At the 1969 Canadian Film Awards, one of its jurors, the young British director Peter Watkins, declared that there was no Canadian film industry. There could hardly have been a more damning, or more humiliating, moment for such a charge to land. The CFA is a government-funded institution created with the express intent of legitimizing (and, by extension, catalyzing) a homegrown film industry. But Watkins’s complaint was legitimate: for the first time in the CFA’s twenty-year history, there were no feature films for him or his fellow jurors to view.
Watkins also levied aesthetic criticisms at what he had seen, calling for Canadian filmmakers to shake off the yoke of British and American movies. “What we need today are filmmakers with guts, toughness. Because it’s that flame that’s so easily squashed out,” he told a Toronto Daily Star reporter while softly punching one fist into another. “Once a filmmaker gets sucked into the commercial machine, chances are you never hear of that toughness again.”
The day before the awards, a twenty-six-year-old David Cronenberg held a “grudge” screening of Stereo, his sixty-five-minute fiction film about eight sequestered co-ed telepaths’ carnal encounters. The CFA’s selection committee had rejected Stereo on the basis it was actually an experimental film.
“If the film awards are ever going to mean anything, they’ve got to be more than just commercials,” Cronenberg was quoted as saying in a brief article about the event. It appeared on the same page as Watkins’s inflammatory remark.
Watkins was almost certainly too busy with his official jury duties and arguing about the finer points of socialism with fellow jurors to know that the screening was taking place, let alone have time to attend. Still, it was far from obvious that Cronenberg would assume the mantle of tough filmmaker. Toronto’s underground film scene was booming. An even larger group of cinéastes were making waves in Montreal, then Canada’s most prosperous and international city.
The centre of power in Eastern Canada has nothing and everything to do with exploding heads, tummy vaginas, and perverted identical twins, whether you like it or not. The Toronto that Cronenberg was born in on March 15, 1943, was a very different place to what it is today—even though Canada’s a place that is most often thought of as no place at all.
The alternative—that it’s a sweet liberal wonderland, a smarter, nicer version of the United States where immigrants are welcomed and encouraged to retain their cultures—hides the virulent racism, xenophobia, anti-environmentalism, and conspiracy mongering that have taken hold of sizable segments of the population. Canadianness exists, at once hideous and just-sort-of-all-right to behold, and runs throughout Cronenberg’s body of work, not simply in shooting locations but sensibility.
Save for wheat, a sizable number of products are still imported to Canada, be they cars or consumer goods. In the first half of the twentieth century, this reliance on sourcing things from abroad extended to culture: it was the Scot John Grierson who drafted the bill that created the National Film Commission (later the National Film Board of Canada) in 1939 and focused its resources primarily on the production of non-fiction and experimental films. (Prior to Grierson’s intervention, which garnered the NFB multiple Oscar nominations, the majority of Canadian films were aimed at attracting immigrants and tourists, or they were sloppily made B-movies intended to meet a government-mandated quota.)
It was only after the international success of Don Owen’s 1964 film Nobody Waved Good-bye (it initially bombed in its native land) that the Canadian Broadcasting Company’s television arm chose to partner with the NFB. Still, there wasn’t a clear path for someone who sought to make narrative features in the country—again giving credence to Watkins’s complaint. Although the young Cronenberg was a fan of westerns, comics, and horror movies, just like Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Tobe Hooper, or any other number of male American directors of his generation, his access to narrative film and filmmaking was distant.
Sex and changing mores around it in the ’60s formed the core of David Secter’s Winter Kept Us Warm (1965), the film that permanently altered Cronenberg’s relationship to the medium. Written, directed, and produced while Secter was still a student at the University of Toronto, the drama follows a male U of T student who has a girlfriend as he catches ambiguous feelings for another male U of T student, who also has a girlfriend. (Winter Kept Us Warm was shot on equipment Secter borrowed from Ryerson University, because, unlike the University of Toronto, it had a film program.) Many people Cronenberg knew acted in the film, which went on to screen at Cannes and other festivals internationally. Film was no longer merely something to be experienced, but something achievable.
