But not on this blog, Nellie. Oh no. That's why when people send me their whinges about "why do you have to write so long?" I come back with the standard retort: "because I don't have enough time to write it short."
The subject of the looming WGA strike came up today. I know it's probably the thing that's boiling and roiling and causing everyone to frock themselves in the Southland, but luckily, those of us in the genteel-er northern climes, with our cold weather and strong currency, where actors strike yet keep working -- approach the impending labo(u)r unrest down south with a peculiar mix of train wreck fascination ("O My God it's not going to affect me!") and pique, ("What, no HOUSE?)
In talking about the last strike, the '88 strike, my Border colleague David Barlow said something extraordinarily smart. See, we were talking about the occasional big plans and big dreams of Canadian creatives, and the idea that, hey, if there's a strike, who knows, maybe -- just maybe -- you could have your Canadian show make a sale to a U.S. Network. They'll have to buy something, after all.
Barlow related a funny tale of the last time the writers ankled, and it basically confirmed what I thought already. He said that when the strike started in 1988, there were calls -- lots of them. And interest. Lots of it. "What are you doing, what have you got? Oh yeah, interesting, interesting."
It lasted precisely the length of the strike. Once the strike was over -- crickets.
Now, that may seem like an obvious turn of events. But it's not to many creatives in this country. That golden goose-- the U.S. sale! is like the siren song calling many to the rocks. I've sat in meetings with producers as they talked up the potential of the U.S. sale that would never come.
The U.S.A. has, with reason, the most motherfucking confident culture in the world. A quirky Canadian show like Slings & Arrows can slip through on a small cable outlet because it's cheap, and has a different sensibility. But that aint network, folks.
The Canadian industry, therefore, has been traditionally split into two camps. The Capulets and the Montagues.
The Montagues love U.S. programming. They try to come up with concepts that have inherent "U.S. appeal." They try to create homegrown versions of shows that play in the U.S.A. They want cop shows, lawyer shows, broad-based comedies that could be just like American shows. They also want to do movies that are like this.
And who can blame them? Our box office receipts are counted every Sunday night as part of the domestic U.S. box office. We get the same shows, at the same time, as the U.S. networks. Yeah, we get them from Canadian networks, but let's face it -- that's mostly in name only. We gorge ourselves on U.S. programming. Same as the Yanks.
And yet...that eats away at us. Some of us, anyway. More of them in a minute.
One of the great problems of the Canadian mindset, observed in over thirty years now of living here, is that Canadians consider themselves the leading world experts on Americans. And in many ways, they are. They consume the same culture, they see the same films, they watch the same shows at the same times -- but the obsessions are not the same. The ... climate ... is not the same.
Three small examples:
- My parents (lovely people) are, in the usual way of parents, a little more conservative than me. But a few years ago they retired. They now spend half the year in Florida. They're disoriented, frequently, by how little they people around them see on the news. How much stories lack the larger world perspective, or give in to simplistic notions of fear. They find themselves having to bite their tongue when talking of the world. That is not a state that comes naturally to New Yorkers, but years in Canada means that they manage. They just didn't think it was something they'd have to do once they went back.
- When I was in High school and University, I lived with, laughed with, and loved a number of Canadians who were, at root, kind of anti-American. Some of these people later moved to the States -- some for love, some for money, some for school. To a one, every single person came back less Anti-American than they left. Why is that? Well, if you want to know the leap I make, it's this: the media that they consumed -- their primary view of Americans, showed a narrow side. Once they were among them, they saw a fuller picture. And that picture created dissonance.
