South Korea currently has one of the most successful domestic film industries in the world. It is one of the few countries where homegrown titles have the drawing power to trump Hollywood imports at the box office, where even international behemoths like Titanic can find themselves outshined by a surprise blockbuster from an emerging Korean filmmaker. In 2006, Korean films are estimated to have accounted for a remarkable 64.2 percent of the market share nationwide.
Although there are many factors that make Korea’s film market unique (the Korean language being the most obvious and important), there are many qualities it shares with any market struggling to compete against the ubiquity of Hollywood. In particular, Korea makes an interesting comparison with Canada, where the problem of getting audiences to see Canadian films has defined our film culture since its inception. Both countries have relatively modest populations compared to their closest neighbours and rivals, and both are in close proximity to nations whose cultures have had a massive impact on global cultural trends.
This is the first in a series of articles that will serve as a case study of Korean cinema, and look at its potential to be a model for the Canadian film industry in its continuing push to win wider exposure and acceptance for Canadian films.
PART I: The Funding ’Net
The Foul King, a comedy about a man who finds dignity through professional wrestling, was the fourth-highest grossing film in Korea in 2000, with only Mission: Impossible 2, Gladiator and Park Chan-wook’s record-breaking JSA: Joint Security Area topping it in admissions. The film’s budget was a modest $1,600,000 US – almost a hundred times less than Ridley Scott spent turning Russell Crowe into a burly Roman thug.
What is truly remarkable, however, is where a significant chunk of the money used to make The Foul King came from. Fully $77, 500 US was contributed by private investors – ordinary people willing to gamble their money on a film production. Even more remarkably, it was no small group of people, no clique of bored millionaires who decided to make a film in between hostile takeovers. Rather, 464 different financiers contributed to the film’s funding. All of them did so through so-called “netizen funds” – online funds that allow anyone with Internet access to throw a few dollars towards the production of a film, with the potential to see a bit of a return on investment in the process. In the end, The Foul King netted investors a 97 percent return on their contribution, causing a minor sensation and giving birth in Korea to a unique relationship between the online and cinema communities.*
Contemporary Internet culture can often seem like an agitated rash of buzzwords, undercooked concepts and soothsaying, all aimed at exalting the Web as a hub of “interactivity” where everyone is connected and technology makes everything possible. So far, most of what’s been promoted under the banner of digital revolution – YouTube, social networking sites, the iTunes playlist – has been of dubious cultural value, largely an extension of either the culture of blind mass consumption or a frightening step toward the kind of tech-bred societal alienation portrayed in so many dystopian novels of the past century.
Early Korean netizen funds encouraged interaction of a different sort. The windfall The Foul King provided its investors proved to be a relative rarity – after an explosion of netizen funds in the early part of the decade, resulting in some significant losses for investors when films didn’t perform as expected, the Korean government’s Financial Supervisory Service had to step in to make sure netizen funding didn’t spiral into a series of financial disasters. But the goal, at first, was not profits – not primarily. It was giving people a new way to engage with Korea’s film culture, a gateway into participating, however indirectly, in a major creative enterprise. According to an article by Darcy Paquet published at koreanfilm.org, Intz.com, the Internet startup that backed The Foul King, designed their fund mainly as an alternate marketing tool, a way of increasing interest in film production and the health of the Korean film industry. It was a way for audiences to “experience the joy that comes from helping to make a film with your own hands,” Intz.com’s Cho Jin-tae told Paquet.
The model for netizen funds evolved shortly after The Foul King’s success, with companies like Daum.net and Simmani.com developing a system closer to normal stock market gambling, designed with big profits, rather than public interest, in mind. These systems allowed investors to buy shares in a film, which could be traded on the open market until the funds matured roughly three months after the film’s home entertainment release; investors would then be paid depending on the film’s financial performance. Still, despite the more commerce-minded approach, the financial plausibility of investing in cinema, for even the most cash-strapped cinephile, remained; anyone interested could invest as little as 10,000 Won – the current equivalent of about $12 Canadian dollars – in a film that had the chance to become the next big hit.
