10 THINGS YOU CAN DO TO SUPPORT THE WGA

Half of me is on strike and half isn't. Half goes to work every day and half doesn't. I'm a multi-hyphenate writer member of the WGA and the Writers Guild of Canada, producer and of late director. Explaining how I fragmented so much is far too complicated. To be honest, I don't fully understand it myself.

With the WGA on strike, my business in that realm is at a standstill. On the plus side, the long distance phone bill this month promises to be a little more manageable. On the WGC half, I can write for Canadian companies working in Canada and I'm fielding calls from Canadian producers trying to figure out how to profit from the current labor disruption and hoping I'll get aboard that train.

Not a chance.



There's much at stake in this WGA/AMPTP dispute and no matter how you frame it, doing anything but fully supporting the WGA is tantamount to helping the American media conglomerates gut our fellow writers -- and do the same to directors, actors and anybody else who works in film and television as soon as they finish with the scribes.

Big Media is in trouble. Oh, they've put a rosy face on things. All those recent acquisitions and mergers have allowed them to appear fat and happy at the bottom line. But the risk averse nature of the new corporate owners has gradually led to their TV audience dwindling. Repetitive styles and sequels do not make for a reliable source of steady cash at the box office. DVD sales have peaked. The Music business is in freefall and everybody seems to be going to the internet.

The internet is where the money and the future lies.

Only the corporations don't own or control the internet.

Yet.

Under the current system, the movie business is financed primarily by DVDs, followed by the box office and then sales to television and other distribution systems. Problem is that because of their own risk aversion and mismanagement, that money isn't going to the studios that make the movies anymore.

Global Media Intelligence in association with Merrill Lynch, just published a report concluding that much of the studio income (current and future) has already been alotted to the top stars, directors and producers in the form of participation deals. That's a share of the gross revenue, not just the profits, of a movie.

Major studios are now giving away as much as 25 percent of a film's receipts under these agreements. Some stars even get a share of the sales of popcorn and milk duds.

Industry-wide, the payout was $3 billion last year alone, with many of these players still making fortunes even when the films themselves lose money.

It's a system that closely replicates the corporate structure of the companies controlling today's media; where obscene sums are paid to a few but at the expense of everyone else involved and imperiling the very business that could easily sustain them all.

In TV, the economic climate is just as bad because of the same level of greed and mismanagement. Last year, a relatively good one by all forms of measurement, the major networks still had to give back $200 Million to their advertisers in the form of "make goods"; meaning free commercial time to make good on promises of audience numbers that weren't delivered.

One week into the strike, late night ratings were down 30% and numbers in all time slots are expected to decline precipitously once current shows run out of original material.

The question is not only how much the nets will have to "make good" this season, but how much their advertising clients will be willing to offer up front in June to finance next year's pilots and series. The prevailing wisdom is -- a whole lot less than they did this year.

This mess is the result of stupidity. The whole system could easily be run better, creating a positive financial outcome for all concerned. But then all those concerned might leverage some creative control or ask for a share of income that better reflects their contribution and that just isn't allowed.

So Big Media's only hope to regain and retain the profit margins they've enjoyed to date is to break the unions and control content on the internet. But building the same stranglehold on creativity and distribution they've enjoyed up to now requires complete and absolute control of every penny flowing through that new media conduit.

If they break the writers, they'll move on to break SAG whose membership has both a shorter average professional career and a lower median income, making it harder for most SAG members to sustain any long term resistance. Directors, the smallest guild, would inevitably follow and that will be that.

The thin gruel that makes up the bulk of what's on television and available at the multiplex would now come to you online as well.

This isn't a battle between Big Media masquerading as Producers and a bunch of guys who write scripts. It's the opening salvo of a war over who can have a place in the media of tomorrow, It's also a reflection of the desperation of conglomerates whose only hope of creating shareholder value is through the complete elimination of all shared revenue streams and the subjugation of their workers.

So what can you do?

Being a thousand miles from the nearest picket line, I asked myself the same question and came up with a list. Here are 10 things you can do to support the striking writers of the WGA, their fellow artists and the countless others who provide you with your entertainment options.

1. STOP WATCHING AMERICAN TELEVISION. I'm not saying kick the TV habit. Just stop watching anything created or broadcast by any of the BIG 6, Newscorp, Time Warner, GE, Viacom, Sony and MGM. That may mean watching CBC in Canada or a lot of tele-novellas stateside, but you'll survive and you might even find something you like. If you must watch "House" and "CSI" until they're out of original episodes, so be it. But please don't watch the reruns or what replaces them. And if the Neilsen people call before then, tell them you're not watching anything and tell them why.

2. STOP BUYING AND RENTING DVDS. Writers get virtually nothing from their sale, either to you or the rental place. Tell the kid at Blockbuster why you're not renting from him. He's a film geek and doesn't like studio product for more reasons than you'll ever understand and will therefore appreciate your "stickin' it to the man". Once this is over, he'll happily have a free bag of M&M's and a big Coke waiting to greet your return.

3. STOP DOWNLOADING from iTunes or any other pay site for media. Writers get nothing from those purchases. Yes, downloading from pirate sites is stealing. But paying for downloads when the revenue is not shared with the creators is corporate theft. Is stealing from thieves a crime? I'll let your own moral compass be your guide on that one. Watch what you already own. Swap with friends. Just don't put another dollar in the hands of the WGA's persecutors until this is over.

4. STOP GOING TO MOVIES. Again, I'm not asking you to give up date night or Sunday afternoon with the kids. Just don't go to see anything made by the BIG 6. Their names are plastered all over the ads, so the marks of the beasts are quite visible.

There's a ton of indy features you can go to see instead, along with art films, documentaries and foreign films. And those foreign flicks are not all in French, Swedish or Italian. Remember: Canadians, Australians and the British all speak English and also make some damn good movies. Try breaking down other cultural barriers you might have too because there's great stuff made by the Chinese, the Japanese and at least a million different guys in Bollywood.

5. STOP BUYING PRODUCTS from the multi-nationals who own the networks and studios. A comprehensive list of their holdings can be found here.

Your Mom or your girlfriend/boyfriend does not need a GE hair dryer or a Westinghouse toaster oven for Christmas. Buy jewelry instead. At least then you're only supporting local warlords and slave traders, in some cases, a moral step up from the average Multinational CEO.

There's also a lot of guys who aren't named Sony making Plasma TVs. Get your news and sports information online instead of buying Time or Sports Illustrated. The information you get will also be less than a week old. And understand that people write good books that aren't published by Simon & Shuster (another Viacom company).

Y'know it's appalling how much these people own and yet they still can't seem to make ends meet without screwing writers. I think their shareholders should be asking who's in charge.

6. BECOME A SHAREHOLDER. Buy one share of one or all of the BIG SIX. Given what's going on, you might want to make that purchase on margin and short the stock. Then start phoning management to complain about how things are being run. Be a pest. You're a shareholder. It's your money they're throwing around on private jets and gourmet lunches while box office and ratings are suffering. Ask a lot of questions about those movie participation deals. How come the shareholders weren't told a quarter of the cash flow was going to that Spielberg guy and Tom Cruise? Why should your dividends end up financing E-meters?

Hound them about the accuracy of their books too. Do you think these people would only cheat writers?

7. THE SAME GOES FOR TV SPONSORS. Find out who buys ads on your favorite show and phone them up. Tell the guys at Ford that you want 24 episodes of "24" or you're going across the street to the Dodge dealership. You might also ask what kind of message they're sending by having a guy who's going to jail for DUI as their product spokesman while you're at it.

Overall, let any sponsor know that you're not very happy with them using their ad dollars to support businesses like TV networks who don't treat their employees fairly. Suggest that you won't be buying their product until they pull their ads. If enough people call, that strategy works. I know, I've been on the wrong side of it. Even if it doesn't work, you'll get a nice letter with some coupons.

8. COMPLAIN TO YOUR ELECTED REPRESENTATIVES. There's an election coming up in the USA. Call your local candidates and anybody running for President and ask where they stand -- on the side of greedy, faceless corporations or ordinary people who can outvote them on a scale of about 10,000 to one? When they patronize you with the obvious answer, demand to see some tangible proof. There are photo-ops aplenty for any politician who walks a WGA picket and a lot of questions that need to be asked of those not brave enough to show up.

In Canada, this political objective can be accomplished by asking your MP how come the CRTC allows Canadian networks to buy so much programming from people who don't want writers to earn residuals which could support their families in a land without universal health care, subsidized theatre and guaranteed maternity leave.