- When I worked in Cape Town, South Africa, three years ago, it was the middle of the summer before the U.S. Presidential Election. It was an interesting experience. South Africa is far more influenced by the British cultural axis, than the American. I didn't read an American magazine for almost five months and it nearly did me in. Every conversation I had with South Africans eventually turned to U.S. presidential politics -- once they found out I was from the States. But the funny thing was seeing how they reacted to the Canadians. Because the Canadians were constantly trying to affirm how different they were from the Americans. But from the perspective of the South Africans, they didn't see that much of a difference at all. That made the Canadians livid. Besides bar conversations, there were also tons of five and ten year old Canadian shows on South African TV. And the funny thing was, though the people I talked to (all TV people, natch) didn't see that many differences between Canadian and Americans, they were able to spot the difference between Canadian and American TV shows. The Canadian TV shows they saw, they saw because they were a lot cheaper to buy than the equivalent American shows. And they said that they seemed a lot like the American shows, except...slightly.....OFF
The Montagues dream desperately of that U.S. sale. Of making a show that gets sold to the U.S.A. and takes them places. They do things that they think will appeal to the American market. And they never do. At best, the Brits, who are probably the best at exporting English language cultural product to the Americans, know that the best example is to sell the format -- hence, All in the Family, Three's Company, The Office.
Sure, the original might run on BBC America. But the glory, if the glory comes, goes to the remake.
Canadians make a lot out of talking about how "we produce comedians," etc. Mark Farrell talked about this on a Canadian TV podcast. The reality is that those who succeed are those who leave and embrace the American sensibility wholeheartedly. Mike Myers. Will Arnett. John Candy. Dave Foley. Jim Carrey. Paul Shaffer. Dan Aykroyd. Samantha Bee. Jason Jones. Andrea Martin. Rick Moranis. Dave Thomas. Martin Short. Phil Hartman. The list goes on.
One of the stories of this fall is the number of Brits on U.S. TeeVee. You have Kevin McKidd (Journeyman,) Michelle Ryan (Bionic Woman,) Damian Lewis (Life,) and that's not counting those who preceded the trend, like Jamie Bamber on Battlestar Galactica or the great Hugh Laurie on House.
See, those who are good -- who can really, really play American -- the U.S. readily embraces. Nobody cares if so and so is British or American, so long as you can play an American convincingly. That is the mark of a confident culture.
The mark of truth for me comes when you watch British TV and you see the actors who stay behind, who are asked to play American. They suck. Almost universally.
The only thing, for me, marring the otherwise excellent Jekyll, were the characters who were supposed to be American. They were over-the-top caricatures. They didn't convince me, to the extent they took me out of the story. Same with MI-5, (except for Tom's CIA G.F. in Season 1, who was U.S. Born) and any number of Brit shows that drew from British based, British talent to play American. It doesn't matter how much they studied, or tried, they weren't the ones who went and embraced the culture full bore by moving there... they didn't get the thing fully. They were... OFF.
The people here who dream of U.S. sales, of making shows that appeal to U.S. audiences and who will "get a U.S. sale" -- who think that somehow, some way, their take on a concept that you would see on U.S. TeeVee will fly -- well, they're Montagues.
There's a long history of Montagues in the Canadian industry. Some are Canadian. Some are Canadians who went down to the U.S. and had modest success and came back. Some are delusional -- who don't realize that the point of the U.S. -- the whole point, is that you go and surrender yourself fully, like Carrey or Neil Young -- and then you get accepted. You can't keep one foot here and expect to dine at the big table. Not when your accent's flat and not Brit-plummy. Some of the Montagues aren't Canadian at all...they're Americans, working Canadian in name only -- taking advantage of lax regs and passport scams and tax credits and loose realities that allow them to be "deemed" for the purpose of the production.
Then there are the Capulets.
The Capulets, you see, resent the Montagues intensely. They are cultural nationalists. They hate the fact that American culture dominates; the same as cultural nationalists in any country in the world.
The Capulets, largely, have driven the Canadian film industry. They produce films that are aggressively not American in tone or subject matter. That means, often, they have to eschew the things that Americans do well... they can't be sentimental, so they undercut emotion or sympathy. They don't go for the gut. They focus on shocking things Americans would never do. They don't tie up tidily or have a 'win' at the end - not because it's right for the story, but because that's what American films do.