It would take a lot of $12 contributions to get enough money to make a by-the-numbers feature film – even in Canada, where the average feature costs about $3 million. Luckily, no one in Canada save a few misguided souls at Telefilm cares about by-the-numbers feature films; our best attempts – the insult-to-injury combo of Men With Brooms and Foolproof a few years back – have fallen laughably flat with both critics and the public. Meanwhile, there are features (and good ones) being produced for much, much less. Take Reginald Harkema’s Monkey Warfare, a small gem of a film that’s had a successful festival run and poised Harkema to become a major voice in a new, saucier and more culturally savvy brand of Canadian filmmaking. The film features one of Canada’s most recognized stars in Don McKellar, a highly marketable soundtrack and the most attitude and innovation seen on a Canadian film screen since Hard Core Logo. And here’s the best part: it was produced (not ‘finished’ or distributed) for between only $30,000-$60 000.
While the film received post-production funding from Telefilm, do the math: if 2,500 people made the minimum $12 contribution to a netizen fund, they could conceivably finance in toto a film of the same calibre as Monkey Warfare, which might then have the same chance at winning the favour of government funding sources after the fact. Granted, they might end up financing a piece of crap; not everyone has Harkema’s talent. But hey, it’s $12 – less than the cost of a ticket to your local megaplex to see the latest Jerry Bruckheimer gong show. Besides, that’s assuming minimum donations all around. If such a system were implemented, there would doubtless be many willing to risk much more than twelve bucks on film productions – the same people who drop hundreds of dollars on TIFF tickets every August, say, or who put aside part of their savings to donate to one of the country’s unfortunately few Cinematheques (all of whom have proven, however indirectly, their willingness to invest in cinema as a cultural project).
It’s fair to assume that no one would make much money on netizen-funded Canadian films, at least not at first. But, as the people at Intz.com knew, there could be other, arguably greater benefits than profit – benefits for the whole Canadian film industry in addition to the individuals who chose to participate.
The most obvious one is public interest. The immediate question will be, why will regular Canadians – people who don’t have a stake in the industry, who aren’t bureaucrats or aspiring filmmakers or critics or actors or just hard-core cinema nerds – be willing to cough up money, even small amounts of it, to finance homegrown films when they’ve demonstrated so little concern for the fate of Canadian cinema as it stands? The question answers itself: right now, the general public couldn’t care less about Canadian cinema. I suspect there’s nothing less appealing to a casual movie fan reading his or her morning newspaper than coming face-to-face with yet another article about the workings of the Canadian funding system, or Telefilm’s new ploy to get them to see “commercially viable” movies.
With the right marketing – and, given the reach of the Internet, it wouldn’t have to be expensive – giving people a way to participate in film culture, to cast their votes, as it were, in the form of a few dollars, for the films they would actually like to see get made, could go a long way to breaking down the wall between the general public and the few, the fated, the funded. It could encourage people to see beyond the still-widespread idea that artists are just laggards getting a free ride from the government. And it could produce some genuinely interesting insights into what kinds of movies the Canadian public, presented with the financial realities of making a feature film – that is to say, engaged in the project personally and (just maybe) thereby forced to concede that we can’t afford to make films like Gladiator – would be willing to stand behind. Witness Korea, where the domestic film industry has become a source of great national pride -- so much so that, when American studios recently lobbied the Korean government to cut quotas requiring cinemas to show a certain number of Korean productions, there were actually public protests in response.
As for numbers, 2,500 people may seem a lot to convince – and that’s for a film made on the tiniest of budgets. But consider the number of people who spent a few dollars phoning votes into Canadian Idol, and it starts to seem a lot less insurmountable. Add to that the plummeting costs of production thanks to new digital technologies, and it starts to seem downright plausible that enough Canadians might invest in a netizen fund to make a few decent films.
