The Pied Piper of Tucson

One of the ways you know summer is over and it's time to get serious again is when the Main Stream Media kick off yet another campaign to blame everything evil on the Internet.

Yesterday, Globe and Mail Columnist Bruce Dowbiggin, one of the country's best sports writers, had a major whinefest about bloggers wanting access to team locker rooms and the same journalistic privileges in the sports world that the big boys (like Bruce) enjoy.

Aware of how much these bloggers have eroded his own ability to be first with the news or mold public opinion, Dowbiggin suggested "if a blogger wants a place in a press box or dressing room environment there should be something more tangible at stake - say, a bond of $10,000 that a blogger would lose should a court or arbitrator find he or she broke professional standards or libel laws."

Dowbiggin made it clear that bloggers, who he calls "the gypsy cabs of journalism" just don't know how to behave at the big people's table, and then went on to relate the story of TV Azteca reporter Inez Sainz (pictured above) and her inappropriate dress issues with the NY Jets, in the process getting his own facts wrong by stating she had turned up at a Superbowl presser to interview Tom Brady while wearing a wedding dress.

His confusion between Senorita Sainz and the other bride Brady left at the altar, one Inez Gomez, had a number of commenters asking when the Globe would cough up ten grand for their own lack of fact checking.

Luckily, the immediacy of the Internet allowed the paper to pull the embarrassing gaffe from their online site. No word on whether anybody ran around taking back all the print editions.

In a less humorous example, media across the country today relayed the tragic story of young woman who had been gang raped in Pitt Meadows, BC with photos of the attack posted on facebook. The TV coverage featured an RCMP Officer choking back tears as she said she couldn't imagine what this young woman now had to deal with and cautioned about the dangers of cyberspace.

It was the second time in a week I'd watched a Mountie tear up, the first in a news report on the dangers of back to school parties advertised on social networks.

When exactly did crying become an essential tool in policing? Or is this how the RCMP convince soccer moms they're really not as heartless as those taser videos made them appear?

On the other hand, such emotional presentations and the sympathetic responses evoked might be what the Mounties have been told best gets the message across by the media they most often encounter.

A media that values the quick sound bite and drive-by hit of blame which absolves them of having to go deeper with a story and maybe get in the way of "Access Hollywood" starting on time.

But I digress.

The point is that once again activities such as social networking which counter what the powers-that-be can control are being falsely blamed for society's ills.

In the 1920's that led to prohibition. In the 1930's it forced Hollywood to enact the Hayes Code.

By the 1940's it was decided comic books were causing all the harm. It was Rock and Roll's turn in the 50's and Television pretty much ever since.

A couple of years back, a college massacre was blamed on video games and before that one at a high school was connected to bowling. Finding a whipping boy is always easier than admitting the problem is more human in nature and perhaps much harder to eliminate.

And God forbid that anybody might want to tamper with the Young Offender's Act.

In 1975, I appeared in a play at the Toronto Free Theatre called "Heat", playing the lead character in a story based on the life and crimes of Charles Howard Schmid Jr. who had been dubbed "The Pied Piper of Tucson".

A popular high school gymnast with Hollywood good looks, Schmid had murdered three young women in Tucson, Arizona; killings that local teens were widely aware of but never reported to police.

Some had even attended parties with Schmid on the promise of being able to witness a murder first hand.

He had a hypnotic attraction to those around him, convincing friends to hand over their girlfriends to be slain and then help him bury them in the desert.

Schmid was finally convicted of the murders in 1966 and sentenced to Death.  And the play examined many of the same questions people in 1975 were still asking about how well bred kids had evolved into the Manson family.

So, as part of my preparation for the role I wrote a letter to "Smitty". And he wrote back.

He was very open about what he'd done, the pages he sent filled with the bravado of somebody whose charisma had blinded him to the damage he had brought upon so many others. He detailed how he felt he should be portrayed and even applied to the prison Warden for permission to come see the show.

When that was obviously declined, he vowed to escape and come see it anyway. Unfortunately, his travel plans were interrupted by two other inmates who stuck a shiv in him 47 times. He died in a prison hospital a few days before we opened.

At the time of his trial, Life Magazine, Time and Playboy all ran stories about the Tucson murders, each coming up with their own theories on why so many local kids had admired Schmid and enjoyed the vicarious thrill of his handiwork.

A lot of people in Pitt Meadows and elsewhere are probably trying to get their heads around the same questions today. But implying that facebook is any part of the problem serves no other purpose but giving the established media an opportunity to kick around some of their competition.

In the early 1960's, those following the Pied Piper of Tucson passed notes in class and whispered over chocolate shakes in the burger joints along Speedway Boulevard. Today they pass the same notes on Twitter and upload photos from the camera in their phones.

The method of communication may be different. But what motivates it is the same. It's a need to be part of something more exciting than what you've got, a desire to have or share in a persona that's recognizable and apart from the sameness that's all around you.

Life magazine described Charles Schmid this way…

"He was different. He was Smitty, with mean "beautiful" eyes and an interesting way of talking, and if he sometimes did weird things, at least he wasn't dull."

…at least he wasn't dull.

The power of most social networking sites is their ability to give users an opportunity to transform. They can populate their pages with what matters to them instead of what permeates their lives and reconfigure their social circle into the group of "friends" they'd really rather have.

Most of them do that in a manner reflecting their hopes and aspirations and unspoken or still unfocused desires. 99.9% will never harm anyone or anything except maybe their own future employment by posting a picture of the first time they got drunk or pulled up their shirt.

Judging by the popularity of the inane games on facebook, many are there because they're just bored or lonely.

But the human animal is not perfect and some of us are downright evil little fucks. They're the other .1%.

Those guys don't make "mistakes" or behave "inappropriately". There is real malice in the world and they embrace it. And they know how to use digital cameras and wi-fi too.

A smart lawyer might wring some sympathy from their juries by blaming splatter movies, too many Twinkies or facebook. But they either knew full well what they were doing was wrong or were already so far gone the difference between right and wrong didn't even register anymore.

It's too easy to believe that by reining in facebook we control the rage or venom that powers those people or that a crying policeman sharing our pain is helpful. What solves the problem is simply making sure the .1% in this case never have the opportunity to be alone with a 16 year old girl again.

Within the body of its story on Charles Schmid, Life magazine detailed all sorts of vague teenage angst and alienation in searching for an explanation of what happened in Tucson. They also included the lyrics of a song that had been popular at the time of the killings, Crispian St. Peters' "The Pied Piper".

"Hey, c'mon babe, follow me,

I'm the Pied Piper, trust in me,

I'm the Pied Piper

And I'll show you where it's at."

Evil always knows "where it's at" and we need to be there waiting to kill it instead of following where some Main Stream Media Pied Piper would rather lead us.

An Open-ed E-Mail to Piers Handling

-----Original Message-----
From:  [mailto:U_know_Who@mediabureaucracy.gov.ca]
Sent: Monday, September 13, 2010 10:04
To: Piers Handling

Subject: Did We Run Out Of Kool-Aid?

First, congrats on the successful launch of both the 35th Annual TIFF and the opening of your shining new jewel box theatre(s). Significant accomplishments both as well as stressful and time consuming I'm sure. Some of us over here are suspecting the added work and pressure are what caused you to slip off your meds last week.

How else do we explain what we heard from your own lips courtesy Peter Howell at the Toronto Star on the Eve of the Festival, linked here if your busy social schedule hasn't allowed you to keep up with all the press clippings. 

To condense, the salient quotes concerning us this morning are:

“We shouldn’t be making 250 feature films in this country. I don’t think it can sustain. Where are those films going? I mean, are they just home movie productions done on credit cards? For what audience?"

And…

“I’m happy that people are making films and all that kind of stuff, but what kind of resources have been taken away from filmmakers who perhaps needed those resources, that could have used those resources? Are there significant filmmakers with things to say?”

Our concern, basically is, how did you allow you inside voice to become your outside voice -- and in front of the press?

