How it happened for Mark Starowicz
Long-time CBC producer made some of the most influential TV in Canadian broadcast history
One recent morning on the patio of a Bloor St. W. café, Mark Starowicz confided that his career path was inspired by the 1952 Hollywood movie Deadline — U.S.A., starring Humphrey Bogart as the crusading editor determined to expose a mobster’s crimes even as his newspaper was on the brink of collapse.
In the payoff scene, as the gangster threatens to keep his wrongdoings from being revealed, the crusading editor gives the nod for the presses to roll and they do, making a racket. “What’s that noise?” asks the gangster in alarm. That’s when Bogart utters the line that shaped the life of Starowicz: “Them’s the presses, Blackie, and there is nothing you can do about it.”
At 68, Starowicz has exceeded his boyhood fantasy of growing up to be a journalistic crusader. And by the time he walked out of his office at the Broadcast Centre on Front St. just over a week ago for the last time, a big piece of the CBC’s institutional memory went with him.
Some of us with long memories had bittersweet memory flashes about those glory days when nobody needed to ask why Canada needed a public broad- caster. This exit did not trigger quite the tumult surrounding the departures of David Letterman and Jon Stewart. But it was definitely the end of an era.
On hand to mark the occasion were Margaret Lyons, Starowicz’s former boss, who retired years ago, and Peter Herrndorf, the top CBC executive of a bygone era who created the climate in which broadcasting revolutions could take place and later became the country’s cultural godfather while running Toronto Life, TVO and, now, the National Arts Centre.
“Mark Starowicz continues to develop very well as a producer while his relations with his colleagues remain good but erratic,” Lyons had reported in a performance assessment in March 1970.
“He shows great skill and imagination in production and is learning management skills,” she added about the rookie upstart from Montreal. “He is gradually reconciling himself to the bureaucratic requirements of the position.”
Under the “remarks” section, she summed up her view: “Mark Starowicz seems to be more effective working along than as part of a team, and he still lacks patience with the institution, but his journalistic and production abilities are exceptional, and I would therefore recommend confirmation.”
Under the influence of that Bogart movie, Starowicz started his career in the newspaper business. But by the time he left the CBC, he had been at the public broadcaster for 45 years and created a phenomenal number of the best programs on radio and TV in Canadian history.
In recent years he was the chief of its in-house documentary unit and was the last man standing after the unit’s recent elimination for budgetary reasons.
Now he has a plan for the future. He will be one of those indie producers of documentaries that the CBC needs to rely on, since it has no in-house unit.
After the 1970 performance review from Lyons, Starowicz went on to revolutionize a low-key radio show called As It Happens and invent Sunday Morning, one of CBC Radio’s most enduring programs.
Then, moving to TV, he orchestrated The Journal — the great and muchmissed public affairs show, which followed The National — creating a superb news hour at 10 p.m.
The Journal lasted just over a decade, starting in January 1982.
Later, Starowicz was best known to a new generation for masterminding and producing Canada: A People’s History.
Long before his CBC triumphs, I met Starowicz when we were both 20-somethings working at the Toronto Star’s old building on King St. W.
Why was he working in Toronto? The son of Polish immigrants, he had moved as a boy to Montreal, which he considered home. But, he recalls, there was a reason he did not have good prospects for a career at Montreal’s English-language dailies, the Montreal Star and the Gazette,
As a McGill University student radical, he was known to be sympathetic to Quebec nationalism, even arguing that the staunchly English McGill should become bilingual.
After starting in the Toronto Star’s summer program, Starowicz was offered a full-time staff job but turned it down — to the disbelief of many — to return to Montreal as editor of the McGill Daily for the academic year.
In the spring of 1969, he did take that job with the Toronto Star, hoping to become a foreign correspondent. But just months later, he moved to the CBC.
In my view, the high point of the Starowicz era at CBC was his extraordinary partnership with Barbara Frum, the great luminary of public broadcasting who died in March 1992.
They were co-workers first on radio, at As It Happens, and then when she was a host of The Journal (originally partnered with Mary Lou Finlay).
“For the first two months we worked together, Barbara and I did not get along,” Starowicz said. He found her chilly and snarly. “But it was mostly my fault. We were making things up as we went along.”
Then at Frum’s behest, the two met at a greasy-spoon restaurant over a plate of french fries that neither of them touched for two hours.
“She got off her chest what was bothering her,” Starowicz recalls.
“I got off my chest what was bothering me. We agreed we would back one another and be allies.”
“For the first two months we worked together, Barbara and I did not get along. But it was mostly my fault. ” MARK STAROWICZ ON WORKING WITH BARBARA FRUM AT THE CBC
And from that moment on, they were, for more than 20 years. And for many of us in those decades, our sense of what it meant to see the world from a Canadian perspective was shaped by the collaboration of Starowicz and Frum. She was the star power that attracted millions of viewers and enough lucrative ads to make the show a winner financially as well as culturally.
The last time Frum and Starowicz worked together, she was in the studio interviewing Mordecai Richler.
“As she fumbled for the next question, the pauses got longer,” Starowicz recalls. “This went on for three or four minutes.” She looked pale and wan. Thinking she had a fever, Starowicz called her husband, Murray Frum.
“You better come down and pick her up,” he said.
That was the last time he saw her alive. “Next time, I was a pallbearer at her funeral.”
Later that year, the CBC, facing budget cuts, cancelled The Journal. Its final episode was telecast on Oct. 30, 1992. mknelman@thestar.ca