Taking the Show on the Road

“Time is God’s way of making sure everything doesn’t happen at once.”

  George Carlin

Released on July 2, 1970 on a shoestring budget of $87,000, “Goin’ Down the Road”, directed by Don Shebib, is generally embraced as English Canada’s first successful home-grown feature film. Better late than never. Even the Yanks dug it – Roger Ebert gave it four stars. Ergo, it must be good!

Over 50 years on, the cinema verite realism of the archetypal buddies-in-bad-times tale still both defines and limits us as Great White Northerners. Knowing we can’t compete with the blinding sheen of the Hollywood dream machine, we remain loyal to our wide-awake, nitty gritty documentary tradition and console ourselves there’s nothing more mythical than the real. Or perhaps the comedic/ironic: come on down Rich Little, David Steinberg, Lorne Michaels, Jim Carrey, Dan Aykroyd, Martin Short, John Candy, Mike Myers, et al.

Reflecting the massive westward emigration of Maritimers in the ‘50s and ‘60s, Joey (Paul Bradley) and Pete (Doug McGrath), ingenuous goof and glum hothead, are down-on-their-luck working class stiffs, sweating out $1.25 an hour in a dreamless canning factory, yearning to trade the economic blight of Cape Breton for the streets of Toronto, reputedly paved with gold.

Over a mournful Bruce Cockburn soundtrack and a montage of rusted out cars, sunken trawlers and rotting barns, our shambolic anti-heroes plunge 1,100 miles west in their delta-finned 1960 Chevy Impala convertible adorned with dingle balls and a flame-painted hood. As they toss stubby beer bottles on the highway, a flat tire presages their future. They have $30 in their pockets.

Cruising down the slope of Richmond Street East into the city, the un-rich Easterners knock on the door of Pete’s aunt and uncle’s house, expecting to stay over while they find work, but the city folk hide behind the curtains to dodge their country bumpkin kin. Spending their first night in a Salvation Army shelter, Joey berates Pete for his failed promises.

Heading to a job interview in an ad agency, Pete indulges in a fantasy of a suit and tie, curvaceous secretary, company car and a nameplate on his office door. The interviewer is baffled why a housepainter, gardener and roofer without a high school diploma thinks he is remotely suitable, and condescendingly bids him to return to school.

Pulling in $80 a week loading crates on trucks at a Wilson’s soft drink factory, Pete and Joey now think they’ve hit paydirt. Shouting “Hide your daughters!”, they swagger through the neon nightlife of Yonge Street. In A & A Records, Pete spots a classy young woman browsing the classical bins, takes a stab at talking posh about Erik Sati, but strikes out. As they revel with fellow Maritimers in a beer parlour, Joey befriends a waitress, Betts (Jayne Eastwood) and she finds a date for Pete.  The quartet ramble on the Scarborough Bluffs, but Pete’s date fails to light a spark.

One month into their dreary, punch-clock jobs, Pete wakes up one morning hungover and rails against the nasty foreman who is driving them hard: Pete calculates they each haul 20 crates a minute, or 9,600 a day, a total of 304,000 to date. Sisyphean.

One day Pete hops into a forklift – symbolic of his upward strivings -- but topples a stack of boxes while ogling a foxy office worker strolling through the warehouse. He turns on his idea of charm and she agrees to a Friday night date. When she dances with another guy, he sulks. He’s not the Lothario he thinks he is.

Picnicking on Centre Island overlooking the pre-CN Tower city skyline, Pete, Joey and Betts form an awkward triangle. Pete suggests a boys’ night out – “No broads, just us tonight.” Dancing together in a bar, their bromance edging deeper into homoerotic territory, Pete urges Joey to dump Betts and head to the west coast.

“But I really love her.”

“But we got things to do!”

Joey reveals he has knocked up Betts and they are getting hitched. Cut to a shotgun wedding reception of confetti-strewn gloom where the groom summons enough dignified chutzpah to confront the snickering guests.

The testy trio moves into a high rise and buys furniture and a colour TV on credit. For an uncanny moment, I was convinced the actors were occupying my old downtown Toronto apartment at 41 Dundonald Street -- the same parquet floor, the same garbage chute beside the elevator, the same concrete balcony overlooking the city skyline.

Laid off by the bottling plant at the end of the summer, the boys pick up odd jobs as car washers and bowling alley pin boys. Distributing junk mail in high end Rosedale, they dump their bags and, seized by a sudden, fuck-it-all burst of joy, frolick in the snow like teenagers. (As Kurt Vonnegut reminds us: “We are here on earth to fart around – and don’t let anyone tell you any different.”)

