Collected Works: 1983-1993: Creative Consolidation
Stephen Mackenzie
edited, with a forward by Dorian Flinders
Faboo & Faboo
527 pages
review by: Herschel “Bud” Blundtman
Before the actors can complain about their trailer and motivation, before the director can complain that the budget is constraining his artistic vision, before the set designer can complain about not having enough cobalt blue paint, the producer must find the funds to make a movie. In Canada, this usually means endless rounds of filling out application forms to the country’s various funding agencies.
Stephen Mackenzie never produced a film. However, over a period of 35 years he submitted proposals for more films to more funding agencies than David Cronenberg, Atom Egoyan and Buffy Berlinger combined. His career spans the period of government funding from the tax shelter days – when any Canadian with a pulse could get funding – to the present – with its emphasis on marketing plans and minor American stars.
Although he never made a film, Mackenzie’s funding proposals are works of art, full of dramatic intrigue, heroes and villains and heavy dollops of fiction. Faboo and Faboo have published an instant classic for film students (and those who simply love the medium) by collecting Mackenzie’s complete oeuvre in three volumes.
This is the second of the volumes. The first volume showed that Mackenzie had a lot of promise as a grant applicator, but also had rough edges that needed to be smoothed out. Compare “Canada Council Film Production Grant – September, 1980” from the first volume with “Canada Council Film Production Grant – August, 1990” from the present volume and you will immediate see his maturity as an artist.
The first application is for a modest sum of $10,000 for a low budget horror film that would get limited release in second run theatres. By 1990, however, Mackenzie’s creative vision had grown, and he was asking for $500,000 for a film with American stars and international distribution. There is a boldness to these later applications that is missing from his earlier work, a willingness to explore new territory in funding.
This second volume also sees Mackenzie experimenting with new media. “Ontario Arts Council Grant for Emerging Fiction Writers – June, 1987,” to cite one of many examples, is an attempt to get public funds for the writing of a novel rather than the making of a film. Despite this shift, it contains many flourishes typical of Mackenzie’s work, including his eye for essential detail and creative use of secondary materials.
Some critics have argued that Mackenzie’s attempt to branch out was actually a cynical and opportunistic move: having failed in finding the funding to make a film, he was desperate to get money for anything he could. There may be some truth to this accusation. However, regardless of Mackenzie’s motivation, even his harshest critics must allow that his work sets a high standard for those who follow in his footsteps, regardless of the medium.
Collected Works: 1983-1993 is by no means perfect. An introductory chapter situating Mackenzie’s work in the broader context of Canadian film financing would have been very helpful, especially for the general reader who, unlike film academics and students, is likely not to be familiar with his work. Perhaps Wyndham Wise’s long awaited biography of Mackenzie, A Way With Below The Line Budget Items, will correct this oversight.
The book would also have benefited from a glossary of funding agencies. Those who don’t know their OFDCs from their OACs will be at a loss while reading the book, which makes few concessions to the uninitiated.
These are but minor quibbles, however. Reading a masterpiece of creative accounting like Telefilm Script Development Funding Proposal — 1989, one is struck by its simplicity (unlike many of his contemporaries, Mackenzie was a minimalist who didn’t pad his funding proposals with extraneous materials in order to make them look more impressive) and its clarity of purpose (every second sentence seems to be “Give me money. Please, please, please, fund my film!”).
For anybody who wants to know how the Canadian film industry really functions, Collected Works: 1983-1993: Creative Consolidation is necessary reading. I look forward to the publication of the final volume in the set, scheduled to be released next fall: Collected Works: 1994 to 2003: Quest for an Audience.