Canadian Bacon - History of Canadian Filmmaking (Part Three)

“Let's think the unthinkable, let's do the undoable. Let us prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all.”
― Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

The Exhibitors Part Two - Welcome Back Cineplex

During this, Garth Drabinsky was quickly becoming the hero that all of canada deserved. He was tackling the problem of first-run distribution malpractice in a typically forthright way, heading to the Combines Investigation Branch, a Canadian federal investigative body, with documents proving that competitors such as Canadian Odeon Theatres and Famous Players had enjoyed preferential distribution agreements with the major U.S. film companies for several decades. The Canadian government threatened to sue the exhibitors and film companies, but a settlement was reached that allowed Cineplex and other small chains to bid individually for first-run films. The settlement was widely viewed as a victory for Cineplex.

By 1984, Cineplex had swallowed Odeon, reducing the competition and N.L. Nathanson was finally forced out of the market. Drabinsky then launched a major acquisition spree in the U.S., positioning Cineplex to become the second-largest theatrical chain in North America. Cineplex Odeon Films would begin operations in Los Angeles, California, in November 1986.

However, in view of Drabinsky's celebrated attempts to restore glamour to the movie-going experience, competitors were surprised when he introduced on-screen advertising to his Canadian venues in 1985. At a time when theaters were losing audiences to video and cable television, commercial-free screenings seemed to be one of the movie industry's most important attractions. Disgruntled patrons publicly took issue with this, in some cases throwing objects at the screen when a commercial aired. Drabinsky refused to withdraw advertising from all but 26 arthouse venues in Canada.

In a symbolic move to signal the rise of Canadians in the North American film industry, Cineplex Odeon Films' first film on American screens would be The Decline of the American Empire (1986), a sex comedy-drama directed by Denys Arcand.

Drabinsky's ambitions went beyond operating a large number of screens. Determined to make theater-going a clean, civilized, and exciting experience, he made quality service and attractive locations priorities in any operation he took over. He spent millions of dollars refurbishing run-down theater complexes and, in some cases, painstakingly restoring historical landmarks to their former glory. Every new acquisition was evaluated and refurbished by a 100-person design and construction team under the direction of Cineplex head architect David Mesbur.

Cineplex undertook the restoration of cinemas on Vancouver's Granville Street, and the new complex quickly became one of the most profitable venues in Canada. According to company reports, the Gordon Theater in Los Angeles brought in a weekly revenue of US$6,000 before a US$650,000 facelift by the Cineplex design team. After the Showcase was renamed, the refurbished cinema averaged US$30,000 a week. Art Deco motifs, plush seating, state-of-the-art sound equipment, and cappuccino bars revolutionized the way Americans thought of the cinema experience. Even Drabinsky's rivals admit that he raised the standards of service and appearance in the industry. In May 1989, Forbes estimated that Cineplex spent approximately US$1,400 per leased seat, compared with an industry average of US$500 per seat.

Cineplex’s early catalogue is a who’s-who of overlooked gems and cult classics: The Glass Menagerie(1987), The Last Temptation of Christ(1988), Prancer(1989), The Grifters(1990), Mr. & Mrs. Bridge(1990), Madame Sousatzka(1988), Jackknife(1989), Oliver Stone's Talk Radio(1988), and The Care Bears Adventure in Wonderland(1987) created and animated by Nelvana.

In 1986, Drabinsky would cash out and sell 49% of Cineplex Odeon to MCA, the parent company of Universal Studios, effectively putting Cineplex back under American control. The company was not financially successful, and its debt had risen to $24.6 million by the end of 1982 due to loans at 22% interest. Taylor and Drabinsky took the company public to afford expansion, which was not a good move. Only $3.85 million was raised, and the stock price fell from $5 upon opening to between $2 and $2.50 in August 1983. The Ontario Securities Commission ordered the company to stop trading shares five months after it went public. Drabinsky attempted to repurchase it in 1989 but lost in a publicized corporate struggle.