In an improvised scene, Pete and Joey banter with actual homeless men in Allen Gardens – the dead end to which they are fast heading. Tight close-ups of their faces, growing ever grimmer, are set against the melancholy backdrops of the Yonge Street subway, the City Hall skating rink, the grey, cobra-headed parking meters and defaced phone booths of a bygone Toronto. (What we do not see are glimpses of the middle class, counterculturalist refugees from Yorkville Village and shaggy Vietnam War draft dodgers swarming the squalid drug hub of Rochdale College — that would be another movie entirely).

As Pete and Joey retreat to a scruffy boarding house, their collective angst intensifies amid the gum-chewing, the hair curlers, the Kraft dinners and potato chips. The pregnant Betts has quit her waitressing job and Pete is now the only one working. Joey is keeping his head down while his alter ego aspires to something higher, gazing into shop windows at Christmastime, the face of the outsider forever pressed to the glass.[1]

One day Pete interrupts Joey and Betts having sex, sparking a snark-fest. The writing is on the wall. In the climactic scene, they hatch a desperate plan to load up a cart of groceries at a Loblaws store, distract the cashier, and then run for it. A bagboy chases the outlaws into the parking lot, and in the ensuing scuffle, Pete clobbers his adversary with a tire iron, leaving him bloody and unconscious in the snow. After calling an ambulance, the culprits return home to find themselves evicted, their furniture piled on the sidewalk, Betts hightailed to her aunt and uncle’s place, and the cops looking for the innocent lads turned criminals.

Abandoning the pregnant Betts, they barrel west along the Gardiner Expressway in their battered Chevy, their Toronto dreaming reduced to nothing but “concrete and dust.” As the newly erected black twin monoliths of the TD Centre drift past, Bruce Cockburn sings “another victim of the rainbow.”[2]

###

When GDTR came out in 1970, I was an alienated undergrad, sophomoric in more ways than one, inured to unhappy endings, in literature, in films, in life: a teenaged love killed in an accident in 1968; a father twice attempting suicide in 1970; soon after, a roommate fragmented into paranoid schizophrenic delusions.

Each trauma bled silently into the next; with no roadmap on how to grieve, I was snared in a perpetual holding pattern. Dissociating from direct experiences, I swallowed my feelings, igniting a case of Crohn’s Disease that ruthlessly colonized my colon with stabbing pains in my groin and endless bouts of diarrhea, deepening my erotic incompetence. (No one had yet shown me the ropes, and I don’t mean for hanging myself).

I formed an aversion for the sappy Hollywood ending, even the ambiguous ones; sorry, but Pip and Estella and Ben and Elaine will definitely NOT live happily ever after. The haunting, sexy, slow-motion massacre of Bonnie and Clyde at the end of the 1967 movie – Summer of Love? Not really! – burst through the sentimental lies of family, school and church, echoing the discord of my inner world.

A frosty WASP childhood – no touching, hugging, kissing or intimate talk – had made my parents (and people generally) slightly unreal to me, a distant, filmy presence-as-absence. During the Cold War of the 1950s, the prolonged silences and night terrors of my nurseless nursery drove me deep within myself, almost as deep as the mute Oskar of The Tin Drum, protesting the cruelty of his world on his hypervigilant journey from the womb. To stave off the abyss, I memorized words, numbers and images as a survival strategy; if my mother would not read me bedtime stories, I’d make up my own.

During my formative (de-formative?) years, movies, books and music slipped through the chinks of my emotional armour and seized my heart and mind. Maybe it’s the pagan Irish in my blood, but the giving and receiving of stories seemed to embody a subtle, mysterious, alchemical healing power that easily outstripped the empty rituals of our neighbourhood Protestant church, the holder of our dominant cultural myth, now losing its ancient grip on the masses to the mass media.

In my final year at university, 1971-72, I took a film course that diverted me from terminal cynicism. As we unpacked the oeuvres of Welles, Bergman and Bunuel scene by scene, my professors, Peter Harcourt and Robin Wood, could have passed for art therapists. Storytelling, dreams and films-as-dreams dangled fingers of meaning, a welcome helping hand for navigating the perpetual dramas of living. What would Malcolm McDowell do? No English Canadian films graced the course, of course, as there were none to speak of – not even GDTR.