9. PHONE PETER CHERNIN AND LESLIE MOONVES. These two network CEOs told WGA negotiators a deal could be made if DVD payments were taken off the table and then reneged on that promise when the Guild complied. If I was on the negotiating committee, I'd be raising that DVD payment 1% a day from now until a deal is finally reached. You can't allow this kind of duplicity to go unpunished.

There's no way to end any labor dispute until a level of trust between the parties is achieved and these two men all but eliminated that possibility. They both need to be called to account.

You can reach Mr. Chernin at 310-369-1000 and Mr. Moonves at 323-575-2345. Don't let the nice lady on the switchboard deter you, the boys are somewhere in the building and you will be forwarded. Studio policy requires that all phone calls placed between 8:00 am and 8:00 pm be voice answered and logged, making the staff less available to assist these two reprehensible CEOs in putting their plans for world domination into action.

10. SUPPORT INDEPENDENT PRODUCT ONLINE. Writers and other creatives are already offering new media forms of entertainment online and it's not hard to find. Just Google what whets your appetite and a thousand options will present themselves. It's just as easy to crack a beer and flop in front of your computer as it is using a couch and a television. And it's going to get a lot easier real soon. There are entire networks here that you've never heard of, original webisodes and alternate universes and graphic novels and real people you can interact with while being entertained.

There are opinions expressed here that are not diluted or spun to serve the self interests of mega-corporations as well as products and services that will never carry an "As seen on TV" sticker. It's a brave new world that isn't owned and controlled by six companies. A place where artists and audiences can engage without a grasping middleman and where the future can be shared equitably.

Sharing equitably is what this strike is about. Thanks for doing whatever you can in helping us all get there.

MY SOUNDTRACK

The overwhelming social ramifications of the WGA strike weighed on me this weekend and I started working out what I think it means to all of our futures.

I hope that post will turn out to be as insightful and informative as what's to be found or linked here and here this morning, for I'm getting the sense that all the disruptions that have shaken our industry for the last 10 years (including this strike) have been merely the pre-shocks to the "Big One" that will hit this summer.

For those two or three that hang on my every word, I won't keep you in suspense much longer. Point is, by last night, I was utterly depressed and being a guy who doesn't drink as much as he should, I turned to responding to a tag from Jill Gollick and in the "research" portion of that process, refound my spirit, which was at the core of her tag question...

Jill's directive was to reveal what music gives me story ideas, inspiration or the motivation to write. And since it was finding the video samples I was supposed to supply that got me out of my funk, the tag couldn't have been more timely.

I'm one of those writers who doesn't require quiet solitude to create. Maybe it's all those years in busy production offices. Phones ringing incessantly. Constant interruptions. One crisis or another. So my writing environment of preference includes continuous background chatter or distraction.

However, unlike professional athletes or those soldiers in Iraq who post their pre-patrol playlists on Facebook, I don't have a specific piece of music that gets me primed.

What I seem to do is begin trolling the collection as I'm focusing on a new story and winnowing that down to 2 or 3 albums which become the soundtrack for each individual writing assignment. Those albums then play continuously until my script is done. The music itself has nothing to do with the themes or moods of the material but is everything in resparking whatever creative cable was laid during the "thinking" stage.

I wrote one of my first features with Rush's "Moving Pictures" hammering away in the BG. To this day, hearing the first notes of "Red Barchetta" or "Tom Sawyer" immediately puts me back in that time, sitting in that room, pecking away on a Tandy computer.

My tastes are fairly eclectic. But about 10 years ago I reconnected with Country music and now I'm pretty much Hillybilly Hardcore.

Country is also primarily a story telling genre with almost every song having a definitive beginning, middle and end that covers the traditional 5 W's and repeats the theme in the choruses and coda. Generally two or three lines firmly set the scene and you're into the plot, a cogent reminder while writing that less is always more.

It's also precise storytelling as in Garth Brooks' "Papa Loved Mama" -- to wit -- "Papa loved Mama. Mama loved men. Mama's in the graveyard. Papa's in the Pen." You don't create story more economically than that.

I've actually developed a theory that like the story-breaking process or writing room discussions, Country music uses stories to tease new stories from its listeners and therefore puts you in instant writing mode.

What I like best in a good script is also at the heart of Country music. Honesty. As Rock and Pop have (for me) become more formulaic and niche focused; Country (which probably has the most precisely targeted demographics in the music industry) maintains the sense that its artists both believe and live the philosophies that permeate their music.

Yeah, I've written to Dave Grohl, Springsteen and Don Henley (both in and out of "The Eagles" -- great new album there BTW) as well as film composers like Mark Isham. But Country is what consistently stimulates and lubricates my creative flow.

For my required footnotes and examples, I've chosen three songs from three artists who are likely easier on those among you with non-Country ears. I hope they inspire you a little. And if they do -- TAG -- you're it, explain yourself.

BROOKS & DUNN -- RED DIRT ROAD



ALAN JACKSON -- LITTLE MAN



MARTINA MCBRIDE -- BROKEN WING

LAZY SUNDAY #2: GUITAR

Ever since the first guitar was electrified, teenage boys have hunkered in garages, bedrooms and basements practising the licks that might lead them to rock stardom.

And then there are guys like this...

THE VOTE WHORES

Conjure the following scene...

A fortified jungle outpost. Machine gun fire and rocket propelled grenades spew from the slit windows of a concrete blockhouse as the fortress's Defenders come under relentless attack.

Surging from the jungle, wave after wave of troops charge headlong through tall elephant grass that rises above their shoulders. They struggle to aim and fire AK-47's that are almost as large and heavy as they are. The attackers are Children and the fortress Defenders cut their tiny bodies to pieces...

This isn't fiction. It's a brief description of the Battle of Elephant Pass, which occurred in Northern Sri Lanka in 1991, lasted 4 days and involved more than 10,000 combatants.

The attacking army was "The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam"(LTTE). They lost the battle and left 573 dead child soldiers on the battlefield, some as young as 4 years old.


The use of Child soldiers is one of the most repugnant aspects of modern warfare. Around the world, hundreds of thousands of children are abducted from their families, abused until compliant and turned into killers. They are literally cannon fodder. Disposable. Dispensable. Never missed or mourned by their commanders.

The war in Sri Lanka has been going on for more than 20 years, with the Tamil Tigers credited for not only inventing suicide bombing, but for abducting thousands of children in the tiny island nation to act as soldiers in units the Tigers themselves have dubbed "Baby Brigades".


If it were possible to make this practise even more disturbing, the LTTE has done that too, now owning and operating orphanages where the children placed in their care are trained for special combat units called "Leopard Brigades" or their "Black Tiger" suicide squads.

And they've done all of these things with money raised in Canada (mostly within 25 miles of my own home) while Liberal Prime Ministers Jean Chretien and Paul Martin repeatedly refused to place them on any list of banned terrorist groups.


As the LTTE assassinated heads of government, massacred hundreds in rural villages, engaged in human smuggling, arms smuggling, Tsunami relief fund theft, piracy and massive extortion in immigrant communities abroad; the USA, India, Australia, Great Britain and 27 countries in the European Union outlawed their activities, jailed their enablers and froze their assets.


In Canada, the ruling Liberals did nothing, not wanting to "upset" Tamil residents who account for 100,000 votes in Federal ridings East and North of Toronto. And you don't have to take my word for that.

While the RCMP investigated "intimidation and extortion" of Tamil Canadians to secure funding for the Tigers, an FBI report designated Canada as a major source of illegal funding to the Tigers because "The federal Liberal Government, in an effort to bolster support in the Tamil community, refuses to declassify the Tigers as a terrorist group despite several recommendations from CSIS to do so."


Last year, the new government of Stephen Harper followed the rest of the International community and declared the LTTE a terrorist organization. The RCMP raided their fund raising charity fronts in Toronto and Montreal while police arrested several involved in arms smuggling.

Last Friday, the Sri Lankan Air Force killed LTTE Brigadier S.P. Thamilselvan, deputy leader of the Tigers. On Monday night, not far from where I live, 10,000 Tamils gathered to mourn his loss, joining them and speaking from the stage were 9 federal Liberal members of parliament.

The MP's said they were there "to urge for peace" and have been praising the dead Tiger leader as a "peacemaker" despite his well publicized (and self-acknowledged) record of hundreds of atrocities and have denied that the Tigers are involved in extorting their constituents and are anything but terrorists.


That would seem to fly in the face of reams of evidence supplied by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, UNICEF, Interpol, the FBI and CSIS.