By the late '90s, the name changed again. The company formally changed its name again to Odeon Films before releasing the science-fiction film Cube (1997) under the Cineplex Odeon brand. Cube(1997), released in American markets under Trimark Pictures' banner, was directed and co-written by Vincenzo Natali. It was a product of the Canadian Film Centre's First Feature Project, which enlisted support from Téléfilm Canada, Viacom Canada, and the Ontario Film Development Corporation. Starring Canadian film icon David Hewlett of Stargate fame, Cube would enlist the services of CGI and Post-production houses C.O.R.E. Digital Pictures, Film Effects, and The Magnetic North.

Despite the optimism generated by its expansion, Cineplex Odeon recorded net losses of around $32 million in 1995 and 1996. Industry-wide box office revenues rose 7.6 percent in 1996, to $5.9 billion, and Cineplex apparently did not reap the rewards of the industry's spectacular performance.

In late 1997, Cineplex Odeon announced plans to merge with Sony's Loews Theatre Group. The proposed merger would create the largest motion picture exhibitor in North America, with $1 billion in sales and 2,600 screens in the United States alone. Early details of the deal indicated Sony would own 51 percent of the new company, Loews Cineplex Entertainment, and Cineplex's shareholders would hold the rest as follows: Seagram, 26 percent; the Bronfman family, 9.7 percent; all other Cineplex shareholders, 13.3 percent. Both Cineplex and Sony hoped their combined forces would help them expand overseas and compete with other rapidly consolidating exhibitors.

In 2001, Loews Cineplex Entertainment filed for bankruptcy amid the early-2000s recession and struggled to stay afloat for the next few decades. However, it never truly disappeared and even bought out Famous Players from Viacom for CA$500 million (about US$397 million) on June 13, 2005.

Cineplex now holds approximately 75 percent market share in Canada, recording $764 million in revenue through the first two quarters of 2023. Cineplex also runs one of the largest loyalty programs in Canada, Scene, which rewards customers with Scene points that can be used to pay for Cineplex’s products and services. In Cineplex theatres, every $1 spent earns 5 Scene points.

Nat Taylor would work in the exhibition business until the end on February 29, 2004. But towards the end of his life, as the nature of the business changed, he was always shocked about the industry’s expectations of him: “People keep telling me they heard I was retired,” he says with a slight grimace. “I can only quote Mark Twain: ‘The reports of my death have been grossly exaggerated.’

Garth Drabinsky, once an acclaimed Canadian hero, would unfortunately fall into a life of fraud and white-collar crime. After exiting Cineplex, Drabinsky leveraged his ownership of the Pantages Theatre in Toronto to form the publicly traded theatre production company, Live Entertainment Corporation of Canada, Inc., also known as Livent. The company expanded, building or refurbishing several theatres, including the Oriental Theatre in Chicago, and entered into management deals with others in Toronto, Vancouver, and New York. It became noted for its productions (which earned a total of 20 Tony Awards out of a total of 71 nominations), such as Phantom of the Opera (1989 Canadian production), Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat (1992 Canadian production), Kiss of the Spider Woman (1992 Canadian production) and Sunset Boulevard (1995 Canadian production) to name a few.

However, the company faced serious partnership concerns, and in 2005, former investors sued Garth Drabinsky and his business partner, Myron Gottlieb. A suit in which the investors won a $23.3 million judgment against Drabinsky and Gottlieb in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, a judgment that the Ontario Court of Appeal upheld for enforcement in 2008.

On March 25, 2009, Drabinsky and Livent co-founder Myron Gottlieb were once again found guilty of fraud and forgery in Ontario Superior Court for misstating the company's financial statements between 1993 and 1998. Drabinsky was sentenced to seven years in jail on August 5, 2009, for his role in the case. Drabinsky filed an appeal in the Ontario Court of Appeal on September 3, 2009. On September 13, 2011, the Court of Appeal, while upholding the convictions, reduced Drabinsky's sentence to 5 years. Drabinsky was granted full parole on January 20, 2014.

