CANADIAN CANADA $7 SUMMER 2015 VOL.17, NO.3 SCREENWRITER FILM | TELEVISION | RADIO | DIGITAL MEDIA The 2015 WGC Screenwriting Awards – The Screenwriters Take The Spotlight ‘To Banff’ Or ‘Not To Banff’ The State Of Canadian Comedy Writing For Youth X Company Stephanie Morgenstern and Mark Ellis Reveal Canada’s Secret Spy School PM40011669 CTV_WGCmag_AD_flpg_final.pdf 1 2015-05-01 11:13 AM CANADIAN SCREENWRITER The journal of the Writers Guild of Canada Vol. 17 No. 3 Summer 2015 Contents ISSN 1481-6253 Features Publication Mail Agreement Number Stephanie Morgenstern and Mark Ellis: 400-11669 Spies Who Came From The Cold 6 Publisher Maureen Parker Stephanie Morgenstern and Mark Ellis and their team of Editor Tom Villemaire screenwriters tell the story of Canada’s X Company spy [email protected] school and the kind of people who trained there. Director of Communications Li Robbins By Matthew Hays Editorial Advisory Board Denis McGrath (Chair) To Banff Or Not To Banff 12 Michael MacLennan We asked the question of Canadian Screenwriters: Susin Nielsen Is Banff worth the time and money? For some, yes, Simon Racioppa for others, not so much. If Banff isn’t for you, President Jill Golick (Central) we have some alternative suggestions. Councillors By Diane Wild Michael Amo (Atlantic) Mark Ellis (Central) The 19th Annual Dennis Heaton (Pacific) WGC Screenwriting Awards 16 Denis McGrath (Central) Anne-Marie Perrotta (Quebec) The night just for screenwriters, a fun, feted evening, Andrew Wreggitt (Western) recognizing our best and brightest. Art Direction Studio Ours With photographs by Christina Gapic Design Studio Ours Printing Ironstone Media Writing For Youth: More Than A High School Confidential 30 Cover Photo: Christina Gapic There’s a skill required to write successfully for a young Canadian Screenwriter is audience. No other age group has a finer sense of smell for the published three times a year by the Writers Guild of Canada (WGC). authentic than a teen or pre-teen audience. 366 Adelaide Street West, Suite 401 By Katherine Brodsky Toronto, Ontario M5V 1R9 TEL: (416) 979-7907 The State Of Canadian Comedy 34 FAX: (416) 979-9273 We make people laugh. Why is it we have so few WEBSITE: www.wgc.ca home-grown comedies on air? Well, like writing Subscriptions: WGC members receive a comedy, the answer is complicated. subscription as part of their membership. By Mark Dillon Non-member subscriptions: $20 for three issues. W-Files Advertising policy: Readers should not assume that any products or services Joseph Kay — By Dani Ng-See-Quan 41 advertised in Canadian Screenwriter are Jan Caruana — By Cameron Archer 43 endorsed by the WGC. Editorial Policy: The WGC neither implicitly Columns nor explicitly endorses opinions or attitudes expressed in Canadian Screenwriter. From the Editor/Contributors 2 Submissions are subject to editing for Inside/Out — Michael Amo 3 length, style and content. “Oh Great Scribe...” — Advice for Advertising Sales: the Scriptlorn 48 Visit www.wgc.ca or contact Li Robbins at [email protected] News Letters to the editor are subject to editing for length. Not all letters are published. Tribute to John Hunter — By Jim Henshaw 40 Beat Sheet 4 Spotlight 44 New Members 46 Money for Missing Writers 47 FROM THE EDITOR CONTRIBUTORS Yippee-ki-yay Spring 2015 Michael Amo has written Gem- ini-nominated TV movies. He also created the The Listener. Presently, he’s developing a It can be a frustrating time to be a writer, with virtually every medium that features the product of writers undergoing project with Sony Pictures Tele- upheaval. vision. He lives with his family in I guess, when you take into consideration the general Nova Scotia. personality disorders that create writers, it can always be a frustrating time to write. So why do we bother? We are regularly told our craft is Cameron Archer runs the outdated or we’re too old or too young, or fill in the blank. Canadian television/media When I worked at a newspaper in the late ’90s, one of the website Gloryosky (http://www. sales people left to work at a radio station. sweetposer.com/), and is also a She popped in one day, after taking some sort of course for selling radio time, and gloated about the speed of radio, the freelance arts writer. He currently immediacy. lives in Eastern Ontario. “The written word is a dinosaur,” she said. When asked who told her that, she said she read it in one of A freelance arts and entertain- the books she was given for her radio course. I don’t think she understood why everyone laughed. ment writer, Katherine Brodsky And then there are people like Joseph Kay — featured in has written for Variety, Enter- this edition as a subject of