Return to Hollywood North: veteran producer Peter O'Brian takes a turn behind the camera

TAKE ONE, Sept-Dec, 2003 by Janice Kaye

* THE OFFICES OF PETER O'BRIAN, perhaps one of Canada's best-known film producers, are hidden away in all industrial building behind Yonge Street in midtown Toronto, across a narrow parkette from a set of gentrified new renos. With sandy brick walls and wooden-beamed high ceilings, the interior is late 1970s, early 1980s funky--the kind of space many film companies rented during "the bad old tax-shelter days," when the industry was wild with the possibilities and shame of the phenomenon known as Hollywood North. O'Brian has chosen a story set in this period for his directorial debut--Hollywood North, a multi-layered satire about producing a tax-shelter movie that had its debut Canadian screening at the Toronto International Film Festival's Perspective Canada.

From 1977 to 1981, the Canadian Film Development Corporation (now Telefilm Canada) made millions of dollars available to produce big-budget movies intended to compete in the North American market. Most often set in U.S. locales, with second-rate American stars, Canadian expatriates, Canadian crews and supporting casts, they featured genres unfamiliar to the Canadian cinematic lexicon: sex comedies, political thrillers, disaster and horror movies. Industry stories abounded of producers scandalously skimming "off the top." The movies mostly flopped, many never seeing the light of day; Canada was ill drag, masquerading as the United States.

Like many others, O'Brian considers the 100 per cent capital cost allowance tax write-off "ill-fated and ill-considered." He set out "deliberately" to make two pictures in that system, "I thought, 'I've gotta use this money before it's too late,"' he remembers. "For me, the money was to create our own identifiable cinema but we didn't, There was a real opportunity and it was blown." O'Brian wisely balances his criticism of the tax-shelter era by generously granting "that the bureaucrats did their best," The fever pitch of 1979 saw 47 features made, compared to 23 the year before and only eight in 1968. TSE would be a fitting acronym for the tax-shelter era, since the Toronto Stock Exchange [editor's note: now the TSX] and the investment sector considerably influenced the tax-shelter films, many of which were financed with public offerings through unit sales. O'Brian's best-known TSE films were (using production rather than release dates) The Grey Fox (d. Phillip Borsos, 1980)--still on most critics' Canadian Top Ten list--and My American Cousin (d. Sandy Wilson, 1984). He also has produced Me (d. John Palmer, 1974, co-produced with Christopher Dalton), Love at First Sight (d. Rex Bromfield, 1975), Outrageous! (d. Richard Benner; on which he was associate producer, 1977), Blood & Guts (d. Paul Lynch, 1977), Fast Company (d. David Cronenberg, 1978), One Magic Christmas (d. Phillip Borsos, 1985), John and the Missus (d. Gordon Pinsent, 1985), Milk and Honey (d. Glen Salzman and Rebecca Yates, 1987) and Far from Home: The Adventures of Yellow Dog (d. Phillip Borsos, 1994).

His first movie as a solo producer, Love at First Sight, starring a young Dan Aykroyd as its blind hero, remains not only better than most Canadian movies but also significantly underrated. It's a blind spot in the history of Canadian film--omitted from serious academic and journalistic discussion--like the TSE itself. In Hollywood North, Bobby, the hapless Canadian lawyer turned producer (played by American Matthew Modine), deals with his blind spot this way: "I've learned to turn off the shame and guilt parts of my brain," he says. Although the TSE illustrates the case of an industry and a government suffering not only blindness but also temporary insanity, without its attempts to carve out a space for Canadian film in world cinema there might not be a Canadian film industry at all, or a Peter O'Brian.

What could be more Canadian than a movie from a Canadian novel about a repressed young P.E.I. schoolteacher, starring a psychotic has-been American star (played with extreme gusto by Brit Alan Bates) who rewrites the novel as a political thriller about the U.S. ambassador in Colombia? Suddenly Lantern Moon becomes Flight to Bogota. "For industry insiders, there will be some guesswork about who the characters are based on," acknowledges O'Brian, who came up with the Hollywood North concept. Screenwriters Tony Johnston, long-time O'Brian collaborator John Hunter and Barry Healey (all Canadians) collectively contributed to the script. It features John Neville as the lisping, pullover-clad British director who hasn't made a movie in 15 years; Jennifer Tilly as the talentless American leading lady, all hormones and breathy voice, confiding, "I hate real life"; Kim Coates, luminescent eyes as blue as a Saskatchewan sky, as the egotistical American co-star playing a South American revolutionary; and Alan Thicke as the smarmy investment banker/executive producer who insists on American star power. "Real" Canadian films are represented by a documentary filmmaker (played by Deborah Kara Unger) shooting a "making-of" as well as her own black-and-white feature. "You aimed for Frost, you got Faust," she reprimands Bobby. The films-within-a-film technique required three different aspect ratios used in five different ways--a particular challenge for the entire crew.