Local filmmaker Michael Sparaga was looking to come up with some extra material for the DVD release of his feature film debut, the independently produced superhero flick Sidekick. Instead, he found a whole new movie.
Sparaga took Sidekick on a cross-Canada tour in April 2006 and, while traveling across the country, decided to ask people about their views toward Canadian film on the whole. What he found opened his eyes and formed the basis for a new project, Maple Flavour Films, which is slated to premiere at the 2008 Canadian Filmmakers Festival next week.
“I went out and asked people what they thought about Canadian English-language film and I kind of expected everyone to say that they hate Canadian movies,” he said. “Across the country, what I kept hearing, though, was people saying they really liked them.”
While that came as a surprise to the North Toronto writer/director, the discovery came with a very large – and very unfortunate – catch.
“When I pressed people further about Canadian films, most people didn’t even know one,” Sparaga said. “Why say you like something if you don’t know any?”
As a filmmaker himself, the news was obviously unsettling to Sparaga, who found Canadians’ lack of knowledge over their own film industry daunting.
“I actually wouldn’t have cared if people were saying negative things about the industry,” he said. “If people are bad-mouthing something, at least they’re talking about it.”
Sparaga has some ideas as to why Canadians are so often oblivious as to the films being produced in their own country. The problem, he said, stems from Canadian filmmakers’ own opinions as to what makes for a ‘Canadian’ movie, and how that differs from the tastes of the general public.
“Hollywood concentrates on (drawing audiences of) young boys, but we declare ourselves more of an art house country,” he said. “The thing is, the big, wide release movies in the U.S. finance their production of independent films. We don’t have that; we’d rather say, ‘At least we didn’t have to sink to making The Mighty Ducks.'”
Sparaga said his solution is for Canada to start funding and producing more films that are, if not big-budget blockbusters, perhaps more a form of entertainment for entertainment’s sake. While he enjoys a profound art house film as much as anyone, Sparaga acknowledges the need to meet audiences halfway.
“You can’t deny what the public is saying, and if you look at box office, it’s pretty clear what they’re saying,” he said. “Unlike most of the world, we fund our country’s films through our tax dollars. The industry should give people what they’re paying for and not just (cater to) niche groups.”
While Maple Flavour Films takes various facets of the Canadian film industry to task, it stops short of pointing fingers. Rather than laying the blame at the feet of distributors, producers or funding agencies such as Telefilm, whose mandate is to develop and promote the Canadian audiovisual industry, the movie is more an in-depth investigation into the industry.
“I don’t want this to come across as me making fun of something when it’s hurting or kicking something when it’s down,” he said. “I don’t want people to think it’s an attack on Canadian filmmakers or on Telefilm. Telefilm developed my superhero movie, and they’re developing my Bigfoot action movie.”
If anything, Sparaga hopes to help uncover and tackle some of the issues that have led to Canadian films sagging in popularity even locally. To that end, the film’s premiere will spark a panel discussion featuring top industry professionals and moderated by noted Canadian film critic Richard Crouse.
Considering that Sparaga has screened Sidekick to sold-out audiences across Canada, he is surprisingly anxious about his latest venture, perhaps because it will premiere before many of the Canadian film industry’s movers and shakers.
“I’m nervous as hell, and when I was talking to Richard (Crouse) about it, he said, ‘I’ve done panels before, so don’t worry,'” Sparaga said. “So great, now I only have to worry about the world premiere of my film, not about the hour afterward.”
Maple Flavor Films will premiere at the Carlton Cinemas, 20 Carlton St., at 3:30 p.m. on Wednesday, March 26 as part of the Canadian Filmmakers’ Festival. For more information on the film, visit www.grindstonemedia.com. For tickets to the screening or information on the film festival, visit www.canfilmfest.ca.
