PROGRAMMING NOTE

TORONTO CABLE MOVIE CURATOR DISCUSSES SPICY HISTORY OF CITY-TV, AND HOW TO GET VIEWERS IN 2017

Max Renn, the hero of David Cronenberg’s early-’80s cult-horror masterpiece Videodrome, is head of programming at CIVIC-TV, a fictitious low-budget television network based in the east end of Toronto. Civic is the scrappy, unpretentious channel that distinguishes itself with reckless disrepute — an underground ethos on the mainstream airwaves.

They compensate for their inferior position and lack of resources by showing the kind of programs their more dignified competitors would never deign to air, and it’s Renn’s job to scour the TV wasteland for just the right brand of sleaze: cut-rate import erotica, obscene back-alley curios, unorthodox late-night porn. Renn programs the movies Canadians don’t even realize they want to see.

CIVIC-TV, savvy Canadian moviegoers were well-aware at the time, was Cronenberg’s thinly veiled homage to CITY-TV, Toronto’s own independent (at the time), wildly unconventional UHF television network, where the attitude was subversive and the content was dangerously risqué.

Which I suppose would make Max Renn City’s longtime head of programming Ellen Baine.

“I think that was supposed to be Moses, actually,” Baine laughs when I draw the comparison, referring to CITY-TV founder and executive producer Moses Znaimer.

But she goes on to reminisce about the halcyon days of the network’s ignominious reign in ways that sound very much like Videodrome outtakes. Baine, just like Renn, made backroom deals with soft-core distributors, wheeled and dealt with Playboy representatives.

Listening to Baine talk of CITY’s golden era, it isn’t difficult to imagine her embroiled in some mysterious Cronenbergian drama, immersed as she apparently was in the underworld intrigue of programming for latenight TV.

“It’s boring watching porn over and over again,” she tells me flatly. “You’d think it wouldn’t be.”

We’re chatting in an empty boardroom at the Yorkville offices of Hollywood Suite, a cluster of four specialty cable movie channels where Baine serves as head of programming. I’m here because I’m interested to know how exactly someone like Baine curates and assembles daily lists of feature films that are meant to be watched by thousands across the country. But we’ve got to talking about her CITY days because I’ve become fascinated by an intriguing contrast: what’s it like programming movies for television in the age of Netflix, and how does it differ from the time when the mainstream networks reigned?

“In those days, you were always trying to program movies that were as new as possible,” Baine explains. People like her were largely in thrall to a cascade of release windows, which dictated not only what was available but precisely when. The latest blockbuster would enjoy a national theatrical rollout, then arrive in video stores on VHS or DVD, then make the leap to ondemand channels and pay-perview, before finally winding up with the networks. Basically the studios wanted to prolong their product’s shelf life until it was exhausted, and so they seized every opportunity to charge an audience money to see their movies before permitting them to be screened over the airwaves to millions for free.

“The windows are getting shorter and shorter,” Baine points out. Many movies “open” online and via cable video-ondemand platforms the very same weekend they hit theatres, while the vanguard of Netflix and Hulu have reoriented the release-window schedule entirely. Which is part of the reason Hollywood Suite doesn’t bother with it. The four channels Baine programs for are divided by decade — 1970s, ’80s, ’90s, and 2000s — and the emphasis is squarely on the past. Baine scours not the underground wasteland but the back-catalogues of the major studios, now seeking classics instead of sleaze.

What constitutes a classic is mainly left to Baine’s own discretion, interestingly satellite networks have no access to ratings or metrics of any kind, so it can be hard to know with any certainty how many people are tuning in for what and why. Baine is a lifelong cinephile — she cites Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams as a personal favourite she’s insisted on airing despite its mainstream obscurity — and programs with the authority and conviction of a curator who knows her stuff. But she’s quick to point out that programming is more of a science than a practice of whim: “Some of this is based on what I personally like,” she says. “But you can’t program a TV station based solely on your personal likes. You just can’t. It’s not going to work.”

So what else can you base it on? Well, experience, in Baine’s case. She has the hard stats and history of the CITY-TV days to draw on. She knows very well what people like to watch. “You have to know what movies people will watch on TV,” she explains. “That’s different than what people will watch in a theatre.”

She recalls the bungled launch of the cable movie network First Choice. “The first movie they ever played was Star Wars. They assumed it was going to be a huge hit — it’s Star Wars, after all. But it wasn’t a success.” Why? Simple: “People had seen it too many times. Everyone thought, ‘Why would I watch this again? Why would I watch this on TV?’”

But there are movies, Baine says, that people can be relied upon to watch “over and over and over again.” The examples she offers are an eclectic but somehow totally sensible cross section of populist favourites: Miss Congeniality, Working Girl, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. “Some movies people will watch once. These are the kinds of movies that people will watch 10 times. So you just get to know which those are.”

CITY, like its Videodrome counterpart, used to differentiate itself from the market by out-transgressing local and international stations of a more conservative character. Its early specialties were ribald video smut, DIY counterculture shows and a notorious late-night catalogue of soft-core it dubbed Baby Blue. By contrast, Hollywood Suite has a rather more distinguished tenor — this week its programme boasts such fare as The Color Purple, A Cry in the Dark, and Cafe de Flore, among other prestigious offerings — but it’s reassuring that the skills Baine developed during her CITY days are still being put to use in this more venerated realm.

It’s as if Max Renn cleaned up his network and started dealing in classics. The style has changed but the goal is the same: Baine programs the movies Canadians don’t even realize they want to see.