February / 2004

book review
Hollywood North: Creating the Canadian Motion Picture Industry

by Solange De Santis

Hollywood North: Creating the Canadian Motion Picture Industry, a memoir by a founder of the Canadian Film Development Corp., could have been subtitled A Gripping Tale of the Development of a Government Department. You might guess it is not a scintillating read, but it is important, and any book about the movie business has its glamorous and sexy side, even in Canada.

The CFDC, now called Telefilm Canada and an arm of the federal Department of Canadian Heritage, last year put about $300 million of taxpayer money into Canadian film and TV production, an industry now worth about $3 billion. The man who was to become its first executive director, Englishman Michael Spencer, recalls in this paperback volume how the CFDC was started in 1967 with just $10 million – double what he’d originally proposed.

“I remember Jim Grandy (a Finance official) – with the swift stroke of a pen – changing $5 million to $10 million for the final report to Cabinet,” Spencer writes.

An engaging beneficiary of serendipity, Spencer’s career in Canada began in 1939 when he was on holiday in British Columbia at the time Britain declared war on Germany. It was a slow trip back to the U.K. in those days and he detoured into Ottawa, where British documentarian John Grierson was setting up the National Film Board of Canada. Spencer quickly found himself part of the Canadian Army Film Unit, filming the troops in the U.K., Italy and Germany.

Returning to Ottawa with a Canadian spouse, he became an executive with the NFB, getting to know filmmakers in Quebec, where feature moviemaking was underway, as well as in English Canada. In fact, the subtitle of Spencer’s book would seem to be a bit of hype, since the CFDC certainly had a big hand in boosting the Canadian movie business but hardly “created” it all alone.

Spencer and his co-author, writer and communications consultant Suzan Ayscough, detail the political battles, good and bad funding decisions and remarkable cast of characters, both in government and in the world of filmmaking, in Spencer’s 10 years directing the Crown corporation and in his career afterward as a completion bonder.

Hollywood North represents a useful addition to the story of Canadian film, but its subject matter makes it a book that’s rather like medicine – you know it’s worthy and good for you, but root beer (or David Selznick’s memoirs) tastes better. A dozen or so typos and errors scattered through the book – the most glaring being “Maple Leaf Stadium” instead of Maple Leaf Gardens – don’t help.

In the end, Michael Spencer can look back on a career well spent, although in some areas, little has changed. English Canada does not have an indigenous commercial feature film industry and, given the size of its population and the proximity and language it shares with the United States, it may never have one. The Genie Awards still honour films that the majority of the Canadian public has never seen. However, Canadian films have made steady advances in quality and the best now garner international attention, mostly in the film festival/art house milieu. Equally as important, the country does have a vibrant production business from Halifax to Vancouver, employing thousands of skilled professionals. For that alone, we could say “thank you, Michael Spencer.”

Hollywood North: Creating the Canadian Motion Picture Industry
By Michael Spencer with Suzan Ayscough
Cantos International Publishing Inc.
232 pages
ISBN 2-89594-007-X
$22.95

[ Magazine ][ Archives ][ Search ]