However, it would just get worse for Drabinsky. On November 29, 2012, Governor General David Johnston signed an Ordinance of Termination revoking Drabinsky's Officer membership in the Order of Canada, originally conferred in 1995. On July 17, 2014, Drabinsky would also be disbarred by the Tribunal of the Law Society of Upper Canada for unbecoming conduct, having been found guilty of defrauding the public and forging certain financial statements. The Tribunal's order revoked his licence to practice law in the province of Ontario. The final blow came in 2017, when the Ontario Securities Commission permanently banned Drabinsky from serving as a director or officer of any public company in Ontario.

The Road to Hell is always paved with good intentions.

Circling Back To Filmmaking - Canada's Clark Kent

As film exhibition in Canada began to take shape, it was fraught from the outset. But what was even harder was becoming a filmmaker, and a successful one at that. Until 1889, Canada had no homegrown filmmakers. But as soon as the first immigrants landed, they settled down the best they could. Some of them would divert their attention to non-homesteading machinery and begin manufacturing images rather than land.

The first Canadian to pick up a film camera was James Simmons Freer. Freer came from Bristol, England, and was a newspaperman-turned-wheat farmer who settled in Brandon Hills near Winnipeg, Manitoba, in 1887. No pictures of Greer exist today, but it would be right to imagine him as a plaid Clark Kent, covered head to toe in filming gear, a reporter's notebook, with the classic farmer's fork and muddy boots. Freer was soon to become the Superman of the small Winnipeg film industry.

In the early 1900s, the Canadian Pacific Railway was the leading company funding filmmaking across Canada. The Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) was constructing a transcontinental railway across the country. The enormous construction costs necessitated that the CPR explore every possible option to generate revenue, reduce its debt load, and begin to make the line profitable. So, CPR turned to the film industry to encourage people to travel, live, and explore the nation's great landscapes. Their Film production would commence wherever a significant city with a railway, a tourist destination, or industrial development existed. Wherever there was a railway, there was a way to make films.

Today, Toronto, Montreal, Halifax, and Vancouver (and formerly Winnipeg) are the main “hubs” of the Canadian film industry, and their origin comes from the fact that they were railway towns, outposts strung along the veins of the Canadian Pacific Railway and became the main hubs of commerce and migration. These initial film hubs built by the Canadian Pacific Railway would foster a surrounding community of film-processing labs, post-production facilities, special-effects houses, and supporting infrastructure, thereby shaping local communities for centuries.

The CPR, in cooperation with federal and provincial governments and the Hudson's Bay Company, developed plans to encourage immigration and to expand agriculture, mining, and forestry, and hired prominent Canada and U.S. filmmakers to produce railway films. The CPR promotion included still photographs, illustrated lectures, and testimonial pamphlets. It also used companies, filmmakers, and celebrities to maximize exposure. CPR filmmaking fell into two categories: those designed specifically to educate, inform, and persuade, and those for entertainment. This is where James Freer entered the picture.

Freer was described as an outgoing, friendly man and a gifted public speaker who made films about the Canadian prairies featuring Canada's various railways. James Freer produced brief films under two minutes, employing only in-camera editing of local, everyday activities. His titles included Six Binders at Work in Hundred Acre Wheatfield (1898) and Arrival of CPR Express at Winnipeg (date unknown). Farm scenes and trains were his favorite subjects, and other titles included Typical Stacking Scene (1898), Cyclone Thresher at Work(1898), Harnessing the Virgin Prairie(1898), and Harvesting Scene, with Trains Passing(Date unknown). One of his productions, Premier Greenway Stooking Grain(Date unknown), featured provincial politician Thomas Greenway, and another, Coming thro’ the Rye (Date unknown), showed his children. Feer’s films were never glamorous. But they gave us our first close-up of a country still sketching out what it meant to be Canadian.

Initially, the CPR encouraged its filmmakers to avoid filming in areas of Canada that received heavy snowfall, as this was seen as a factor that could deter future immigrants. However, this rule had some exceptions, such as the Montreal Winter Carnival of 1903, when a CPR cameraman filmed the first recorded hockey game.