For my 20th birthday in 1970, my mother, a frustrated artist – her joyless, Scots banker father had barred her from attending the Slade School of Art – had given me a Super 8 film camera. With my brother and a friend, a natural physical comedian, we goofed around through the early 1970s, dressing up and shooting satirical vignettes, the manic, Buster Keaton-esque action compensating for the camera’s lack of sound. Simultaneously, my physician father Jack, a middle aged, self-betraying crack-up zoned on lithium, was staring at the TV screen for eight hours a day in an unbreakable trance, lost in the late night talk shows in his head. I dared not turn my camera on him, but one day I would find the words.

From thousands of childhood hours of TV and movie watching, I instinctively knew how to place narrative action within a visual frame; I wore a t-shirt that read: “What I really want to do is direct.” Regrets, I’ve had a few -- especially not following my bliss and “going south” to film school, as Shebib did. I was unconsciously playing out my mother’s self-thwarting drama: the road not taken.

In September 1973, after a desultory year of journalism school, I started my first job as a mild-mannered (pathologically shy) cub reporter on a small Scarborough weekly newspaper, trying to give birth, or re-birth, to my buried Superman self. After a nine month gestation period, Andy Munro, a fellow reporter, and I quit the paper and squeezed into his two-seater Triumph sports car and headed east to Halifax, Nova Scotia -- “Goin’ Down the Road” 1,100 miles in the opposite direction. A reverse migration! Starting from scratch! Escaping our scripted, middle class prison, we planned to pick up odd jobs on the fly, like Pete and Joey, imposing no limits of time or space. I was casting myself as the lead character in the experimental film of my 23 year old life, in search of a plot outside of the shade of the graveyard.

Andy found work operating a printing press while I was hired as the assistant manager of the Odeon Casino movie theatre on Gottingen Street in the shadow of the Citadel. Built in 1916, the 1,200 seat fleapit, a fraternal twin of Toronto’s Bloor Cinema, had seen better days. One afternoon I stumbled into a dusty back room behind the balcony where I found old posters, tuxedos and top hats from gala premieres long past. Working “behind the scenes”, I felt an uncanny sense of familiarity, maybe even a hint of a destined path. Are we not all actors treading the stages of our lives, wearing our grandfather’s clothes, anticipating Coming Attractions?

Once a month, the theatre hosted dusk-to-dawn horror movie marathons and “blaxploitation” flicks catering to the angry Black underclass. Sell-out crowds of Shaft-worshipping patrons opened the exit doors for their friends and carved up the seats with switchblades as a pair of timid beat cops failed to keep the peace. The casual and prolific use of racial slurs by my co-workers opened my eyes to Nova Scotian racism (as opposed to the genteel, underground Toronto brand); had I landed in a northern Alabama?

Around midnight, the cops escorted me to the bank where I dropped $5,000 in cash receipts in the night depository, which I estimated barely covered the property damages. (As a tall, but far-from-tough teenager, I was enlisted by officials of our church, Timothy Eat-or-Be-Eaton Memorial, to escort the cash from the Sunday collection plate to an office vault, as if we might be mugged by a Forest Hill chatelaine en route. I thought: Churches? Casinos? What’s the diff? The prophet motive exposed!”)

At the Odeon Casino, my days were enlivened by chasing glue sniffers and purse snatchers, young and old, black and white. My boss, Newman MacNeil, a pugnacious Cape Bretoner with a weathered, pudding face and grade 9 education, was a dead ringer for the Pete character in GDTR. He taught me how to submit to the protection racket of the local charismatic gang leader: in exchange for not throwing rocks through our marquee window, we issued him free passes and all-you-can-eat popcorn. A fair deal.

When I wasn’t counting the soft drink cups and boxes of smarties for the daily inventory, I supervised the shaggy teenagers who worked the concession counter and ushered patrons to their seats with flashlights. Their names, faces and quirks still occupy my memory palace: my favourite characters were Tina Mombourquette, a sweet ingenue wide-eyed with admiration for my busy vocabulary and her boyfriend Lee Joudrey, a trickster mocking my Upper Canadian mannerisms. As they swept up the holy host of trodden popcorn from the moth-eaten lobby carpet, they’d act out operatic scenes from Jesus Christ Superstar as Jesus and Mary Magdalene. The boundaries between showbiz, the sacred, and everyday life dissolved into a blur.

In my ratty jacket and tie, hair creeping down to my shoulders, I was a picture of the reluctant middle manager. When Newman took a two week’s summer vacation and left me in charge, I’d toke up in his office and linger by the swinging doors at the back of the theatre, worshipping at the altar, day after day, night after night, studying the shifting contours of the 20 foot high faces gracing the secular stained-glass window.

