Throughout the years that my son, Jude (who prefers to be called Nathan) and my lovely and tough-as-nails (but not entirely sane) daughter, Megan — hey, it runs in the family, on both her mother’s and my side — through their younger years and their teens music was ever-present in their lives.
On the long Sunday afternoon drives, the monthly excursions to Seattle, the quarterly sojourns to the west coast of Vancouver Island, visits with friends on the far side of Port Coquitlam, nearly in Pitt Meadows, more often than not the music loud enough that we would all sing the lyrics together, or sometimes we would just lie back (although, I am always hyper-alert when driving) and listen to one or more of our favourite Todd Rundgren songs, or music by The Boss, The Bangles, Bob Dylan, The Ronettes, Elvis Costello, Tears for Fears, or whatever pop song was playing on hit radio — and later on, for my son, angry, profanity-laden hip hop songs — for Jude and Megan and I, music was throughout the course of every day of our lives a central feature of lives full of love, and well-lived.
In the 1970s, I was the go-to guy if you wanted to purchase new stereo equipment, or anything tech related. As you might well imagine, then, in the Tomlin household you would find the best, high-end stereo equipment, a perfectly calibrated turntable and stylus, amp, tuner and speakers, the best money could buy (I wasn’t always a pauper). My love of great stereo equipment, or lovingly created mix tapes, encompassing the broadest cross-section of music you could imagine — for most of my life, I’ve been an arts critics, the record companies only too willing to give me any vinyl record or, later, CD that I wanted, creating a vast library of music at home, played to optimum effect on the very best audio equipment available on the market — providing access to the best sound and broadest array of music you’d find outside of Business in Vancouver editor, Kirk LaPointe’s home.
My love of music, and love of tech and stereo equipment, is a feature of my life, and now my children’s lives, a gift that has been bequeathed to them.
My son is a recording engineer, putting out his own music under the name DJ Nameless. At home he has recording equipment stacked floor to ceiling, mixing equipment, turntables, all of the music both played and recorded on vinyl, or other legacy media. Jude has taken my rudimentary mixing skills (of which, I am sure he would say I have none) and developed his skill set in music & recording into an art. Listen above to one of his house records.
Every now and then — a gift from my son I very much look forward to — Jude will have found a rare recording, and contrary to the best interests of his nature, and love and commitment to the warmer sounds of legacy media, will digitize a song he’s run across in his travels, loading the mp3 into my iTunes, forever after to be a part of my 6000+ song mp3 library of lovingly crafted music of the new millennium, providing access for me both at home, and on my latest model iPhone — the soundtrack of my life.
On June 28th, 1999, Jude came over to my home for a visit (we were to go to dinner later in the afternoon), just sort of hanging out in my place, repairing for awhile to the magnificent rooftop paradise created by two of my housing co-op’s landscape visionaries, and then as it came time to go, Jude turned to me, gave me a hug (note: Jude gives the warmest and most loving hugs), Jude sitting down on my comfy office chair, leaning into my state-of-the-art computer’s CD drive, loading the song below, the first release by The Art of Noise from their concept album (vinyl, of course), The Holy Egoism of Genius, the song The Seduction of Claude Debussy.
Before he pressed play on the now loaded iTunes song, Jude turned to me and said, “You know that I think mp3s represent a corruption of sound, and I’ll never own an mp3 player, no matter how easy and available they become — but when I heard this song, I thought of you, and thought that maybe, probably, that you’d like it. You’ve always liked narrative in the music you listen to, and on occasion, a particularly compelling and well-wrought foreground narrative — which is an element of the song I am about to play for you.”
“John Hurt, who I know you like — because you’ve taken Megan and I to almost every film in which John Hurt has ever starred, or we’ve watched them at home late on a weekend night, for Megan and I, The Elephant Man and 1984 two of John Hurt’s more memorable films that we have watched with you at home, or when we were younger, at the cinema.”
Here’s the song Jude gave to me that late afternoon, early summer’s day …
In November 2017, I wrote of a signal event of my life — a 7th birthday present from my mother of a transistor radio, on August 11th, 1957.
