has suggested that with the many changes facing the television business, the person heading Telefilm needs a longer mandate than the year remaining in his contract. ‘We have to bring the corporation to yet another level of excellence. It will require some time; it’s perhaps a two- to three-year process, and maybe it’s better for someone new.’

That’s not to say that DesRoches agrees with those who say Telefilm should evolve out of existence, or with those who argue that market forces should determine which producers survive and which perish in Canada. DesRoches is unequivocal in supporting investments in Canadian films and television as indispensable investments in Canadian culture.

‘Generic programming’

‘The (entrepreneurial) dreamers feel we can do without Telefilm…But then you’ll get generic programming’ that could have been produced anywhere, for any audience. ‘We invested $6 million in (the Cite-Amerique production) Blanche because it’s for our own public.’ Anyone, he adds, can find an audience for pornography. But, ‘do you produce Love and Human Remains without support? Or smaller films like (I Love A Man In) Uniform? No. It’s an investment in our identity, in our culture.

‘Nothing Canadian will come out of free-reigning entrepreneurial spirit. It used to be there were more American programs available to Canadians than to Americans and this is the rationale for the existence of the television fund,’ he says.

In this, as in much that he has accomplished at Telefilm, DesRoches finds a supporter in Sandra Macdonald of the Canadian Film and Television Production Association. She says the federal government was ‘prudent’ to use Telefilm as a ‘guardian’ of money intended to support Canadian product on tv. She says the old Department of Communications had at one time considered giving the broadcast fund money directly to broadcasters, specifically the cbc. Some in the community still advocate this type of idea.

Well-conceived

But Macdonald says it would be a bad plan. She says the broadcast fund was well-conceived and is well-run. It has been, she reckons, ‘the most successful public policy initiative in the industry in the last 25 years.’ To give broadcast dollars directly to broadcasters would be ‘a disaster,’ in her view. ‘You would give up any right to say where that money would go. `Canadian programming’ encompasses too wide a range of things’ to guarantee good products in all programming areas.

Macdonald also agrees with DesRoches that two of the policy success stories of his administration are the production revenue sharing program and the loan guarantee program, which has been announced but not yet implemented. The loan program allows Telefilm to assess filmmakers’ business plans (like presales, distribution agreements, etc.) and, if acceptable, guarantee bank loans to certain limits so that bankers don’t have to learn the intricacies of the entertainment business and can feel comfortable lending money to producers.

While things may be in fairly good shape in Telefilm’s relationship with broadcasters, it hasn’t been as successful in building Canada’s feature film industry. Telefilm faced certain problems in the feature realm when DesRoches arrived in 1988, and he says ‘we still have them. In Canada, we don’t have the means to develop enough critical mass to fight the onslaught from the United States.’

Meantime, he says Telefilm is encouraging feature producers to find coproduction financing, both foreign and domestic. He says Telefilm has supported moves by the provincial funding agencies to smooth out policy differences which impeded interprovincial coproductions.

Who’s next?

Who should run Telefilm for the ’90s? On this, as usual, DesRoches is the consummate diplomat. Behaving as if still Canadian ambassador to la francophonie, he refers to the much-discussed ‘crisis period’ in Telefilm’s history prior to his arrival, as ‘a time of growing pains.’

His successor should feel less of that pain. DesRoches is confident he is leaving ‘one of the most efficient, most competent agencies in the world in the delivery of (film and tv) products.’ His successor, he says, should be intelligent, imaginative, a good administrator, a leader with the talent to hire the right people, and, of course, possessed of a really good sense of humor.