Each of the films rotating through the place I absorbed multiple times, memorizing snatches of the screenplays -- The Sting, California Split, The Three Musketeers, My Name Is Nobody, The Spikes Gang, Deep Throat II, 99 and 44/100% Dead, The Nine Lives of Fritz the Cat, Andy Warhol’s Frankenstein (in 3-D!) The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz. Coming to know each movie by heart -- even the bad ones cast a spell -- I honed the habit of gauging the reactions of the audiences, the random ripplings of laughter, surprise, boredom, fear.  Then it hit me why we idealize film actors as gods: forever fixed in a strip of time, they have found immortality. The ghosts in the machine!

Occasionally I’d climb the stairs and visit Frank the projectionist who, unsurprisingly, happened to be a day-dreaming voyeur, peering out the ocular window onto Gottingen Street with a pair of opera glasses, scanning the passing parade of pulchritude. Frank Through the Looking Glass. Changing reels every 20 minutes, he had time on his hands.

Unsurprisingly, Frank also happened to be an amateur film historian, and one day we gabbed about the 1924 silent classic Sherlock Jr. in which Buster Keaton plays a film projectionist. While showing a film about the theft of a girl’s pearl necklace, the projectionist falls asleep and dreams that he enters the movie as a detective. Oz-like, the other actors are replaced by the projectionist's “real” acquaintances. In his dream, Buster saves the girl from the clutches of a gang. When he awakens, the girl shows up to tell him that she has learned the identity of the thief. As a reconciliation scene plays on the screen, the projectionist mimics the actor's romancing of the girl.[3]

Like the isolated projectionist, I was girl-friendless, although I was not ready to confess such a shameful factoid to Frank. The spawn of an all-boys school, I had never necked with a girl in a movie-house; I guess moving pictures felt far more alluring than making a move on an actual warm body. The dreamy eroticism of the glowing silver screen, the vaguely sinful criss-crossing of mental boundaries, my self-projection in and out of fantasyland -- now a daily experience – was filling a need, however vicarious.  My job was my own private film school, my timeless womb matrix, my extra innings baseball game theoretically extending into eternity. No sudden death overtime here; it felt like the next best thing to actual love.[4]

Perhaps, then, it was no accident that I was slow to realize that as a lethargic outcome of a so-called elite education, I was being “groomed” by the Odeon brass for a career in theatre chain management. Chain, chain, chain, chain of fools! Little did they realize I was busy trying to shed the polished surfaces of careerism and “Great Expectations”; I identified with the ex-Etonian, George Orwell, author of Down and Out in Paris and London, who preferred to buff his resume by diving into the gutters of life.

One day I made the mistake of telling my counterpart in another Odeon theatre that Andy and I were planning to split to Europe that fall of ‘74; when word got back to Newman, my semi-literate boss, he fired me – gonged by J. Arthur Rank – an echo of Pete being axed from his factory job in Toronto. Real life slapped me awake -- me and Tricky Dick Nixon, forced from office that very week.

Andy and I headed to Yorkshire, the land of dark satanic mills and the original Industrial Revolution.  Initially we crashed at Andy’s aunt and uncle’s place, another echo of GDTR, although in our case they let us through the door. Moving into our own shabby digs, we ground out tough, menial jobs as warehousemen and milkmen over the winter, like Pete and Joey, falling into sporadic snarkfests. Then Andy fell sick and decided to return to Toronto.

“But we got things to do!” I protested, in vain. (Unlike our fictional counterparts, we were not undone by a triangle drama with the opposite sex).

I pressed on alone for six more months until I realized my working class dabblings were more tourism than heroism. I returned to Toronto. I worked, reluctantly, as a newspaper reporter. I dreamt. I went to the movies, generating fresh rounds of dreaming. I read books, especially books on film, Pauline Kael’s “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang” neatly reducing popular films to their universal appeal – sex and violence. 

While not playing in the same league as critic-turned-director Peter Bogdanovich who claimed to have watched 400 films a year for 20 years, I saw myself as a typical Canadian cinephile surviving the long, cruel winters, burrowing like a dreaming bear into the folds of the Carlton, the Uptown, the Imperial, the New Yorker, the Hollywood, the Hyland, the Bloor, the Roxy, the Towne, the University, Cinecity, savouring in solitude the dancing cave paintings. Andy and the characters of the Odeon Casino lingered in the movie archive of my memory, morphing into the stuff of fiction.