The acquisition of the leather-encased transistor radio — I was the first boy in my neighbourhood to own one — so influenced my life that I developed not only a lifelong love of pop culture as a consequence of receiving the present, but a lifelong love for radio, which less than 10 years later would see me working at CFUN — then Vancouver’s rock ‘n roll giant — studying with Red Robinson (at the time, the programme director), producing the station’s Sunday night programming, and occasionally going on the air.
The gift of the transistor radio also meant that after going to bed at my usual bedtime of 8pm, I could turn the radio on to CKNW and listen to the classic radio programmes of the 1940s and 1950s: The Shadow, Our Miss Brooks, the Jack Benny – a favourite – and Red Skelton shows, and George Burns and Gracie Allen, and The Charlie McCarthy shows.
Summer 1957 also had a darker aspect.
For the first five years of my life, I didn’t speak. I sang, but I didn’t speak. Early childhood trauma, I expect — neglect, a lack of love, and darker goings on I won’t write about today, but there was joy in my young life — the Sunshine Bread truck that would situate itself in the park at the end of Alice Street, over by Victoria and 24th, providing the young children who lived in the neighbourhood an opportunity to ride on the tiny merry-go-round on the back of the truck, the children running home to their mothers saying, “Mom, oh mom, you’ve got to buy some Sunshine Bread.”
During this period, though, and throughout my life, there was not a mother at home for me to run to. My father, too, was absent; I’m not sure where he spent his days, all I knew was that he didn’t have work — my parents argued about it all the time — and neither was he a fit parent, as he proved time and time again. There were nannies at home, recent immigrants from Germany, mostly, from whom I acquired my love of warm & filling oatmeal for my breakfast in the morning, for there wasn’t much food in my home, and often that oatmeal breakfast would constitute my meal for the day.
At age five, I began to speak, first haltingly and then in full sentences. For anyone who knows me, they’d probably say that for many years now, I have been making up for the lost words of the first five years of my life.
In my home, there were no bedtime stories. Not that either of my parents were inclined to read to my sister and I. My father had a Grade One education, and couldn’t read. My mother had a Grade Three education, and she could read — but not to either me or my sister. Not that she was ever around the house long enough to read stories to us, even if she was so inclined — which she wasn’t.
My mother was the breadwinner in my family.
From the earliest years of my life, through all the years of my maturational growth, my mother always worked three jobs — for many years she worked days at Bonor and Bemis, just off Strathcona Park, a factory job where she worked in the part of the factory responsible for making paper bags; afternoons saw my father lifting my sister into the back seat of the car to pick my mother up from work, to drive her to Lulu Island and the Swift Meat Packing Plant, after which my father, sister and I traveled home in our 10-year-old Plymouth, the car barreling down Victoria Drive, with my sister far too often opening the back door of the car, spilling out onto the roadway, as my father’s car sped away down the street, me screaming, “Dad, dad — Linda’s jumped out of the car!” at which point he would stop, turn the car around and head back to where my sister lay in the middle of the road, a car having stopped so he wouldn’t run her over, holding up traffic, my father rushing over to pick up my sister to take her home.
In any one of those incidents, my father never thought to take Linda to the hospital. Sometimes the driver of the car that had stopped — to prevent himself from driving over Linda — would repair to my home, on Alice Street, or East 2nd Avenue, with me screaming at my father or the man or men who were standing around in the kitchen of my house, Linda laying bruised and bleeding on the hard melamite kitchen table, me now screeching at the adults gathered around my sister, men hands held to their chin, doing nothing, my screaming at them to take her to the hospital.
But they never did.
In September 1956, I entered Grade One. My mother was actually present to enroll me my first day of school at Lord Nelson Elementary, at Templeton Drive and Charles. Miss Pugh was my Grade One teacher. The only memory I have of her involves asking the children in class to put our heads down on our desks when her boyfriend would come to visit, as I peeked toward the front of the class, where I would see the two of them kissing — the only affection between adults I had ever witnessed to that point in my life.
Grade One was, for me, a blur.
I was, I suppose, unmanageable, full of life, although I don’t have any strong memories of my attendance at Lord Nelson Elementary school, from September 1956 through June of 1957 — I had never been socialized, no one had ever made demands of me in regards of my conduct, although I would receive hard spankings if I got out of line, although it was always difficult to determine what “getting out of line meant,” as there were no boundaries around my conduct that I can recall having been set for me.