VANCOUVER — When Steven Kerzner was 14, he put on his slightly-too-small bar mitzvah suit, grabbed a briefcase he found in his house, and took the bus over to the tiny local community television station in his Toronto neighbourhood. He walked in, pitched a show called Let’s Talk, and was hired – as a volunteer – on the spot.
By the time he was 18, Kerzner was running the station. In the meantime, he had created several shows and personas – including Ed: a mouthy, cigar-toting, politically incorrect sock puppet.
Ed the Sock is now a bona fide TV star, having made the leap from community to mainstream television in 1994. Guests of Ed’s Night Party (now Ed & Red’s Night Party) have included Christina Aguilera, Hilary Duff and Coldplay.
The red carpet Ed now frequents seems a very long way from the threadbare studios of Newton Cable, but community TV was integral to Ed the Sock’s creation. “It was a great opportunity to have all these toys there to play with, without the commercial pressures that are there now,” says Kerzner, 40. “We could go and play around and have fun and see what worked and learn … without there being [the] pressure of being graded for it.”
This week, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission is considering removing the requirement that community channels remain on basic cable as part of a sweeping review of broadcast distribution regulations. The public hearings began Tuesday in Gatineau.
Alarmed by the possible disappearance of community television, where he spent more than 30 years as a volunteer, Richard Ward of the Community Media Education Society has written to the CRTC, urging it not to expel community TV from basic cable.
While Ward acknowledges that the issue is just a tiny part of the CRTC’s review, the overall discussion about deregulation has him worried. “We have got distinctly Canadian things to say and the community channel [has] the broadest reach of all of the parts of Canada’s broadcasting system,” he said from Calgary. “I think it’s prudent to be on guard, even if the threat is not directed primarily at the community channel. I don’t think you wait until everyone else has been destroyed before you speak up.”
In probably the most documented rise from community television, Tom Green went from hosting a show on Rogers Cable 22 in Ottawa to The Comedy Network in Canada to MTV in the United States. The Tom Green Show – part talk show, part gross-out prankfest – made him a star.
Like Kerzner, Green was an early community television volunteer, starting when he was 15 at Rogers 22’s predecessor, Skyline Cable, learning lighting, camera and reporting. He vividly recalls seeing himself on TV for the first time, reporting for the station’s news program about an earthquake fault in Ottawa. “I remember just being completely amazed when it aired,” he says. “I was sitting at home watching it on my television and I just literally couldn’t believe that I was able to sort of volunteer there and then be on TV, on real TV.”
Times have changed: Tiny stations like Skyline and Newton Cable have been swallowed up by conglomerates like Rogers and Shaw. And thanks to regulatory changes introduced in 1997, advertising is now allowed. Nowadays, much of what’s on community television is slick, professionally produced programming. Fourteen-year-olds aren’t running the show any more.
Take Reel to Real: The Rogers-produced film review program is a community-TV hybrid, the hosts are paid freelancers, a Rogers-employed staff person runs the show and volunteers do the technical work.
The show, in its 15th season, attracts A-list guests like George Clooney, Halle Berry and Jerry Seinfeld. Only once in recent memory has it been denied a big-name guest because it was a “community TV” show (the U.S. publicist’s decision was reversed, and the guest, ironically Canadian music producer Daniel Lanois, did ultimately appear).
Reel to Real has made a celebrity of co-host Richard Crouse, who has parlayed the gig into other projects, including books (his sequel to The 100 Best Movies You’ve Never Seen, called Son of The 100 Best Movies You’ve Never Seen, comes out in September) and a just-launched radio show.
“We’re on a low number on the dial in the biggest TV market in the country,” Crouse says. “It’s created a loyal following for us.”
Being low on the dial is key, Ward believes, to community television’s survival. “A lot of people still watch television as opposed to watching a particular show,” he says. “They flip through the dial [and] when they pass the community channel, a surprising number of them stop there.”