Beyond public interest, netizen funds could benefit filmmakers, and not just in the strictly financial sense. Speaking about finding funding for Brand Upon the Brain!, produced by the U.S.-based The Film Company, Guy Maddin commented on how unfamiliar it was looking to non-government sources for money. “In Canada, it’s hard work and it’s a struggle to get films made, but it’s sometimes a purely bureaucratic struggle,” he said. “(In the U.S.) you’ve got to trick rich people into giving you money. And when they say, ‘So why should I invest in your film?’ you just lift the highball glass up to your face and try to suck the last few drops of gin off your ice cubes and try to think of an answer. As a Canadian, I’ve never really thought in those terms before.”
Which is to say, there are lots of good things about Canada’s funding system. But it can undeniably become a crutch to new filmmakers who believe the only way to make a film in Canada is to get money from government bodies. If the hustle-and-flow model of American entrepreneurialism doesn’t seem particularly well suited to our film culture, the more democratic online system offered by netizen funds seems an ideal fit. It’s practically polite, something like the funding equivalent of a referendum: ask people if they might like to invest a few dollars in your film project, and see what they say. If they don’t like your idea, maybe they’ll back the next guy.
All of this aside, the big question with netizen funds is, what is there to lose? All that remains is for someone to take up the gauntlet. For the record: to anyone willing to try, I’ll give you $50 for your first project. Find 600 of me and, as they say, you get the picture.
*The numbers in this paragraph were taken from pages 14-15 of Anthony Leong’s book, Korean Cinema: The New Hong Kong, Trafford Publishing, © 2002.
A curious film arrived on my laptop screen last October, passed on to me by a roommate who found it for free through the Internet’s illegal network of peer-to-peer torrent sites. Interestingly, this distribution method is the manner in which I imagine the makers of the project, called Loose Change and available online at www.loosechange911.com (and through Google video), would appreciate the film be seen.
Maybe because I was told it was a conspiracy movie, and because it bore the filename ‘United 93’ – a wink at the film’s status as a frank alternative to Paul Greengrass’ 2005, 9/11 Hollywood product on the same subject – I put off watching it. Eventually I discovered that Loose Change – a conspiracy theory-filled 89 minutes featuring 3D animation, stock footage, and a variety of Internet (most often wiki-based) sources used to cement the argument that the September 11 attacks were an inside job – more or less looks and feels like a feature documentary, even one that could play at the less discriminating documentary festivals popping up around the world. Yes, it presents a fairly amateur intellectual and cinematic argument, employing a narrative largely constructed through biased narration, whose tone grates with rhetoric and sheer volume, and too often simply describes or reads on-screen visuals and text; furthermore, its soundtrack accompaniment is, let’s just say, suspect. Still, it benefits from the good zany energy of a conspiracy theory, and is readily accessible, so it’s not a bad watch, all in all.
What most interested me about Loose Change, though, was the source of so much of its actual argumentative imagery: wiki pages, news clippings and news footage used without clearance. Given little weight in modern day academia, these web sources are still regularly considered pseudo-intellectual or amateur. Yet a resource such as Wikipedia undergoes a unique constant construction as contributors aim to clarify and correct history as it happens. For citizens of a certain age, this no longer seems like such a suspect leap – combine that with the desire to form a visual argument out of all the information readily littering our largest highway, and it even feels natural. This patchwork approach strikes me as an emerging form of Internet symbiosis, one that feeds on the information created and constructed expressly for the online world, furthering its future and foundation in the process.
The guerilla, DIY nature of Loose Change naturally extends to its 3D imagery. The entire film was reportedly made on a home system anchored by a $1500 (USD) Compaq Presario laptop, using the easily-pirated Adobe Premiere (to edit) and Adobe After Effects to create its graphics. The actual footage shot for the documentary, done on a consumer-grade DV camera, doesn’t look very good, but is better than the stolen and consequently low-res stock footage. And its ‘underground’ distribution reeks of the old school, pre-Web days of bulletin boards and pirating groups that still exist below the radar today. It’s telling that Dylan Avery, the director of LC, instead of offering a ‘director’s cut’ or bonus footage alongside a feature length film on, say, a DVD, has released his movie for free over the Internet, and since updated the first release of the film; he is now working on a ‘final cut,’ due for an apparent Summer 2007 theatrical release.
