Controversy dogs once-popular head of Telefilm
Wayne Clarkson’s appointment was hailed by both the English and French industries a year ago, but he has fallen from grace
MONTREAL — What a difference a year makes. When Wayne Clarkson was named executive director of Telefilm Canada last December, virtually everyone in t h e f ilm and TV i n d u s t r y applauded the government’s decision to give him the job.
It was one of the rare occasions when English and French-Canadian industry players actually agreed on something. They all liked the idea of Clarkson running the country’s leading film and TV funding agency.
But there has been remotely little resembling enthusiasm about Telefilm in the year since Clarkson took office. That’s mainly because the Montreal- based agency has been mired for months in the mess that is the Montreal film festival. Clarkson t o l d a s k e p t i c a l g ro u p o f reporters a few weeks back that Telefilm didn’t create this cockup, but he is dead wrong on that count.
Before his arrival, Telefilm cut off its funding for Serge Losique’s Montreal World Film Festival and began the process of creating a new Montreal filmfest to replace Losique’s faded event. The result of this unprecedented Telefilm intervention was the Spectra-run New Montreal FilmFest. Organizers spent $6 million to mount the inaugural edition in September and, in spite of the big bucks, the event was a total bust. Two months later, it is far from clear that there will even be a second edition next year.
But the filmfest quagmire is not Telefilm’s only problem these days. Now the funder is in trouble with Auditor-General Sheila Fraser, who may turn out to be an even more dangerous foe than Losique.
Fraser recently i ssued a scathing report on the way Telefilm is run, blasting the Crown corporation for not properly checking the Canadian content requirements for the film and TV projects that it finances. Fraser also said the agency often does not keep proper records to backup the funding decisions it makes.
The most serious allegation is that Telefilm does not adequately check the Canadian citizenship of the personnel on the films and TV shows it finances. This came as a shock to most industry watchers — and to many in the industry, for that matter — because the same issue was at the heart of a major scandal that rocked Telefilm six years ago.
That was when it was alleged that prominent Montreal TV producer Cinar took scripts written by Americans and falsified documents to make it look like they were penned by Canadian authors in order to receive Telefilm funding.
But given Fraser’s conclusions, you wonder why anyone would bother to go to the trouble of putting Canadian names on American scripts. Since Telefilm apparently wasn’t checking citizenship, presumably all you’d have to do was tell Telefilm executives that these American authors a l l h ad Canadian addresses.
This is no minor matter. The whole basis of the public film funding system here is that the money should be going to projects created by Canadians. And, more seriously, Telefilm has some real cash to manage, with an annual budget of around $200 million.
As usual, Clarkson wasn’t talking to the media about Fraser’s report, but, in a written statement, he didn’t dispute any of the charges. He simply said his agency was already working on correcting the problems.
Meanwhile, there is no end in sight to the Montreal film-festival feud. Spectra has said it will drop out of the New Montreal FilmFest if the festival is unable to reach an agreement to work in tandem with the rival Festival du Nouveau Cinema. If Spectra throws in the towel, that’s almost certainly the end of the New Montreal FilmFest. But since making that announcement a month ago, the New Montreal FilmFest organizers have yet to contact anyone at the Nouveau festival. No one is talking, which makes a deal a little unlikely.
Over at Telefilm, Jean-Claude Mahe, the point man on the Montreal festival dossier, has been shifted into another department.
The most likely scenario at this point is that there will be two major international film festivals i n Mo n t re a l n e x t ye a r — Losique’s World Film Festival and the Festival du Nouveau Cinema. In other words, things will look pretty well exactly as they did before Telefilm started this whole messy affair.
CanWest News Service