God knows we all agree that we shouldn't have to put up with these upstarts pandering to an audience. And the handful that do get their work released accomplish little more than reducing the overall access to foreign Art films and Paul Gross which is annoying enough. 

But the sad fact is that unless we keep implying a need for this drivel, we can't continue justifying the funding of culture. And then you, I and everybody else in the service of government sponsored art is out of a job.

Are you aware of the Public Relations nightmare you might have created had any member of the Lame Stream Media connected your words with Sunday's announcement of $9 Million in new funding to the Canadian Film Centre for training?

Luckily, the open bar at the CFC BBQ distracted any of them from asking why we needed more money to train more filmmakers if we already had too many movies!

Please give some thought to the fiefdoms you are endangering by such flip remarks.

Must I point out that 30% of TIFF funding comes from government? Last year we sent you almost $7 Million. What kind of film festival would you have with a third less money? I'll tell you what kind, one where the only celebrity you can attract is Harry Dean Stanton!

Because Hollywood sure as shit isn't going to send planeloads of glitterati up here on their own dime. And without the endless parade of those vapid freaks can you conceive of how difficult it would be to convince your subscribers that it doesn't matter if they can't get tickets to a George Clooney movie because one more coming of age story set among the Tibetan diaspora of Smithers, BC is what real Cinema is all about.

And that serves a double purpose with our political masters.

Most of them come from such out of the way places that they think Olivia Newton John is still a star. And luckily, we've got a Culture Minister who doesn't know anybody who isn't a Mixed Martial Arts fighter. So dangling a Bruce Springsteen Red Carpet Photo Op in front of them combined with a packed house for Don McKellar's "Look Upon My Navel" convinces them he's an artist worth supporting too.

God knows we don't expect you to show all 250 Canadian features, Piers.

And especially not the ones somebody made with their own money and out of some kind of burning passion to entertain an audience. We've got to save most of those for Calgary and Vancouver and Montreal to justify the millions we plow into their festivals. Not to mention all the new ones we've got coming on line in every town that'll never get within a hundred miles of an NHL franchise let alone Werner Herzog.

Nobody will believe they've got a real film festival if there isn't at least one World or Canadian Premiere and even better if said premiere is directed by somebody local whose IOU they're holding.

"Look, that pushy little buggar from the Blockbuster made his movie. And we can see it if we also buy a ten pack of tickets to some short films from Baffin Island."

It's all about keeping the public dollar wheel turning, Piers. Movies with no viable audience begat festivals which begat the need for more movies with no viable audience.

Please think of our poor colleagues stuck in such film Siberias as Saskatchewan and New Brunswick. They need all those movies. Because they too need to justify the extraction of tax dollars for cultural purposes and without a good festival, they're not seeing the latest existential masterpiece from Vanuatu and are also in danger of justifying their jobs by partnering with Hollywood hustlers on co-productions where the financing falls through and leaves the crews hanging.

Must I remind you of the core directive of what we do?

Secure a comfortable living for ourselves while insuring that nothing gets made which could become successful enough to make people ask why the industry can't survive on its own. Then use our positions to denigrate any attempts at popular cinema while ensuring we have posh settings in which to view the extended version of "Berlin Alexanderplatz" while dreaming of the day Atom Egoyan gets to remake it!

BTW, our thanks for turning up the spotlight on "Score". We thought tossing a little funding into that pandering little turkey would go a long way in undermining any groundswell to make entertaining films here and you certainly gave them the "push" off the pedestal we had hoped for. No late Wednesday Canadian Perspectives slot to hide the beginners' warts for those suckers.

I felt certain we would have sapped the will of Canadian creatives not wanting to make our kind of movies by now. But perhaps that little disaster will teach them we mean business and chase them all to Santa Monica or wherever it is they go.

In closing, do know that we appreciate the agony of feigning interest in those Canadian submissions that might have challenged a Hollywood Blockbuster. Assuage those hurts with thoughts of how much we're all going to enjoy the LGBT retrospective from Singapore next year. We discussed it at last week's retreat in Montebello and I can confirm that we all agree "Pacific Rim" is a fitting title for the programme.

I must go now and let your sponsor friends at the Royal Bank know that the Finance Minister has been all over us about their commercials for TIFF. Apparently, the bank's affection for the Ed Harris narration on their Winter Olympics commercials led them to forget in which country TIFF takes place.

Note the currency.

Another thing you should have noticed. Maybe it's time for Cameron to take a little more of the load. Hmmm?  

Lazy Sunday # 136: Pride & Prejudice & Gym, Tan, Laundry

For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbors and laugh at them in our turn?
-- Jane Austen

Stuck at my Grandma's house one summer, I pawed through her piles of Ladies Home Journal and "Nurse Jane Goes to Hawaii" novels for something to read and happened on a cover featuring a shirtless cowboy. To a nine year old smitten with Westerns, this at least had potential.

An hour later I'd come to the conclusion that proper ladies like my granny liked the same sort of stuff the older boys snuck into the hot-stove hut by the outdoor rink on slow nights and read aloud to each other while us littler kids laced up our skates and pretended we weren't listening.

The language of my Granny's book was a little prettier and less to the point. But the basic idea was the same.

By the time I was introduced to Jane Austen in University, I'd been in a rock and roll band long enough to know women liked to get it on just as much as guys did. I sort of got that women liked being more discreet about it all. And I sort of didn't.

Years later, when I was writing and producing Harlequin Romance novels for television, I wrestled with how you made the conceits of those books play within the logic of contemporary drama.

I remember sitting in a boardroom with a couple of female development execs, trying to get my head around one particular moment.

Me: "Okay, she's attracted to this guy but she's also convinced he murdered her brother so she hates him."

Exec #1: "Right."

Me: "She's following him and falls into a mountain stream and he has to rescue her."

Exec #2: "That's going to be so symbolic when she clings to him as they swirl through the rapids."

Me: "Uh, yeah. But here's the part that doesn't track. He pulls her out of the river and carries her back to his cabin."

Exec #1: "Can that look like one of those Fabio covers?"

Me: "Okay, but she still thinks he's a killer. Yet the first thing that happens when they get to the cabin is he takes all her clothes off and makes her take a hot bath."

Exec #2: "Mmmmmm."

Me: "And then he makes a pass at her and she's totally into it."

Exec #1: "So?"

Me: "It doesn't make any sense."

Exec #2: "Which part?"

Somewhere in the process of trying to figure out what women want, I came to the conclusion that most romance novels are just "Beauty and the Beast" with slightly less hairy guys and that kinda got me through.

And if you think about hit "reality" series like "The Bachelorette", "The Hills" or "Jersey Shore" as a Jane Austen novel for people who don't or maybe can't read, it helps explain a lot about why they've been so successful.

We all want a little romance in our lives, even when the best we can hope for is "Snookie" or "The Situation".

Enter -- Canadian actress Ceciley Jenkins with the brilliant idea of taking Jersey Shore back to its Regency Romance roots.

Ceciley and her equally inspired cohort of actors and director/editor Michael Livingstone simply lift some of the more quotable or outrageous moments from "Jersey Shore" and transpose it to a period and presentation style that would probably make it almost palatable for my dear departed Granny while sending the rest of us into fits of laughter.

As one of her fans succinctly puts it: "If Jersey Shore was this funny, I'd watch it!"

There are five episodes of "Mashterpiece Theatre presents Jersey Shore" so far with more to come. A remarkably entertaining web series that features exemplary Canadian content and likely didn't ask for or receive a dime in CMF funding.

Prepare to have your bodice wonderfully ripped. And Enjoy Your Sunday.

WHY I HATE THE TORONTO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL

OR: An Analysis of the Canadian Cultural Dilemma

 
To mark the opening of the 35th Toronto International Film Festival, I am deferring to guest blogger Nick Mancuso.