one of our W-Files. He went through tainment Weekly, USA Weekend, all the trouble of becoming a lawyer. And not just any lawyer, but Mashable, Elle Canada, MovieMak- a Bay Street lawyer. But even attaining that level of success in a very challenging er Magazine, The Independent, profession did not quench the creative fire. Stage Directions, and many oth- He had to be a writer. ers. She has interviewed a diverse We all write for lots of reasons. We have stories to tell, range of intriguing personalities, messages, lessons, and morals to get across. We have context. While I was thinking about the challenges facing writers including Oscar, Emmy, Grammy, today, I realized I was dying to know who had written that line Tony, and Pulitzer winners. In her about the written word being a dinosaur. I asked around. A spare time she wears sunglasses handout for some radio courses had a bunch of quotes thought at night and runs her own cult, to be useful in countering objections a potential client might have to advertising on radio instead of newspapers. Apparently Katherineology. Follow her on the line had been cropped from the book The Last Word: Tales Twitter @mysteriouskat from the Tip of the Mother Tongue, by Ben Macintyre, and was a paraphrase of a quote from Bruce Willis who was saying that Mark Dillon is a Toronto-based movie reviews, like most of the written word, were going the way of the dinosaur because they were only for people who still read. freelance journalist and former Which raises the question about the scripts that, um, movies and editor of Playback magazine. He television shows start with. is author of the award-winning The woman didn’t know what the context was for his Fifty Sides of The Beach Boys. comment. The person who gathered the quotes for the handout either didn’t know or didn’t care about the context. Clearly Bruce Willis didn’t realize how silly his comment was, in the Christina Gapic is a Toronto- context of how he makes a living. You know, reading words. based freelance photographer Yippee-ki-yay. specializing in portrait, event and — Tom Villemaire documentary photography. 2 INSIDE/OUT N.S. premier reverses promise on tax break John Hunter produced Jim Henshaw’s first feature script “A Sweeter Song.” To date, Jim has Michael Amo is the WGC councillor for the Atlantic region written and produced hundreds of hours of Prime Time series as well as several movies. My, but we do have our share of characters here in Nova Scotia. The sleaze-fuelled car salesman “Fitz” Fitzpatrick. The explosively needy Mr. D. The scarily sensual Babe Bennett. The Matthew Hays is a Montreal- fearless Marg Delahunty. The magnificently moist Raj Binder. based writer, author, and These are just some of the creations that allow us to punch miles university and college instructor. above our weight in the personality department. His articles have appeared in Need I mention the Trailer Park Boys? You’d have to be smoking kitty litter not to know that Bubbles, Ricky, and Julian The Globe and Mail, The New have put Nova Scotia on the map in a way that no milquetoast York Times, The Guardian, tourist ad ever could. Vice, Maclean’s, The Walrus, And then there’s Stephen McNeil. If you’re not a fan of our Cineaste, POV, and The Toronto politics, he was the former appliance repair shop owner who won our hearts as the new leader of the provincial Liberals. Check out Star. He teaches courses in film this clip of him on the campaign trail in 2013, chatting up some studies at Marianopolis College game developers, promising to extend our Film Tax Credit by and Concordia University. His another five years. book, The View from Here: Go to YouTube and search: Stephen McNeil’s broken film tax credit promise. Conversations with Gay and It’s like some late-arriving audition tape for “Freaks and Lesbian Filmmakers (Arsenal Geeks.” So sweet. So genuine. So Principal Skinner. Now this is a Pulp), won a 2008 Lambda media-savvy nerd I could vote for. Literary Award and he received Flash forward to April 2015 and something changed. Right. He got elected. the Concordia President’s Tough choices to be made. An axe to be swung. A deficit Award for Teaching Excellence to be very loudly, very publicly attacked. Out goes the five- for 2013-14. year extension on the existing tax credit — the one Mr. McNeil promised — promised to maintain — replaced by one a fraction of its former self. Dani Ng-See-Quan is a Whether you accepted the CMPA’s figures ($122 million digital content manager, in 2013-2014) or the government’s numbers ($66.8 million in freelance writer, and former production volume and $39.4 million in salaries and wages for Associate Editor of Playback.