Yesterday, I heard MP Jim Karygiannis deny that there was any evidence of Tamils in Canada being threatened, abused or forced to pay money to support the Tigers. That would mean that he's unaware of the letter sent to members of parliament and the Toronto Police Chief 11 months ago by Human Rights Watch which outlined just such practices.


He also apparently missed the CBC story from a year earlier that outlined the door-to-door fundraising where Tamil families were given Pin numbers for donations. Numbers they would need to enter certain districts in Sri Lanka when they returned for visits. Numbers which would also assure the safety of relatives still living there.

And I guess he was busy in June of 2000 when 400 Sri Lankans marched on Parliament Hill urging the Liberal government to crackdown on fund-raising by the Tigers that had Tamil neighbourhoods living in fear.

In protecting their political backsides, these politicians protect killers, not only breaking the laws of this country by "associating with a banned terrorist organization", but contributing to untold suffering and bloodshed half a world away -- much of it by children whose innocence has been traded for inhumanity.


According to Human Rights Watch and UNICEF, the Tamil Tigers abducted 5,666 children between 2001 and 2006, although they speculate only 1/3 of cases are actually reported to them.

The report also states that these Children were used for "massive frontal assaults" like Elephant Pass and that boys and girls 12-14 were used to massacre women and children in remote rural villages. Children as young as 10 are used as suicide bombers and assassins, the Tigers preferring girls and young women because they are less likely to be searched for explosives by security forces.


And if this isn't sinking low enough, LTTE child soldiers are provided with cyanide capsules and grenades and instructed to take their own lives to avoid capture.

There's an adage that the only thing required for evil to succeed is for good men to do nothing and another about the banality of evil.

The nine Liberal Members of Parliament pictured below certainly exemplify the banality of evil.

In descending order, they are:

John Cannis -- Mark Holland -- Jim Karygiannis -- Derek Lee -- John McKay -- Maria Minna -- Yasmin Ratansi -- Lui Temelkovski -- Borys Wrzesnewskyj...




















Despite their stance as peacemakers, supporters of "freedom fighters" or however else they rationalize their behaviour -- nothing can justify defending those who twist children into killers and assassins or walking bomb delivery units.

I honestly hope there's some way they can be punished for their support of the purveyors of terror. Maybe our anti-terror laws actually have some teeth. Maybe American Homeland Security can put them on some no-fly list. Perhaps the decent people in their constituencies have other ways to take them to task for the terrible acts they've assisted by their desire to hold a seat in Parliament.


How do these people sleep? Just how much can a vote really be worth?

THERE'S A NEW KID IN TOWN

Friday night saw the launch of Canada's new Pay-TV service, "Super Channel", owned by Allarco Entertainment of Edmonton.


It's a gutsy move bringing a product like this to life in a television environment already heavily fragmented, competing with video-on-demand, movies-by-mail and the TMN/Movie Central matrix that has dominated the Pay industry here since 1984.

TMN/MC fought Super Channel every inch of the way from conception to birth, arguing against its license at the CRTC primarily on the grounds that another Pay service would create a "lack of program diversity" and cause the movement of some specialty channel programming to Pay.

Well, gee -- then why don't the networks affected get out there and produce some new stuff of their own? That's what they promised to do when they got licensed, wasn't it?

I guess monopolizing your turf makes good business sense at one level. But the best way to deal with a competitor is to outclass or outmaneuver him before he has a chance to get a solid footing.

With six months to prepare an ambush, you'd think TMN/MC might've cooked up something the new arrival would have had a tough time matching. Some ground-breaking series. Perhaps a stunningly original film or three. But so far the senior service doesn't appear to be offering its subscribers much beyond the usual fare in order to hang onto its "Big Dog" title.

Featuring 4 individual channels plus 2 HD positions on the dial that replicate the content on the first four, the current Super Channel schedule promises it will deliver "a little something for everybody". I'm sure that'll draw a wide variety of viewers to sample their wares, but the big question is how SC will hold onto those viewers in the coming months.

While TMN/MC continues to support the Canadian feature industry through equity investment and generous pre-buys, the last few years have seen a concerted effort to set themselves apart by creating or acting as first window for series such as "ReGenesis" and "Slings & Arrows" as well as prestigious minis like "Durham County" and "Terminal City".

SC's current commitment of $4 Million in the first year in new production and acquisitions would translate to licensing 3 or 4 series annually (if that's all it was used for). But that further copies the competition and I doubt such a commitment would have enough overall impact to clearly define their programming intentions. I also doubt such a strategy would attract a wealth of new subscribers or hold those that the limited hours of such new series might initially lure aboard.

SC and its audience might be better served by following the formula which laid a solid foundation for Showtime and was later replicated by currently successful specialty networks Sci-Fi and Lifetime. All of these opted to produce a mass of low budget productions that may have had their creative faults but ensured viewers would have at least one brand new and original feature every single week of the year.

People might have rolled their eyes at titles like "Moonshine Highway" or "Night of the Twisters", but they kept coming back in large enough numbers to establish their broadcaster.

Programming a slate of low-budget but audience friendly films in whatever genre(s) SC feels its target demographic is most apt to watch would be a simple way for this new kid in town to have something original to promote on a weekly basis and make sure they cover their quota of 30% prime time and 25% the rest of the time Canadian content.

And whether the content were exploitive or followed a middle path of Romantic comedy or bestseller mystery, it would still put the channel in a position to hedge its bets in the Pay market while tapping the revenue streams these original films would have in the foreign, DVD and online after-markets.

To be sure, the safe course would be to follow the TMN/MC format of Hollywood fare augmented by over played or just plain played out CanCon. But then, who's going to notice the new kid and are there enough subscribers to keep two more or less identical networks profitable? Let's not forget that it was this kind of "same-ness" that helped kill two of our original Pay services (C-Channel and the single word version Superchannel) the first time there were competing entities.

Super Channel is already committed to diverting 32% of its revenues to Canadian production, so why not give the production community the immediate shot in the arm it desperately needs, and build on the resulting mutual success later. It's a move which would earn Super Channel enormous industry support and just might attract viewers with a product no other Canadian broadcaster is currently offering them.

THE FALL SUPPER

I'm one of those guys who doesn't gas up until he's running on fumes. I've got some friends who comment that they've never driven anywhere with me when the fuel light wasn't on and one who recalls literally coasting 26 miles down a twisting cliffside road through the middle of nowhere in Australia to reach the only petrol station within a day's drive.

We made it. I always do. Not sure if it's just luck or an innate ability to calculate distance to fuel ratios, but I haven't been stranded yet.

This weekend I was shooting way North of Toronto. After wrapping the crew and packing the truck, I set out on the long drive home just before sunset, soon realizing I was low on gas and also starving since I'd worked through lunch.

I'd just rolled past the last service area for the next 50 miles, because like all highway service areas these days, it was basically a McDonald's franchise with pumps and I wasn't doing that to myself.

There was a turn-off ahead for a small town a half dozen clicks from the highway so I figured I'd find gas and maybe a nicer place to eat there. The town was small and the only eatery I'd seen, the coffee shop opposite the gas station, was closed. I filled up and asked the kid at the cash if there was a restaurant open nearby. He shook his head, "Everybody's closed. They're all down at the Fall Supper."

It was a term I hadn't heard in years. But I asked directions and the kid gave them to me. He even had a couple of tickets left and sold me one. $10 -- for the best meal any former country boy can have.


The Fall Supper is a North American farm tradition that goes back at least a couple of hundred years. Before there were official Thanksgivings, every rural community would hold a post harvest feast, an opportunity for those who'd spent the last weeks getting in the crops to relax, catch up with their neighbors and dig in to the best local recipes and home cooking to be found thereabouts.

They reached their peak in the 1950's and were such a cultural fixture in Saskatchewan during my childhood that some dignitary decided that the Queen and Prince Philip should attend one during a Royal visit. There's a famous story of one of the church women picking up the royal plates and saying, "Hang onto your fork, your Majesty, there's pie!"

It's still a major part of the Autumn social calendar all across the Canadian Prairies and through the Midwestern States. But from late September to late November, it isn't hard to find something similar anywhere rural.

The one I found tonight was in the basement of the local United Church, just like most of the ones I'd attended as a kid. Back then the tickets cost a buck, a quarter for anybody over 60 or under 12.

Preparation started early in the day with the local women gathering at the Church kitchen to either create their personal trademark dishes or warm up the foil covered cauldrons of heirloom recipes they'd prepared at home.