Inspired by Secter, Cronenberg wrote, photographed, and directed his first short, Transfer (1966), a disjointed, Dadaistic tale of a neurotic (classmate Rafe Macpherson) who’s in love with and relentlessly pursues his male analyst (classmate Morton Ritts). Other twentysomethings in Toronto were also galvanized by Secter’s achievement. In 1966, John Hofsess founded the McMaster Film Board, an organization dedicated to screening experimental and independent films, modelled after Jonas Mekas’s film co-op in New York; it shut down following a series of financial and obscenity-related scandals but was soon revived by Ivan Reitman (yes, the Ghostbusters guy), who took it in a more wholesome direction.
In 1967, Cronenberg, Robert Fothergill (a pre-Secter director), Jim Paxton, and Lorne Michaels (yes, the kinda evil Saturday Night Live guy) began the Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre, which rented its prints to film societies—organizations dedicated to screening foreign and art-house films, typically located on college campuses—at the rate of $1/minute and split the profits with filmmakers. The MFB and CFDC were not simply places where filmmakers could vaingloriously screen their own films but provided community, distribution networks, and a crucial form of aid to young directors. Amidst screenings at the Isaacs Gallery, the CFDC’s Cinethon (a marathon film festival), the MFB, and on the city’s sidewalks, Cronenberg, Iain Ewing, and Bob Fothergill founded the Toronto Film Co-op based at Cinecity, a post office that had been converted into a foreign and art-house theatre by gay Dutch lawyer Willem Poolman.
In 1969, Cronenberg shot Stereo on black-and-white 35 mm at the University of Toronto’s Scarborough College, marking his first foray into science fiction and movie blood. He served as the film’s cinematographer, cameraman, writer, director, producer, and con artist—while in production, he lived off of a $3,500 government grant obtained by claiming he would write a novel. In addition to self-financed screenings in Edinburgh, Scotland, and Adelaide, Australia, Stereo was accepted by the Museum of Modern Art’s science fiction film festival and was shown alongside Stanley Kubrick’s 2001. (The film’s queer subject matter also led to Cronenberg being propositioned following a screening in Montreal; he politely declined the man.) The New York–based International Film Archives purchased the film’s distribution rights for $15,000, as well as a $5,000 option on his next feature, Crimes of the Future, which received a warm reception.
Cronenberg then did a stint as a clerk at Toronto’s Sam the Record Man music emporium for a bit, before departing for France in 1971. There, with a 16 mm camera purchased with a Canada Council grant, he shot several short, impressionistic documentaries for the CBC.
In what can be understood as the dark twin of seeing Secter’s Winter Kept Us Warm, Cronenberg went to Cannes in 1971 and was exposed to the revolting extravagance of the big-time moviemaking machinery. (He was allowed to sleep on a couch at the Ritz-Carlton.) While there, a very different epiphany came to him: if he were to continue being a filmmaker—a professional one and not a hobbyist—he couldn’t make movies like Stereo and Crimes of the Future. More specifically, he realized that he could no longer make films where he served as cameraman, editor, producer, sound recordist, and director. A real crew, and a real producer who could properly distribute the finished product, were required. He returned to Canada.
Like several of his contemporaries in the filmmaking underground, Cronenberg went to work with the CBC. The glow of the ’60s was fading; he also had a daughter, Cassandra, to support. He continued to generate short documentaries for television, and also directed Secret Weapons (1972), but there still wasn’t an industry with which to align himself. The NFB held fast to its non-fiction mandate, and the underground’s reach was, by definition, limited.
But a little farther north lay the softcore wonders of Cinépix. Based in Montreal, André Link and John Dunning’s company produced films that not only went to mainstream theatres with large audiences but had soundtracks that got airtime on Quebec radio. Following the Quiet Revolution in Quebec, a newly liberated populace enjoyed their freedoms and stuck it to those who’d held them back for so long. (For context, one of the filthiest French Québécois swear words is “tabernacle.”)
Cronenberg was nervous when approaching Cinépix, because he knew his experience wasn’t particularly strong—he’d made a bunch of gay art-house movies and a handful of documentaries for TV, neither of which were remotely similar to their output. Yet, upon seeing Stereo and Crimes of the Future, Dunning exclaimed, “We know you’ve got a sexual sensibility there, we’re just not sure what kind it is!”
Cronenberg secured their support for his next project, Shivers (1975). Its simple premise—a half-bug, half-penis, half-turdlike parasite renders its host dead eyed, extremely horny, and compelled to spread the contagion—took years to realize. Dunning sought funding from the CFDC, a governmental body that was created by a Liberal government in 1967 to encourage domestic commercial film production. They balked at its content and proposed a $400,000 budget and also demanded an American distribution deal upfront. No American company would agree to buy the rights to an unproduced, special-effects-heavy feature based on the strength of Stereo or Crimes of the Future.