The Pressure to Conform
Loose Change was made, according to Avery’s bio, for a scant total of $2000 USD – or simply, as they say, ‘the love.’ Watching LC on my 12” laptop screen was a strange experience, one that reminded me again of the Hollywood domination of North American and the majority of world screens, and how little the term “independent” has come to mean in the battle for new viewers, especially those increasingly shunning the box office.
Death bells marking the demise of theatres have been sounded before, but with viewers increasingly tuning into media on their own schedule, and often as not away from home, it seems the Internet actually poses the biggest threat to TV, not film. Consequently, film festivals may even continue to maintain a unique position moving into the 21st century; currently, the best of them – or at least their intentions – remain the global tastemakers for films that can often appropriately be labeled independent or alternative.
However, an article by Geoff Pevere published in the Toronto Star in January, ostensibly about the Sundance setup/experience, suggests festivals’ dedication to the underground is increasingly chimerical. Pevere bluntly notes, “These days, if you're not working on studio-subsidized $80 million dollar-plus (U.S.) budgets, you're by definition independent. And that means you need festivals like Sundance.” Reading Cinemascope publisher Mark Peranson’s recent account of Berlin and Sundance’s growth, not to mention witnessing Toronto’s $1.50 Festival Tower condominium surcharge (per $18.00 public ticket at 2006’s festival), and Tribeca’s 50% increase in public ticket pricing, to $19.50 for 2007, makes me wonder who these festivals ultimately cater to, from a public (and publicity) perspective. World, national, or provincial premieres now dominate the festival landscape, often complete with celebrities (if the festival is big enough) and filmmakers in attendance for an introduction and Q&A that regularly appears to do little more than whet the upper middle class bourgeois appetite for stories of encounters with the famous and kookily creative. Yes, there are good independent films worth seeing on the sidelines, but however hard festival programmers may try (and many do), they and filmmakers apparently cannot adequately use original stories to compete with $20 brushes with fame.
Finding a middle ground of films that can comfortably reach this middle (cinema) class audience – between the Hollywood blockbusters and Pedro Costa marathons – has arguably become the primary function of the contemporary programmer, and also therefore inadvertently continues the development of a predictable and hollow middle of the road cinema. This is nowhere more evident than in the realm of what’s often called American independent film today. These are movies typically high on the ‘quirk’ factor, specifically developed to play – if not by – festivals such as Sundance, Tribeca, or South by Southwest. They often stand good chances to win promotion from these fests as a mainstream counterpart to big budget battle fare, but ultimately do little to further the medium or its viewer’s thought process. How else to explain the recent success of the dreadfully hollow yet critically feted Day Night, Day Night (Julia Loktev, 2006), or, at SXSW 2007, the special jury prize award to the glacially paced Orphans (Ry-Russo Young, 2007)? In the same way Canadian independents tend to explore contrived, weighty personal pasts in the name of art – or, at the highest granting level, broad mainstream American knock-off efforts in the name of box office – this situation somehow seems to acquiesce the blind majority, or at least everyone but the most critical critic.
Notably, in the same Star article, Pevere, perhaps revealing the bias of a mainstream critic, compares Sundance to the Toronto International Film Festival: “No matter how many truly challenging movies that festivals like this choose to program, there's always going to be more interest in a temporarily slumming celebrity than a bravely struggling artist. This, too, would seem to be a kind of deal that successful film festivals have had to strike with the devil that is the contemporary ‘entertainment media.’ In order to get something extraordinary in the spotlight, it's got to stand behind the most ordinary of glamorous attractions.”