The menu might vary from Turkey & Sauerkraut or thick beef sausages if the ethnic makeup were primarily German to Perogies and Roast Pork in a Ukrainian community. But there was always a wide variety of choices and the servings were immense. If you could carry your plate to the table with one hand, you were definitely not getting the full experience.

The diners came from miles around. In a time of bachelor cowboys and hired hands, it wasn't unusual for a pick up truck crammed with guys eager for a real home-cooked meal to travel an hour or more to find the local church having "Supper Night".

That popularity meant there were always multiple "sittings", meaning the enormous meal would be served at least 2-3 times per night.

Kids ate first and you turned up at the church around five, sitting in the pews until somebody came to wave you down to the basement. That wait was always an exquisite agony. Incredible smells drifted up through the floor boards as you debated what kind of pie they might have (my favorite was Rhubarb) and some too-brainy kid would always insist it wasn't a "Fall" supper, it was a "Foul" supper because of all the chickens and turkeys being served.

Meanwhile, you tried to avoid making eye contact with the Minister pacing the aisle, eschewing his dog collar for a more trendy "social evening" turtleneck, because you didn't want him mentioning that he hadn't seen you at Sunday school for a while.

The Organist was usually there too, playing something more up-tempo than hymns. We figured it was what she played down in Swift Current at the hotel. There was always an ad in the Saturday paper showing her "At the Hammond for Happy Hour".

Y'know, I'll bet there's a story in that woman's double life; playing "Begin the Beguine" amid swirling cigarette smoke over the clink of "Hi-Ball" glasses until midnight, then driving all night to appear scrubbed and prim as she pumped out "Bringing in the Sheaves" at the 8:00 a.m. service.

But I digress...

Eventually somebody took your ticket and ushered you down to the basement and its waiting tables. You waved to your mom and loaded up your plate with Turkey and Goose and one of Mrs. Hartman's amazing Moose sausages. Then your aunt heaped mashed potatoes and gravy on one side of your dish while the nice lady from the farm with the big St. Bernard ladled on peas and carrots fresh from her garden.

You found a seat at a table with big bowls of still steaming rolls and pitchers of water, apple juice and cherry Kool-aid. The first sitting was always noisy as hell. Imagine a giant Thanksgiving dinner made up of nothing but kids' tables.

Once the amazing meal had been put away, the church ladies came around to clear the plates and serve dessert. It was always a big slab of homemade pie with a dollop of fresh whipped cream and a couple of sugar cookies on the side. You could also pretend to be grown up and have tea.

Overhead, you could hear the second sitting arriving and you knew the pre-dinner aroma torture they were undergoing and that they wouldn't be happy if you dawdled. The ladies were always anxious to move you out too -- for reasons I didn't understand until I was old enough to be part of the second or the even more mystical "third" sitting.

I doubt that anthropologists or sociologists study Fall Suppers. But they should, because there's a dynamic going on that's really intriguing.

For as the diners got older, the women in the kitchen got -- younger.

The second sitting was primarily the local menfolk and seniors. Farmers finished with their evening chores, store clerks, grain agents and the fellas from the railroad. Their wives and sweethearts were the cooks and servers, but instead of sitting down with the kids, tonight they were eating with all their friends.

It was Christmas dinner without being worried if Uncle Al would drink too much or crazy old Aunt Margaret would call a curse down on the Catholics during grace. The gaiety of the kids tables now translated to adults free of their social norm and in an atmosphere where a guy could openly flirt with the woman next door because she just made such great scalloped potatoes and a lonely telephone operator could draw an appreciative smile from a gentleman farmer with her flaky pastry.

It wasn't anything that threatened to turn into a Little Swingers Club on the Prairie, but it was a huge change from their ordered days and proscribed social options. Most of the women ate their meals when the men had desert and coffee, harvesting their full measure of kudoes and compliments.

But soon the restless shuffling upstairs moved the men and the seniors out. The hired hands were hungry.

And this is where it got interesting.

Because when the fresh scrubbed cowboys and single farmers in their best shirts made their way down the stairs, most of the married cooks busied themselves washing up the now empty pots and casserole dishes as the single women of the town did the serving and the recommending of each others candied yams and pickled beets.

For the cowboys weren't just hungry for a good meal and this was still a time when a woman got as far with her skills in the kitchen as her looks. In an almost tribal way, the older women were helping their eligible daughters and the handsome cowboys on the path to some smouldering glances around the old corral.

There was only one sitting tonight. But as the women of the church heaped my plate with slabs of roast turkey, ribs, baked squash and barely braised spinach, I could see them nudging a pretty young server into the path of raw-boned and good looking guy who clearly wasn't used to wearing a suit.

She said he should try the pumpkin pie. He asked if it was hers. She almost blushed as she nodded and her mom cut an extra thick slice and gave the Redi-Whip container a good shake. The woman serving me smiled knowingly. I did too.

You just don't get this kind of stuff at McDonald's.

LAZY SUNDAY #1: THE ROLLERSUIT

One of the things I like best about the Internet is the chance to discover and experience things you'd never have the opportunity to encounter in film or television.

Sundays seem to be the days when blogging and blog reading are lightest, so -- mostly in the interest of just keeping the lights on, I've decided to start posting some of my discoveries every Sunday from now on. Sort of my own antidote if your day of rest has deteriorated into one of boredom. I hope these vignettes will inspire and delight you as much as they do me.

First up -- the Rollersuit. Enjoy!

glumbert - Rollersuit in the Swiss Alps

GALLOWS HUMOR

With Hollywood frozen in fear by an impending work stoppage by its writers, a few members of the WGA have released the following...



"Above all else: go out with a sense of humor. It is needed armor. Joy in one's heart and some laughter on one's lips is a sign that the person down deep has a pretty good grasp of life." ~Hugh Sidey

LETTERS...WE GET LETTERS!

Apparently a number of Writers Guild of Canada members got form letters from Cable Honcho Jim Shaw this week in response to their having sent form letters to the CRTC (distributed by the Writers Guild last month) which took Shaw to task for his recent attacks on the Canadian Television Fund.

This was followed by the WGC sending the entire membership an email letter suggesting Mr. Shaw's letter was an attempt to "bully" those opposed to him and appending yet another form letter they could forward to the authorities.

Simultaneously, DMC launched another salvo in opposition to Mr. Shaw, in the process calling me out because of my past support for the Shaw offensive.

Now -- getting called out by DMC is not a matter to be taken lightly. I put it on a level with being that hapless sheepherder who suddenly has to go up against Jack Palance in "Shane".

You know the scene. Unarmed sheep farmer. Gunslinger Jack tosses a gun to his feet...

              JACK

Pick it up! Pick up the gun!

Sheep herder picks up the gun. Jack blows a hole in him, turns to the townsfolk...

             JACK

You saw him! He had a gun!

Trust me. DMC and Jack Palance are not dissimilar. Imposing guys. Tend to dress in black. Seldom back from a fight and awful good at shooting from the hip.

Okay...

So there's the gun...

There's the Guild folk looking on to see what I'll do...

Maybe it's time to reveal I'm really a wolf in Sheep herder's clothing...

But first...

I want to make it clear that I didn't get a letter from Jim Shaw this week. Or last. Or anytime since I wrote so intelligently, passionately and glowingly in his support.

No cards. No flowers. No invitations to skip to the head of the "Rocket Fund" queue. And he didn't offer a cable discount, perhaps because I don't live within his monopoly jurisdiction, but that's beside the point.

I mean -- thanks a lot, Jimbo! I nominate myself for Pariah status on your behalf and what do I get in return?  Zip!  Nada!  Nothing!

You Rich guys are all alike...

And Mr. Shaw -- one other thing -- you're still right to be going after the CTF and anybody else who doesn't want them to be accountable for their decisions.

You know what really bugs me about all this? Just how God-damned Chickenshit the Guild I helped found and so many of its members seem to be.

Ohmigawd! The big bad cable guy is after me! He's mean and angry and he knows where I live! Somebody save me!

Hey! The guy wrote you a fucken letter! You don't like it? Write him back!

Or phone him up! You can even do that toll free: 1-888-472-2222. I don't know for certain, but I'll bet he's in the office from about 9:00 a.m. onwards.

Tell his Assistant that he contacted you, so you're just returning. He wanted to talk about the CTF and you have much to tell him.

Honestly people, if you feel you're being pushed around -- PUSH BACK!

Stop asking me to carry your torch and pitchfork!

I mean, is there some reason why you can't speak (and maybe think) for yourself?

You're supposed to be Writers for Christ's sake! Why do you even need somebody else to compose a letter for you?