I enjoyed my pre-school days (read: before I attended elementary school), and I suppose I enjoyed school, my memory of playing marbles at recess acute. Quite honestly, though, I can’t remember anything else of my first year of school — apart from the kissing at the front of the class, from time to time, between my teacher and her boyfriend. As my mother was working three jobs — 16 hours a day, six days a week, 24 hours on the 7th day, the unskilled factory jobs paying, early on, about 25 cents an hour, climbing to 35 cents by 1957 — I was lost, there were no governors in my life, no love, no affection, I felt alone, and more often than not, full of dread and fear.
My most cogent memories of September 1956 to June 1957 are this …
Walking to school alone through billowy white fog, so thick you couldn’t see your hand in front of you, arriving at school on time, and settling into a day where I would learn nothing;
Running to Joy and Louise’s house after school, and playing with them for 2 hours, their parents at work, just the three of us at home playing make believe;
Spending occasional afternoons at my best friend John Pavich’s home, his mother with fresh-baked, warm cookies at the ready, a glass of milk on the table. I would often stay for only a half hour, after which I would walk down Charles Street in the rain, towards Nanaimo, rumbling thunder and lightning in the steel blue skies a wondrous delight for me.
I have always felt most secure in overcast weather. Clouds in the sky, particularly the dark billowy clouds that covered the sky on those most overcast of days, offered me a secure and reassuring blanket, a security I lacked in every other aspect of my life, my love of darkened — some would say, forboding, but not me — a feeling that lives in me still.
I love the rain, I love leaden skies, I love the security that those overhead clouds continue to provide me, as if nothing bad can or will happen to me — and in a life, as far back as my pre-school days, an ever more present and necessary feeling as I glided through my Grade One year, untouched, unaware, when I raised myself alone (who knew where my sister was?), the clouds in the sky offering me the only security that was available to me.
Six-year-old me, Raymond Tomlin, on my bike, outside my home, in the spring of 1957
As the school year was ending, the sports day complete, the warm summer days having now just begun, on the last day of school in June 1957, I received my report card, taking it directly to my home as instructed by my Principal and my teacher. There was no one home. I played make believe all on my own. I left my report card on the kitchen table. Alone, I felt fatigued, and went to bed early on that June 30th afternoon, unsure of what the summer would bring, and what life held in store for me.
Early the next morning, following 12 hours of fitful sleep, upon opening my eyes, I was surprised to see my mother standing over my bed. She looked at me, seething, her lips pursed and tight, her face purple with rage — next thing I knew, she hit me across the face, hard. “You failed Grade One. No son of mine is going to fail Grade One. You are in for a summer of hell!”
And so it proved to be.
For the only time in all the years I lived at home, my mother left her employment, staying home with me through July and August, the renters in the downstairs suite evicted that summer, my days of hell beginning at 8am, tied to a chair in the kitchen of the downstairs suite, from 8am til 8pm Monday through Friday of each week of summer 1957, for near on 60 days — save my birthday, on August 11th, when I was given a day off — I was beaten, the rope tying me to the chair cutting into my skin, the early part of the summer finding me screaming in fear and in pain.
Hour upon hour upon hour.
Of course, in those days, there was no definiing concept of child abuse, no such thing as a Ministry of Human Resources or Ministry of Children and Family Development, no one to look after the welfare of children. A child screaming, most parents — at least in my east side Grandview-Woodland neighbourhood — thought the child probably had it coming to them.
Over the course of the thirty-one days of July 1957, something of a miracle occurred amidst the tears, and the now lessening screams of the day: I learned to read. I learned arithmetic. I learned to print. I learned everything I had not learned in ten months of enrollment in Grade One.
By summer’s end — as would soon be discovered, I knew how to print and to write in cursive longhand, my arithmetic skills progressing far beyond basic addition and subtraction into fractions, and elementary algebra and geometry. I learned to read, I read for hours every day.