Here it seems to me that Pevere is taking the issue just a tad down press pity row, as many contemporary columnists do, using his regular space to vent frustrations about the kinds of films (and filmmakers – or stars, rather) that he’s repeatedly required to write about, even if he doesn’t want to. Clearly, the mainstream press is dealt a double-edged sword each day and week of publication: big budget American films can buy the most advertising space, offer the most potent publicity efforts, and fill the most screens in any given city, forcing editors – who might suggest they’re simply acting on the desires of the public – to guarantee them a prime spot in a paper’s entertainment section. In cities outside Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver and perhaps Calgary, places like London or countless smaller locales across the country, cinemas exclusively play and promote American fare, and local newspapers consequently exclusively publish empty wire service plot summaries as reviews – or box office details and highly marketed DVD releases – in their movie section. Meanwhile, regular reading of film sections in major Canadian papers the Star or Globe and Mail repeatedly yield no-star reviews of films the reviewer will often admit in the first sentence he either a) had no interest in seeing, or b) is a cinematic crime against humanity. Still, mainstream press – both editors and writers – must take some blame for regularly publishing redundant box-office and rental rankings at the expense of promoting a new alternative screening or multimedia event they may actually believe deserves the space more. Worse, a negative article just as often turns into the next day’s sympathetic story on the sad slowdown of the box office, or the lack of viewers truly interested in a ‘tough year’ for the ultimately meaningless (unless you gamble) Oscars. It’s true: no press is bad press.
Perhaps it’s semantics that matters most right now. In the current economic climate of cinema, indie, like ‘alternative’ music before it, has become an appropriately marketable misnomer for any new band, film and movement. In the early 1990s, North American cinema caught the tails of the low-fi home 4-track audio movement (in budget) and the angsty, plaid, slacker-songwriter energy of ‘grunge,’ and produced films that somehow shot the movement’s iconic rebel, Robert Rodriguez, to success. Now, like fellow one-time indie hopefuls Soderbergh, Linklater, or Wes Anderson, Rodriguez (whose ‘success’ was ultimately solidified with a series of kid films) routinely attempts to retain his indie title, most recently by teaming with Tarantino for Grindhouse, a combined three-hour, $60,000,000 budget project marketed as a B-movie effort and appropriately devoid of expectations in anything other than cheekiness.
It’s hard to imagine where a film like Loose Change fits into this paradigm, and also what would happen if its director were given even 1/100th of the Grindhouse budget to produce his next film. When directors reach the financial big leagues they have a tendency to equal the salary bestowed upon star athletes, and their newly inflated price tag (or ego) and vision often bumps them forever out of the indie ballpark.
New Modes of Distribution
Despite the media’s focus on the mainstream-indie – or maybe because of it – it seems I can’t click my touchpad without unearthing a new approach by an artist toward distributing their work online. Even in the fine arts, the inherently ephemeral act of an installation can now be rendered, through new digital media, as an artifact capable of being endlessly examined from new angles and locations. On April 19, 2007, artist Joe Fleming (represented by Gallery TAKSU, Singapore), unveiled Cold Comfort, hard wood, an act “comprised of an ice house that melts away during the course of the event, a projection of figure skating pairs on the ice house’s back wall, and a wooden deck viewers can destroy with provided sledgehammers.” Premiering from 7-10 pm at DeLeon White Gallery in Toronto, it was presented as a timed-interval participatory exhibition: “this media convergence dramatically illustrates the breakdown of trust, trust that either gradually melts away or instantly smashes to bits.” However, it will soon be reborn for replay and experience outside its inherently limited lifespan; as the press release informs us, “COLD COMFORT, hard wood, filmed by cinematographer Micha Dahan, will premiere on You Tube, June 1, 2007.” Furthermore, the creator built into the event a unique, pre-release object d’art, available at the installation – “an original silk-screened COLD COMFORT, hard wood movie poster will be available for sale the night of the performance.”