Aren't you good enough to write what you feel on your own? Are you so out of touch with your own industry that you wouldn't know what to say?

Are you maybe this out of touch because you don't actually live here and are distracted by more immediate local concerns like California wildfires and couldn't care less whether the Guild passes your form letter off as a vote of support from a real Canadian writer?

Or are you like so many members of the WGC, anxious not to rock any boat that might one day ferry you a meager development deal via some CTF funding envelope?

I understand strength in numbers and union solidarity and all that -- but why is this attack on Jim Shaw coming from union management down and not from the membership up?

Who's running the WGC -- writers -- or the same kind of cloistered bureaucratic thinking that appears to be running the CTF and almost every arts funding outfit in this country? 

"Don't ask questions! We know what's best for you! Trust us! We have the best interests of you artist types at heart!"

And since the inception of the Fund, the average income of Canadian writers and the number of work opportunities for those telling Canadian stories has gone in which direction...?

If there really is accountability and open public reporting and no cozy or even casual deals between CTF board members and network reps or anybody else who benefits from the Fund's largess, then what's wrong with having a look at that?

And what's wrong with examining the process to see if it can be improved?

Why is my Guild asking me to sign and send a form letter which states, "The CTF needs to be left alone to do its job and not spend significant resources defending itself from attacks in the media."

I mean -- if there was no reason to look into the CTF -- why has the CRTC already decided to do just that? And why do the loudest voices opposed seem to belong to those who have been the major beneficiaries of the Fund?

Sure, some fine TV programs have come about because of CTF funding. But their costs and budgets make up a miniscule percentage of the funds allotted.

Don't we have a right to know why the lucrative development deals that were killed were killed?

Do we, as the folks funding the Fund through our cable levies, not have the right to ask why the creators of failed shows keep getting new deals, why the same executives keep green-lighting the same production companies and never through their joint "expertise" create a show that makes it to air, let alone becomes a hit?

Is there no public right to see why shows that are successful somehow never seem to return a profit to either their investment partners or the Fund?

Wouldn't our industry be better if all that was a little more out in the open?

No wonder Jim Shaw questions your commitment to the cause. He knows you don't really have any commitment. And so do all those people who got your form letter.

Any idiot can sign a petition demanding a cleaner environment or an end to hostilities in Darfur. The people Politicians listen to are the ones who actually pick up the tools and do something.

Okay, DMC.  Your turn.

First, I have to compliment you on having the courage to say what you think and what you feel. That's a rare trait above the 49th. I may disagree with you on some stuff, but you sure as hell have the strength of your convictions and you're a thing of beauty expressing them. If this country had ten more writers with half your guts and a third of your passion, we'd have an industry that could challenge the world.

But you gotta kick off the cutting edge blinkers, Pal. You gotta stop looking at the business through the prism of Queen Street West, the Film Centre and what they like to hear down at the CBC. Trust me, none of those folks will be there when you really need them or when it counts. Because none of them care about the one constituency that truly matters -- the audience.

I know that you do care about the guys on the other side of the tube. I can see it in your work and in your passionate advocacy of "Trailer Park Boys", "Corner Gas" and a host of shows I suspect you personally can't stand.

Hard as it may be to accept, you and Jim Shaw are fighting for the same cause. Yeah, you're doing it for art and he's doing it for money. But it's the same cause -- the right of the audience to have access to a variety of programming they actually want to watch.

I can't believe you printed what the man had to say in his form letter response, but clearly didn't read the sentiment...

"Neither I nor my colleagues at Shaw Communications want to determine what Canadian programs are to be funded by the CTF. We do not want to control decisions on content. We believe television should entertain us, inform us, inspire us, and make us all think – as Canadians. We support the development of original Canadian programming and we want to ensure that money is well spent to produce programming that matters.

That means the CTF should be an active participant in supporting shows that people actually watch. They should be as great as this country; they should tell our stories and they should be aimed at commercial success."

I'm walking away now, DMC. I'm leaving your gun in the dirt and taking a pass on this showdown. My fight isn't with you any more than yours is with Jim Shaw.

Let the rich guy have his day. Use his love of money to help our cause. I honestly believe we'll all be better off if he gets what he wants.

THE STRANGE POWERS OF ANDRE BERNARD BERGÉ

The other night, I watched an ordinary young actor hyping his very ordinary TV series and referring to the showrunner as a “Genius”. Well, maybe in his world. But I have a feeling in his world, a guy who can work the Latte machine at Starbucks has a shot at the Nobel Prize in Physics.

A couple of years back, I saw a similar interview that featured Dakota Fanning sitting between Steven Spielberg and Tom Cruise as they publicized “War of the Worlds”, both men reacting with resigned humility as she referred them as “Geniuses”.

Guys, for crying out loud! The kid’s eleven!!!

There are a lot of very bright and capable people in show business, few of whom, I think, feel they’re particularly gifted. And you’d figure the average audience member who has sat through a lot of ordinary television or Spielberg’s “War of the Worlds” wouldn’t be encouraged to tune in again just because somebody involved is considered to be a genius.

But they do. And the scary thing is – nobody buys into the concept more than the media and the critics.

I tend to think it’s the desire among those fraternities not to be late for the next big thing. None of them want to be the last guy on the Sudoku bandwagon and I believe they receive some sort of professional bonus points for being the first with something.

It’s not unlike the way you just had to be impressed by the first kid in Kindergarten who actually ate a bug or later felt sorry for that geek in the lunchroom who was still trying, years after the fad, to get the sides of his Rubik’s cube to match.

The quest for the new, the ground-breaking, the “edgy” next thing is the critic’s job – and also their Achilles heel.

Nobody knew that better than Andre Bernard Bergé.

Bergé was a French Post-Existentialist writer obsessed with American cinema. He longed to write tawdry detective movies and taut thrillers in a post-war culture obsessed with Buňel, Goddard and Truffaut. Unable to find producers for his screenwriting, Bergé crafted a play entitled “The Theatre of the Film Noir” which became a critical sensation when it opened in Paris in the late 1950’s.

Unfortunately, Bergé did not live to enjoy his newfound fame. The morning after his theatrical triumph, he was crushed by a Citroën, while peddling his bicycle home from retrieving his morning baguette.


The only other thing you need to know about Bergé is that he didn’t actually exist.

In 1982, theatre Impresario Garth Drabinsky decided to organize a World Theatre Festival in Toronto. Over the month of June, more than a dozen of the planet’s National Theatres, along with dozens more of the most respected companies in the theatrical firmament, would descend on Toronto to present their best work. Famous names from the textbooks of almost any Drama 100 class would also be appearing and financing was found to make sure many of Canada’s theatres could be there too.

I was working with Toronto’s Factory Theatre at the time and we were going to do a new George Walker play entitled “The Theatre of the Film Noir”, a dark comedy set in Paris just days after its liberation in WW2. We’d been work-shopping the play for over a year and it was drop dead funny and a terrific evening of theatre.

Problem was, though barely into his 30’s, Toronto’s critics were feeling George was passé. His last couple of productions had been savaged. He just wasn’t staying within the genre box that they and the media had built for him. He was supposed to be Toronto’s quirky working class playwright. Nobody thought he should be directing, attempting larger themes or doing any of those things real artists do.

Imagine the art world if Picasso had stuck to Bullfight posters.

So, it was decided that in honor of the Festival, the Factory, which only performed Canadian plays, would, instead of riding one of its stable of writers, present the lost work of a lost genius, “Theatre of the Film Noir” by Andre Bernard Bergé.

Now, in the realm of World Theatre we were really small potatoes, made smaller in our home town by the arrival of international heavies our local critics and media hungered to embrace. And attempting a hoax like this could be seen as immature and inappropriate. But then – that’s what we mostly were.

We also knew George had written a really, really good play and that if it could get decent notices in the midst of the raves that would inevitably be given the Royal Shakespeare Company, the Steppenwolfe Theatre or the Seattle Rep, well -- we had a shot at taking the Gold.

To the flurry of press releases and background material being compiled for the throngs of arriving critics and media, we added a detailed bio of our deceased theatrical genius -- with pictures. The pics were snapshots of one of the Artistic Director’s relatives, who’d been obsessed with cycling and even included a shot of Bergé’s crushed bicycle – although I think the real one had been run over by a bus in Calgary.

One of my jobs was to go around to all the libraries and insert index cards for both the translation of Bergé’s play and his limited edition biography into the stacks. These cards indicated the volumes had been borrowed and unreturned. I also persuaded the French Consul and his wife to accept free tickets for opening night, a fact we also made sure got around.

