I saw Paul Gross tonight...
Nov. 15th, 2006 11:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dewline...at the National Arts Centre. He led off this year's Celebrity Speakers Series covering talks about the Canadian Artist in Society.
As some of you know and others have guessed, I've been a fan since I first got hooked on Due South back in the day. It was a good show for me, and apparently for a lot of people around the world then and since.
I may safely say that, as once before at a journalists' association function here a few Octobers ago, just days before H20 first hit the airwaves via CBC, he did not disappoint.
He was, by turns, and sometimes simultaneously entertaining, instructive, supportive, and occasionally even butt-kicking in some of his remarks on the state of Canadian film, TV and theatre and how it got to its present state. I'm not entirely sure that I'd agree with all of his thinking, but then I don't yet know all the facts of the situation and its history. And he wouldn't admit to knowing it all either, reminding us all that he considered it a working theory, subject to revision.
If you've been watching my friendslist, particularly some of the syndicated feeds from other TV and film writers based in Canada, you'd likely find some of his thinking shared by some of those writers. Denis McGrath and Alex Epstein, I'm thinking of in particular at the moment, but there may others lurking in the landscape.
Disconnections with the audience, the battle to maintain some sense of balance between the imperatives of Art and Commerce, over-reliance on the governmental trough(whilst not making a clear enough case for the justly-continued access to that same trough)...all of these things came up for discussion during the course of the interview.
Something I'd wanted to ask about but didn't: "Could the success of Quebec's elements of the TV and film industry within the provincial borders be replicated outside of Quebec?" came up during the 'questions from the audience' phase and it triggered a thought that there is at least one place in Canada where the same phenomenon could repeat: the Territories. It might require intensive focus on the part of the territorial governments from Yukon to Nunavut, particularly the part of building up a reliance on their "made in the Territories" languages, such as Inuktitut. But I think it could be done.
Mr. Gross was somewhat more skeptical on the general idea of repeating what Quebec's done elsewhere in the country, and I wish I'd posed the Territorial argument when I had the chance.
Paul, if you should ever chance to read this, my apologies to you for not speaking up.
One word's going to be sticking in my brain for a while, though, which I suppose will be sufficient punishment for the neglect on my part: "loopy".
I swear: If I didn't have this comic book gig, the sort of work that I've wanted to do so badly since I was a kid reading Peanuts and Andy Capp in the papers and watching Spider-Man and Popeye on TV, I think I might seriously consider switching to acting.
Oh...and when are we gonna see Paul's movie version of Hamlet?
As some of you know and others have guessed, I've been a fan since I first got hooked on Due South back in the day. It was a good show for me, and apparently for a lot of people around the world then and since.
I may safely say that, as once before at a journalists' association function here a few Octobers ago, just days before H20 first hit the airwaves via CBC, he did not disappoint.
He was, by turns, and sometimes simultaneously entertaining, instructive, supportive, and occasionally even butt-kicking in some of his remarks on the state of Canadian film, TV and theatre and how it got to its present state. I'm not entirely sure that I'd agree with all of his thinking, but then I don't yet know all the facts of the situation and its history. And he wouldn't admit to knowing it all either, reminding us all that he considered it a working theory, subject to revision.
If you've been watching my friendslist, particularly some of the syndicated feeds from other TV and film writers based in Canada, you'd likely find some of his thinking shared by some of those writers. Denis McGrath and Alex Epstein, I'm thinking of in particular at the moment, but there may others lurking in the landscape.
Disconnections with the audience, the battle to maintain some sense of balance between the imperatives of Art and Commerce, over-reliance on the governmental trough(whilst not making a clear enough case for the justly-continued access to that same trough)...all of these things came up for discussion during the course of the interview.
Something I'd wanted to ask about but didn't: "Could the success of Quebec's elements of the TV and film industry within the provincial borders be replicated outside of Quebec?" came up during the 'questions from the audience' phase and it triggered a thought that there is at least one place in Canada where the same phenomenon could repeat: the Territories. It might require intensive focus on the part of the territorial governments from Yukon to Nunavut, particularly the part of building up a reliance on their "made in the Territories" languages, such as Inuktitut. But I think it could be done.
Mr. Gross was somewhat more skeptical on the general idea of repeating what Quebec's done elsewhere in the country, and I wish I'd posed the Territorial argument when I had the chance.
Paul, if you should ever chance to read this, my apologies to you for not speaking up.
One word's going to be sticking in my brain for a while, though, which I suppose will be sufficient punishment for the neglect on my part: "loopy".
I swear: If I didn't have this comic book gig, the sort of work that I've wanted to do so badly since I was a kid reading Peanuts and Andy Capp in the papers and watching Spider-Man and Popeye on TV, I think I might seriously consider switching to acting.
Oh...and when are we gonna see Paul's movie version of Hamlet?
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
Hamlet?
Date: 2006-11-17 01:33 am (UTC)Live Theatre
Date: 2006-11-17 01:42 am (UTC)Re: Hamlet?
Date: 2006-11-18 02:30 am (UTC)Re: Hamlet?
Date: 2006-11-18 07:48 pm (UTC)<u>H<sup>2</sup>O</u> and <u>Trojan Horse</u>
Date: 2006-11-18 07:57 pm (UTC)Yep, you only thought Tom McLaughlin was done making trouble on the planetary stage...
More about Tom
Date: 2006-11-19 04:10 am (UTC)Re: More about Tom
Date: 2006-11-21 01:02 am (UTC)