I memorized the small dictionary my mother had purchased for the express purpose of teaching me language. I learned the meaning of thousands of words, and I learned to spell those words correctly — lest I be beaten, or slapped hard across the face. That summer I learned to love learning.
On the first day of school in September 1957, my mother — as you may have gathered, a force of nature — marched me into the school office, confronting the Principal, an anger in her that had transmogrified into rage, my mother fierce and unrelenting in a barrage of hate-filled words that filled the room, fear and dread also filling the room, the Principal clearly unsettled, teachers running towards the office to see what this mad woman who had taken control of the office wanted, was demanding.
“My son is ready for Grade 2,” my mother screamed at my Principal, whose complexion now was ruddy, his face shuddering, his eyes wary, wide, concern – perhaps for his safety, perhaps for me – spilling out of his eyes.
“But Mrs. Tomlin, your son can’t read, he doesn’t even know the letters of the alphabet, and he doesn’t know how to do even the most basic addition and subtraction, not even one plus one equals two. I cannot place your son in Grade Two, just because you wish it to be so.”
My mother looked around the office. There was a large plaque on one of the walls, with 20 or so lines of print on the plaque.
Turning to me, pointing to the plaque, she bellowed, “Read it.” And I did. While I was reading the dozens of words on the plaque, my mother looked around the office, spotting a Grade 5 Math book.
Handing the Math book to the Principal, her eyes now in a squint, she demanded of the Principal, “turn to any page, ask him to solve any problem on that page. Now!” The principal did as he was instructed to do by my mother, asking me one question after another, as he flipped through page after page of the Math book. I answered every question correctly — and quickly, as I had been instructed in my basement dungeon at home.
The Principal turned to me and said, “Wait here son, take a seat over there. Mrs. Tomlin, please come with me to my office.”
Twenty minutes later I entered Mrs. Goloff’s Grade Two class, in a portable outside along Charles Street, beginning what would be one of the best years of my life. The school had spelling bees. I won every time, not just for Grade 2, but for the whole school. I breezed through Grade 2. Somehow, over the summer, I had gained a love of learning that resides in me still, and informs my life each and every day. I loved to read, spending hours in the school library reading whatever I could get my hands on.
I loved challenging myself, my facility with math always not just functional, but acute. And memory — looking back on it, I suppose the summer of 1957 was when I acquired my near photographic memory. I loved challenging myself to remember facts and information, discovering a way to achieve near perfect recall by inventing context through narrative. I suppose, too, that the summer of 1957 was when I first gained my love for narrative — as a tool and as a means to create recall and meaning, and a feature of how I would bring myself to the world, from my years in radio having to memorize how long the “musical beds” were for hundreds of songs, so that I could speak over the musical beds right up to the beat just before the lyrics to the song would kick in, or when in high school, taking the lead in school plays, and learning three hours of dialogue with ease.
The summer of 1957. A pivotal summer in my life, not just my young life, but the whole of my life, the most impactful summer of my near 68 years on this planet. In retrospect, looking back on that summer of what began as misery and pain, and what it has meant to me over the course of the next 60 years of my life — I love my mother for what she did for me.
As I have written previously, and as I will write again, I am who I am because of the tough, caring women who have come into my life, who have been demanding of me to be my best, to give all that I can give.
As is the case with most of the women with whom I have shared my life, my mother was a tough, bright, brooked no nonsense and driven woman, someone you did not want to cross, ever, who was also — not to put too fine a point on the matter — crazy (a consequence of childhood trauma), but a survivor nonetheless, and was in her own way, loving, but in terms of the woman who was supposed to raise me, in large measure and for the most part, absent — save one particular summer, the summer of 1957.
In the summer of 1974, Cathy and I traveled to Europe for a three-month European summer vacation, BritRail and Eurail passes in hand, this was going to be a summer vacation to keep in our memory for always.
And so it proved to be …
On another day, in another post evoking memories of our cross-continental European sabbatical, I’ll relate more stories of what occurred that summer.
In this inaugural edition of Stories of a Life, I will set about to relate the following story, one of the most salutary and heartening events of my life.
Only 10 days prior to the event I am about to relate, Cathy and I had arrived in Lisbon, Portugal, alighting from a cruise liner we’d boarded in Southampton, England (passage was only 5£s, much cheaper than now).