With every available theatre venue booked, we ended up in a small 100 seat space that had once been a courtroom. And on opening night we peeked through the curtains to see those seats filled with 100 critics, our guests from the Consulate standing diplomatically at the back.

Now, having a couple of critics in the audience always makes actors nervous. Having an audience of nothing but was insane. We retired to the wings, wondering just what the hell we had been thinking. But we went for it – and the show was a smash.

The reviews were absolute raves across the board. Yes, this truly was a work of “Genius”, a silenced voice of the theatre that deserved to be heard. Yada-Yada-Yada.

The entire run sold out within a couple of days and the extended weeks in a much larger space not long after. There were actually editorials praising this plucky company of locals who had shown that Canadians could hold their own in such auspicious company.

We waited until the weeklies and the magazine reviews were in and then revealed the playwright’s true identity. Needless to say, it created a second wave of press and ticket buying. Some of those we had duped took it in a good natured way. Many even understood the point we were trying to make about homegrown talent. Others falsely claimed they’d been in on the joke. A few got downright nasty.

In the end, “Theatre of the Film Noir” toured across the country and all over the world. It’s become a popular piece in more than one language and is undoubtedly still playing somewhere tonight, more than 25 years after it made its debut.

Would it have been a hit without the foreign artiste who had ostensibly created it? I’d like to think so, but knowing Canada, I wouldn’t bet on it.

More than once, I’ve heard the marketing for the original production referred to as “pure genius”. But as one of the conspirators, I can assure you there wasn’t a genius in the bunch. It was simply a theatre company, a talented writer, a gang of actors and technicians who all had the courage to challenge the status quo, find the weak point of the system and exploit it.

Genius gets you nowhere in this business. Creativity can take you places you never imagined possible.

TWILIGHT OF THE JOURNALISTS

Early in my professional life, I had the good fortune of working with a very socially conscious director. The project we were working on endured hideous opening reviews and was in danger of failing at the box office. So a strategy was developed to get around the critics and find an audience. The process was difficult and one night I asked him if it was worth it, I mean -- maybe the critics were right.

"I don't believe what's on the front page." he said, "Why would I buy what's in the entertainment section?"


We've just been through an election in Ontario. One that should have caught the attention of voters. But it didn't.

The current government has been up to its eyes in broken promises to the parents of autistic children, outright lies on taxation, failed strategies on aboriginal issues and corruption.

Less than a month before the campaign, it was learned $32 Million had been handed out to "minority" charities with political ties to the ruling party. In one case, a cricket club seeking $150,000 was awarded $1 million, no strings attached.

I found it odd that this didn't get a lot of press. Now, government corruption isn't exactly a unique story in Canada. In fact, it's almost a way of life here, with every one of our political parties mired in one or two super juicy scandals. But we just went through a fairly spectacular financial impropriety that brought down the Federal government, so you would have thought somebody would run with it.

But nobody did and the prevailing wisdom was that the various media didn't want to "offend" the ethnic minorities that made up the bulk of the cash recipients.

I'm not exactly sure how anyone can place any blame on a struggling cricket club for not passing on a windfall donation. In the immortal words of Marlon Brando, when offered $3 Million for 10 minutes work as Superman's dad, "If somebody's dumb enough to pay me that much, I'm not dumb enough to say no."

But it got me wondering when journalists became timid and concerned that their reporting might upset the readers. It made me realize that we're not getting the kind of journalism we deserve because newspapers, radio and television can no longer risk alienating any among their dwindling audience.

And maybe that's exactly why their audience is dwindling.

The crusading reporter used to be a mainstay of drama. From "Citizen Kane" and "The Harder They Fall" through a thousand film noirs to "All the President's Men", we were taught that the pen was mightier than the sword.

I'll never forget the look on CIA chief Cliff Robertson's face in "Three Days of the Condor" when Robert Redford told him he was taking his story to the New York Times, or that of any number of villians faced with the same prospect in "Serpico".

Nowadays, the Times is better known for firing reporters who've made stuff up than actually going for the social or political jugular. And worldwide, news media are being exposed as being either in bed or embedded with their subjects and less than accurate in their reporting.

Last summer, there was a political frisson as Russia laid claim to the North Pole with newspapers worldwide printing color photos of Russian subs encroaching under the polar ice cap. It took a 13 year old Finnish kid to point out the photos distributed by Reuters didn't come via military sources but were actually from a scene in "Titanic".


So were there actually Russian subs lurking under the Great White North or was everybody just taking Vladimir Putin's word for it because it sold newspapers?

A month later, Yahoo and others published the following photograph of an Iraqi woman bemoaning the "shoot first" tendencies of American soldiers in Iraq by holding up two bullets which had hit her house -- shells the photos clearly reveal, had never been fired.


Photos are now emerging that suggest this same woman has been the subject of AP photos of Palestinian suffering in the Gaza strip. I realize that in wars, truth is the first casualty. Now, it appears you can make a modeling career out of it.

Or you can pretend you're practicing hard-hitting Journalism, when you're not. Last Sunday, "60 Minutes", brought into life by the Watergate scandal and long the flagship of crusading journalists, advertised an in depth interview with Erik Prince, CEO of Blackwater, the ultra-right-wing Security Contractor suspected of causing untold misery in Iraq while simultaneously bilking American taxpayers for Billions.

I'd recently seen the magnificent Robert Greenwald documentary "Iraq for Sale: The War Profiteers" a blistering expose of the truth behind Blackwater, Halliburton, Titan and CACI, the major private contractors involved in the Iraq war. And I'd been following the lawsuit filed by the families of deceased Blackwater employees.

With the Iraqi government both seeking compensation from Blackwater and trying to boot them from the country, it seemed CBS and "60 Minutes" had scored a journalistic coup in landing the Prince interview.


Instead, the story that aired barely touched the sensitive issues and consisted primarily of reporter Lara Logan stumbling over her words to ask such hardball questions as "You said the loss of innocent life is a tragedy. Do you regret it, do you wish it never happened?" and in reference to the American people "...they want to know from you, from Blackwater, that you wish innocent people didn’t have to die as a result of anything that you’re involved in."
Well, who's going to disagree with any of that?

Ed Bradley would not have been proud and it appears that even such staunch defenders of the responsibilities of the Fifth Estate as "60 Minutes" have realized they can't afford to speak truth to power if it alienates even one of their viewers.

A few years ago, I bought a story that had appeared on "60 Minutes" for an MOW. It was a tough piece that terrified the network lawyers. But because "60 Minutes" had the courage to run it, they acquiesced. In the process, I became friends with the reporter who had initially broken the story. At the time, he was researching a piece about multiple suicides which had allegedly occurred inside Ontario casinos.

He was having difficulty getting official substantiation or interviews. Having done a lot of police stuff, I knew that, in Ontario, Homicide detectives are required to attend at the scene of all suicides to determine if the death was indeed self-inflicted. I encouraged him to find a couple of nearby Homicide cops, buy them lunch and have a chat. He did and felt he'd firmly confirmed his facts.

But the story was spiked. Maybe it still had holes in it. Maybe it was determined to be not all that newsworthy. And maybe it was killed because it upset somebody important. I know the reporter believed his editor was influenced by the potential loss of ad dollars. He moved on to another newspaper.

It certainly isn't a revelation that all forms of traditional media go easy on those of their own particular political persuasions or their heavy advertisers. But as the internet grows and the availability of information expands, more people see through that kind of bias and begin to seek their information elsewhere.

Is it any wonder that millions more people have seen "Loose Change" or "Zeitgeist: The Movie" than read the official 9/11 report.

As newspaper readership declines, radio stagnates and television news plummets in the ratings, it would seem to be a time for real journalists to show courage, demand that their venues be scrupulous about delivering information, no matter who it offends or impacts; and deliver it in a manner that serves the needs of their overall audience rather than kowtowing to private corporate interests or special interest groups.

Maybe the internet and bloggers are less reliable than traditional media. But in the circle of blogs I regularly surf, I find a desire to tell the truth that I don't see much in traditional media anymore. There's also a passion among these people I don't sense in those actually earning a living from the same process.

That crusading spirit is out there. It just doesn't reside in journalists anymore.

THE RIDEALONG

I can't remember the last time I read a book. I used to read at least one or two every week, sometimes more. But once you get into the habit of writing six hours a day and producing, where your every minute is dominated with reading scripts and budgets and notes and memos; the thought of curling up with a good book isn't atop your list of favorite recreations.