Nick and I have been friends since we both had to learn Kazak dancing for the original stage production of Carol Bolt's "Red Emma". We worked together several times on stage before he broke into films, won a Best Actor Genie Award in "Ticket To Heaven" and became a Canadian star in Hollywood.

In the intervening decades, we've crossed paths repeatedly, working in films or series I've written or produced, living in each other's homes and shepherding one another in and out of various marriages. I also have the great honor of being Godfather to his son Sasha, named after the character he played in "Red Emma".

Nick has always been a passionate advocate for the rights of Canadian performers and creative artists, often making his case in personal one-on-one meetings with everybody from industry players to Prime Ministers. This is a guy who has never shrugged off the mantle success granted him or forgotten either where he came from or where he was heading.

Like Nick, I have concerns about what the Toronto International Film Festival has become and how it has warped the path and perception of Canadian films in my country. But he makes the case much more eloquently than I ever will.

The following was written pretty much stream of consciousness a couple of years ago as he and his friend Ed observed the Festival from a cafe patio overlooking the scene…

In the I Ching the Chinese Book of Changes, a book that traces its origins into the mists of time, the Oracle talks about the theatre and therefore by extension the cinema in the following manner:

“Music and pantomime (the theatre) exists to create a bridge to the world of the unseen…. He who could wholly comprehend this could rule the world as though it were spinning in his hand.... True fellowship with men must be based upon a concern that is universal.”

A concern that is universal, and ruling the world as though it were spinning in his hands. A strong brew indeed...

In these two ideas, the massing together of people to view and experience the theatre and cinema, there is the recognition that what we call the Culture of a nation at one time was regarded as supremely important human activity. The collection of people within a community to experience something together was not only an opportunity for the community to experience itself but in this enthusiastic gathering of individuals a group understanding was revealed and re-enacted and thus the; “most sacred of human feelings-reverence for the ancestors” and “religious feelings for the Creator" were united.

Reverence for the Ancestors...? Religious feelings? A far cry from chomping popcorn on a Saturday night at the movies. And yet the operating principles, the gist of undercurrent of these ideas remain the same.

The theatre and movies, cinema and performance bring people together under the roof of a common humanity, and by doing so serve an important purpose. They provide purpose and direction.

You don’t know where you are going until you know where you come from and to know something is to have memory. And a society without memory, like a person, is insane.

The movies remind us of who are and who and what we should be. Art, un-interfered with is one of the great goods of a nation. Interfered with it is a disaster.

Aristotle points out that the Theatre, and specifically Tragedy (what we today call Drama or Action-Adventure) is the imitation of an action but it is one in which the imitation elicits in the viewer the purgation of terror (fear) and the creation of pity (compassion for others) and as such Art serves a moral purpose.

There is an ethical undercurrent in operation in all Art and, defining Ethics as Reason, it is always an attempt to restore balance to disharmony. It provides hope for the future. It does not fragment, it unites.

The movies tell us that the universe we live in is all right in the end. And when they’re done right they make us feel better about ourselves and the world we live in.

These ideas vaguely percolate under my Actor's skull as next to me a couple of autograph hounds, backs to me and my pal Ed, eagerly exchange information about which American star was where and who had been sighted. There is a high pitched thrill in their voices, like people undergoing a powerful transformative experience, an excitement that is almost repellent. It irritates me.

“Robert Altman’s in that limo. Look he’s coming out now!

“Look its Pam Drexel and I can see Kim Cattrall!”

A big to-do in the side entrance of the hotel as various American movie stars are hustled through. I can vaguely see protective bodyguards talking into their collars. It’s like an entrance of the President of these here United States.

There is something nauseating about the experience. And I start to feel internally irritated, then angry and finally –- hateful.

“I hate the fucking Toronto International Film Festival!” I blurt out to Ed who is slurping his tall decaf regular. Ed seems surprised, almost as if I had committed a sacrilege of some kind. “It’s not just the sea of backs and traffic jams and crazy pointless flurry of activity. I find it insulting. Personally so! What’s it about?”

“You're just upset cause you weren’t invited.”

“Maybe. But there’s something more that really bothers me." Ed rolls his eyes upwards in a 'here we go again' kind of look. He is used to my rants.

“Why?”

“It’s all this Britney Spears generational thing. This constant blare of activity and screaming over the void. What’s this got to do with Canada? All of it funded by your and my tax dollars. This is the Canadian agenda?” Ed’s eyes glaze over.

“The what? I like Britney Spears. And Paris Hilton…what a babe! Those lips…”

A dreamy far away look overcomes Ed as the ice cream slowly melts on his chin.

“You’ve got chocolate sauce on your face.” I state flatly ,wondering if I will ever get through to this idiot.

“You ever think about what the Festival means, what it originally meant and what it originally represented?"

“Sure.” Ed says, “They show a lot of movies and a lot of movie stars show up and there’s a lot of parties. Good for business.It's made us a world-class city”

I feel a jolt in my stomach.

“What about the Canadian movies? Since the Canadian taxpayer is paying for these cultural events, 15 cents on the dollar. Where are the Canadian movie stars, writers, directors? How come there’s no hoopla for them, unless they’re coming in from Hollywood like a Keanu Reeves or a Jim Carrey? Why is the Canadian taxpayer paying to advertise Hollywood product? Make sense to you?”

“Oh grow up!” Ed licks his cone.

In the early 80’s, Ed had been a gold patron of the festival but quit in disgust as he watched the hustlers and the sleazy operators take over.

“Let me ask you something, Ed. What would Plato have asked 2400 years ago about its nature?"

“Plato would have lined up for popcorn just like every other teenie bopper.” He stares longingly as a couple of Britney Spears type’s stroll by eating gelatos. “Wish I could eat those gelatos “ He mutters.

“The 60’s are long gone, Ed. So are the dreams of a nation that has sold its birthright. We had a Prime Minister taking cash in suitcases in a hotel room, like an episode of "The Sopranos". Canada was sold to the lowest bidder. It's a dead issue!”

The girls rush by excited and squealing. They have spotted a Brad Pitt look-a-like and pandemonium breaks out. I stare flatly into the hot night, getting a headache and wondering what flavor of gelato I would have to eat to wake up.

In his Poetics, Aristotle, (the very first Syd Field) points out very accurately that there were two approaches to the idea of the theatre and by extension the cinema. He understood that the theatre existed to elicit pleasure but that it could also act as instruction for the mature mind. And that it was through this union of the terrible and the pitiable that pleasure was created and information transmitted.

Hence action movies and love stories, in our age.

But the theatre also served the purpose of purgation, cleansing the community of its invisible demons and eliciting the angels.

Catharsis, in which the hidden and unconscious fears of a society are brought to the surface and thereby vanquished. Pity or Compassion was the end product of this process. Humanization. Music that hath the power to sooth the savage breast. "No buziness like show buziness" etc.

“Like nooooo buzinazzzz ahhhh knowwww, everything about it is aaapeealllling....”

It is for this reason the ancient Athenians had a theatre tax for those who did not attend plays. It was a duty, a civic act of responsibility. Perhaps those Greeks knew a thing of two. Canada, in that sense, is very ancient Athenian. It is taxing people for not going to see Canadian film.

“OOONNNN WITH DUHHHH SHOW....”

If the Canadian government was authentically serious about so-called Canadian Culture it might consider such genuine an option. And take that money and feed its own artists.

But it should not be funding Miami CSI (Alliance Atlantis) or the Toronto International Film Festival. Or accepting the Superbowl as Canadian Content because of “Canadian interest”. Fact.

If the Canadian taxpayer is forced on paying his tax dollars into a cultural agenda, amounting to almost 15 percent, the average Canadian deserves to have that money used for Canadian cultural workers. And no restrictions of any kind should be held over those artists as a kind of bureaucratic sword of Damocles. No mandates, no demand for “commercial product.”

Or cut it all off.

