The State of the Arts

Living With Culture in Toronto

Alana Wilcox, Christina Palassio, Jonny Dovercourt, Alana Wilcox, Christina Palassio, Jonny Dovercourt

• Publisher: Coach House Books
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781770562141
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Essays in Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

City Hall proclaimed 2006 the Year of Creativity. 'Live With Culture' banners flap over the city. And across the city, donors are ponying up millions for the ROM and the AGO. Culture's never had it so good. Right?

The State of the Arts explores the Toronto arts scene from every angle, applauding, assailing and arguing about art in our fair burg. The essays consider the big-ticket and the ticket-free, from the Opera House and the CNE to the subconscious art of graffiti eradication and underground hip-hop. In between, you'll find considerations art in the suburbs, how business uses art to sell condos, questions of infrastructure, an examination of Toronto on film and a history of micro press publishing. You'll read about the fine line between party and art, the trials of being a capitalist in a sea of left-wing artists, the power of the internet to create arts communities and a plea for spaces that cater to musicians and their kids.

Throughout, you'll find equal doses of optimism and frustration, and a good measure of T.O. love. Taken together, the thoughts of these writers, thinkers, musicians and city-builders aim to create an honest survey of where we're at and where we can go.

Jason Anderson

The invisible city:
What happens when Hollywood North plays itself?

The line between city and simulacrum can be a skinny one. One Sunday morning in 1998, I was walking north from College Street around the eastern side of Queen’s Park. The unfamiliar colours (brown, magenta) and shape (too squat) of the newspaper boxes caught my attention. Two contained dailies from Washington, D.C. That struck me as odd but not wholly implausible – surely there were plenty of Ontario politicos in the vicinity of the legislature who needed to know what was going on in our neighbour’s capital. I silently praised them for their diligence regarding cross-border affairs and walked on.

But the cars weren’t right either. Lined up at the curb was a series of drab seventies-style sedans, the kind that shaggy-haired TV cops were forever chasing to scoot butt-first across the hoods. I expected my elected representatives and their staff members to ride with a little more style – there wasn’t even a Lexus in sight. I still didn’t clue in even after I read the sign outside one of the buildings: The Watergate Hotel. I thought, ‘Do we have one of those, too? It’s surprising another hotel would want that name, y’know, considering …’

Of course, we didn’t have one. The sidewalk on which I was standing had become a movie set, the familiar reorganized by a production designer. But without the presence of giant white trailers, thick black cables and twitchy ADS clutching walkie-talkies, the usual boundary between city and set went undeclared. That morning, I had my own private Washington.

I eventually had to cede the space back to the production of Dick (1999), a comedy about two fifteen-year-old girls who inadvertently get involved in the Watergate scandal. Though reasonably amusing, the movie came and went with little fanfare, the producers apparently misjudging the number of teenage viewers with a comprehensive knowledge of All the President’s Men. Few people not directly involved in the production can be expected to remember the film at all, except perhaps as an early credit for stars Kirsten Dunst and Michelle Williams (who utters the would-be catchphrase ‘I love Dick!’). Even fewer would care where it was made.

Such cinematic transformations have become so commonplace in Toronto that many of us barely notice anymore. As a performer, the city is nothing if not versatile. Besides Dick, Toronto also played Washington, D.C., in The Sentinel, The Recruit and Left Behind III: World at War. It was Boston in Fever Pitch, Ice Princess and Godsend. It was New York in Dark Water, Take the Lead, 16 Blocks, The Tuxedo, Don’t Say a Word, Cinderella Man and the later installments of the Death Wish franchise. But Toronto saves a special place in its heart for Chicago, which it portrayed in Save the Last Dance, On the Line, My Big Fat Greek Wedding, Angel Eyes, John Q and, yes, even Chicago.

In 2004, foreign productions (predominantly but not entirely American) poured $331 million of production money into the city. That’s more than double the year before, when many producers were scared away to Winnipeg and Vancouver by the SARS crisis. Those numbers were a great relief to the film-industry workers who marched on Queen’s Park (playing itself that day) that December, prompting legislators to increase the tax credit on labour expenses for foreign productions from 11 to 18 per cent (domestic shoots went from 20 to 33). To counter the impact of the Canadian dollar’s rise towards parity with the greenback, Toronto city officials further guaranteed that producers would be charged a fixed exchange rate of 78 per cent for municipal services. Though 2005 and 2006 were affected by new slumps, Toronto still rates as the third-busiest centre for film and television production in North America. In 2004, the city’s film and television office issued 4,302 permits for 1,502 projects. The industry employs more than 25,000 people locally.