Goodbye Broadcasters (of Narrative – and Thanks For Nothing)
Somehow, the underground network of illegal distribution (with its blackened heart, according to recent accusations from American studios, pumping out of Montreal) has persevered at standards that suit the evolving freelance screen viewer – the one that doesn’t own a TV at home, and finds a laptop-size screen large (and cheap) enough. It’s also likely safe to declare the ubiquity of the Internet – especially with regard to the distribution of narratives and media, from TV shows to experimental music – has reached the tipping point in its dominance over a generation that began consuming media with their eyes glued to a TV screen, and their lives glued to its schedule. Just the other day, broadcasters themselves readily admitted to their graciously loving overlord Google that its online dominance will probably mean their redundance and, eventually, extinction.
Narratively, shorts or stories that serialize have become an immediate source of drawing return viewers to sites, from video news pieces to brilliant parodies by failed Hollywood writers, a la the immortal Yacht Rock. Every other new short film that pops up, from Will Ferrell’s faux budget success The Landlord, to Cookie Blues, a video personally recommended to me by Yahoo!, to those adorable animals falling asleep on the YT, prove that media, at least in short form, has become more portable and accessible than ever.
The point of all this is that viewers are actively engaging with video online, whether it be Major League Baseball’s $160 season long Premium package that allows the user to watch 162 games (times 30 teams; often four at a time, split-screen – perfect for the fantasy gambling enthusiast), or ABC.com’s new service that posts its primetime shows online the day after airing (for US viewers only at the moment). Given the imminent proliferation of devices that broadcast computer media to TVs, it’s worth wondering even why an organization like MLB will need traditional broadcasters (now many sports’ prime revenue source) in as little as three to five years’ time. The ultimate question resulting from this, raised by broadcasters, producers, distributors, and actors – see the recent Canadian ACTRA strike, and perhaps an upcoming American SAG strike over Internet and new media paycheques – is, of course, how to make as much money off of these viewers as they have been through traditional media outlets.
There are some ideas afloat. Take Mark Pesce, the man credited with creating VRML (Virtual Reality Modeling Language, a file format designed for translating graphics to the Web). VRML, which isn’t exactly an invention of Gatesian proportions, does appear to be a somewhat significant development for the web. In a rather staid lecture entitled “Piracy Is Good?” given at the Australian Film Television and Radio School in 2005, Pesce examines modern-day methods of media acquisition, especially the commercially cultivated “I want this now” thought process often behind piracy, and then hypothesizes a visual culture of the future where all narrative content programs are distributed online and broadcasters essentially become the home of live events coverage: news, sports, concerts, live interactive voting programs, etc.
Pesce’s answer to the problem of finding money to produce shows designed to solely be distributed online is solved by envisaging constant ad placement, notably by way of a sponsor ‘bug’: a translucent station or – better yet – product logo that subtly reinforces the brand behind the content.
And ultimately, Pesce argues the torrent network, or file-share downloading through a peer-to-peer system, where everyone participates – spider-web like – in making the distribution of a popular file (such as a movie) readily accessible, is the way of the future. Compression technology, combined with the inevitable loosening of restrictions on Digital Rights Management (DRM), is already making this situation a plausible reality – a world where large-scale digital distribution of a truly independent nature can allow filmmakers who have until now been relegated to the art-house ghetto to reach audiences on their own terms.
Meanwhile, in ye olde Canada, land of mobile services and equipment at least a year behind world trends, most of the encouraging auteurs of the past few years who would arguably benefit the most from greater popular exposure – people like Michael Dowse, Reg Harkema and Denis Cote – admit to making digitally shot features for somewhere in the neighbourhood of $60,000. Often relying on a line of credit or simply credit card debt, these filmmakers hearken back to the glory days of Rodriguez’s debut El Mariachi (1992, and reportedly a $10,000 production effort), receiving post-production financing as Rodriguez did – only, in the case of Canada, from the government body Telefilm. Though this production budget doesn’t include the cost of final film prints and extensive distribution costs including shipping, and, yes, perhaps even a bit of marketing, choosing to finish, screen, and broadcast a film digitally keeps these expenses negligible. In the new cinematic climate of film festival and Internet exposure, these low budget efforts, like their extreme cousin Loose Change, represent a new frontier for the extension of an aesthetic that, at least at this stage in these filmmakers’ careers, inherently opposes the values, approach, and function of their six figure relatives.