In 1980 in a Toronto bar, Hemingways, I met a quick-witted, red-headed college teacher, Ken Ludlow, who had been born poor in Cape Breton, the grandson of a brilliant union leader who died young in a coal mining accident. A real life incarnation of the Maritime archetypes, Pete and Joey, Ken’s father took his grade 8 education “down the road” to St. Catharines, Ontario, where his humour, charisma and street smarts earned a managership of a GM plant. My friendship with Ken deepened, built around our love of film, including, of course, GDTR; over 40 years later, we still remember a mutual feeling of the uncanny when we first shook hands, as if we had fought side-by-side as 12th century Norman Irish knights.

During my 30s in the 1980s, I worked half-heartedly in a branch plant book publishing firm while Ken switched from teaching to a new career as a psychodynamic psychotherapist. After a painful romantic breakup, I realized I needed to pry open the Pandora’s Box of my own inner life and face the music. Real life adversity gave me a push, and gradually I pulled my dream life out of cold storage and put it to work. Long past the prospect of a career in film, I struggled to become a non-fiction writer and published three books over 25 years. Stanley Kubrick, alas, never called. But I had absorbed an essential lesson: to mine the wisdom of dreams (and films), keep your Eyes Wide Open.

  ###

Flash forward (or backward?) to 1996. I am dug into my second decade of depth psychotherapy, slowly strip mining my over-crowded unconscious. Drafting my own original screen-play.

One night, I am wrapped in the darkness of the Bloor Cinema, alone, ensconced in my usual spot in an aisle seat, stretching out my long legs, bag of buttered popcorn in hand, my coat placed on the adjacent seat to discourage the potential incursion of an armrest-elbowing, farting-and-coughing neighbour. Mea culpa – man-spreading in spades.

I’m watching the film Jude based on the 1895 novel Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy. A work of disturbing genius, the book was so savaged by Late Victorian critics that Hardy never wrote another novel. Quietly under-rated, the film is equally as compelling.

A bright working class lad shunned entry into university, Jude Frawley is forced to work as a stonemason. Living in sin (and poverty) with his feisty cousin Sue Bridehead, they have two children and move from place to place, regularly denied lodgings due to their unmarried status. Sue tells Juey, the young son of Jude from his first marriage, that their landlord has told her can’t stay long in their latest digs because there are too many of them. That night, Juey kills his two half-siblings and hangs himself, leaving a note on the door: “Done because we are too menny.”

The psychodrama of the three unwanted children strikes a deep nerve.  My burning throat boils up into a gush of hot tears I try vainly to supress, the shame doubling when I convince myself my fellow patrons (parental proxies) are shooting darts of scorn. I am experiencing an “abreaction”, a spontaneous reliving of a repressed emotion, an ancient Greek catharsis releasing the balm of an endorphin rush.

Serendipitously, my weekly session with my therapist Peter is booked for the next day. As I unpack my experience watching the film, he reveals he happened to be sitting in the balcony at the same showing, having my back as it were. Can I get a witness? You bet! As my body burns off yet another layer of dissociation, I digest something I knew but didn’t fully know: my brother, sister and I had been severely neglected in our frigid Victorian nursery, our emotionally stunted parents, like their parents before them, incapable of responding to a small child in distress. There was no room for us, either; small wonder that suicide runs in my family’s bloodstream. 

Through the magic of cinematic art and talk therapy (and good friends), the scales were falling from my eyes, an inexorable series of necessary disillusionments. Together with Peter, the good father, film strips were helping strip down the myth of loving parents and teachers who were in fact devoting most of their energy to “keeping up an image.”

  ###

Flash forward to 2011: I’m sitting with my partner Katy in our neighbourhood second-run theatre, The Revue, on Roncesvalles Avenue, our ten year relationship cementing around our shared love of movies. Born in the Titanic year of 1912, the Revue is the oldest cinema in Toronto and approaching its 100th anniversary celebrations, medieval by Canadian standards. Katy has been coming here since childhood. It’s our church.

We are listening to the director Don Shebib introduce Down the Road Again, his sequel to Goin’ Down the Road released 41 years earlier. Recently I had discovered that he lives a mere block away from us on our street in High Park. Just down the road. A coincidence? A synchronicity? Don’t get me started.

Four decades after the events of Goin' Down the Road, Pete (the role reprised by Doug McGrath) is now a retiring mailman. How will he spend his remaining days: gardening or writing? His plans change drastically when he receives from his old buddy Joey an envelope of cash and three letters to be opened in a prescribed order. Joey has died of cancer and he wants Pete to throw his ashes into the Atlantic back in Cape Breton—and, oh yes, make a last stab at reconciliation with his forsaken wife and daughter in Toronto. The actor Paul Bradley, who played Joey, died of cancer in 2003, a day short of his 63rd birthday, so Shebib has conceived a clever conceit, art and life imitating each other.

