The newspaper record of Saint John and New Brunswick film runs from about 1999 to 2007, and it tells two overlapping stories: a city that kept being used as a stand-in for somewhere else, and a small local film community that kept trying to make work on its own terms.
The industry question
A 1999 feature in the New Brunswick Reader laid out the state of play. Film New Brunswick had been created two years earlier, modelled loosely on Nova Scotia’s film development corporation, which had grown from a 100-million one within a decade. The inaugural Film NB director, Sam Grana, a co-producer of The Boys of St. Vincent with an Oscar nomination to his name, had moved fast and made enemies. The agency’s office was relocated from Fredericton to Moncton. A $1.27-million deal was struck with a production company that didn’t meet the residency requirement. Grana departed amid considerable speculation, and the industry split almost immediately into two associations with incompatible visions.
One faction, led by producers like Cecile Chevrier and Gilles Losier of Moncton’s Productions du Phare Est, wanted Film NB to invest primarily in indigenous productions: work by New Brunswickers, about New Brunswickers. The other believed the only path to credibility was through out-of-province productions. Hermenegilde Chiasson, the Acadian filmmaker and artist, compared the dynamic to the cod fishery. The province had spent generations catching and packing fish for someone else to process and sell back. “As long as we see ourselves as helpers and gofers,” he said, “we can’t have an industry.” Ken Furlong, an independent filmmaker in Saint John who had optioned the screen rights to a David Adams Richards novel, was more direct: “Just give us the money and we’ll produce a great film.”
The 1999 article, written in the form of a screenplay, caught the industry mid-argument. It never quite resolved. By 2002, the province was approaching 17 million in NB projects against Nova Scotia’s $120 million, though a film industry summit that year marked the tenth anniversary of Film NB, and the Canadian Antiques Roadshow and the miniseries Canada Russia ‘72 had each demonstrated that sustained productions with largely New Brunswick crews were possible. The question of critical mass kept coming up. Without enough productions running simultaneously, trained crew left for Halifax or Alberta. Without trained crew, you couldn’t attract bigger projects.
The city as elsewhere
Saint John’s Victorian streetscapes turned out to be useful. In 1998 and 1999, two productions filmed there. In Her Defense, a courtroom drama starring Marlee Matlin and Michael Dudikoff, premiered to a sell-out crowd of about 550 at the Paramount Theatre in January 1999, the first time Saint Johners had seen their city on screen since Matlin filmed Children of a Lesser God there in 1986. The Fourth Floor, a thriller with William Hurt, Juliette Lewis, and Shelley Duvall, shot in the fall.
Irish Eyes Are Crying (2001), starring Daniel Baldwin, used Saint John’s streets as Boston. When it debuted at Fredericton’s Tidal Wave Film Festival in November 2002, there was some diplomatic negotiation over which city should host the premiere first. A Saint John screening followed, open to the local actors and extras and the general public. A provincial minister promoting New Brunswick locations at a trade event in Gloucester, Massachusetts noted that Saint John had stood in for Boston “at least three or four occasions.”
In 2007, Prince William Street between Duke and Princess was dressed as Montreal for a made-for-TV movie called Sticks & Stones, a dramatization of a 2003 incident in which American peewee hockey players were surrounded by anti-Iraq war protesters. About 400 local extras were paid $75 a day to play demonstrators. They burned American flags and rocked a bus.
The most significant outside production of the period was Stuck (2006), a feature film based on a real Texas case, starring Mena Suvari and Stephen Rea. Shooting over five weeks across multiple Saint John locations (the Princess Street area, St. Joseph’s Hospital, Rockwood Park), the production was estimated to have injected about $2 million into the local economy.