In short, the term ‘independent’ no longer feels like a label with enough contrast for films made outside government and festival-funded paradigms. And so perhaps we in cinema circles should put our faith back in terms like alternative, new wave, or even, at the risk of killing any hope of a popular audience, experimental. I don’t mean to suggest that by doing so critics will convince the mainstream (or even themselves) that Pedro Costa or Matthew Barney are worth checking out of the real world to visit for up to three hours. Nor do I believe that theatres, which have lately confirmed the public desire to view large-scale projects in a group setting by extending their programmes to include professional wrestling and other special presentations (ie, performances from the Met beamed into a Toronto Cineplex), will disappear completely.But critics and the public are clearly in need of a new place to analyse cinema from. For filmmakers the opportunity has perhaps never been so open to make something outside the mainstream and pseudo-indie worlds, a work that challenges its audience based on new narrative and structural techniques that engage rather than somnabulise or shock. Given the financial capabilities offered by video equipment and software, the rising tide of word of mouth exposure, and the weak status of contemporary independent cinema, there’s no longer any excuse for an alternative.
One of the key experiences felt by many (if not all) Canadians in the film industry is a moment of recognition – when you see yourself or your particular reality onscreen. As a student at the University of Toronto, David Cronenberg was inspired to pursue a career in film by David Secter’s Winter Kept Us Warm (1964), a student film shot at the university; the CEO of the Toronto International Film Festival Group, Piers Handling, cites Don Shebib’s Goin’ Down The Road (1970); and as a neophyte at the National Film Board in the 1960s, Don Owen was particularly inspired by Les Racqueteurs (1958). Other filmmakers often cite Owen’s feature debut Nobody Waved Goodbye (1964) as a moment of inspiration.
But for me it was easily Richard Benner’s surprise indie hit Outrageous! (1977) -- not because I was schizophrenic or a female impersonator (like the film’s two protagonists), but because it was the first Canadian movie I’d actually seen where it seemed possible to do something/anything different without leaving the country.
I first saw Outrageous! during its initial run at the long gone and much lamented York Cinemas on Eglinton Avenue in 1977. Wonderfully garish with an absurd twisting staircase, it was a great, very comfortable place to see a movie, and at the time was one of the city’s premiere venues. I went to see the film because of a Canadian studies course I was taking in high school, plus the pictures of the female lead featuring the snaggle-toothed waif Hollis McLaren, who would later show up as a fugitive hippie in Louis Malle’s Atlantic City (1980) and cause a minor sensation in Don Owen’s then-racy Partners (1976)- for having the temerity to get on top of her lover during sex. Being from the suburbs and therefore unfamiliar with Toronto, not to mention extraordinarily cheap (and somehow having gotten lost on the subway before), I took the Go Train in and figured I could walk to the theatre, only to find out the distance between Front Street and Eglinton Avenue is just a bit of a hike. By the time I made it to the cinema, I actually had to turn around and head back downtown to an Iggy Pop concert. It was still kind of a partial success because I actually found the theatre – and returned the next week; and, afterwards, a couple more times.