In the current situation, Canadian performers receive about 2 cents on the film dollar, with writers receiving about 3. Crews working on film sets in what was at one time a 4 billion dollar industry get 4 times what the Canadian actor gets. In the end about 70 percent supports a bureaucracy and the erstwhile “management teams".

In effect, one man sweeps the floor and 9 men manage his sweeping and receive 10 to 1 what the sweeper gets. How in any way can a system this idiotic pretend that it supports the Arts?

If the Canadian Film industry were a painting on a wall, the size of the frame holding the canvas would be on a 7 to 3 ratio. Some painting.

But then what is to be expected of a nation that forces the Ross Rifle on its soldiers, ensuring their deaths in the trenches of WW1, then dishonors and forgets its heroes?

Canadian governments have never been representatives of the people and by the people. Their orders have always come from the outside. England. France. The USA. So why would Government support the arts, except in name only?

Why should the average Canadian foot the bill so that the children of the ruling class can play dress up for their relatives and friends?

And why should universites, colleges and schools pump out a stream of acting, film and TV graduates with no place to go? Except for Hollywood, which is no longer what it used to be.

Especially since every actor crossing the border is immediately an “illegal alien” if he has “intention to work”, a situation created by Canadian unions when they, under nationalist fervor, separated from their American brothers. SAG and American Equity immediately pushed regulations to prevent Canadian “acting” competition from entering the USA.

The end result,thanks to Mulrooney’s “Free Trade” agreement with Washington, in which no change can be made to the Canadian Cultural mandate without approval from Washington, was the creation of cultural apartheid.

“So you see, Ed, the Canadian artist is a 3rd class citizen and he is the “excuse” for the downloading of his parents and his own tax dollars to which he has little no access, thanks to to his own government."

Ed is distracted by the excitement as yet another 'Star sighting' takes place. 

"The artist in Canada is a scapegoat, a “patsy”used as a method by unscrupulous and ignorant producers and bureaucrats to leverage Canadian tax payer dollars. It does NOT support the artist; in fact, it oppresses him and he foots the bill for the jackboot pushing in his face."

The girls squeal. Flashbulbs flash. Ed's ice cream cone melts.

“The trouble with the movies is..that it is an art form disguised as a business and a business disguised as an art form”

Charlton Heston  - Spoken to me during the shooting of "MotherLode"

All comments to this post will be moderated by Nick Mancuso.

That's Not What I Mentored

Will Dixon and I had similar reactions to Episode 7 of this "Mad Men" season, "The Suitcase", wondering if Matthew Weiner was writing not about the 1960's and Advertising but about his own relationship with the show's writing staff.

Certainly the parallels between Sterling Cooper Draper Price and your average television production office are all there. The mix of creativity and commerce, the clash of egos and artistic differences, the collaboration and the very long nights.

The sex and drinking too, but from my experience they're pretty much the norm in any work place.

If we're correct in our assessment and Art ultimately imitates Life, then it seems likely the Season will end with Peggy eclipsing Don, perhaps sharing his next Cleo and departing in the manner Weiner split with his personal assistant turned writer turned Emmy winner Kater Gordon.

I don't know anything about the personal dealings between those two or whether Weiner pulled Gordon into the epicenter of his show out of some level of physical or platonic attraction or simply because he recognized her talent and abilities.

But it got me wondering about the whole nature of Mentorship in our business and what each side of those relationships actually provides the other.

I used to think that young writers sought out the more experienced to get an assessment of their craft from one who's been successful at doing what they want to do. "Read my script. Tell me what isn't working. Show me how to make it better."

And I think most mature writers faced with those requests and knowing they were once in the same position try to respond appropriately. "The inciting incident is weak. Don't fall in love with your dialogue. etc."

But looking back at my own times on both sides of the equation, I realize that each is really after what's mostly unsaid in those story conferences but more often shared in the drinks and anecdotes that usually follow.

Like Don and Peggy in "The Suitcase", we all need reassurance that the work matters and that the sacrifices we've made in our personal lives will ultimately be rewarded. Writers young and old share the same passion for good writing yet are aware that just because something is good doesn't mean it gets made.

I think the young writer I once was had more interest in the inside scoop on how Producers went about screwing you than what was not working in the second act. I knew sticking to craft would fix the script. What I really needed to know was how to make sure the vision survived to execution.

And those characterized as Mentors also know a writer with talent will eventually figure out his script issues and our only contribution comes in shortening the process and lessening the pain by drawing lots of red ink stars and circles on the page he or she most needs to look at.

At some level we know that it's our anecdotes and insights born of experience that are more important. And bleeding off the pitfalls, blindsides and encounters with certifiable buffoons that have checkered our own careers is also helping us maintain the belief that good writing and the best idea ultimately do win in the end.

We know the young writer will likely never encounter the exact brands of imbecility and malice that have occasionally beset us, because imbecility and malice have a way of evolving at studios, networks and government agencies like bacteria mutate to overcome penicillin.

So we try to teach them to be true to themselves, loyal to their material and as honest in both work and Life as they can possibly be. If you do all of that you can at least depart any eventual train wreck intact enough to carry on.

But we also know the most helpful wisdom we can instill is that it's all a fucking crapshoot so don't take it personal and we really don't know why we were successful and others more talented weren't beyond maybe being able to sense one of those predators in the underbrush before he pounced.

Like hoary old cavemen we try to teach the young the moves they never thought the wily Mammoth had in him.

Somebody once asked Tab Hunter how he'd managed to elevate himself above the crowd of pretty boy actors who populated Hollywood in the 1950's and become a major movie star. He attributed his success not to hard work, luck or talent but to the mentorship of an agent who taught him how to dress.

The agent called Tab one day with very specific instructions on what to wear to an upcoming audition, insisting the actor put on a white T-shirt, pressed chinos, penny loafers and two pairs of athletic sox.

After the audition, Tab called the agent and said his reading had gone well enough to get him a call back but wearing those two pairs of socks had pinched his feet and made it hard to walk.

"You idiot!", the agent snapped, "You wear one pair, roll up the other one and stuff it down the front of your pants!"

Tab followed the advice on the call back, got the part and the rest, as they say, is Hollywood history.

No matter how much you might think your talent got you where you get, more often than not it's just what keeps you there once you've arrived.

So, whatever happens between Peggy and Don or wherever she goes from here, I know she's going to be okay. Because she's got a Mentor who's teaching her what she really needs to know.

For All The Marbles

Apparently, Rogers Communications, unable to get its corporate rocks off by gutting CITY-TV and erasing one of the only truly unique brands ever created in Canadian broadcasting, has now decided to drive fans away from the country's only remaining Major League baseball team.

If ever one company epitomized a Capitalist scorched earth policy as well as everything that's been allowed to go wrong in Canadian Broadcasting, it's this pitiful specimen. The children of their employees must be so proud.

"Daddy, tell me again how you took the fun out of everything! Remind me that nothing matters in Life except money. Especially when you can make it at the expense of everybody else."

 

When I was about eleven and going to Grant Road Public School in Regina, we were hit by an obsession with playing marbles. Within days, every recess and all the hours after school would find dozens of guys my age carving circles in the dirt, laying out handfuls of spherical glass and playing for "keepsies".

Those of us adept at the skill swaggered around with our winnings slung from our hips in one of those gold tasseled purple felt bags that our fathers' Christmas bottles of Crown Royal came in.

Every Thursday afternoon back then, the curriculum required us to trek to the next nearest school, Vincent Massey, where the girls studied Home Economics and we went to Shop, learning to hotwire cars and sever our fingers with a band saw.

We knew Massey had gone marble crazy too and polished up our best shooters, ready to come home pockets brimming.

That first hour of shop dragged past as we flexed our thumbs and debated whether the prairie topsoil in their playground was any different from the surface we were used to playing on.

When the bell rang for recess, we charged into the school yard, ready to wreak havoc and brought up short by the chaos that greeted us.

Somehow Massey had evolved past mere circles in the dirt and a dependence on keen aim and rebound strategy. The place was like the red light district of the Barbary Coast on a night miners rolled into town with pokes of Gold dust.