Yet for a city that has been filmed so often and so extensively, Toronto seems doomed to be forever cast in supporting roles, never as a star. It exists most often as background – unobtrusive, unremarkable, indistinct. Though filmmakers have long paid tribute to the great cities of the world, it seems unlikely that Toronto will ever inspire a cinematic tribute as loving and lyrical as Roma, Manhattan or Jesus of Montreal. Other movies encompass the many varied, vibrant and often contradictory sides of a city – consider the visions of Paris in Amélie or Mexico City in Amores Perros.

The way cinema celebrates, manipulates and falsifies real spaces is boldly illustrated in Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003), a film essay by film-maker and Cal Arts professor Thom Andersen. Strewn with hundreds of clips of films shot in Los Angeles, Andersen’s analysis of ‘the most photo-graphed and least photogenic city in the world’ reveals how aspects of the city’s architecture and history have been celebrated, perverted and abused through a century of filmmaking. By contrast, the more Toronto has been photographed, the more it has disappeared from view – what other city would so willingly submit to the indignity of playing Detroit in at least three different movies in 2005 alone? That none of these films – Assault on Precinct 13, Four Brothers and The Man – made much of an impression on audiences gives this dubious achievement an additional edge of civic self-abnegation. It doesn’t matter to the city whether it vanishes in service of a future Academy Award winner or a Steven Seagal movie even his fans abhor. While Los Angeles has many faces, it can feel like Toronto’s only job is to not be Toronto.

We have a strange relationship with these images. They may inspire an element of pride because they prove Toronto is a movie-biz player, a place that attracts movie money and talent, even if advantageous exchange rates are (or were) the biggest reason for this influx. These images are also confusing, especially when the new names or uses of familiar locations imperil our ability to suspend disbelief. They can come attached with a trace of self-loathing since they encourage us to believe Toronto has no identifiable character of its own. If the opposite were true, it couldn’t be easily covered over with the characteristics of other places.

But from time to time, Toronto has rejected its disguises, asserting itself in such a way that even the lousiest Hollywood dreck temporarily feels like a home movie. We can’t help but laugh at instances like the appearance of the CN Tower in the ‘Chicago’ of Angel Eyes (2001). Like many of the productions the city hosts, this Jennifer Lopex vehicle is utterly unremarkable aside from this moment when the true city is accidentally revealed.

Ironically, Toronto began its century-plus screen career by playing itself. A short document of the fire that destroyed much of the downtown in April 1904, as well as the subsequent demolition of damaged buildings, The Great Toronto Fire is the first known example of motion-picture photography to be shot in the city. More activity was promised when the country’s first film studio opened in 1917 in Trenton, Ontario. It closed three years later, then was reopened in 1924 by the Ontario Motion Picture Bureau ‘for the purpose of preserving Canadian traditions.’ But by the early 1930s, American companies controlled the distribution of films in Canadian theatres – domestic filmmakers would henceforth be pipsqueaks in their own marketplace.

The beginning of an English-Canadian – and a specifically Torontonian – film culture comes with the 1939 establishment of the National Film Board of Canada, under the direction of John Grierson. Canadian filmmaking would be dominated by the board’s documentary mandate for the next three decades. Filmmakers trained by the NFB would be the first to establish a beachhead for a film scene in central Canada, with figures like Claude Jutra and Michel Brault in Quebec and Don Owen in Ontario. They favoured real locations, cinéma vérité-style camerawork and a frank, unvarnished approach to their subjects and actors, all of which suited their minuscule budgets.

The story of an angry young man from Etobicoke who rebels against his parents’ bourgeois values, Owen’s Nobody Waved Good-bye (1963) is widely acknowledged as the first modern Toronto movie. Shooting on the fly, Owen captured a cloistered, WASPY city, its bland cityscape occasionally interrupted by brightly lit shopping centres and desolate city parks. Who’d bother waving goodbye to all that? Yet Owen’s film also established a counter-tradition of local filmmaking, eventually producing a slim but energetic canon of movies that portray the city with more honesty and more affection.

Perhaps the most enduring and indelible of Toronto movies, Don Shebib’s Goin’ Down the Road (1970) is the tale of two amiable Maritimers who try and fail to make a go of it in the big city. Here is Toronto as bustling metropolis, as neon-lit palace of fun, as killer of dreams. The daytime is not so kind to Pete (played by Doug McGrath), whose first interaction with the city involves trying not to get trampled by busy downtowners amid the black skyscrapers of Commerce Court. At night, the Yonge Street strip is a riot of colour and noise (we still have Zanzibar and Sam the Record Man, but whither Topless a Go-Go?). In a tavern full of fellow Maritimers, Pete and his buddies toast ‘the women of Yonge Street!’

There’s a similar expression of Yonge love in Outrageous! (1977), the story of the friendship between a mentally fragile woman and Craig Russell’s proto-fabulous drag queen Robin Turner. A visit to Sam’s confirms its one-time status as the city’s consumerist utopia, though a glimpse of what was left of legendary strip club Starvin’ Marvin’s Burlesque Palace is equally enticing.