Back when I did read, one of my favorite authors was Joseph Conrad ("Heart of Darkness", "Lord Jim", "Nostromo"). Conrad was an interesting guy, didn't learn English until he was 20, spent half his life as a merchant seaman and still created a writing style and body of work that would influence virtually every major writer of the 20th Century and especially Ernest Hemingway, Graham Greene, William Burroughs and Jerzy Kosinski.

The first time I was asked to lecture on screenwriting, I went looking for an explanation of the craft and found it in Conrad's description of what he did -- "My job is to make you see."

That wasn't how I saw what I did when I started writing. My first scripts were purely mercenary and primarily ego driven. I was an actor repeatedly cast in roles where I was either going off to war or losing my virginity (sometimes both). I wanted to do something different, to stretch, to show off my talents (either real or imagined).

I had the good fortune of doing plays with some of the most talented writers in Canadian and American theatre. I also had the cutie pie looks that kept me busy on an endless stream of television and film material written by complete hacks.

During theatre rehearsals, I experienced the rewriting and polishing process as the playwrights sweated out the daily agony of hammering their work into performance shape. And on film sets, I had the down time to look at the day's pages and think, "Fuck, I can do better than this!"

And so I used the experience of the former combined with the ease of the latter to forward my own career by writing a couple of films to exhibit what I felt I did best.

Joseph Conrad felt he truly became a writer while serving as the captain of a Congo steamboat, the Roi des Belges. His experiences and the insight he gleaned into human nature evolved into "Heart of Darkness", his most acclaimed novel.

I think I became a writer by riding around in a police car.

When I was hired to write the pilot for "Top Cops", I knew very little about police work and I didn't like cops that much. The few I'd met had hassled me for having long hair, searched me for drugs, wrote tickets for speeds I wasn't traveling or pulled guns on me on lonely country roads.

I looked on cops as a necessary evil, bigoted or societally blinkered, power drunk and prone to throwing their weight around or outright bullying.

But I liked the show concept, the money was great and I had an offer to do something better before the summer was over. Luckily, I knew enough about drama to get the show on the air and vamped my way through a few more episodes learning what made the network happy -- and how much I didn't know about the world of cops.

Then one hot July night, I was driving home at 3:00 in the morning and pulled alongside a Toronto police cruiser at a stop light. My windows were open and so were those of the cop car. I glanced over at the two young constables. One nodded back as the other ignored me, listening to a call crackling over their radio. An instant later, their toplights and siren kicked on and they rocketed away.

I sat at the light, suddenly realizing that I didn't have a clue what those guys might be feeling at this moment. I could write that scene. Cruiser at night. Toplights. Siren. Destination unknown.

But I couldn't put myself in the shoes of the characters. And that meant I couldn't put the audience there either.

"My job is to make you see".

The Executive Producer of "Top Cops", Sonny Grosso, was a former NY Cop made famous when one of his cases was turned into a film entitled "The French Connection". Sonny made a couple of calls and a day later, I was in New York, scheduled to spend a weekend riding along with cops patroling the most crime ridden precinct in Harlem.

Sonny always believed you jumped in at the deep end.

I turned up at the precinct dressed, as instructed, in jeans, T-shirt, sneakers and baseball cap. The Black desk Sergeant took one look at my Toronto Blue Jays cap and sneered, "You tryin' to get shot?"

I was outfitted with a kevlar vest, given a quick briefing on what I was supposed to do in an emergency ("How fast can you run?") and signed a paper saying the City of New York wasn't responsible for my sorry ass.

My first night was in an NYPD cruiser. I was introduced to the two cops I'd be shadowing and informed that my first duty was to pay for coffee.

We got coffee and parked on an overpass overlooking evening rush hour traffic. This was their first assignment of each night shift, a half hour in which they could catch up on wants and warrents while remaining handy for one of the inevitable fender benders. I'd barely cracked the lid on my coffee when the radio dispatcher snapped off a nearby address along with..."Man with a gun, shots fired". Their coffees went out the window and mine went all over my vest as the cruiser took off.

My first thought was, "We're not going to this..."

But we were. And my second thought was, "I'm not ready for this..."

Then I wondered how they could be. One minute, complete calm and a casual coffee. The next, siren screaming, weapons drawn and a crime scene coming on too fast to think about what you were going to do when you got there.

By the time we covered the two blocks to the scene, we were back up to two officers who already had a man spread-eagled on the sidewalk, a Saturday night special with a duct taped handle firmly under the foot of one of the uniform cops. Two other cruisers rolled up right behind us.

The perpetrator was taken away, the other cops ribbing the arresting officers. Much of their night would be spent doing the necessary paperwork to charge and arraign their arrest. That meant more turf to cover for the remaining radio cars.

As I watched these guys goof with each other, I realized they were no different from the other tribes of which I'd been a part, sports teams, bands, theatre companies. Black guys, White guys, Asians and Hispanics, united by the uniform they wore and defined by their job.

Our next few calls were domestic disputes. A drunk husband at the first, a mentally disturbed wife behind the second and at the third, a young Black man I will always remember.

His girlfriend had just broken off their relationship and he had resisted her request to leave her apartment, certain he could change her mind. Unbeknownst to either of them, her mother had called the police. The two cops and I now stood in the apartment as it was explained that he could either leave on his own or come with us.

To the pain of his heartbreak was added the humiliation of a couple of cops giving him the bum's rush. He wavered for a long time, fighting back his hurt and embarrassment, edging toward that line where the choice would no longer be available. His girlfriend glared at her mother, angry that she hadn't left well enough alone. I could see that both officers hated having to be part of this ridiculous and unnecessary drama. But it was their job and they did it.

Four hours later, they spotted the kid in a coffee shop and went in to sit with him for a while, assure him they knew he wasn't what his girl's mom thought he was, that they'd lost girlfriends too and unfortunately, it wasn't fatal.

An hour earlier, we'd chased a crack dealer into an abandoned tenement, losing him in the rubble and the darkness and finding ourselves walking on a carpet of broken syringes and discarded needles. It was a shooting gallery. And at the height of the AIDS epidemic, we were ankle deep in detritus that was a pin prick or glass shard away from infecting all of us.

We cursed a lot, silently accepted our predicament and walked out like soldiers navigating a minefield.

An hour before that we'd found a lost kid and then assisted another of 12 as she was loaded into an ambulance in the final stages of labor. The father hovered nearby, high on something and insisting she shouldn't be allowed to come home unless she had a boy who could play for the Knicks. Scared to death, she promised her mother she would, perhaps hoping that would also make life easier for mom, who was the father's real girlfriend.

We went for lunch after that, talking about abortion laws, wondering how many Pro-Lifers would feel that way after seeing a 12 year old in labor. We talked about a lot of things in the half hour we had to down Arbie's sandwiches and Snapple. They wanted to know about making movies and TV -- not from any desire to be part of that scene, but because they'd both just read "Nobody's Fool" and thought it would make a really good movie.

They talked about other best sellers they were reading, how one of them had gotten the whole Times crossword last Sunday, how hard the Yankees sucked and how difficult it was to understand 14 year olds, especially when they were yours.

After lunch we took sandwiches to a rookie, who like all rookies was assigned to stand at a post (a street callbox) all night for his first week, learning to watch and listen and understand the ebb and flow of the neighborhood. My Ridealong cops tried to coax him into doing things that would get him into trouble, shared spooky stories on their own rookie nights on a post and otherwise made the kid feel like he was already a part of the tribe and they'd be there for him.

Our last call of the night was a rain drenched race to that post to rescue the same rookie after somebody started shooting at him.

A little after midnight, my first ridealong was over. It would take me until dawn to record all the experiences, in the process realizing I didn't know a damn thing about cops, and neither did anybody else who had been raised on a diet of TV cop shows or what was most often said about police officers in the various media.

First thing next morning, I called to pass on that "better offer" that was waiting.

Over the four seasons of "Top Cops", I did several hundred ridealongs in just about every major American city. I hung with narcotics squads, gang units, homicide detectives and beat cops. In the process, I realized that the world was a whole lot bigger than it appears on television, and to be "good" on television you had to take the audience somewhere they had never been or give them an insight they'd never had.

"My job is to make you see".

Writing for television is as simple (and as complicated) as that.

HAPPY THANKSGIVING!

Canadian Thanksgiving arrives a month before it does in the USA. I like to believe that's because the frost gets on the pumpkin a little earlier up here.

But I'm told it had something to do with a bunch of our politicians positioning a Holiday about halfway between Labor Day and Christmas, while not wanting to match what "they" were doing further south.