Every inch of the yard had been staked out by some pint-sized Carnie barker with a pitch and a plan to acquire every marble available. There were hand-made Skeeball slides, teetering wooden labyrinths and balsa obstacle courses, all designed to swallow Aggies whole and impossible to beat.

Each and every one of these set-ups had two or three guys running it. One attracted the rubes while the other two scooped up their losses by the handful, dumping them in plastic buckets big enough to hold a whole case of Crown Royal.

We watched dumbfounded as kids were fleeced of their precious orbs as fast as they could put them into play. Fortunes changed hands faster than getting into a card game with four guys named Doc.

It was like watching Goldman-Sachs being born.

But two memories of that afternoon remain above all. The first was seeing all those marbles being scooped and dumped with such disdain that they transformed from cherished diamonds to worthless pieces of glass.

And second -- nobody was having any fun.

It was all about greed and acquisition with no thought to the pleasure of competition or the pride of winning fair and square.

That's the thing about Greed. It not only robs the victim of everything he's got; but whatever the winner gains comes at a cost to his own reputation and self-respect that no amount of wealth can re-purchase.

It also quickly devalues whatever he was selling, turning it into something people either decide to find elsewhere or simply do without.

In the end, the Gordon Geckos of the world may lounge on a private beach with access to all the finer things in life. But even they know they're hollow Charlatans mostly surrounded by other Charlatans assuring them "Yeah, that really is the going price for Champagne these days".

Last week, Rogers Communications, the fine folks who invented the "Negative Billing Option", "Unlimited Data Plans" and "Net Traffic Shaping" decided it was time to go for all the marbles in Sports television, using their corporate reach to get a stranglehold on both the competition and their subscriber base.

Never mind that the goal comes at the expense of cheapening their only asset with access to people's hearts and imagination -- the Toronto Blue Jays.

The idea the Rogers brain trust came up with was this…

1. Get a license from the CRTC for a new Sports Channel called "Sportsnet One".

2. Wait until their baseball team is finally attracting viewers by playing like the world champions they once were.

3. Move most of the Jays' games in the final month of the season onto said "Sportsnet One", which is currently unavailable to most of the country.

4. Tell the fans they can only watch those games if they subscribe to or pressure their Cable companies to find a spot on the dial for the new channel.

5. Make Bell, Shaw, Cogeco and other Cable operations look like the bad guys for not making the new service immediately available by paying through the nose for it.

In other words, the Rogers concept was to take what people were already paying for on one Sportsnet channel and charge them more so they could see the same thing on another Sportsnet channel.

It is the equivalent of putting "Lost" or "The Sopranos" on one channel and then creating an entirely new one requiring an additional fee in order to get the final episodes.

But Rogers felt this was the best way of getting competing cable companies over a barrel. Because not only does Sportsnet One have exclusive control over the Blue Jays, they have deals with several Canadian hockey teams for an average of 13 games each in the coming season. Included on that list are Calgary, Edmonton and Vancouver, cities where Rogers doesn't have a cable monopoly or even much of a corporate presence.

Local fans in Vancouver thought they had found a new friend when the company ponied up big bucks to slap their name on the city's hockey arena. Little did they know that money would be coming from them in the end.

Despite the risk of angering not only baseball fans but rabid hometown loving hockey fanatics, Rogers was confident the competition would have to cave and pay whatever Rogers wanted for the new channel. And if the price was too high? Well, it was no skin off Rogers if the competition had to pass those costs on to their customers.

How does a company get the right to conduct this kind of rampant consumer pillage?

With the help of the CRTC, of course.

Despite the number of sports channels already on the Canadian dial, whenever a broadcaster walks into his office, Commission Chair Konrad von Finckenstein whips out a tube of lube and bends over in the hope he can make them happy.

Sorry...

That's a picture I don't even want in my own head.

But how else do you explain the licensing of a channel nobody needs for any other reason than the creation of a new revenue stream for a semi-monopoly that already rakes in billions?

I know there are people out there who hope KvF doesn't get his pandering ass fired anytime soon because "He really is coming around to our way of thinking".

You poor babies!

I hope your awakening isn't as rude as it has been for the thousands of Canadian TV viewers who couldn't care less about Canadian drama but thought buying a sports channel from the guys who owned the team would assure them access to their home town heroes.

And if the CRTC isn't a broadcaster rubber stamp with absolutely no interest in following its consumer protection mandate, wouldn't you think they'd have noticed that all the sports channels we now have don't really broadcast sports and ask what exactly was the purpose of the new one?

There are hours and hours of poker, darts and panel discussions with ex-jocks no more informative than your average guy in a sports bar on the channels we already have.

Last week, Rogers replaced the first shifted Jays game with one between two American teams barely anybody in this country follows and which they would have never broadcast under any other circumstances.

How's that for giving your audience what it wants?

Days later, as the Jays played the Yankees, 3/4 of the country got to watch a British airplane race.

And Sunday night, instead of doing something remotely sports-like such as replaying what had been a pretty exciting Jays afternoon win over New York that nobody got to see, Sportsnet Pacific was running a 30 year old movie.

As a result of all this, ratings for Jays games have dropped 94%.

Do we need much further proof that Canadian broadcasters have no interest in ratings, let alone trying to do the best they can for their sponsors?

Why would any owner treat an asset, its paying advertisers and the fan base this way unless they were completely oblivious or insensitive to the value of anything but their own selfish agenda?

Given the 29 times more Rogers Communications spends on US programming than Canadian product and this move, its safe to say that this is not a company that prides itself on customer service or business ethics. It's all about the arrogance of being a privileged monopoly who doesn't have to care to make money.

Only it appears that the strategy isn't working this time…

Unlike the hot house flowers who whine to Rogers' collaborator (the CRTC) for relief, Jays fans are skipping the monkey and taking the fight right back to the organ grinder.

Already tickets to games are being unceremoniously dumped at the "will call" windows. One group cancelled a booking of 250 seats it has annually purchased for decades.

Others have announced an intention not to renew season tickets and gone to the stadium to give away the seats they own to rob the team of earning additional revenue for their greedy ownership.

It's said that Jays manager Cito Gaston held a closed door meeting with his players to let them know that they need to play the remainder of the season for personal pride since nobody will be watching them.

Cable and cell phone subscriptions are being cancelled. Boycotts are being organized to make the Rogers Dome as empty as possible for Home games to embarrass Rogers at the League level. And a move is under way to target Sportsnet advertisers until they withdraw their contributions to the company's coffers.

Leading this charge are not the beer swilling young bucks Rogers lusts after to attract brewery Ad dollars while buying even more mobility and internet bells and whistles, but Seniors. Those on fixed incomes and with the free time to enjoy watching a ball game on almost every summer evening one is available have been the first to cry foul.

This is a disaster in the making. And it didn't have to happen.

If anybody at Rogers had stepped out of their private corporate box and wandered the stadium during the team's recent lean years, they could have easily seen that Seniors and people in low wage categories were their most loyal supporters. Even though the team sucked, they still cared enough about what baseball brought to their lives that they bought tickets.

That Rogers exec only had to venture to the cheap seats of the outfield, past the shuttered hot dog stands and cob-webbed beer wagons that had ceased bringing in money to find sections filled with folks in their declining years who enjoyed a sport that allowed them conversation during its progress and maybe wanted to take home a score card they'd filled out themselves.

Such an observant Rogers employee might have glanced across the field to the empty hundred dollar seats and realized that their real fans didn't have a lot of extra cash and maybe there needed to be a change in strategy to keep their business instead of chasing some phantom demographic.

But the guys who run Rogers aren't that smart about television.

They don't seem to realize that they've bought into an industry which, like the airlines, only has a small window of opportunity to make a profit on live or one time events. Once the plane leaves, those empty seats are worth nothing and it would have been smarter to take whatever offer came your way.

And once a game has been played, its value has been diminished as well.