After a couple of wonderful days in Lisbon, Cathy and I embarked on the first part of our hitchhiking sojourn throughout every portion of Portugal we could get to, finally traveling along the Algarve before arriving in the south of the country, ready to board a train to Spain. Unfortunately, I developed some intestinal disorder or other, requiring rest and fluids. Once Cathy could see that I was going to be fine, she left the confines of our little pensão to allow me to recover in peace, returning with stories of her having spent a wonderful day at the beach with an enthusiastic retinue of young Portuguese men, who had paid attention to and flirted with her throughout the day. Cathy was in paradisiacal heaven; me, not so much.
Still, I was feeling better, almost recovered from my intestinal malady, and the two of us made a decision to be on our way the next morning.
To say that I was in a bad mood when I got onto the train is to understate the matter. On the way to the station, who should we run into but the very group of amorous men Cathy had spent the previous day with, all of whom were beside themselves that this braless blonde goddess of a woman was leaving their country, as they beseeched her to “Stay, please stay.” Alas, no luck for them; this was my wife, and we were going to be on our way.
Still suffering from the vestiges of both an irritable case of jealousy and a now worsening intestinal disorder, I was in a foul mood once we got onto the train, and as we pulled away from the station, my very loud and ill-tempered mood related in English, those sitting around us thinking that I must be some homem louco, and not wishing in any manner to engage.
A few minutes into my decorous rant, a young woman walked up to me, and asked in the boldest terms possible …
“Do you kiss your mother with that mouth?
“Huh,” I asked?
“Do you kiss your mother with that mouth? That’s the filthiest mouth I’ve ever heard. You’ve got to teach me how to swear!”
At which point, she sat down across from me, her lithe African American dancer companion moving past me to sit next to her. “Susan. My name is Susan. This is my friend, Danelle,” she said, pointing in the direction of Danelle. “We’re from New York. We go to school there. Columbia. I’m in English Lit. Danelle’s taking dance — not hard to tell, huh? You two traveling through Europe, are you?” Susan all but shouted. “I come from a large Jewish family. You? We’re traveling through Europe together.”
And thus began a beautiful friendship. Turns out that Susan could swear much better than I could; she needed no instruction from me. Turns out, too, that she had my number, and for all the weeks we traveled together through Europe, Susan had not one kind word for me — she set about to make my life hell, and I loved every minute of it. Susan became the sister I wished I’d had, profane, self-confident, phenomenally bright and opinionated, her acute dissection of me done lovingly and with care, to this day one of the best and most loving relationships I’ve ever had.
Little known fact about me: I love being called out by bright, emotionally healthy, socially-skilled and whole women.
The summer of 1974, when Cathy became pregnant with Jude, on the right above
Without the women in my life, Cathy or Megan, my daughter — when Cathy and I separated — Lori, Justine, Alison, Patricia, Julienne or Melissa, each of whom loved me, love me still, and made me a better person, the best parts of me directly attributable to these lovely women, to whom I am so grateful for caring enough about me to make me a better person.
Now onto the raison d’être of this first installment of Stories of a Life.
Once Susan and I had settled down — there was an immediate connection between Susan and I, which Cathy took as the beginnings of an affair the two of us would have (as if I would sleep with my sister — Danelle, on the other hand, well … perhaps a story for another day, but nothing really happened, other than the two of us becoming close, different from Susan).
Danelle saw a ragged copy of J.D. Salinger’s Nine Stories peeking out of Cathy’s backpack. “Okay,” she said. “In rounds, let’s each one of us give the title of one of the Salinger short stories,” which we proceeded to do. Cathy was just now reading Salinger, while I’d read the book while we were still in England, about three weeks earlier.
Cathy started first, For Esmé — with Love and Squalor. Danelle, Teddy. Susan, showing off, came up with A Perfect Day for Bananafish, telling us all, “That story was first published in the January 31, 1948 edition of The New Yorker.” Show off! I was up next, and came up with Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut. Phew — just barely came up with that one! Thank goodness.