Local work
Gretchen Kelbaugh, a Quispamsis filmmaker, spent five months of weekends in 2004 shooting Margaret & Deirdre, a character drama about a teacher and her student. Made for under $20,000 with an all-New Brunswick cast and crew on volunteer or deferred pay, it was the first feature shot in Saint John using only local talent and the first female-directed English-language feature in New Brunswick. Kelbaugh screened it at the Atlantic Film Festival and the Silver Wave Film Festival, and in early 2006 appeared before Saint John’s common council asking for modest support for a local theatrical screening. She went on to make Piece O’ Cake (2007), a four-minute comedy shot in a single morning in her kitchen with her children and ex-husband as cast, which was accepted into the Broad Humor Film Festival in Venice, California.
Piggy Bank Blues (2003), directed by John N. Smith and starring Jane Curtin, Mary Walsh, and Patrick McKenna, was a 3.2-million CBC movie-of-the-week starring Megan Follows, was a co-production between Moncton’s Dreamsmith Entertainment and a Toronto company, shooting at locations across the city.
Andrew Tidby and Greg Hemmings, childhood friends who had met at sailing lessons at the Royal Kennebeccassis Yacht Club before studying film in Ontario and returning to Saint John, produced Planet Luxury from their Acamac Backland Road house and production facility in 2006. The ten-part half-hour series for CTV Travel and Escape explored ultra-expensive goods (230,000 perfume) shooting across 39 locations in Europe and North America. They made a point of producing it from Saint John rather than Toronto, acknowledging it cost more but staying anyway.
Short film grants from the province in 2006 went to two other Saint John filmmakers: Angels Cedeira Damil (Lolita’s Nook and Corner) and Sheldon Garland (Learning Curves).
The Continental Drift International Short Film Festival, in its fourth year by 2007, showed twenty-four international films at the New Brunswick Museum over a weekend, alongside a Maritime showcase Sunday afternoon. That year’s director, John Marshall, had graduated from the UNB Fredericton film program and was running a beef farm in Hampton while continuing to make films on the side.
The work that came out of the community I was part of (the Summer Film Series, the short film festivals, the films) existed at a different scale than any of the above. But it was in the same city, some of the same years, and a few of the same people were aware of both worlds.
Sources
- Bruce Bartlett, “A sea of films,” Telegraph-Journal, September 29, 2007, p. G1
- Dina Maxwell, “Whole family gets into the act in filmmaker’s comedy,” Telegraph-Journal, August 13, 2007, p. C1
- Khalid Malik, “City stands in for Montreal in filming of TV movie,” Telegraph-Journal, May 7, 2007, p. C4
- Sandra Davis, “Movie to shoot about $2 million into local economy in five weeks,” Telegraph-Journal, November 1, 2006, p. B1
- Simon Cheung, “Province’s film industry has stars in its eyes,” Telegraph-Journal, September 22, 2006, p. A1
- Khalid Malik, “Affluence from ‘nowhereville’,” Telegraph-Journal, September 21, 2006, p. D1
- “Two city filmmakers win grants,” Telegraph-Journal, July 21, 2006, p. B4
- Grant Kerr, “A melding of forces,” Telegraph-Journal, April 19, 2006, p. D1
- David Shipley, “Director seeks council’s help promoting local film,” Telegraph-Journal, February 13, 2006, p. B3
- Amy Cameron, “Film NB Follies,” New Brunswick Reader (Telegraph-Journal), January 16, 1999
- Grant Kerr, “Movie shot in Saint John will make Canadian debut at Fredericton festival,” Telegraph-Journal, October 25, 2002, p. A5
- John Mazerolle, “World premiere film graces Saint John,” Telegraph-Journal, January 25, 1999
- Andrew Philips, “Mesheau pitches for film action,” Telegraph-Journal, March 2, 2001, p. C1
- Sandra Davis, “Actress of Anne fame to shoot movie in N.B.,” Telegraph-Journal, August 14, 2003, p. A2
- Grant Kerr, “Actor relishes different role in Piggy Bank Blues,” Telegraph-Journal, April 10, 2003, p. A7
- Alan White, “‘You ought to be in pictures’,” Telegraph-Journal, November 8, 2002, p. D1