That lack of understanding couldn't be any more obvious than by observing the position Rogers now find themselves with Bell, Cogeco and Shaw.

With a consumer backlash in full swing and the current value of the Sportsnet One package diminishing with every game that becomes history, the competition is under less and less pressure from its subscribers to make the kind of deal Rogers wants.

Some say Rogers had to make this move now, hurting Jays fans in order not to enrage hockey fans in Western Canada where Shaw dominates the cable landscape if they did it later. Unfortunately for them, Jim Shaw is a guy who has never heard of lube.

The lesson here for all us Creative types is clear. The CRTC and broadcasters like Rogers will never side with either us or our audience. They're more than willing to allow their own credibility to suffer before doing anything that is good for the country or its culture.

If we are to realize our own dream of a vibrant Canadian production industry, we need to make the public realize who is really preventing it from happening. We need to consider where we buy our phone and internet services as well as how we access television.

Jays fans angered by the Sportsnet One play are already posting dozens of web sites and links to streaming software that will deliver the games they want to see for free.

Maybe we don't need to go that far. But it might be worth calling up our cable companies and letting them know that if they're not going to be there for us, then we have no reason to be there for them.

If enough of us do that, it might make them realize that owning all the marbles isn't really going to be worth much in the end.

Lazy Sunday # 135: The Third And The Seventh

Usually, I plug the videos in at the end of these Sunday posts. This week, we're doing things a little different.

Please expand to full screen by punching that little button in the bottom right corner of the video frame to get the full effect.

What follows is 10 minutes of sublimely beautiful imagery…

…sublimely

beautiful…

…imagery

that…

…believe

it…

…or

not…

…simply

does…

…not

exist…

…anywhere

in…

…the

real…

….world!

Because…

…every

single…

…frame

was…

…rendered

in…

…a

computer.

Every single image.

There is no setting for your story that is impossible anymore. Perhaps nothing in story telling is impossible anymore, or beyond our technical abilities, or our budgets and our desire to communicate to an audience.

And it's only going to get cheaper and easier.

Good thing because audiences are going to expect more from us. This season, such productions as "Boardwalk Empire" and "Game of Thrones" will bring epic scale to the small screen and making the audience feel they are truly inside the world of your story will become imperative.

And that means that as a writer, producer or showrunner you need to know as much about how it's done as you can. Sometimes making it look bigger, richer and more believable is cheaper and easier than bringing it to life in any other way.

Here's a sampling of the practical applications from HBO's "John Adams".

Don't write what you think they want. Write what you know you can pull off. And Enjoy your Sunday.

You Shut Up! No, You Shut Up!!!

I awoke this morning to the Toronto radio station I most listen to (Talk640) issuing an apology for a news item it inaccurately reported a few months ago.

Included in the redaction was an acknowledgement that as a member of the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council, the Corus Entertainment affiliate had violated Article 1 of the Radio Television News Directors’ Code of Ethics which requires that all news organizations “inform the public in an accurate, comprehensive and fair manner about events and issues of importance”.

I'd never been aware of that ethical requirement before or that it actually had some teeth. And hearing it made me wonder why there's such a tempest over the SUN TV News application predicted to bring a "Fox Style" news network to Canadian television.

Although my personal view is that there isn't enough interest in such an operation here to make it financially viable, a fact the parent company, Quebecor, seems to acknowledge by insisting the new offering receive a Category 1 "Must Carry" license; I've been astonished by the relentless campaign to make sure the service never gets up and running in the first place.

This week, Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood hopped on that bandwagon, signing an American sponsored online petition to oppose the SUN TV News license. That petition claims the new network will bring “American-style hate media” to Canada and broadcast “hate-filled propaganda.”

Well -- first of all, unlike The USA, we already have laws on the books to prevent hate speech, so I kinda doubt much "hate media" is gonna happen. And, as mentioned,  it seems we also have requirements that news organizations convey the news in an "accurate, comprehensive and fair manner".

What's more, since the new network hasn't transmitted a single word or image so far, how has anybody been able to determine what it's going to say, let alone how it's going to say it?

What's really going on here?

I should point out that other famous signatories of the online petition include Boba Fett, a human clone from the planet Mandelore and Snuffaluffagus from Sesame Street, so I don't think anybody deciding whether or not SUN TV News gets a license is going to take it too seriously anyway.

So why would a respected author who used to head PEN Canada where she fought so hard to prevent the censorship of writers living under both Right and Left Wing dictatorships now be so adamant about the need to censor somebody else?

I'm fairly certain Ms. Atwood and many who share her concerns about SUN TV News didn't have a problem with Al-Jazeera getting a Canadian broadcast license, or even BBC News, which former British Labor Prime Minister Tony Blair acknowledged in his just published auto-biography as having a "massive bias to the Left".

Why is media with one clear agenda "okay" with those lining up to oppose SUN TV News while what it "might do" is not?

Maybe this isn't so much about having a conservative leaning News channel around here than a fear that it will lessen the ability of somebody else to determine how stories get reported in this country.

I don't make a habit of watching Fox News, but I stop by on occasion and I have to say I don't see the terrifying specter of jack-booted, Christian fundamentalist, right-wing fanatics perpetually demonized by other branches of the media.

Virtually every news outlet since Gutenberg invented the printing press has had an agenda (hidden or otherwise) because speaking truth to or for Power will always get you a loyal base of support.

And even if a news outlet is attempting to be even-handed, their mere choice of words and images will convince some with a rigid view of an issue to feel their own bias isn't being acknowledged.

When this whole thing started, most of the chatter was coming out of the CBC, whose various divisions have always been a great friend to Margaret Atwood. And I'm wondering if both she and they know that just one more competitor might be enough to finally tip them all into irrelevance.

One of the first things you notice when you tune into CBC's Newsworld is how many ads there are for 2 cent a minute phone cards, payday loan operations and requests to join pharmaceutical class action suits. My favorite one of those asks you to sign on "if you have suffered death from taking ---- ".

Right away you know that legitimate advertisers have abandoned the channel because the only people watching either don't spend any money or -- they're dead.

And if you watch further you become acutely aware of how hard Newsworld tries to imitate the chummy, "we're just like you" format of Fox News while still pretending they're different. No "Breaking News" or "This just in…" from these guys. The Newsworld catch phrase is, "Now coming in over the wire…".

Srsly? There's a wire?

Jumbotron Screens and open laptops linked to Skype all over the place yet the impression given is that Newsworld is originating from the same era in which Ben Hecht wrote "The Front Page", delivering old-school nothing-but-the-facts news without spin.

But it's not. And quite often not in the facts department either.

During one newscast, I heard a reporter state a pilot had survived the CF-18 crash pictured above because a "light breeze" carried him away from the doomed aircraft. This happened while video clearly showed the man being explosively catapulted out of his plummeting at several hundred miles an hour jet.

But apparently nobody at Newsworld, be they journalists or producers understands, or thinks their viewers understand simple Physics -- or saw "Top Gun".

Or maybe a serendipitous "light breeze" better conjures the network's "Don't look at what's really happening here, look what's going on behind the scenes" approach, especially when many of their recent discussion segments had argued that we didn't really need to be spending billions on new fighters cause the old ones were "just fine".

Similarly, the story which followed predicted disaster for Newfoundland oil rigs because our Government, in another apparent fiasco of mismanagement, didn't have guidelines for drilling at depths "similar to" the oil spilling Deep Water Explorer -- completely ignoring that the two operations have barely any engineering similarities beyond the words "offshore" and "oil".         

And when inaccuracies like those are buttressed by the kind of "Experts" CBC regularly trots out, it's no wonder they are construed by some as having "an agenda".

For CBC doesn't just seem to find somebody with an opinion on the news of the day but they gravitate to those whose desire to be fair-minded about it is dubious at best.

