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A scene for a movie
is being shot on the Leslie Street Spit. Three rough-looking Americans —
fierce patriots all — are staring at the Toronto skyline.
“It’s beautiful,”
says one. “It’s like no other city I’ve ever seen . . . only cleaner.”
A feature film made
by an American director in which
Toronto plays itself?
Usually Toronto is
used by Yankee film crews to masquerade as any number of American cities —
unless the CN Tower gets in the shot. But that’s fine with Michael Moore,
who directed the quirky documentary Roger & Me, it’s supposed to be
Toronto.
The scene
continues: “It’s all white people,” says Kabral, a deputy sheriff of Niagara
County, New York
— played by Bill Nunn — explaining why the city looks so tidy, even from
miles away.
The one member of
the cast who should, in real life, know the most about Toronto sounds a
cautionary note: “Don’t let appearances fool you,” John Candy mutters darkly
as Bud Boomer, Niagara County
sheriff. “Underneath that clean exterior lies raw evil.”
“Cheap, efficient
public transportation,” Kabral says, his jaw tightening with controlled fury
and resentment.
Kevin J. O’Connor's
Roy Boy, the character first astonished by the city’s cleanliness and
beauty, grips his gun tighter. He clenches his teeth. “Those sons of
bitches.”
This is Michael
Moore’s Canadian Bacon, his first fictional feature, being shot by
him and 120 other people in around Toronto since mid-November. Canadian
Bacon tells the story of a U.S. government scheme that goes awry, zeal
turning it into an (unplanned) invasion of Canada, which is Canadians’
well-known and longstanding fear, whether it’s economic and sparked by free
trade, or the cultural incursions of American radio and television.
Something that’s
usually missing in the debate about Canada’s future is the weapon Moore’s
using — humor.
“I did it because
it’s not a comic thing,” Moore says. “It’s a deadly serious thing. But being
deadly serious about stuff like this is boring; it’s a turn-off.”
The story begins
with the current U.S. president — played by Alan Alda — obsessing on his
dismal public approval ratings. The collapse of communism has left the U.S.
without an identifiable enemy which, in turn, has led to the collapse of the
defense industry. In desperation, the president carries out a plan concocted
by close advisors: “Canadian Bacon” is the military and intelligence
code-name given the project to demonize this country for political gain.
Canada is a natural but previously overlooked enemy; the country’s abundance
of fresh water, relative quiet and perceived simplicity are all suspect. And
there are darker problems, too — Canada’s obvious superiority in Zamboni
technology.
“And there are all
those sneaky Canadians who walk among us in the United States,” Moore points
out. “Peter Jennings, Morley Safer, Robert MacNeil of MacNeil/Lehrer.
And you can’t tell them apart; they look and talk just like Americans. And
what about Alex Trebek? Jeopardy is a Canadian plot. This Canadian
was sent to America to ask difficult questions backwards just to make us
look stupid.”
Moore got the idea
for the story and began working on the first of some 20 drafts of the
screenplay in 1991, just as the Gulf War was beginning. “It was the way
everybody just jumped on that bandwagon so quickly. Nobody really knew that
much about Saddam Hussein or Iraq. But all of a sudden he was the worst
enemy we’d ever had. Granted, he is a bad guy. But we’d spent a lot of time
and money arming him and thinking of him as a good guy immediately before
that.”
Canada
came naturally to mind as an unlikely enemy for a couple of reasons. One of
Moore’s grandfathers was born and raised in Ontario, and during the early
1970s, Moore was certain a low lottery number for the Vietnam draft would
mean he’d have to move here.
Moore has always
told stories: he started telling them in print first, but didn’t think of
telling them in pictures until his journalistic career ran out of steam.
“One firing led to
another, one bankruptcy led to another,” he says. He founded and ran his own
left-leaning weekly, The Flint Voice, in his hometown in the
mid-1970s. On the strength of editing and publishing there, he was offered
the editorship of Mother Jones, a magazine known for its
investigative work and social conscience. He moved to San Francisco but was
fired after a well-publicized conflict of editorial direction. He went back
to Flint just as General Motors announced it was eliminating 30 thousand
jobs.
“Because of what
had happened with Mother Jones, I didn’t feel like writing anything.
I called up the people who made the movie Atomic Café, and asked them
if they would come to Flint to teach me how to make a movie. They said,
‘Yeah, we’ll give you a week.’”
The result of that
self-taught, on-the-fly approach was Roger & Me, Moore’s movie about
trying to get then GM chairman Roger Smith to explain why he had laid off
thousands of people and being rebuffed or evaded in every attempt. After
first capturing attention at Toronto’s Festival of Festivals, it got a
worldwide distribution deal through Warner Brothers, and went on to turn a
healthy profit while trailing critical superlatives in its wake.
Now Moore gets to
make a film with studio backing, well-known actors and a professional crew,
including Hollywood heavyweight Haskell Wexler as director of photography.
Moore says working
with professionals has made the movie-making process easier, but that
raising money was tough.
“That was because I
didn’t understand a central fact about Hollywood,” Moore explains, “which is
that it doesn’t matter how good the script is. What matters is who’s in it,
and will people pay money to go see them?
“I had my list of
people I wanted to be in this film, but I never thought of actually going to
the actors first.”
He started with
John Candy, who agreed. Interest from other potential cast members followed
quickly: Bill Nunn, Kevin J. O’Connor, Alan Alda, Rhea Perlman, Rip Tom and
Kevin Pollak.
Investors lined up
next. The picture is a co-production, with funding split between Propaganda
Films, a division of the PolyGram entertainment company, David Brown (of
producing team Zanuck/Brown) and Madonna’s production company, Maverick.
The film’s budget
is roughly ten million dollars — about a third of what the average
mainstream studio production costs.
There’s one more
scene to shoot on the Leslie Street Spit. Moore is driving a pickup truck
loaded with gun-toting, mean-looking patriots who’ve driven from Buffalo to
help Sheriff Boomer with his invasion.
He sends them to
Saskatoon, ordering all eight of them to take the city by force and burn it
down.
Moore has another
week’s worth of shooting left on Canadian Bacon. He’ll edit the picture in
New York and it will probably be released sometime in the second half of
1994.
“But before we
leave next week, I am going to help you guys out with a couple things,”
Moore says. “It’s a great country, but you need a little help. First, the
French-English thing; you gotta cut that out. Choose one. I don’t care which
one, but choose one. Number two, lose the queen. You’re free. You’re a
democracy. Get with it; be proud. Get the queen off the money, off the
highway signs and off the stamps. People are laughing at you guys.
“Oh yeah, and
there’s one other thing I gotta find out. What’s in a Harvey burger?”
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