In 1898, Freer released “Ten Years in Manitoba,” sponsored by the Canadian Pacific Railway. This documentary encouraged people to relocate to the province. In England, a 1898 advertisement promoted Canada as an ideal place to live. Some may have thought this movie was ten years too long, but this was Canada’s first feature film by a Canadian filmmaker.

There is debate about whether Freer filmed Ten Years in Manitoba alone or just spliced together footage from other films. Evidence suggests the latter. The Manitoba Historical Society has confirmed that other filmmakers contributed to parts of the film. A Winnipeg bartender, Richard Hardie, and an American filmmaker, E. H. Amet, had their films of Manitoba acquired by James while he was making his own, which were then used as filler. Neither of these men was pleased, and their arguments are preserved in the Winnipeg Free Press archives along with the reporter's note that Freer could not be reached for comment.

However, Ten Years in Manitoba was a success and launched Freer on a tour of the United Kingdom in late 1898. Press reports of Freer's British tours indicate that at least one film showed his home and family as a model of what potential emigrants could expect. He returned to Manitoba in the spring of 1899, filming his journey from Liverpool to Quebec, which he then presented as a successful lecture series.

If a corporation wished to convey a message to a widespread audience, the most effective medium was film. These films were then loaned free of charge to service clubs, church groups, women’s institutes, and schools, which were eager to provide entertainment at their meetings. Many corporations provided the film and a speaker, who would deliver a short presentation, make a small donation to the service club, and then project the film. The film would fill an evening’s program, usually including a cartoon, a newsreel, a short film, and then the feature. This was precisely the program to which Freer was assigned when he toured the United Kingdom.

While Freer was in England on his first tour, a neighbor and farmer, Clifford Sifton, assisted him in tending his farm. Sifton would go on to become the federal minister of the interior for the Liberal government of Sir Wilfrid Laurier and was anxious to encourage immigration to Manitoba. He used his influence to obtain government sponsorship of Freer’s second journey to England.

This time, Freer's second tour to Britain in 1901 garnered an unenthusiastic response. Much of the footage from the original tour was reused for his second and supplemented with material shot by others, including stale views of Niagara Falls.

From there, the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) would bring together a group of filmmakers, known as the Bioscope Company of Canada, to produce Living Canada (1902). Amongst those filmmakers hired was James Freer. This series of 35 scenes depicting Canadian life was designed to encourage British immigration to Canada. The series included the first fictional drama made in Canada, the 15-minute-long Hiawatha, The Messiah of the Ojibway (1903).

In 1904, in an effort to generate renewed interest in Canadian travel, the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) contracted with the professional Charles Urban Trading Company to produce a series of films promoting immigration and settlement in Canada. As a filmmaker's outsourcer, Freer was thanked, dismissed, and left to return to his fields. Freer returned to his farm and continued to host occasional film screenings locally.

In 1906, Freer, shooting high for another chance in the filmaking spotlight, proposed another tour. CPR and the government said no, but Freer, ever stubborn, went anyway. After returning, he continued to make films. But he soon tired of farming. He relocated to Elkhorn, Manitoba, around 1910, and then, leaving his property in the hands of his son Joseph, he moved with his wife to Winnipeg. In 1917, he became a printer at the Winnipeg Free Press. James Freer passed away on December 22, 1933, in Winnipeg. He left behind seven sons and two daughters to continue his legacy.

East Coast , West Coast

Canadian filmmakers were scarce in the late 1800s and early 1900s. It was more common for American filmmakers to travel to Canada to film newsreels and travel vlogs, popular backdrops for dramatic productions, than for Canadians themselves to document the nation's landscape. One of these filmmakers was William H. Harbeck, an American who would become Vancouver's first feature filmmaker. In 1907, Harbeck produced what is now considered Vancouver's oldest surviving film.

Early Vancouver was documented primarily through newspapers, photographs, and other records, but rarely on film. The city was first filmed around 1900, when an unknown American cameraman recorded footage of horses boarding a steamship bound for the Klondike goldfields. From there, Vancouver became a popular location for filming. It was seen as a mystical place surrounded by mountains. The Government of Canada and the Canadian Pacific Railway would also help promote this elegant cityscape through Western promotional films from the early 1900s.