Pete first visits Betts (again played by Jayne Eastwood), who has never forgiven Joey for abandoning her in 1970 when she was pregnant. Pete meets her daughter, the fatherless Betty-Jo, now a feisty, tattooed 40 year old who, unsurprisingly, burns through men. She overcomes Pete’s objections and joins him on the journey, driving eastward in the same 1960 Chevy Impala that she was conceived in. As she quizzes him about his days with her father in Toronto, his ashes brood on the dash of the open convertible.

As they talk, we flashback to scenes from the original 1970 film – the guys horsing around in the snow, the Zanzibar strip joint on Yonge Street, Centre Island, the shotgun wedding. Betty-Jo reveals she searched for her unknown father in public records; Pete colours in the blanks, characterizing Joey as a guy who would “give you the shirt off his back—the one he stole from you the week before.” Feeling guilty over the desertion, Pete confesses to Betty-Jo: “I talked him into it.”

The Cape Breton homecoming turns out to be both a challenge and a gift from Joey to Pete. He meets an estate lawyer, Matt, and his mother, Annie, suffering from Alzheimer’s. Gradually it comes to light that after Pete was laid off at the steel mill in 1970, he knocked up a rich, posh girl who was packed off to Boston for an abortion. Then he left with Joey for Toronto, never hearing from her again.

Some years later, Joey received a letter from the girl asking after Pete. But Joey returned the letter, taking revenge against his friend for persuading him to abandon his wife and unborn daughter back in Toronto. Upset by this belated revelation, Pete assaults the urn: “Now I know why it was so easy to convince him to leave.”

Eventually Pete discovers that Annie, the sufferer of Alzheimer’s, is his long lost true love and the Matt the lawyer is his son.  Pete brings Annie roses and as he unfolds his story – “I used to be a gardener” – she struggles to understand through the fog of her fragmented memories. The couple slow dances, side-by-side with Matt and Betty-Jo. Joey’s ashes are committed to the sea (Toronto’s Cherry Beach serving as the Atlantic). His posthumous plan has worked. The living have much catching up to do; what goes round, comes round.

While lacking the punchy verisimilitude of the original, Down the Road Again is a poignant story of second chances, a requiem and a farewell tour, strange enough to feel true. The Pete character – “a happy guy who doesn’t have a happy life” -- is forced to take stock, confront parts of his disowned past, and face the responsibilities of fatherhood. His youthful hunger to leave a mark -- “Pete McGraw was here” – arrives in an unexpected way and in the process, he fulfills the narrative arc of his life, his story, his personal meaning.  If we feel we have fallen short at the art of living, maybe we can succeed at the art of dying.

  ###

Sadly, English Canada remains rooted in its failure to establish a feature film industry. Our talent pool still generally drains southward, but there’s an upside to the phenomenon. We don’t suffer from the “Day of the Locust” madness of American celebrity worship that consumes its objects of fascination. “Canadian fame” is an oxymoron; or as Mordecai Richler famously put it: “I’m world famous all over Canada.”

Goin’ Down the Road and Down the Road Again number among a handful of Canadian movies that have fed my own ever-evolving personal myth.  One of the charms of Shebib’s work is their use of recognizable places within my own lived experience. Early in Down the Road Again, Pete shoots pool in a Vancouver restaurant, except that it is actually the Inter Steer Tavern, one of my “locals” on Roncesvalles Avenue, a short walk from my home (and Shebib’s). While on the road east, Pete and Betty-Jo stop at Flapjacks, a breakfast joint in New Brunswick, except that is actually on Highway 10 in Caledon, a short walk from a cabin Katy and I rent on the Credit River. Another one of our “locals.” I recommend the back bacon and butter tarts, eh?

Why are Canadians so thrilled when we see our environments captured on film? In The Last Detail, Jack Nicholson is seen drinking in Toronto’s Spadina Hotel and freezing his ass off in High Park, a small, pathetic “claim to fame” back in 1973. How far down the road have we evolved since then? Does the city of Toronto actually exist other than as a proxy for Chicago? Do we actually exist?

Like unseen children, we Canucks are starving for cinematic mirrors to free us from our colonial meta-lives. Depicting the strife between 17th century Catholic missionaries and indigenous peoples, Black Robe is the “truest” Canadian film I’ve seen to date – and it was made by an Australian in 1991. As one of our forgotten Prime Ministers observed 75 years ago: “If some countries have too much history, we have too much geography.”

