Why a Montreal film producer deserves a Toronto tribute
Denis Héroux had a great impact on both French and English movies, including Atlantic City, a Best Picture Oscar nominee
Rarely has the Maple Leaf been more prominent on Oscar night than it was in 1981, when the France/ Canada co-production Atlantic City was nominated for five Academy Awards, including the big one for Best Picture.
It’s the producers who are nominated in that category and the producers of Atlantic City were Denis Héroux and John Kemeny, who had both forged their careers in Montreal.
The movie is a sly comedy about Mobsters, hustlers and dreamers. The script was by New York playwright John Guare; the story was set in the U.S.; the director, Louis Malle, was French; and most of the main characters were played by Hollywood stars.
There was Canadian content, however: The interior studio shooting was done in Montreal, even though Malle spent five weeks filming exterior scenes in Atlantic City, N.J. Many members of the crew were Canadian and the supporting cast was full of witty turns by Canadian actors, including Kate Reid, Hollis McLaren, Robert Joy, Al Waxman, Louis Del Grande, Harvey Atkin, Robert Goulet, Sean McCann, Cec Linder and Moses Znaimer.
The reason I’m mentioning this now is that Héroux died a few weeks ago at age 75 and, though that was big news in Montreal, his passing was virtually ig- nored in Toronto.
That’s a sad commentary on our sense of history, especially the history of Canadian movies.
Héroux had a great impact not only on French-language movies made in Quebec but on English-language movies as well. Indeed, he won two Best Picture Genie Awards, one in each of our official languages: Les Plouffe (1981) and The Bay Boy (1984).
At this year’s Kennedy Center Honours, telecast on CBS, we were reminded of how top Hollywood directors Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas have made a point of keeping movie history alive through the restoration and preservation of hundreds of films.
Quebec has a sense of its film history that is lamentably lacking on our side of the Two Solitudes. Regrettably, in the rest of Canada, a major figure like Héroux can disappear from our collective memory bank.
He was a debonair man of the world whose film career started while he was studying history at the Université de Montréal. He and two friends co-directed a low-budget film about student life called Seul ou avec d’autres (1962).
But his breakthrough film, which caught the public’s attention and created a sensation, was Valérie (1968), about a girl who leaves a convent with the leader of a motorcycle gang, becomes part of Montreal’s hippy culture and then a prostitute.
With its nudity emphasizing its theme of breaking away from piety, it grossed over $1 million, becoming the top domestic release of its era in Quebec.
Héroux directed many other movies, but in the 1980s he focused on becoming a powerful producer and financier, spending a lot of time in Paris and becoming a founding partner of the Toronto-based Alliance Entertainment.
“There were four senior partners: Héroux, Kemeny, Stephen Roth and me,” recalls his friend Robert Lantos. “He was stationed in Paris, cultivating European business.”
Héroux left the company circa 1990 because he preferred living and producing movies in Paris to building a huge company based in Toronto.
ccording to Lantos, Héroux preferred producing to directing. “Producing can be more fun than directing,” he explains, “because you can work on half a dozen films at once instead of being fully committed to one for a long time.”
Among the movies he produced: The Bay Boy, Les Plouffe, Quest for Fire and The Blood of Others. One of his biggest hits was the M.A.S.K. TV cartoon series.
As Lantos recalls, Héroux had a long and close friendship with the great novelist and former Montrealer Brian Moore, who wrote the screen adaptation for The Blood of Others, based on the Simone de Beauvoir novel. “As a result, Alliance had the rights to many of Brian Moore’s books,” Lantos says.
Two that were made into films were Black Robe (1991), which won many awards, and The Statement (2003).
For decades, Héroux hopped back and forth between Montreal and Paris. Unlike most players in the Quebec film world, he was not a separatist, which made him in some ways an odd man out, resented by ardent nationalists.
“Denis was an infinitely charming man who liked the finer things of life, including a glass of Champagne before bed,” Lantos recalls.
Atlantic City was made during Canada’s notorious tax-shelter era, when film investors could get a 100-per-cent tax writeoff, resulting in many expensive and embarrassingly bad movies.
Atlantic City was a lucky fluke, rushed into production since it had to be shot before Dec. 31 to qualify for tax-shelter status. What assured its touch of class was that Héroux was known and respected by some of the best directors in France, including the brilliant Malle.
With Malle in the director’s chair, the project attracted brilliantly witty writer Guare and Burt Lancaster, one of the world’s finest actors, co-starring with Susan Sarandon.
Several months before its theatrical release, Atlantic City was hailed at the Venice Film Festival, where it shared the Golden Lion with Gloria, written and directed by John Cassavetes.
It remains on a very exclusive Academy Awards list of movies nominated for all of the “Big Five” Oscars: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress and Best Original Screenplay. Yet it did not win a single Oscar.
That year, Chariots of Fire won for Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay. Malle lost to Warren Beatty for Reds in the directing category; Lancaster and Sarandon lost to Henry Fonda and Katharine Hepburn for On Golden Pond.
The following year, Quest for Fire, another movie produced by Héroux and Kemeny (along with three other producers), did win an Oscar . . . for makeup. A Canada/France/U.S. co-production directed by JeanJacques Annaud, it was based on a Belgian book set in prehistoric times. Besides the Oscar, Quest for Fire won two major prizes in France, the César Awards for Best Film and Best Director. In Canada, it won five Genie Awards.
How can Toronto give Héroux his due? The Toronto International Film Festival and the Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television should collaborate on assembling excellent prints and creating a retrospective series of his key movies ( Valérie, Atlantic City, Quest for Fire, The Bay Boy and Les Plouffe), augmented by special guests and panel discussions.
We can’t afford to let our movie history slip away. mknelman@thestar.ca