It's been pointed out by people I care about that sometimes I'm a little hard on Canadian film. And that's true. I am (at least the English language division) The thing is, I firmly believe that a lot of what motivates some of these Canadian filmmakers are things that are anathema to creating good drama -- a good story is not as important as being different than American film. So long as that's how you think -- I want to be different, rather than "I want to tell a good story," you will not be a confident culture. You will always exist only as a reflection of something else - in this case, U.S. culture.
There are Capulets in Canadian TV. There are Montagues, too. And neither are going to get to a place where good work is consistently produced. Not if the WGA strikes, and not if they don't.
Good work will come from a growing community of people like, dare I say it, me. People who are post Capulet and Montague, who want to find a middle ground. People who think that Canadians do have a unique and different view on the world. (McLuhan, bitches!) A generation who believes that "telling Canadian stories" simply means "Canadians telling stories (and not 'stories they think Americans want to hear)" A generation of artists who doesn't care that Cold Case is Cold Squad with more money; a generation who uses their more expansive and inclusive world view to remix, recombine and come up with things as wildly inventive as Jekyll, or even Little Mosque on the Prairie, not as derivative as Shark but nice, or The Ghost Whisperer but different, or Without a Trace but ... um... in Kamloops.
By the way, immigrants will rock this new reality. And it's a fluid thing. Read back and see how many times I talk 'we' and 'they' when I talk about Canadians. That's a thing with me, too. Split identity. Globalization? Eff you, America. The Canadians have been dealing with that shit for years.
Anyway, point being, that just like in Romeo & Juliet, we've reached the point where if the Capulets and the Montagues don't find a way to get along, a lot of people are going to start dying. (At least in a, "you know, it's the industry and we've all got an inflated sense of our importance" kind of way.)The problem? Most people in the middle -- not quite Montagues, definitely not Capulets, have found working in the Canadian industry a bit hostile and so they have traditionally left.
Montagues -- who like U.S. product and storytelling -- there has to be a dialogue with Capulets, who just may embody a fresh take and an alternative to the dominant U.S. style of story and tone and execution -- even point of view.
When it comes to something like MIP and selling abroad, there's got to be more than "we're like a U.S. show only cheaper." There have been commenters on this blog over the last few years who have pointed out that it's weird that Canadians report success based on how many countries we sell in, not how many people watch us at home.
Well. That's not odd, though it should be. It's perfectly understandable. We're a colonized culture. Nothing's going to change that. Except, maybe, just maybe, making our stories more universal and not reactive to U.S. trends.
Stop waiting for the phone to ring.
Wow. You're good. You are magic. I can't believe, from my stool at my secret pub lair in Toronto, that you've read this far. Well done. Now, as a mint, I will reveal to you the spark for this overlong essay. This is a blast from the past, a pure, unadulterated Montague classic that fueled my thinking on this piece. This is crass, and obvious, and from another time. This is indicative of the lowest common denominator. This alone is reason why the Capulets, though they grate on me, have a point. This is an example of just how far we've come in developing watchable product in Canada, and it's a cautionary tale against opening the floodgates to second rate American "talent" who can't work at home but who will come up here and try to chart a course for the industry, if the CRTC has its way. These Montagues are still out there. Fear them.
To American and World readers, I present the following lexicon:The woman in this picture is a Canadian actress, who's married to one of the two top Canadian news anchors. Imagine she's, say, the wife of Dan Rather.
This movie was produced by Canada's top movie producer.
This is what the Montagues were doing in 1984.
Please revel in the crassness.
And thanks to Dix for inspiring the link.
Ladies and gents, the box copy for 1984's Heavenly Bodies:
From the creators of Flashdance - comes a movie where dancing, music & romancing add up to the highest level of energy you are ever going to
find!
A disused warehouse is transformed into a workout club called HEAVENLY
BODIES. Now, instead of lifeless packages scattered about the place,
energetic women race into the locker room. Headbands are attached, leg
warmers are carefully pulled up well-defined calves and legs step into
leotards. Bras are unsnapped and feet are squeezed into sneakers.
Long, wavey hair is pulled back into a ponytail - the locker doors
slam and the class begins - THE ENERGY IS CREATED AND THE ACTION GETS UNDERWAY!
Awe.Some.