Part of our collective DNA still retains the souls of Pete and Joey, lovable losers straining for a patch of dignity and identity. Are we still a pipsqueek, derivative, ironically distanced, branch plant culture of “borderline personalities”? Are we still like Rosencrantz and Gildenstern, the wise-cracking muppets perched in the balcony, passive-aggressive spectators watching the Big Show from the sidelines? Are we still just a mess of small-timers spread thinly across a vast land mass, longing for the day when we “come into our own”, a 22nd century population of 100 million stuffed into classless, multi-cultural, geo-thermal condo towers ringing the shores of James Bay?

We still await the forging of our own cultural greatness, our own Moby Dick, our own Wuthering Heights, our own Fifth Symphony. “I coulda been a contender!” is the American cri-de-coeur; “I coulda been a bartender!” is more our speed. Americans like to make money; we like to count it.

Yet, as we watch the American Dream devolve into a nightmare, maybe flying under the global radar is one of our secret superpowers. The disenfranchised, face-painted Viking planting a turd on Nancy Pelosi’s desk may be signalling the violent end-game of the anonymous American working class white male; our contemporary Canadian Petes and Joeys, hurling gravel at Justin Trudeau, might be heading down the same road.  But who knows. As a model of anti-nation nation-builders, some of us polite, hoser-peaceniks dare to dream that we are humbly leading the world, kicking and screaming, to its unified, “We Are One” destiny — assuming of course, that Alberta and Quebec up their intake of magic mushrooms. Stay tuned.

  ###

August, 2013: Katy and I are enjoying a meandering road trip through Quebec and the Maritime provinces. Returning from Newfoundland, we stay overnight in a Halifax bed and breakfast within walking distance of the old Odeon Casino at 2021 Gottingen Street.  

I’m disappointed to find my old haunt is long gone, replaced by an apartment block called “Theatre Lofts.” On the second level, a rectangular opening the size of a cinema screen overlooks a courtyard, a memorial to the Odeon Casino; nearly 40 years on, Katy snaps a photograph of me out front.

Lofting my chain of memories through the air of the open screen, I reel in the ghosts of my 1974 cast of characters: my tough-nut boss, Newman, the look-a-like of Pete in GDTR; the beat cops and gang leaders; Frank the voyeuristic projectionist; the teenaged ushers Lee and Tina dancing in the lobby as Jesus and Mary Magdalene, flashlights in hand. Making a scene. I think of surprising them with a phone call – “Do you remember me as much as I do you?” – but Google fails to revive them. A sudden uprush of nostalgia leaves me embracing the oldest and wisest of clichés: all things must pass. Or do they just keep returning in different disguises?

Flash forward to 2018: While attending a beginner’s video-making course in Roncesvalles Village, I am partnered with a guy named Graham Mills who happens to be a fellow writer, and we click. We are assigned to shoot and edit a short film on the history of the Revue Cinema across the street. While we are rummaging around back stage, “looking for an angle”, we happen upon a pair of Laurel and Hardy puppets garbed in prison stripes.

Online, Graham finds a 1927 silent comedy short, “The Second Hundred Years”, in which Laurel and Hardy play jailbirds making their escape. Coincidentally, the title echoes the fact that the Revue Cinema itself has recently entered its second century.   

A lightbulb pops over Graham’s head and I help pick up the shards. We rip a scene from the 1927 film of Stan and Ollie sawing a hole in the floor of the warden’s office.  Then we cut to the puppets breaking out of the screen of the Revue into our present world. (Graham held the puppets aloft on selfie sticks while I manned the camera). Running up the aisle, the puppets pause for a Corona at the concession stand, then take a pee in the “W.C.”, where they meet a scolding W.C. Fields puppet perched on an adjacent urinal. Finding the door to the projection booth, they race upstairs, and as they watch their own movie, they see a cop blowing a whistle. Freaking out, the fugitives scram downstairs onto Roncy, catching a streetcar to freedom. Like Pete and Joey, or Andy and me, escaping our own prisons “back in the day.” [5]

The Revue played our three minute short-short during a silent film festival -- wheels within reels – then vanished into obscurity, like Jude, into the YouTube ether (see the link on my website: www.jamesfitzgerald.ca).

Late in life, I had come full circle to the “silent era” of my early childhood.[6] I am a camera; I am a time traveller; I see films; films see me. Was I ever the master of my own destiny? Or a puppet on a string? Or both? I’m guessing my universe unfolded as it should have, as Pete Trudeau would have it.