It can be surprising indeed to discover how many people have seen a particular community-TV show episode. Ed the Sock’s public access tipping point came the night actor Robert Vaughan, who was in the area doing dinner theatre, was a guest. The former star of The Man From U.N.C.L.E. seemed furious at Ed’s questions, and the segment created all kinds of buzz. “Nowadays it would be all over YouTube,” Kerzner says. “But in those days, people just videotaped it and took it to their friend’s house and it sort of spread and from there it kept going.”
So in the age of YouTube, is community television still needed?
Steve Anderson, the co-ordinator for the Campaign for Democratic Media, says yes. “Most people still get a lot of their news and information from TV despite the Internet,” says Anderson, who is also a graduate student in communications at Simon Fraser University. “Also, the Internet is a very global medium whereas community television … is locally focused, locally produced and locally watched.”
And for people starting out in TV, Green says, an online forum can’t possibly replace a hands-on experience. “At the end of the day, if you go down and volunteer at a public access television station, there’s a lot of people there who are really passionate about television and they’ll teach you a lot of stuff,” he says. “You wouldn’t really be able to learn any of that kind of stuff on your own just sitting at home putting clips on YouTube.”
Green, who this year launched a new show, Tom Green’s House Tonight (The Comedy Network), says he used the skills he learned from community television to create the program. “I wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing now if it wasn’t for that,” he says. “If I hadn’t picked up all that stuff on the way at Rogers Cable, I wouldn’t have even known where to start.”
The British Commonwealth spelling of the word “flavor” is your first clue that we aren’t in Kansas anymore. Actually more like Toronto, the home base of Canadian filmmaker Michael Sparaga, whose documentary Maple Flavour Films premiered on Wednesday, March 26th at the Canadian Film Festival.
The premise of Sparaga’s directorial debut is simple but intriguing as it commingles interviews with industry folks and critics alongside those of average men and women on the street to determine the temperature of Canadian moviemaking. Since there are far fewer well-known movie critics in Canada than there are in the U.S., Sparaga felt it imperative that his doc feature one Richard Crouse.
“The lists of professional folks we wanted to talk to were pretty short, and we pretty much got everybody we wanted right off the bat,” Sparaga tells Excalibur, a newspaper published by his Toronto Alma Mater, York University. “I mean, Richard Crouse specifically has the longest running movie review show in Canada, Reel to Reel, and he’s pretty much the only personality that’s recognizable as a critic. So, it just felt like a natural [choice] to talk to him and get him involved.”
Perhaps the most intriguing revelation of Sparaga’s research is the lessons English Canada needs to learn from French Canada, a.k.a. Quebec. Although the perception in the former is that French-Canadians embrace all cinematic offerings in their native language, it’s actually more a matter of a standard preference for high-concept action and comedy.
“Those [high-concept] movies do better because they’re made for audiences, and that’s what English Canada has to realize, that we can’t rely on Away From Her,” Sparaga suggests. “We can’t rely on a drama to be the engine of our box office. A one-million-dollar box office success is not successful at all. It’s successful for a drama, and for the style of film it is, but it can’t be everything we’re betting on that year at the cinema.”
Further confirming Sparaga’s views is the fact that the recent 2007 Canadian film Silk, despite the presence of Keira Knightley in the lead, failed miserably at the box office because of its murky 19th century narrative. Conversely, he suggests that even though the Mike Myers films Wayne’s World and The Love Guru were made by Paramount Pictures, their maker and narratives easily tip them over the 49th parallel.
“The Love Guru is about a guru who comes back to Toronto to help the Toronto Maple Leafs win the Stanley Cup,” Sparaga notes. “That’s going to be the most Canadian movie this year, I guarantee it. It’s a hundred times more Canadian than Eastern Promises. I still think Titanic is more Canadian than Eastern Promises.”
Local filmmaker Michael Sparaga was looking to come up with some extra material for the DVD release of his feature film debut, the independently produced superhero flick Sidekick. Instead, he found a whole new movie.