William H. Harbeck saw new commercial opportunities with the film medium. Born in 1863, Harbeck had pursued several careers by 1900, including as a bookkeeper, journalist, inventor, traveling book agent, and deputy sheriff. He could be best described as a man full of adventure. His other jobs included serving as a steam laundry proprietor and as the editor of the Anaconda Examiner in Colorado. From there, Harbeck began his film career as a cameraman for Miles Brothers of San Francisco in 1906, marking the start of his infamous career.

Harbeck was one of many who claimed to be the first to film the aftermath of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. But his claims helped him build a steadily growing career, and he went on to work for the Selig Polyscope Company of Chicago, the Canadian Pacific Railway, the Grand Trunk Steamship Company, and the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition (Seattle). He would travel to Europe and sell the footage he had filmed to North American distributors. It was during this period that he ended up in Vancouver.

When Harbeck arrived in Vancouver, the city was just beginning to recover from a devastating fire 21 years earlier that had destroyed most of the buildings, less than two months after the town was incorporated in 1886. In 1907, the Vancouver Daily Province, on September 21, 1907, raved about the city’s success and prospects as the “Financial Centre of the Province” and “The Finest Port on the North Pacific.” Several landmark events were happening in the city. The Vancouver Stock Exchange had just opened, and the Police Department had just acquired its first automobile. The fire department became the first in Canada to purchase motorized firefighting units.

Harbeck would also visit Victoria, B.C, to film the provincial capital on May 4, 1907. The Victoria newspaper, the Daily Colonist, reported that Harbeck next planned to travel to Nanaimo, north of Victoria, with a stop at Shawnigan Lake, to film “The Glittering Sheet of Water and the Pretty Little Hotel” and “The Scores of Fishermen.”

On the morning of 6 May 1907, Harbeck arrived in Vancouver, and his arrival was reported in the Vancouver World newspaper. It’s unclear who Harbeck worked for during his travels in British Columbia. Some reports state he worked for the Selig Polyscope Company of Chicago, which made films for Hale’s Tours. Hale’s Tours and Scenes of the World was an American company that specialized in providing audiences with a cinematic experience based on the “Pleasure Railway,” patented by George C. Hale and Fred W. Gifford of Missouri in 1905. The Pleasure-Railway was a stationary theatre that mimicked a real railway car, using mechanical techniques to simulate starting, stopping, accelerating, decelerating, swaying, and a “clickety-clack” sound. Vancouver had one of these “Pleasure Railway” Theatres installed in 1905.

The Vancouver Province speculated that “these pictures will be sent to Portland to be developed and probably be exhibited in the city in about three weeks.” However, the Vancouver Historical Society has not located any reference to a Vancouver screening. The 1907 newspaper also reported that the Vancouver street scenes were to “be exhibited throughout Canada and the United States in theatres, side-shows and other places where moving picture machines are operated” and “sent to England and exhibited all over the Continent.” There is no evidence that this ever occurred. At this point, Harbeck’s film coverage would end, and the film itself would disappear for over 75 years.

For over 75 years, Harbeck’s Vancouver footage lay buried. It was not in a Canadian archive, not in a vault, but in an Australian basement rediscovered in the 1980s and mislabelled as Sydney Harbour. The film was discovered in a deplorable condition. Between 1994 and 1996, film conservators at the National Archives of Canada conducted intensive restoration of the films. The acquisition received three prints on three loops of nitrate film. It was out of order, and the prints differed in timing and context. The conservators had to manually go cell by cell and arrange the film back into its estimated correct order. There was also considerable shrinkage of the film, which caused additional damage. Optical printers had to be customized to scan and restore the movie. Since its restoration, the original nitrate film has been stored in a vault at Rockcliffe Air Force Base, along with the rest of Library and Archives Canada’s nitrate holdings.

