Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you for having invited me to appear before the committee today.
I am going to speak in English. Even though I began my career in Quebec and I worked for a long time in both parts of Canada, I now work only in English. I am going to let my Quebec colleagues make their comments in French.
To do this in eight minutes is going to be a big challenge for me, but I'll try. I've been doing this for 42 years. I began in 1973, when I was still a student at McGill, with my partner Victor Loewy. He and I started a film distribution company. A few years later, in 1977, with another partner, Stephen Roth, he and I produced our first two feature films, which were called L'Ange et la femme and In Praise of Older Women.
What began as a little company between university students grew into Alliance Communications, of which I was the chairman and chief executive. In 1993 I took the company public on the Toronto Stock Exchange, and in 1998 I sold my controlling interest. For more than 20 years, Alliance was the dominant Canadian film and television distribution and production company. It was also a leading specialty broadcaster until it was resold some years after I sold it and then was split up.
For the last 15 years, I have focused exclusively on producing feature films at my current company, Serendipity Point. Over the course of my career I have produced some 40 films and have financed and distributed many others. I've had the privilege to work with some of the world's greatest stars, such as Dustin Hoffman, Annette Bening, Viggo Mortensen, Michael Caine, Ralph Fiennes, Jeremy Irons, Paul Giamatti, and Rosamund Pike. I've worked with some very distinguished directors, such as David Cronenberg, Denys Arcand, Atom Egoyan, Jean-Claude Lauzon, István Szabó, and Bruce Beresford.
The films we made, such as Barney's Version, Eastern Promises, The Sweet Hereafter, Sunshine, and Being Julia have been nominated for Academy awards. They have won Golden Globes and prizes at the Cannes film festival, in Venice, and in Berlin. Here in Canada, these films have won the screen award for best picture five times, and they have been selected to open the Toronto International Film Festival on 10 occasions. They have been distributed globally and some, though definitely not all, have made a profit.
Black Robe, Being Julia, Sunshine, eXistenZ, Barney's Version, and Eastern Promises all grossed in excess of $20 million worldwide. My production of Johnny Mnemonic surpassed $50 million. Here at home, Black Robe, Johnny Mnemonic, Barney's Version, and Eastern Promises all grossed over $3 million at the box office, and Men With Brooms over $4 million.
That is the good news.
One other piece of good news is that during my watch we have come a long way from when I first started. I'll share with you just one anecdote of how it all was back in 1977 when I produced In Praise of Older Women.
We were having a lot of trouble getting the movie theatres to commit to show the film. It had been selected to open the Toronto film festival and had a tremendous amount of publicity around it, so we thought it would be a good idea to open the film right after the festival, but we had a lot of problems getting a commitment from the then theatre circuits. I went to see the man who was then the head booker for what was then the biggest circuit in the country, a company called Famous Players, which at the time was owned by Paramount.
I said to him that for the film to have any chance in the marketplace it needed to have firm commitments with specific firm dates in some of the best theatres across the country. Otherwise, if it was just going to be floating and hoping to get into a theatre some day, we really had no chance. He said, “Why would I do that”? I said, “Well, it's a great film, so why don't you see it?” Because he hadn't. He said, “I don't need to see it: it's Canadian.”