Onto the second round: Cathy, Down at the Dinghy; Danelle, Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes; Susan, showing off again, De Daumier-Smith’s Blue Period, “turned down by The New Yorker in late 1951, and published by the British Information World Review, early in 1952.” Me? Struggling yet again, but subject to a momentary epiphany, I blurted out, Just Before the War with the Eskimos. There we were, eight stories down and one to go.
But do you think any one of us could come up with the title to the 9th tale in Salinger’s 1953 anthology of short stories? Nope. We thought about it, and thought about it — and nothing, nada, zero, zilch. We racked our brains, and we simply couldn’t come up with the title of the 9th short story.
We sat there, hushed. For the first time in about half an hour, there was silence between us, only the voices of children on the train, and the clickety-clack of the tracks as the train relentlessly headed towards Madrid.
We couldn’t look at one another. We were, as a group, downcast, looking up occasionally at the passing scenery, only furtively glancing at one another, only periodically and with reservation, as Cathy held onto my arm, putting hers in mine, Danelle looking up, she too wishing for human contact.
Finally, Susan looked up at me, looked directly at me, her eyes steely and hard yet … how do I say it? … full of love and confidence in me, that I somehow would be the one to rescue us from the irresolvable dilemma in which we found ourselves. Beseechingly, Susan’s stare did not abate …
“The Laughing Man,” I said, “The Laughing Man! The 9th story in Salinger’s anthology is …” and before I could say the words, I was smothered in kisses, Cathy to my left, Susan having placed herself in my lap, kissing my cheeks, my lips, my forehead, and when she found herself unable to catch her breath, Danelle carrying on where Susan had left off, more tender than Susan, loving and appreciative, Cathy now holding me tight, love all around us. A moment that will live in me always, a gift of the landscape of my life, and the first such Story of a Life that you’ll read from here on in, should you choose — each and every Saturday for a very long time to come.
VanRamblings has always loved the cinema, from the time we held our younger sister’s hand to keep her safe, while on our way to the Grandview Theatre, just south of 1st Avenue on Commercial Drive on the east side of the street, every Saturday in every month throughout 1955 until near the end of August in 1958, when our family moved to Edmonton, where our movie-going regimen was kept up — alone this time, on the bus at the age of eight heading downtown during the most unforgiving of 40-below winter nights cascading towards the Rialto Theatre to see the latest Hayley Mills film, for we were in love with Hayley Mills and never, ever missed one of her films … through to the mid-1960s when we were once again resident on Vancouver’s eastside, just north of Semlin Drive & 1st Avenue, in the neighbourhood where we were raised, and where we lived for most of our first 18 years of life, through until … now, to this day, when this year we celebrate 50 years as a published film critic, and ardent lover of film.
Not for us, the big blockbuster films that have dominated movie landscapes for most of the past three decades. No, we’re a ‘window on the world’ foreign film aficionado, as Rocky Mountaineer President and founder Peter Armstrong will tell you if you ask him, and we love small, lower-budget independent films to near distraction, and we love reading and writing about the film festivals that dot the cultural landscape throughout the year, from January’s Sundance Film Festival — founded by Robert Redford in Salt Lake City in August 1978 — to the Berlin “Berlinale” Film Festival in February, to March’s annual, Austin, Texas-based South by Southwest (SXSW) Film Festival, followed in April by Robert DeNiro’s Manhattan-based Tribeca Film Festival — and this next month, the grand mama of them all, the prestigious and much-anticipated Cannes Film Festival, which has taken place on the leisurely French Riviera every year since 1946.
As we write above, VanRamblings loves independent — or, indie — film. But what is indie film? Hang on to your hat, because here we go … Indie films are movies produced with a low budget, most often by small, boutique production companies, and produced for less than $20 million.
Originally, the defining quality of indie media (film, music, publishing, etc.) was that it was produced outside of the traditional systems of production. So in film, for example, movies produced without the support of the major Hollywood studios would be independent films, or “indies” for short.
After a few decades of independent media, however, aesthetic patterns and themes have emerged that make “indie” more of a style or genre label.