Harbeck himself continued to let his sense of adventure drive his ambition, and unfortunately, his travels would conflict with one of the most infamous disasters in naval history. In 1912, Harbeck would step foot on the world's most famous passenger liner to film its maiden voyage for the White Star Line. Passionately filming the historical event, Harbeck and his subject matter would be oblivious to the oncoming events headed their way. The ship Harbeck was hired to film aboard was named the Titanic, and Harbeck would become one of the 1522 passengers to lose their lives in the depths of the Atlantic Ocean. Harbeck’s death was announced in a trade magazine, and he was described as “a pioneer in the moving picture business, who had roamed the world with his camera, and contributed much to the enlightenment of his fellowmen by making pictures that will outlive him as valuable records.“

Some cities, such as Vancouver and Halifax, also became popular shoot locations because of their proximity to major film cities in the United States. Vancouver had Hollywood next door, and Halifax had New York just a boat ride away. Because of this, Halifax would become the home of Canada’s first feature film production.

Captain H.H.B. Holland was an ex-seaman and full-time showman who, in 1912, launched the Canadian Bioscope Company—the second film company in the country and the first to plant its flag in the Maritimes. With a base in New York and a heart in Nova Scotia, The Canadian Bioscope and Captain Holland sought to share the lives of Nova Scotians with the world, and the company quickly laid the foundations for international film distribution. The company would successfully create Canada’s first feature-length film, Evangeline (1914).

Shot across Nova Scotia and Quebec, Evangeline, adapted from Longfellow's poem by the same name and adapted by Marguerite Marquis, tells the story of the 1755 expulsion of the Acadians from Nova Scotia, framed as the love story of two characters, Evangeline and Gabriel. Costing $30,000 for the entire production, the leads were played by American actors Laura Lyman and John F. Carleton, and local actors R.J. Leary and Rhea Rafuse held supporting roles.
When it opened in Halifax that February, critics raved. The movie received critical acclaim, and reviews appeared in New York and Saskatchewan. The Halifax Evening Mail declared it a "masterpiece...a splendid representation of the immortal poem in moving pictures." These positive reviews enabled Bioscope to release six more films—shorts, comedies, and reels—but none matched Evangeline’s charm.
Because of the lack of follow-up success with its productions, the company would fold before World War I was even in full swing. The company's films were auctioned, and the original copy of Evangeline was observed departing Halifax with some of Canadian Bioscope's American production crew. This film is considered lost. Its final resting place is unknown. All that remains in Canada are a few stills of the production, the advertisements, and newspaper reviews.

In 1920, Wallace W. MacDonald founded Halifax’s second film company, the Maritime Motion Picture Company (MMPC). This was a more corporate and cautious company, with overseers who were local Halifax businesspeople. Most of its films were filmed in Cape Breton and Atlantic Canada. Instead of hiring Nova Scotians, MMPC quickly realized that importing talent into filming locations was cheaper than hiring locally.

MMPC’s first film, A Ten-Day's Trip Through New Brunswick (1921), garnered less attention than Evangeline and was considered a commercial flop. And the flops kept coming. The company would move to produce Big Timber (1921), Port aux Basques (1922), and the drama Sea Riders (1922), but none were successful. By 1922, lawsuits from U.S. companies started piling up. After attempting to syndicate twice and to reincorporate, MMPC entered bankruptcy, was dissolved in 1935, and was sold the following year.

Bioscope and MMPC laid the foundation, proving that Nova Scotia could tell its own stories on its own terms. These companies gave the community a voice in how they wanted their province portrayed in the media. Many of the former employees went on to become prominent voices in the Halifax media, including W.G. MacLaughlan, Allan Fraser, E.D. Bollinger, Alexander Leighton, W.R. MacAskill, Sam Short, C.C. Foster, and Harold Weir. They were photographers, documentary filmmakers, and pioneers in 16mm. They chronicled their time with startling clarity, including one of Canada’s darkest chapters—the Halifax Explosion of 1917.