One summer morning's radio broadcast of "The Current" castigating "The Harper Government" for everything from G20 cost overruns to making Canada an environmental pariah featured Maurice Strong, a man who resigned his post at the UN in the wake of alleged involvement in the Iraq "Oil for Food" scandal.

Does any Canadian really need to be lectured on Human Rights and the Environment by a guy who now teaches at the University of Beijing?

Who was the first highly placed official Newsworld trotted out to offer his opinion on the Tamil refugee/human smuggling ship?

Bob Rae, a guy the Sri Lankan government kicked out of the country less than a year ago for being a Tamil Tiger sympathizer.

Yeah, Bob's gonna give me a "fair and balanced" take on the situation.

Maybe the best example of this occurred on CBC Radio's "Q" on August 13th (free podcast available from iTunes) in a segment about the Time Magazine cover depicted above.

Following in the footsteps of many American blogs and news aggregators who felt the cover was intended to enhance the US Military agenda in Afghanistan, "Q" interviewed a University of Cambridge professor who got several minutes to claim displaying the atrocity visited on a young Afghan woman had been designed to exploit her misfortune and increase support for the war through a calculated example of "mutilation chic".

Interestingly, she also asserted that the perpetrators of the assault should be "roundly condemned" not rounded up so they couldn't do the same thing to somebody else.

Moments later, all her arguments and assertions were powerfully blown to smithereens by the shot's photographer. By the end of her description of how the picture came to be, the "Q" host seemed audibly embarrassed at being associated with a segment miles from being "accurate, comprehensive and fair".

Would another network taking a "Fox News style" approach have addressed this topic any better? Maybe not. But maybe its availability would make somebody at CBC hew a little closer to those three tenets of ethical news coverage it claims to follow.

And those who want to fan the fire against SUN TV News might want to ask whether CBC News is really as open and honest about what it does as Margaret Atwood would have you believe.

CBC executives will be in court in a week's time, called to account for more than 400 Access to Information requests to which they have failed to respond. Some dating back to 2007.

It makes you wonder what's being hidden and why there's such desperation to make sure somebody who might be interested doesn't get to do any digging.

Time to Focus

I predict future happiness if we can prevent government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of the people. - Thomas Jefferson

Ancient Priests and mystics used to go to a mountain top at sunrise and open up a pigeon or a goat, maybe a Virgin if they could scrounge one up in the Agora, spread out the guts, examine their color or contents and confidently predict the future.

Most early mornings these days, I just open up a browser, link to a few bloggers and form a more or less educated opinion on what might be coming down the pike.

Same process, less carnage. We really are becoming civilized despite ourselves.

But what these online Priests found this week got me wondering if that trend toward civilization, to being more inclusive and nurturing, is what's behind the continued decline of Canadian Film and Television.

Maybe by trying to please everybody we're not really helping anybody.

Take his eminence, Bill Brioux, examining the 2010 Gemini Nominations. I can't disagree with much of what he sees in this once important and now over-taxed organ.

What began as an Award show to celebrate "The Best Of" what we make for TV, maybe 10 - 15 categories showcased to excite an audience, has devolved into a 107 category (8 more than last year) "something for everybody" exercise that sprawls over three nights and doesn't even hold the attention of those who make TV for a living anymore.

The day after the last Gemini is presented, there will be more Canadians who can tell you which product Don Draper won his fictional 1965 Cleo for than who is Canada's best actor, director or writer.

And while holding up a Gemini used to almost automatically qualify you for a Green Card because it certified that you possessed some unique talent, now you're lucky if it gets a development executive at Super Channel to return your calls.

Don't get me wrong. I've got lifelong friends up for Geminis and I'm happy they're being celebrated for what they do. There are even a handful of nominees who make me burst with pride because I gave them their first job, recognizing a talent that's now being acknowledged by the industry and their peers.

But sadly, winning will not step any of their careers up a notch because the Gemini has been so horribly diluted as both an industry honor and a tool to attract an audience by its insistence that it has to be sensitive to every possible sub-genre and job description.

It's as if, because there is so much government money supporting the Academy running the Geminis, the organization has to make sure nobody is left behind.

Somebody enlighten me on what difference it makes if a biography documentary is judged alongside a History documentary or a documentary documentary. 

Are the Gemini juries picking the best documentaries or just making sure there's something representing all of the available cable bundles?

And why is it impossible to claim that Practical/Lifestyle Information programming is even in the same ball park as Personal/Human Interest programming and none of it is even close to Reality programming?

These awards were designed to build a star system and delineate those skilled at creating shows in the hope that the powers that be and the audience would want them to do more of the same.

Instead, it's now a junior soccer tournament where every network's marketing department goes home with a ribbon it might as well magnet to the fridge in the staff lounge because the gushing press releases they'll fire off as a result won't be read by anybody who might tune in to see what else they have to offer.

Perhaps the entire purpose of the Geminis is only to give our networks something to wave in front of the CRTC to prove they're not really fudging on their commitment to the country.

The best we have in the industry deserve better. And the audience deserves better too.

That's certainly a sentiment shared by High Priest Howard Bernstein who turned his attention from the sorry state of television news to sports this week.

By examining what passes for testicles within the Jock TV genre, Howard asserts what every sports fan in the country instinctively knows -- sportscasts are an anachronism in the digital age.

I'm always struck by how the energetic and hair-gelled guys at Sportsnet come slamming in hard on the last out of a Jays game to tease the outcome as their lead story. Dudes, I just watched the game! I know how it turned out! Anybody who wasn't watching wouldn't know to tune in at 10:17 pm for the top story.

Doesn't matter. They play up the suspense. And then like all good Canadian sportscasts, give me a rundown of everything else that either played earlier on their network or is a franchise to which they own the rights before covering whatever else is going on in the sports world.

And then its a long tour through sports appealing to every discernable advertiser demographic (somehow ignoring the poker and monster truck competitions that actually fill their schedules) while never approaching the depth of online sites like Deadspin or ESPN endlessly repeating scores and stats I can find myself in 30 seconds online, instead of sitting through the same beer commercial eight times in order to get them.

Once again, in a desire to provide content to everybody, Canadian TV sportscasts don't serve anybody, maybe least of all their sponsors.

And you begin to wonder if the long hours these nets spent around a sports desk are only to qualify the required Canadian content percentages, since little of the day's live sports content involves Canadian teams or even takes place in this country.

Howard asks a lot of great questions, like does a nation of 30 Million people really need 8 different sports networks. Well, not if they're all the same we don't.

But being the same allows each of our broadcast conglomerates to wring another couple of bucks from fans who can't follow their favorite team without subscribing to several channels operated by different owners.

Those who follow sports which are less popular here remain underserved or completely ignored. And as illustrated by Rogers new Sports offering which will suddenly deny 15 Blue Jay games this season to those who subscribe to the wrong Cable provider, it's clear that the avowed policy of those who regulate the industry is not meeting the needs of the public but of ensuring that a chosen few can enjoy corporate pissing contests.

In a remote part of the temple, prairie medicine man Trevor Cunningham reads much the same in the entrails of the UK Film Council, noting the similarities between this rightfully pitch-forked bureaucracy and our own Telefilm.

Expanding on a wonderful video dissection of the corpse by longtime UKFC beneficiary Chris (not the guy from "Blue Lagoon") Atkins, Trevor delves into the bloated bureaucracy and cult of institutional favorites which have been dealt with ad nauseum here at the Legion.

Everybody knows that one of the biggest problems facing Canadian films is distribution and the inability of English features to crack the 5% threshold of screen time at the local multiplex.

Despite setting that goal as a priority in 2001, 2004 and 2008, Telefilm has failed dismally at achieving even that small benchmark. Yet they continue to fund studios and local cinema icons who have never returned a penny of the millions they've been gifted for their work because nobody goes to see their movies here or anywhere else.

Meanwhile, there are a myriad of Telefilm programs to support filmmakers representing a certain ethnicity, regional minority or social disparity usually in order to create a film that can appear at some tiny film festival that celebrates the same issue.