No matter what side of the border you're on, however, the sentiments and the traditions are the same. Family and friends. Pumpkin pie and Turkey. It's a chance to express your gratitude for the good things life has given you and share some of that abundance with your neighbors.

This past year's been rough on a number of people that I care about, many of them American. And in the midst of our celebration it's good to remember that there are those with less reason to be thankful, less able to have a table heavy with the bounty of the harvest.

Hopefully, they too will soon have reason to be Thankful.

SO FAR, NOT SO GOOD

The 2007-2008 TV Season officially kicked off a couple of Sundays ago. Unofficially, it began about 6 weeks earlier when pilots for about a dozen shows, including NBC's "The Bionic Woman", ABC's "Pushing Daisies" and "The Sarah Connor Chronicles" from Fox, were mysteriously leaked online.

I use the term "leaked" advisedly, because it was odd that none of the escapees, which also included CW's "Reaper" and the first two episodes of Showtime's "Dexter", were work prints, rough cuts or bore the other watermarks of material clandestinely spirited from their rightful owners.

In other words, 12 pristine, DVD quality pilots for series whose debuts impact the bottom lines of several networks in a major way, all got loose at exactly the same time.

Sounds like a marketing plan to me.

And one that was both useful and necessary for the studios and networks involved.


This is a make or break season for television as we've known it. Audiences are receding, budgets are exploding, advertisers are cautious and the usually dependable media hype has been diluted by the disappearance of TV writers and critics in many markets and an increasingly concentrated focus on Celebrity misbehavior in the television and magazine arenas.

There was a time when "Entertainment Tonight" and fan mags could be counted on to create TV stars. Now, they get more mileage by trying to destroy them.

An AOL/Time Warner poll conducted in late September found 62% of Americans holding the opinion that TV was getting worse, with a mere 7% indicating a desire to sample even one of the new offerings.

In a situation like this, an imaginative approach is essential. And since not much imagination had been evident in the announced pilots, most being takes on previous hits or well worn TV paradigms; the hype machine needed to create buzz, controversy and spin in a short period of time. And what better bunch to do that with than the less-discerning-than-journalist fan bloggers and genre geeks.

At some level, I think the Studios and Nets got what they wanted, for a number of the leaked shows were soon re-tooling ("Caveman") throwing staff overboard ("Bionic Woman") or taking out full page ads ("Pushing Daisies") to trumpet their imminent arrival.

One thing that caught my attention during this whole exercise was that anybody who took the time to assess and respond to the material would have to have been, in Hollywood terms, "A Pirate". Yet, there was Hollywood now embracing such rogues when it fit their needs.

Ever since Jean Lafayette, American desperation has begot strange bedfellows.

It'll be interesting to see if the next kid charged with illegal downloading by the MPAA will have a lawyer smart enough to ask how his client is supposed to differentiate between pirated material and that placed on P2P sites by the studios themselves.

It'll take a few more weeks to know for certain if the online buzz created by "The Great Escape" will make a difference where it counts most -- in the Ratings. But if the first week's numbers are an indication -- it wasn't much help.


On the season's debut Sunday, the highest rated prime time program was a football game. By the second week, the numbers were saying that the overall audience had declined a full 7% from the same week in 2006.

Last month, the networks handed their advertisers $150 Million in "Give Backs", representing the 8% dip in audiences they'd suffered for all of last season.

While the numbers confirm that the audience hasn't found a reason to come back to Network television, perhaps of greater concern is that, so far, none of the new series has generated any real excitement.

We're now 2 episodes into most with nary a "Desperate Housewives", "Lost", "Heroes" or even an "Ugly Betty" emerging from the pack.

This is significant for two reasons. First, if there is no breakout hit, how is anybody supposed to know what to copy for next season?

And second -- if the first wave of shows underperforms as badly as they appear to be doing, the Nets are faced with throwing a new slate of programs (deemed over the summer to be of even lesser appeal) into the breach. But few, if any, of these series have banked episodes. And with a Writers Guild of America strike imminent, failure by the reinforcements will mean we're in for a long winter of dance contests, spelling bees and bug eating.


Canadian audiences seem to be following the same path as those parked on American couches. Hockey Night In Canada's season debut was down 41% from last year. I'm not going to blame that one entirely on a disinterested audience. The season debut was on a Thursday, a night now so dominated by programming aimed at women that it's long been "Boy's Night Out" for most of the married or attached men I know.

I'm also one of a growing number of guys who won't be watching any hockey on CBC this season.

As I endured play-by-play stalwart Bob Cole stumbling over names and losing track of what was happening on-ice, as well as three times refering to players as "that guy" -- as in "That guy misses the pass" and "Wow, that guy hit the crossbar"; I realized that the amazing hockey coverage I'd seen from ESPN and NBC during the playoffs hadn't budged the traditionalists at HNIC. Don Cherry's anti-Francophone opening line confirmed that the same-old-same-old is what's on tap over there.

So this year, I'll be watching hockey online at www.nhl.com. Their Center Ice (No Canadian Spelling Here) package costs less than the cable/satellite versions and will also help wean me off the masochistic relationship with the Toronto Maple Leafs that the CBC and I seem to have shared.

Go Penguins!!! I think...

Losing me won't pitchfork the numbers at Hockey Night, but I'm certain I'm part of the same trend that already has the National Football League scheduling more of their games on their own network and online, despite being offered a king's ransom in TV license fees for them by several US Networks.

The NFL also introduced new rules for the media this season. To protect the internet operations of their 32 teams, they informed news organizations that they can post no more than 45 seconds per day of video online on any team. That includes player interviews, news conferences and comments by coaches.

When one of the strongest brands and most reliable suppliers of a captive audience begins to shift content away from traditional televised media and also makes sure they are the "Go To" source that gives fans what they want when they want it, you know the handwriting is on the wall for broadcasting as we know it.

And when guys like me, who spend half their alloted TV time watching hockey to start with, begin to watch it online -- how much longer until we start questioning how badly we really need most of the channels we're paying for but hardly ever watch.

That's when a trickle of audience depletion turns into a flood.

Unfortunately, the people in broadcasting, though clearly under threat, don't seem to be diverging from their traditional development and scheduling paths. Despite acknowledgment that their lunch is being eaten by cable services like HBO, Showtime, AMC and even Turner, nobody in the free-to-air executive suites seems motivated to pick up the gauntlet or use the awesome strength they still have to join the battle.

At the CBC, "Little Mosque", which did well last season (though not in an earth shattering way) was simply supplied with fresh horses, but not adjusted to expand its reach. It debuted down 25% from last season's average and "Intelligence", a series which had no business (beyond dubious artistic merit) being renewed, saw its audience decline by a full 50%.

Whether the audience opinion is wary interest or outright rejection, if you're going to renew a series, you also need to give them a reason to suspect their first opinion might have been lacking and they need to give the show more attention.

That doesn't seem to be happening anymore. And did I miss a meeting or is there a resurgence of 70's style television going on in Canada? Because CBC has two offerings about to debut which clearly reflect that ambience and style.

I'm not sure how "Triple Threat" and "Heartland" will fare, but after watching the online promos, I can't see either of them threatening anything scheduled opposite, and I sure wouldn't want to be aboard the shows that follow them.

Meanwhile, a nasty scrap has broken out between CTV and Global over who programs the better selection of American series. While such dust-ups are common in most competitive markets, it caught us off-guard in Canada, where all our networks are more or less publicly subsidized and therefore expected to be courteous in polite company.

But it further exemplified just how high the stakes are this season.

No matter what the Canadian ratings are for US series, our viewing habits won't impact on their potential cancellation or demotion to an alternate time slot. Those cancellations and time shifts wreak havoc with the Canadian simulcast system, so advertisers for specific demographics need to be locked in before the cull commences.

Both Canadian Nets are also strapped for cash after a summer of corporate take-overs and with little product to market to ipods or on DVD, immediate ad cash is all that's keeping the lights on.

Job cuts might hide the bleeding for a quarter or two but after that...

To be sure, DVR numbers(once tabulated)will pretty up the picture for everyone. But I'm still not exactly sure how they know I watched "Chuck" later the same night, the following Saturday afternoon, or intend to catch up over the Christmas holidays -- let alone whether I fast forwarded through all the commercials or just the boring ones.

The spin going on in our industry isn't just Networks pretending their product mysteriously escaped online, it's in their pretending that nothing's wrong, that band-aids are enough and things can go on just like they always have.

In a way, "Cavemen" isn't just the name of the first new series that's likely to be cancelled this season. It's a description of the TV Executives occupying the boardrooms.