By the 1920s, foreign filmmakers had stormed the East Coast as tourists with tripods. Halifax would be overrun by American and British filmmakers who saw Canada’s backdrop as an “exotic” frozen frontier. Many British and American films from the 1920s onward depict the Nova Scotian countryside while reinforcing over-the-top stereotypes. The majority of Edison, Bioscope, and American Mutoscope films featured residents as drunk horse-and-buggy potato farmers and fishermen. One of the earliest American-made dramatic films, An Acadian Elopement (1907), produced by the American Mutoscope, was a sentimental romp featuring a Nova Scotian “Quaker maid.”

One of the many foreign filmmakers who traveled along the East Coast was Varick Frissell. handsome, confident, athletic, and over six feet tall, Frissell was a social activist, explorer, and filmmaker. Born in New York on August 29th, 1902, he had a profound sense of adventure and purpose, which led him to travel to Newfoundland and Labrador.

In the 1920s, Frissell would attend a lecture by medical missionary Wilfred Thomason Grenfell, and be swept up with Grenfell’s crew, volunteering to drive dogsleds to deliver medical supplies, manning the hospital boat Strathcona II, and even laying the first water supply in St. Anthony for the International Grenfell Association in Labrador from September 1921 until April 1922. He also helped establish the Yale School in 1926 at North West River in the province.

Frissell was an amateur documentary filmmaker. This interest inspired him to travel by canoe up the Hamilton (Churchill) River, a journey that Frissell estimated at 300 miles. He wanted to learn more about Labrador’s resources to improve the economy and to gain personal freedom. During this 1925 trip, Frissell shot the first film of the Grand (Churchill) Falls, explored undocumented and unexplored parts of the country, and discovered and named the Yale (Thomas) Falls. The footage was released as a short documentary titled The Lure of the Labrador, which was modestly successful in 1925.

In 1927, Frissell published an account of his expedition in the Geographical Journal of London and was appointed to the Royal Geographical Society. He spent the first half of this year working aboard a sealing steamer and shooting film when not on duty. In 1928, Frissell became the director of the Grenfell Association of America.

In 1930, intending to make a feature-length film about seal hunts, Frissell formed the Newfoundland-Labrador Film Company, which was incorporated in Delaware with funding from American and Newfoundland investors. This film's working titles would be White Thunder and Vikings of the Ice Field. Frissell received no salary and agreed to be paid in company shares if the film succeeded. After securing a distribution deal with Paramount Pictures and $100,000 in financing, he began shooting in February. The director was George Melford, and the film starred Captain Robert Abram Bartlett, a Newfoundland-born American Arctic explorer, who played the ship’s commander. The film was created under extremely hazardous conditions due to the surrounding oceanic ice flows. This film was one of the earliest sound-synchronized motion pictures shot on location in Canada.

The first screening of the film occurred early in 1931, and Paramount, uneasy about the subject matter, reversed course and declined to distribute it after Frissel refused to follow its recommendation to replace the current actors with Hollywood A-list talent.

The fallout of the distribution deal did not deter Frissel. To renew the distribution efforts for his film, Frissell set out to shoot additional material that he hoped would salvage White Thunder. Frissell hired the steamer Viking. Commanded by Captain Abram Kean Jr, the ship left St. John’s on 9 March 1931. On board were various explosives, mainly used to deal with ice jams as the voyage progressed. Frissell was deeply concerned after observing the crew casually handling the explosives and documented voicing those concerns during the voyage. Stating, “If you fool with them, we’ll all be blown to Hades before daylight!” He was right.

On March 13th,1931, an explosion was heard eight miles away. An explosive blast tore the stern off the Viking, blowing it to smithereens. Frissell was one of the 27 men, out of 143, who were killed. Over the next few days, the survivors, some critically injured, were picked up by rescue ships or made their way over the ice towards land. Frissell’s body was never recovered.

In the wake of the disaster, and capitalizing on the publicity, independent distributor J. D. Williams salvaged Frissell’s work and quickly released the film under the title The Viking. Despite the publicity, the Viking had limited box-office success, and the Newfoundland-Labrador Film Company was quickly disbanded.