While all those may be laudable initiatives, they do nothing to grow an industry, ignoring that a rising tide lifts all boats and a couple of commercial successes will create both ongoing work and the ability for the artists being paid for that work to initiate projects close to their heart and/or addressing their ethnic, regional or social issues.

And when Telefilm axes the only program they had to support original work from writers who have a proven track record, you know their real agenda has nothing to do with developing better material within the industry.

We've got to get away from self help programs for people who seldom make a second film, let alone establish a career. And we've got to get away from Federal and local funding agencies who fund foreign projects or certify them as Canadian content because it at least keeps some grips or Post production houses working. If the emphasis was not on finding a niche where we can find odd jobs, but delivering what an audience will pay to see, we'd be a lot further ahead.

It's time for all of us to get a little more selfish and little more focused. A Gemini Awards with 20 categories will be far more effective in raising public awareness of what's being done in the industry than five times as many categories containing so many titles our audience can't begin to remember them all.

Maybe the people who fund the Geminis could then use the money they spend on those hundreds of extra trophies to do something else to tell Canadians how great some of the other stuff we do really is.

With the mass availability of digital information, our sports networks no longer need to spend money on hair gel, fancy sets and guys who once had a hockey career. That money could go to acquiring more sports programming or a digital sub channel where I can catch a game I missed or didn't DVR and watch it for myself. Or it could go to actual sports journalists with the experience to give me the whole story and not just the quippable catch phrases.

Maybe the CRTC Commissioners who license those sports channels could stop thinking that more of the same thing is an alternative for the public. Maybe they need to finally license an amateur sports channel or one that specializes in the games or in-depth reporting that the others do not.

And maybe Telefilm could just stop being so damn precious and dare I say "elitist". There's something about those sub-programs for underprivileged filmmakers that smacks of condescension as much as continuing to fund art house wannabes typifies upper class arrogance.

Nurturing on the basis of originality and talent while supporting based on achievement would go a long way to turning things around here.

Lazy Sunday # 134: The Garbage Nazis

There's a little circular filing cabinet under every writer's desk. It's where all the detritus of a day at the office ends up.

The one under mine currently holds some discarded notes, a section of the newspaper, two dead Tim Horton's cups, one plastic vacuum pack from a new thumb drive, one dead ballpoint pen, two plastic water bottles, one half chewed rawhide bone (not mine) with something growing on it, one Styrofoam wrapped juice bottle and an apple core.

Used to be you just dumped all of this in a bigger garbage can at the end of the day and then dumped that at the curb.

Not anymore.

Now we sort. Paper and plastic and organic and glass and cardboard all go into different piles that then go out to the curb in different colored boxes and/or different colored bags on different pick up days.

Hey, does this rawhide bone go in one box but what's on it have to get scraped into the organic bin?

It's all very confusing. And depending on where you live, what you are allowed to recycle is different or has even more rules around it.

I've been known to refer the people who make environmental rules as the Garbage Nazis, both for the way they want to control every aspect of our lives by what we use and/or discard, but because they deal in lies and fear and all other sorts of "garbage".

Last year, the City of Toronto's Garbage Nazis almost got into a war with the Tim Horton's coffee chain over the lids to their cups, which apparently COULD NOT under any circumstances be recycled because they were made of a kind of plastic deemed no longer allowed to exist on the planet.

Tim pointed out that every suburban city surrounding Toronto didn't have a problem with their lids. Didn't matter. The Nazis drew a line in the sand. Tim volunteered to take its coffee, jobs and massive tax contribution elsewhere. The Nazis decided the bad plastic could maybe just go into a new bin.

There are now so many different and regulated containers in Toronto people began complaining that there was no room in their yards and on their porches for all of them and the clutter was unsightly. The city's solution was to order they be kept indoors.

A few months ago, I helped a friend clear out his garage. And like the conscientious lovers of the planet that we are, we loaded up a ton of old paint cans and drove them to the "special place" that takes toxic materials.

A local Garbage Nazi who looked like he was also auditioning for the re-make of "Deliverance" eyeballed every paint can as it came off the truck, muttering something about making somebody squeal like a pig if latex got mixed with enamel or any of the drip marks clashed.

At one point he literally leapt at me as I lifted an old mayonnaise bottle of discarded paint thinner, blocking access to his precious piles of garbage.

"Hold it! We can't take that!"

I explained that it was just paint thinner as he trembled with fear, his hands outstretched to keep the jar from getting any closer.

"We can't take nothin' that ain't in the original container!", he insisted, his voice quavering. "There could be anything in there. Without an original container, we can't know what it might be. That's the rules."

I asked what I was supposed to do with it.

"Put it in your regular garbage. They'll take it to the landfill."

Really? I thought the whole point was to keep toxic stuff out of landfills.

Note to good self: Next time just dump it in a can with some paint it dissolves, neutralizing both of them a little.

Note to bad self: If you're ever a terrorist stuck with some spare atomic waste, just bag it and leave it at the curb.

More and more, however, the Garbage Nazis can't ever seem to decide what's really bad for us or how it ought to be handled.  Their zeal to save the planet from the likes of the rest of us is even starting to confuse them.

Where my dad lives, for example, they have very specific rules listing different ways different kinds of cardboard need to be sorted. Cereal boxes can't go with egg cartons and neither can go with orange juice cartons. Therefore, one breakfast = three different piles of recycled material. What's more, it all has to be tied with "non-rubber" fastening in packets "X" cm by "Y" mm by so many inches thick.

The people in his neighborhood have to buy perfectly good string that's only used to tie up their garbage.

They also tell a funny story about a garbage collector so incensed by constantly having to re-sort their wrongly placed recycling before it contaminated the wrong bin on his truck that he finally broke down in tears and had to be taken away.

In my neck of the woods, we have to pay for plastic shopping bags to keep them from forming a deadly vortex in the middle of the Pacific Ocean that's now apparently bigger than the decaying Antarctic Ice Pack and a navigational danger to all the diesel burning freighters bringing toxic lead toys and tainted food into the country from China.

One of our food chains got all smug about a month ago, declaring that the new no bag policy had kept 3 billion plastic bags out of the ocean last year alone. And that meant they could donate a few thousand dollars to the World Wildlife Fund.

Nobody seemed to want to discuss how many billion more Glad bags had been sold instead so people could keep bagging dog poo, kitchen waste and old mayonnaise bottles of paint thinner.

And not that anybody would doubt the bookkeeping at any major grocery chain -- but given the number of bags people still pay for, if I was with the WWF, I'd be calling the folks who used to own that trademark to borrow some guys way bigger than endangered sea otters to have a chat with an accountant or two.

Yet, in the world of the Garbage Nazis, it seems there is never any solution to an environmental problem that does not create another problem they then need to devise a method to control as well.

During the recent heat wave, I watched one news report detailing how many Pandas are asphyxiated if I run the AC in my car for even a few minutes. Okay, I thought, liking Pandas as much as the next guy (maybe more), I'll just roll down the windows.

Uh-uh. Apparently that's almost as bad since it causes drag on the vehicle which increases its CO emissions which causes people with breathing problems to overburden the health care system which…

This nonsense just goes on and on, constantly implying there is no solution beyond only exhaling your own CO2 on alternate days.

But there are logical solutions.

Lots of them.

There are cities running their public buildings off garbage burning incinerators that don't leave any residue at all. One town down the road from me has paved its streets with what comes out the back end of their own garbage removal system, saving their citizens millions in taxes while creating no other problems with the environment.

And then there is this from Japan, a little box that turns one kilogram of plastic into one liter of oil. Just like that. Imagine a barge loaded with these bobbing in the Pacific, providing its own power and electricity while saving Floaty the Polar Bear from losing his igloo.

Pretty soon, there could be one of these in every home, driving down the cost of gas or electricity as well as the carbon going into the atmosphere while not increasing your blood pressure or the power of the Garbage Nazis.

Enjoy your Sunday.