Confusing matters even more, in recent years the six major Hollywood studios — Fox, Paramount, Warner, Sony, Universal, and Disney — have brought indie films in-house, with Disney acquiring Miramax, Paramount (Vantage), Sony (Classics), Fox (Searchlight), Universal (Focus, Working Title), and Warner (New Line, Castle Rock), the major studios competing each year for prestigious Oscar attention with their much-ballyhooed “independent” art house releases, most of the films acquired by the studios but not financed by them, from many of the film festivals mentioned above.
With indie films, the director’s approach is paramount, these auteur films creative, artistic and personal in tone, with subject matter that reflects the lives of everyday people, or as is sometimes the case, the marginalized persons or communities within our cities, provinces or states; indie films also often take on forbidden subject matter considered to be taboo by conventional society. Indie films will more often than not use music sourced from bands or indie music groups or artists, rather than employ original orchestral scoring to aid in the telling of the film’s story.
At the most recent Oscars ceremony, as the latest clutch of arthouse films — including Darkest Hour, The Shape of Water, Call Me by Your Name and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri — were feted throughout the awards season, indie films grappled with Hollywood’s blockbuster addiction, and the new challenges presented by Netflix and Amazon.
While the big six Hollywood studios made 113 movies last year, taking in $11 billion in domestic box office and another $14 billion internationally, a record number of smaller-budget films were released from the beginning of January to the end of December 2017, most — but not all — of the indie films released onto silver screens at a multiplex near you.
Why “not all”? Where did the “other” indie films secure release?
With 80 independent films currently set for production at Netflix, none of which will be given a theatrical release, in 2018 if you want to watch what might be a few of the most provocative films of the year, films made by some of the most prominent names in filmmaking, you’re going to have to stay home, or watch the latest Netflix “indie” on your smartphone or tablet.
Over the past couple of years, Netflix’s dominance of streaming platforms has proved game-changing for Hollywood, as they work to rewrite the film and TV universe to match its model. For anyone who cares about film and its future, that may be a scary thought, or sound potentially threatening.
But is it really?
Today, most studio greenlight conversations are at their most reductive: “Can we sell this in China?” By contrast, Netflix doesn’t care what “plays” in China, given its utter lack of presence in the country, and seeming lack of desire to gain a presence in the countries that comprise east Asia.
For now, the Netflix model injects a deep-pocketed force in the indie mix, their massive, near global reach casting a wide net, placing Netflix at the forefront of the wave of alternate narrative forms — allowing producers to successfully argue for niche-audience titles that might struggle within the theatrical model — while challenging the conventional distribution model.
As we write above, the early year annual Sundance, SXSW (South-by-Southwest), Tribeca and Cannes film festivals remain primary sources for the discovery of new directors and the first-rate indie films they take on the festival circuit, films that tend to garner critical and awards recognition at the end of each calendar year and, increasingly, films that are produced and screened only on Netflix. But not always. Cinema is not dead, yet.
Next month, VanRamblings will write about all the indie films that you can screen within a darkened, air-conditioned movie theatre, in this sure-to-be-sweltering upcoming summer season. In the meantime, look for …
Bisbee ’17. A Canadian première at next month’s 17th annual DOXA Documentary Film Festival, screening only once (so you’ll want to get your tickets now!), on Sunday, May 13th, 6pm at SFU Goldcorp Cinema, filmmaker and writer Robert Greene will be in attendance to present his latest film, and participate in a post-screening Q&A, responding to audience questions about a film that has variously been described as the “most talked-about documentary film of the year, an audacious, arresting dream-like mosaic”, Greene’s film focused on a traumatic 1917 immigrant deportation, when an Arizona sheriff — backed by union-busting thugs hired by the mining companies — rounded up striking workers, exiling them to the New Mexico desert … never to be heard from again. Greene’s film, while confronting an ugly truth, discovers a measure of healing and solidarity. See Bisbee ’17 next month at DOXA, or miss out on it forever.
C’mon back next Wednesday for more DOXA Documentary Film Festival coverage, which will fit nicely into our ongoing Vancouver Votes 2018 coverage. We’ll look forward to seeing you back here next Friday for feature coverage of DOXA 2018, and an interview with the tough, the brilliant, the wonderful, our friend, Selina Crammond, who this year succeeds the near irreplaceable Dorothy Woodend, as the festival’s new Programme Director.
