4 - Friday, December 11, 1987 - North Shore News 4 Bob Hunter @ strictly personal ® MARTIN KNELMAN’S book, Home Movies, Tales From The Canadian Film World, isn’t really a book. Rather it is a series of flashforwards and flashbacks, a loose, rambling extended magazine feature, part news, part gossip, always erudite and opinionated. All in all, who cares if the for- mat isn’t linear? My old print reflexes make me want to suggest that the next time, Knelman orga- nize his material a trifle more se- quentially. But the point is, I hope there is a next time. It would be dandy if publisher Anna Porter put out a Knelman updater every few years. As a writer who has been pe- ripherally involved in the Byzan- tine Canuck film industry for sev- eral years, {! read Knelman’s fascinating multiple-snapshot of show biz in our land with an eye for the names of the players, a few of whom I know. But for anybody it would be a damn good read. Educational too. The next time you step into, say, a Cineplex Odeon ‘theatre, you would understand something about the political wars that have raged around the question of who con- trols the theatres, where Canadians spend $1 billion a year, and how, for. the moment, at least this one major chain is in the hands of a Canadian. c The story of how Garth Drabin- sky turned the tables onthe Yanks and started buying up theatre chains in the’ U.S. makes your blood bubble with pride. ' Until Drabinsky came along, it was considered normal that the BCAA. largest chains of movie theatres in Canada were controlled by foreign devils. This of course meant that what Canadians saw was being dictated not so much by distant cultural czars as distant bandit chiefs, jocated in Hollywood, cach with their own vertically-integrated fiefdom, from studio lot to pop- corn machine. The billion a year that was being siphoned off from Canada into Hollywood’s pockets, with scarcely a penny being put back into local movie production, is the lodestone around which Knelman’s chronicle of the “superstar wars’’ between Canada and the United States revolves. ft is a bizarre fact of life that Canadian acting talent has long since fouud a way to co-opt the American movie industry, namely by posing as Americans. Just as nobody realized until recently that little old Canada was America’s largest trading partner, and therefore a rather big deal, trade-wise, few Canadians ap- preciate yet what a cultural ‘‘fifth column"’ impact we have had on TVscreens and movie screens alike south of the border. This is my interpretation of Knelman’s material, by the way, not his. His main point is that the approved Canadian movie industry, after having been crushed repeatedly as a result of pressure from Hollywood, stands on the verge of being risen, hallelujah! Ah, but, the tale is a cliff- hanger, because the wars ain’t over. Canadian stars may tread the screens of the globe as a result of having sneaked into the American studios, disguised as American directors, actors and producers, but a single blunder by the federal government could still kill the perennially-budding home movie industry. So stay tuned. { hate to have to say this, but Knelman’s effort is hopelessly Toronto-centric. It tells us nothing about British Columbia’s — or any other province’s — film world. My only other complaints with Knelman’s effort are nii-picks. Why was William Shatner, proba- bly the most famous Canadian ac- tor of them all, thanks to his Srar Trek roles, not even mentioned? The account of the battle to film writer Ted Allan’s movie about Norman Bethune is somewhat un- fair, I think. As Knelman presents it, ‘hungry’? Montreal producer Pieter Kroonenburg horned in on the deal after a score of more no- ble producers like Norman Jewison and John Kemeny had fallen by the wayside. I don’t think that gives Kroonenburg enough credit. Dur- ing a stint in Hollywood, J worked with both Kroonenburg and Allan on another project and know that | To all our Customers Friends + mal A.R.A. certified Kroonenburg was the driving force sustaining Allan, and that he was almost as obsessed as the aging writer himself. With the shooting of Bethune this year in China and Montreal, Knelman makes clear, the Cana- dian movie industry has moved in- to a new phase in its power strug- gle with its old nemesis, Hollywood. It is not just a coincidence, he suggests, that there is ‘a surprising new trend” in the traffic between Hollywood and Toronto. The Canuck superstars are coming home to roost. And that may mean a change really is happening. 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