The film charts the misadventures of Robin Turner (Craig Russell), a hairdresser who’s utterly bored with his dreary day job and yearns to be up onstage (he’s a brilliant female impersonator), but is too terrified to even try at the low rent clubs in Toronto. Alongside him is Liza Connors (Hollis McLaren), a schizophrenic would be writer, who’s just escaped from the mental hospital. (Their relationship was reportedly based on Russell’s friendship with writer Margaret Gibson.) Somehow, they inspire one another and soon enough Liza is actually functioning in the real world and Robin is onstage, impersonating his idols: Judy Garland, Marlene Dietrich, Peggy Lee, and, most notably, Mae West, who Russell knew first hand from working as her personal assistant for a short time. Unfortunately, the stifling confines of Toronto don’t offer Robin may opportunities for career advancement, so he flees to New York to become the drag-artist-in-residence, leaving Liza behind to deal with her illness and a not exactly unexpected pregnancy. Naturally, she believes that giving birth to a baby will dispel her demons once and for all.
In subject matter and sensibility, the film was groundbreaking on a number of levels. It was one of the first movies to deal with the city’s burgeoning gay subculture – and one of the first to expose the rifts within it. Worried that he’ll lose business, Robin’s boss at the salon constantly wails on him for being openly gay and for cross-dressing. In addition, the film was unapologetic and devoid of the weltschmertz, condescending pity and protracted hand-wringing that characterized the queer-themed films that preceded and in some cases followed it. Robin, Liza and their friends had issues with the outside world but those issues never dominated their lives. Instead, the film offered up energy (most evident in McLaren’s wide-eyed achingly sincere performance as Liza, Russell’s stage performances, and Paul Hoffert’s charming disco score) and a sometimes caustic outsiders’ perspective.
Most significantly for me though was its presentation of Toronto as Toronto -- which flew in the face of the direction the rest of the industry was taking. Outrageous! was made during the heyday of the tax shelter years, a largely misguided attempt by the federal government to spark private investment in Canadian movies. Almost all of these films employed over-the-hill American actors and/or directors, using Canadian cities as stand-ins for supposedly larger, more interesting American locations. The most notorious remains Alvin Rakoff’s City on Fire (1979), wherein Henry Fonda, Barry Newman, Shelley Winters, James Franciscus and Ava Gardner have various affairs as Montreal burns to the ground.
Outrageous!, however, was unmistakably, unavoidably Toronto , and not simply because it didn’t bother to hide it. One of the dominant notes in the film is just what a horrifically WASP backwater the city was at the time. Robin can’t find or even think of a place to perform, except for the mega-stuffy Imperial Room, Anne Murray’s favourite place to play. Ironically, Russell later became a regular there. And when Liza first escapes the hospital, we’re treated to a montage of her charging through extremely oppressive, newly erected concrete office towers, something the city’s residents were bizarrely proud of at the time, despite or maybe because of their unwelcoming character. In a perverse way, because the film is so critical of Toronto and argues that its characters had to find and establish themselves elsewhere, it actually made Toronto seem livable. It had a level of self-awareness and self-criticism that was liberating, and opened up the possibility of transformation. Thankfully, there is no trace of the city’s habitual, kind of forlorn yearning to be considered world-class.
Of course the film is somewhat dated, and technically mediocre at best – it was made for under $200,000, a small amount even then. Seen for the first time today, it might seem a trifle calculated, yet it has all the elements of a classic American indie film (pre-Soderbergh and Tarantino): it’s heartwarming and targets a built-in audience/subculture, one conventionally ignored by Hollywood and mainstream cinema. And the film is rife with 1960s assumptions/youth pandering. Robin and Liza’s outsider status makes them the sane, “real” people pace R.D. Laing and 1960s cult hits like King of Hearts.
Ultimately the film’s rawness imbues it with an almost unassailable quality, yet somehow strips away cynicism through the process. A tender, involving and intimate portrait, Outrageous! is simultaneously ambitious and eager to admit its insecurities in order to move on with the show. I wonder how much Toronto and the rest of Canada have learned (and changed) as a result, since way back then.
In addition to being available for download from FilmCAN, Outrageous! is also out on DVD, with an amusingly biting – some might say cranky – commentary by Bill Marshall and Paul Hoffert (who largely serves as Marshall’s straight man). The film will also be screened at the upcoming Inside Out Gay and Lesbian Festival on May 23, 2007, at the Isabel Bader.