For centuries, aboriginal peoples, yogis and Christian monks have practiced the discipline of “lucid dreaming”, the ability to direct and control one’s own dreams. In the first step, you cultivate your awareness that you are dreaming, then work on mastering who and what enters the narrative -- in essence, being awake while dreaming. Potentially we are all walking projection booths. Be your own Buster Keaton -- or David Cronenberg!

Now 83, Don Shebib no longer lives just down the road. I never did get around to asking him out for a beer at the Inter Steer Tavern. If Doug McGrath or Jayne Eastwood brushed past me on Yonge Street, I doubt I’d recognize them. But they did leave a mark. We are nothing but our memories.

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Postscript: In December 2021, I attended the premiere of the documentary, “Revue Cinema: Reel Community”, an hour-long history of the Revue made by the young filmmaker Roy Zheng. Appropriately, the film was shown at the Revue. Roy included dozens of interviews with local movie nuts, including myself, on what the place means to us all, so I seized the opportunity to pitch my pet theory that cinemas are replacing churches as houses of worship, or at least they were until the pandemic landed.

Here’s a link to the doc: https://www.royzhengstudio.com/filmography

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[1] I am reminded of Juan Butler’s 1970 cult novel, “Cabbagetown Diaries”, an even bleaker portrait of disaffected outliers clinging to the brutal fringes of a heartless Hogtown, aka “Canada’s asshole”, immune to the sunshine agitprop of the nation’s Centennial Year celebrations. Butler eventually killed himself in despair that his three books passed largely unappreciated.

[2] In 1982, SCTV Network 90 aired a 10 minute parody of GDTR called Garth & Gord & Fiona & Alice in which Pete (John Candy) is portrayed as a lawyer and Joey (Joe Flaherty) as a surgeon, off to Toronto with shouts of “Jobs! Girls!” Andrea Martin plays a hitch-hiking French-Canadian nuclear physicist who is reduced to “setting up pins at Hazelton Lanes.” Jayne Eastwood reprises her own original role while Don “Shish” Kabob is credited as the director. Two years earlier, SCTV had debuted the archetypal Scots-Canadian hosers, Bob and Doug McKenzie, perhaps influenced by Pete and Joey.

 [3]In 1985, inspired by “Sherlock, Jr.”, Woody Allen made “The Purple Rose of Cairo”, another classic film-within-a-film. After Cecilia (Mia Farrow) sits through a B-film several times, the lead actor Tom (Jeff Daniels) notices her adoration. He emerges from the film's black-and-white world into the real full colour world on the other side of the screen. He tells Cecilia that he is attracted to her after noticing her watching him so many times, and she takes him around her New Jersey hometown. Later, he takes her into the film and they have a falling-in-love night on the town.

But Tom’s defection from the film has caused problems. In other copies of the film, others have tried to exit, or split, the screen. The producer of the film learns that Tom has left the film, and he flies cross-country with actor Gil Shepherd (the “real life” actor playing the part of Tom in the movie). A triangle is set up involving Tom, Gil, and Cecilia. Cecilia must choose between them and she decides to choose the real person of Gil rather than the fantasy figure of Tom. She gives up the chance to return with Tom to his “reel” world, choosing to stay with Gil in “real” life. Then she leaves her husband. There’s a lesson in there somewhere. Films as dream therapy?

[4]As I was watching The Clock, a hypnotic 2010 masterwork by the video artist Christian Marclay in Toronto’s Harbourfront, I fell back to my days at the Odeon Casino. The looped 24-hour video montage culls scenes from film and television history that each feature clocks or timepieces. The artwork itself functions as a clock, each clip synchronized with the local time. For example, the clock in High Noon coincides with the actual time of noon; the clock in Great Expectations, forever stopped at 8:40 when Miss Havisham was left at the altar, appears at exactly 8:40 in real time. The effect is uncanny and mesmerizing, dropping your body into the protoplasm of the personal and collective unconscious. Living in reel time, as it were. (Obsessive types will note that I am typing this article in Times type face).

[5] Only the second time I’d been inside the projection room of a movie theatre, something magical had been lost since my Odeon Casino days in 1974 – no more spinning double reels of 35mm film. More’s the pity – I will remain an analogue-driven boomer to my grave, raising my middle digit to the zero-sum game of the digital age.

[6] If I found the strength (and money) to direct a movie of this essay, I’d pack it with rotating circles, wheels and spheres as linked visual metaphors. I’d have a ball: the tires of Andy’s Triumph, the reels of the Casino’s projector, roulette wheels, clock faces, human faces, hockey pucks, loonies, the earth, the moon, the sun. I could go on. But you get the picture.