The Halifax film industry would continue to experience fluctuations throughout Canadian history. Filmmakers were often challenged by weather, terrain, limited resources, and the sudden disappearance of resources when companies departed. By the '30s and '40s, the Nova Scotia Tourist Information Bureau (NSTIB) partnered with other film organizations to promote travel and lifestyle in Nova Scotia. One partnership would be with the Mandeville Press Bureau (MPB) of New York City to publicize Nova Scotia through newspapers, magazines, motion pictures, and radio. MPB was hired to make arrangements for newsreel coverage of public celebrations in Nova Scotia. As a result, Canadian films were circulated at fairs and exhibitions and shown to special interest groups and organizations across the United States.

However, there were several drawbacks to the Nova Scotia industry's growth. The provincial government was also on its wits' end and tired of Nova Scotia being portrayed as a horse-and-buggy, out-of-touch clan, so it began denying film funding for international projects starting in the 1950s. But on the west coast of Canada, Hollywood filmmaking would start to settle down and set up more permanent roots in the British Columbia coastline.

Quota Quickies

In 1927, England was facing a problem. Their film industry was dying because of the American entertainment industry's aggressive nature. Forced to act, the UK enacted a quota when its productions accounted for less than 5% of the content screened in global theatres. It passed the Cinematographic Films Act, which came into effect in 1928. The law stipulated that 15 percent of films shown in Britain had to be of British or Commonwealth origin.

Now Hollywood had a problem: All Hollywood producers who wanted to show their films in the United Kingdom had to make a certain proportion of their films in the British Commonwealth under British quota laws. The rule required that 20 percent of U.S. films be produced in the British Commonwealth and that 75 percent of the wages and shooting be allocated to British citizens. The distribution of Canadian films would benefit directly from Britain's implementation of a British Empire film quota in North America. This quota allowed more films to enter theatres outside the USA.

While all these quota laws were coming into effect, Hollywood devised a scheme. Americans began photographing in Canada with American crews, hoping to pass them off as British, starting by opening up a base on British Columbia’s capital island. From here, the 1930s would mark Victoria, BC, as “the movie capital of the North” for the next decade.

Victoria was the nearest Commonwealth city to California, so Hollywood exploited this as a convenient loophole and established branches to satisfy British requirements. Hollywood would choose Oak Bay, Victoria, as its central hub. But between 1928 and 1937, 22 low-budget feature films were produced in Canada by companies based in Canada and financed in the United States to take advantage of the quota.

Victoria film entrepreneur Kenneth Bishop would lead the city’s film movement. Bishop had started his first film company in ’33, but his first two flicks were flops. So, Bishop enticed Hollywood companies to use his Oak Bay studio. From 1933 to 1938, 14 Hollywood features, known as “quota quickies,” were filmed there. They took only a month to produce and cost approximately $40,000- $50,000. Building on the success of the productions, Bishop built an additional soundstage, now known as the old Willows Fairgrounds. Bishop would also found Commonwealth Productions and Central Films.

The British Columbia studios attracted major stars, including Rita Hayworth, who appeared in two films produced there: Special Inspector (1938) and Convicted (1938). These films were of generic quality and produced under Columbia Pictures' supervision. Bishop frequently visited Hollywood to ensure the studio was happy with the product and to oversee processing and editing, which were not done in Canada. Post-production at this point was still an L.A. job.

The last big hurrah was in 1942 when Hollywood returned to Victoria to film Commandos Strike at Dawn(1942). The film used the Saanich Peninsula as a backdrop, featured big names, Paul Muni, Anna Lee, and Lillian Gish, and was nominated for an Academy Award for the musical score.

In 1938, the British government renewed the quota law and amended it to exclude Commonwealth films, primarily because Canada had allowed the law to be subverted. Attempts were made in Ontario, Quebec, and Alberta to introduce provincial quotas for British films. But None of these bills became law.

From there, no more quota quickies were filmed at The Willows Park Studios, and it was converted into an ice arena in 1941. However, 3 years later, it was destroyed in 1944. Bishop would quietly disappear, remaining an enigma. Though he claimed to have been a producer since 1918, it’s more widely reported that he was a promoter on the industry's fringes, following a career as an actor in the early days of Hollywood.