4 - Wednesday, March 9, 1988 - North Shore News

WHEN WE finished supper,
I handed out the earmuffs.

“These,"' | explained, ‘‘are for
your cars."’

My wife knew of course what
they were. That is, she'd heard
about them although she had never
owned a pair.

We all tried them on and I made
a joke about how we looked like a
family of rabbits now.

Emily, being only three, was
delighted, but Willy saw through
the forced humor right away:

“‘Does this mean it's gonna be
super-cold, Dad?"’

remember, no doubt, and inflict
revenge someday.

I got talked into applying fora
residency as a charter student at
the new Canadian Institute for
Advanced Film Studies, and by
some amazing fluke, scored one of
the positions.

The catch was, I’d have to live
in you-know-where while attending
the institute. Talk about mind/
body dichotomy! Not that I have
anything against you-know-where,
other than that’s where the head
offices of all the Canadian banks
are, and I take that as an admis-
sion of some kind of guilt.

7 he Canadian film industry has been sputtering
and kicking over for a long time, but mostly you
still have to go south to make it. That might be

changing.’’

Indeed. Seriously. And for real.
Sorry.

He shook his head at me sadly,
not quite believing his misfortune.
Look at all this survival parapher-
nalia piling up!

We'd already bought the coats
and boots and mitts and gloves
and scarves, but without the ear-
muffs, I sensed we wouldn't make
it without the sustaining tissue-
death, even taking the Toronto
airport to our waiting rented house
in North York.

Oh,! would make it okay, being
of hardened Prairie stock. But my
wife and the kids? Not a chance.
They are soft! And when I say
“soft,’’ | mean, like plankton-
eaters.

For them, ‘‘frostbite’’ has been
aterm reminiscent of the sort of
words you find in nursery tales.
Now we arc all risking a mass case
of it.

It’s my fault. And the kids will

Being accepted at the film | in-
stitute means an opportunity for
me to icarn from such people as
Canadian filmmaker Norman
Jewison, who has been the driving
force behind the establishment of
this institute, the idea being, |
gather, to train a corps of pro-
ducers, directors and scriptwriters,
who will go forth and make Cana-
dian movies.

This is an ancient dream, mak-
ing Canadian movies. There have
been a few of them, But not that
many, relative to a country like
Australia, which has developed an
astonishingly successful movie in-
dustry of its own, while Canadians
have languished, somewhat, in the
shadow of Hollywood.

The persistent reader will have
gathered over the years that in
addition to my identity as an opi-
nion-monger and aspiring prose
lyricist, i have been dabbling in the
dark arts of television and movie
writing — indeed, even spending a

SCULPTURED NAILS

wee bit of time in L.A. along the
way.

This was supposed to be sinful
stuff. Kidney-shaped pools, etc.

As is a writer's destiny, howev-
er, mostly I sat around motel
rooms hunched over my word pro-
cessor day and night, only to see
the resulting blood-sweated script
end up in a binder ona shelf.

This is the way with movies, of
course. It’s casier to “age a war
than make a movie, it seems. And
sometimes, definitely, cheaper.

1 should have given up long ago,
but I have an ambitious wife and
the grandchild will be necding new
educational toys soon. And
besides, it’s the old zen trick: keep
pushing and straining and
scheming and driving and
ploughing and someday, who
knows?

In any event, something is
bound to rub off and I'll come
back home having learned a skill.
With a bit of luck, there will be
enough home-town movie work by
then to keep a mellow mogul off
the streets.

The Canadian film industry has
been sputtering and kicking over
for a long time, but mostly you
sull have to go south to make it.
That might be changing. Who
knows, indeed?

Sul Fexpect an interesting time.
It hasn't been dull so far ~ and
we're not even there. Toronto is in
the grip of a housing shortage, we
discovered, with zero vacancy
rates. This was the first hurdle.

If going to Toronto fram New-
foundland is called Going Down
the Road, we must be Going UP
the Road, I guess. Just temporari-
ly. And the North Shore News has

kindly offered to keep running this

column a couple of times a week,
So Il spy on the dreaded Cen-

tral Canucks, as well as learning

arcane mysteries and report back.
Ear-muffs? Geez, | dunno. @

So thin, and natural looking. $ 2999

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N. Shore stuck with plane noise

FEDERAL TRANSPORT Minister
John Croshie says there is no im-
mediate solution to the noise
pollution on the North Shore
caused by small aircraft, but
nevertheless referred the issue to
“the appropriate department of-
ficials for further consideration.”

Crosbie said in a letter to council
that because most aircraft are
designed in the United States
where noise certification standards
are not encouraged by federal
aviation agencies, ‘*Canada would
therefore have little success in at-
tempting to enforce such noise
standards without the support of
the international aviation com-
munity."

Crosbie said the existing fleet of
small civil aircraft have about 15
to 30 years of life remaining so
even if new designs emerge little is
likely to change for a while. How-

ever, new certification standards
are now being developed for
helicopters, Crosbie said.

The issue arose after a West
Vancouver group began a petition
to stop small aircraft from flying
over their homes. North Van-
couver City joined the campaign
and wrote to the minister in
November,

Crosbie said Vancouver has been
identified as a noise sensitive area
with a minimum flying altitude of
2,000 feet above sea level except in
bad weather.

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