Made-for-TV Harris documentary squelched by networks

"Life Under Mike" a victim of the times it documents

By: Mick Lowe

SUDBURY: Although it was made to be shown on television, the one place you won't be seeing James Motluk's film Life Under Mike is, you guessed it, on television, and thereby hangs a tale.
  Motluk's 47-minute film, so timed to leave room for TV advertisers who, it now seems, will never have the chance to advertise, received its Northern Ontario premiere here Friday night at Myths and Mirrors' Second Annual Who's the Fool conference.
  Billed as "a critical look at the social costs of the Ontario Government's Common Sense Revolution," Motluk's indie film has generated considerable media buzz, even though it has barely been screened outside of Toronto's repertorie Bloor Cinema.
  One reason for the attention is that Life Under Mike garnered impressive support from some big-name backers south of the border: guerrilla filmmaker and political activist Michael Moore (Roger and Me, TV Nation), gave the film financial backing.
  Rock music legends Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen waived the usual needle drop fees so Motluk could use their tunage on his sound track free of charge, and Canadian-born economist and Harvard political guru John Kenneth Galbraith consented to be interviewed and appears on screen.
  Such heavy-gauge support made Life Under Mike the subject of stories in both the Globe and the Toronto Star, and just last week the film won an Honourable Mention in the Film Category of the Media Human Rights Awards in Toronto. Still, Motluk's video production remains the movie Ontario TV executives won't let you see.
  "CBC Newsworld turned it down because it had union financial support which compromised the film's journalistic integrity," a frustrated Motluk told me Monday. "I wanted to say it had no integrity anyway," cracks the 37 year-old Motluk.
  Intrigued, I called the CBC's Jerry MacIntosh in Toronto. MacIntosh is in ultimate charge of what gets aired - and what doesn't - on Newsworld's two slots for indie documentaries, Rough Cuts and The Passionate Eye.
  "The film was still in production three or four years ago when I looked at the initial pitch," MacIntosh recalled. "It seemed to be more advocacy journalism, lacking in balance and objectivity."
  "Surely you don't still believe in journalistic objectivity?" I guffawed. "That concept went out the window in most journalism schools about twenty years ago."
  "How about balance or fairness then?"
  "Admirable concepts," I agreed. "But maybe you should change the name of the show from Passionate Eye to Dispassionate Eye to remain balanced and fair and to avoid charges of false advertising."
  "Is that a question?" MacIntosh shot back. "If you have a question I'm happy to answer it, but I really don't have time to have a dialogue with you about the concepts of journalistic balance and fairness."
  And that, according to Motluk, is the crux of the issue. "The lack of debate and discourse is very damaging to our democratic freedoms." Guys like Mike or Jerry get together in places like Seattle or Davos, Switzerland or Quebec City and meet behind closed doors and make decisions that affect us all without consultation and without our consent.
  "Society functions better if we think of it as a community rather than as a business," Motluk says gently, voicing a sentiment that will, in another time and place, get you shot with pepper spray or rubber bullets before you're rounded up and thrown in jail.
  MacIntosh very kindly checks his computer files on Life Under Mike and discovers that one of his people screened the finished film last fall and rejected it for artistic and line-up reasons, and not simply because it was advocacy journalism.
  The CBC exec and I agree on one thing: neither of us has actually seen Life Under Mike, and therefore neither of us can make an informed decision as to whether the film warrants national network exposure or not.
  This movie has special relevance here. One of the story lines concerns a recent strike by the Steelworkers with a particularly unhappy ending, thanks to the Harris government's repeal of anti-scab laws. (The Steelworkers' National Office contributed to the film, thus helping to impair its "journalistic integrity.")
  Speaking of picket lines, Life Under Mike shared the bill at the conference with productions by two local films including Stuart Cryer's terrific agit-prop short doc about the Falconbridge strike entitled One Day Longer and Abandoned Houses on the Reservation, by young Ojibway filmmaker Darlene Naponse. A member of Atikmegoshing (Whitefish Lake First Nation), Naponse is an undergraduate at Laurentian University. Houses is an official selection for the 2001 Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah.

See also:
- sudbury.vianet.on.ca/community/cupw/messages/14302.html

Posted: April 02, 2001

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