What’s striking is that guys like Pete and Robin were the kings of the city back then. A few American productions – like Hal Ashby’s The Last Detail, a poster of which was proudly hung in the Spadina Hotel until it was hostelized – stopped by, but the hometown crowd dominated. That would change by the end of the seventies, when the streets would be overrun by American producers and Hollywood stars, lured up by the prospect of easy cash during the tax-shelter years. As the country’s film industry churned out misbegotten movie vehicles for fading marquee players, Toronto’s screen time would be reduced to whatever fit into the formula plotlines. The newly opened Eaton Centre would figure largely in two of the era’s few notable films, The Silent Partner (1978) and The Kidnapping of the President (1980). In the latter, Latin American radicals scheme to capture President Hal Holbrook in Nathan Phillips Square. The scheme is foiled, like all such schemes, by William Shatner.

A few blocks north, you might find the punk club on Edward Street as featured in Class of 1984 (1982), a seedy, safety-pinned update of A Clockwork Orange starring Michael Fox (no J. yet). Most of the film took place at Central Tech (the production sprayed the school with graffiti which, much to the administration’s horror, was not so easily removed), but Yonge Street reappeared when Roddy McDowall tried to drive over scumbag teenagers in front of A&A Records.

Toronto’s prominence as a temporary home for major Hollywood productions was fully established in the eighties with the likes of Cocktail, Moonstruck, Adventures in Babysitting and Sea of Love. Into the nineties, the sagging dollar and tax incentives added to Toronto’s allure – in 1996, it was host to thirty-six feature film projects. In 1997, the city played Chicago in a whopping seventeen film and television productions. Certain locations proved to be particularly popular. Thus did University of Toronto become any and every East Coast institution of higher learning (see: Good Will Hunting, Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle). The Canary on Front Street East was every old-school diner (see: Three to Tango, Maximum Risk). The King Edward Hotel and the Royal York represented the epitome of old-school luxury (see: Murder at 1600, New York Minute), while the Waverly and pre-restoration Gladstone catered to those on the bottom end of the scale (see: The Corruptor, The Long Kiss Goodnight). Union Station was a nexus for busy travellers and mutants (see: Johnny Mnemonic, X-Men) and the unused Lower Bay Street Station for any subway encounter (see: Bless the Child, Take the Lead). Long before it was recolonized by Torontonians, the Distillery District served as any early-century or Victorian-era industrial locale (see: Chicago, Cinderella Man).

Sir Henry Pellatt’s folly made that old-Europe look available without the old-Europe prices. In the Christian apocalyptic thriller Left Behind (2000), Casa Loma is presented with the hopeful place line ‘London, England.’ Unsurprisingly, Toronto’s most identifiable landmark is steadfastly avoided, which is why the CN Tower gets such guffaws in Angel Eyes. It can also be a challenge to make the streets look mean enough to accommodate the presence of 50 Cent (in Get Rich or Die Tryin’) or the Jigsaw Killer (in the Saw franchise). An apocryphal Toronto movie-biz story (usually attributed to TV’S Night Heat) describes how a film crew returned from a break to discover that city cleaners had sanitized a street scene of its carefully decorated grunge.

Fidelity is rarely paid to the city’s geography. The Steven Seagal movie Exit Wounds (2001) is distinguished only by the presence of a car chase that runs a real-life route from Bloor down to Queen. In the Sylvester Stallone CART flick Driven (2001), a chase through downtown Chicago is less than thrilling once it becomes obvious that the route is actually up and down University Avenue. The greater blunder comes when the cars screech to a halt on what’s marked as Wabash Avenue – the trouble is, the name of the Toronto Hilton is just as clear. Director Renny Harlin later explained that the production ran out of money before the hotel sign could be digitally altered – he hoped Toronto audiences would enjoy it as a tribute.

At least part of Driven is actually set here: the Molson Indy came in handy for once. Occasionally, a film seems to get fed up with all the pretending. Though Toronto doubles for Washington, D.C., for much of the Kiefer Sutherland and Michael Douglas thriller The Sentinel (2006), the film takes a Kidnapping of the President-esque turn by situating the climax in Nathan Phillips ‘Centre,’ prompting several variations on this choice piece of dialogue: ‘It’s going down in Toronto!’

Local filmmakers have long expressed a more genuine interest in what’s going down in Toronto. David Cronenberg began his filmmaking career with student works made in and around the University of Toronto – the air of alienation in Cronenberg’s experimental science-fiction tale Stereo (1969) is well-complemented by the modernist sterility of the Scarborough campus. Later Cronenberg films such as The Brood, Videodrome and Dead Ringers would be filled with familiar locales, yet his most indelibly Torontonian film may be Crash – what o...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• Touchstones
• Topography
• Toil
• Tomorrow
• Utopians