Closer to home, Reitman thought the script was too icky to fund. (He later served as its line producer.) There were years of rewrites that significantly shrank the budget, but the CFDC still refused. At one point, Dunning approached Jonathan Demme to direct, a betrayal that Cronenberg only learned of during his first visit to Los Angeles.
Shivers also marked the start of another central feature of Cronenberg’s career: unbridled outrage. In a three-page article that appeared in Saturday Night beneath the withering headline “You should know how bad this film is. After all, you paid for it,” Marshall Delaney (the name Robert Fulford, the editor, used to review films) excoriated the film’s “perverted sex and violence” and its cynical use of “certain themes borrowed from avant-garde literature.”
However, Delaney devoted the majority of the space to questioning the concept of public funding for film and, along with hurling abuse at the CFDC’s output and its “discredited practices,” concluded by calling for the secretary of state to investigate the organization. In 1975, a film reviewer at a respected publication frothing at the mouth was a scandal that had the potential to become a fertilizing event. Parliament held hearings about the CFDC, and a chorus of criticism rose from all quarters, attacking the institution and the sicko who’d misappropriated public monies.
However, Shivers was the first CFDC-funded film to be profitable and therefore cost the poor, abused taxpayer nothing. Cronenberg learned a bit about the press: he wrote open letters to Delaney and a critic at the Globe and Mail (who thought it was a failed attempt at camp) and did the interview circuit to defend himself and his intentions. Part of his response circled back to the question of Canadianness and English Canadian culture.
“Surely it’s obvious that there should be room for every kind of film from every possible country—I mean anything that disturbs you is not Canadian. It should be nice and somewhat serious if it’s Canadian; that’s the same old bullshit which has produced so many deadly films,” Cronenberg told Cinema Canada. “Where else but in Canada do you get a critic not attached to a daily newspaper who is more conservative, more reactionary than a government body like the CFDC? Where else do you get a critic who quotes [Secretary of State] Judy LaMarsh for his definition of art?”
None of this abated the outrage cycle. Shivers wasn’t allowed to compete in the Canadian Film Awards, and the CFDC refused Cronenberg’s subsequent requests for funding. Thankfully, he had secured work at the CBC before the release of Shivers, directing two episodes of an omnibus horror / ironic punishment series in the vein of Tales of the Unexpected.) In 1975, Dunning told the Montreal Star, “The Saturday Night piece is going to haunt Cronenberg in this country. He’s got lots of talent, but he may not be able to use it in Canada. AIP is interested in Cronenberg. So the Marshall Delaney article may be just the thing to push him across the border.”
That didn’t happen. But Delaney’s words did push Cronenberg out of his home. Cronenberg and his family were evicted after his elderly landlady read a Globe and Mail article about the forthcoming Rabid, which included the news that porn star Marilyn Chambers (of Behind the Green Door infamy) would be the lead and extensively quoted from the Saturday Night piece. She said there was a morality clause on his lease and that she wouldn’t house any pornographers. Cronenberg objected to the label and clarified that the author, Robert Fulford (publishing as Delaney), simply deemed Shivers obscene. The landlady informed Cronenberg that she was a friend of Fulford’s and trusted the writer completely.
Cronenberg was ordered out. As he wrote of the experience later (also published in the Globe and Mail ), “The nightmare paranoia of my own films was coming home to haunt me. I was too rattled to see the wonderful symmetry of it all.” Cronenberg purchased a house across the street from her, and soon after, a city zoning inspector demanded to search the premises. There had been an anonymous complaint that the building, in a residential-only area, held equipment used in the “photographing and developing of pornographic motion pictures for public sale.” The inspector found nothing.
Though the government had created the incentive in 1975 wherein 100 percent of an investment in a film could be written off, the heyday of this inglorious period of Canadian filmmaking began toward the end of the decade, as word of this insane loophole spread, and continued through the early ’80s. Those looking to avoid paying their fair share could either invest in Multiple Urban Residential Buildings, factories, or invest in a film and, in Cronenberg’s words, “visit the set, bring your kids, see Donald Sutherland in action.”
This turn toward privatization led to a sharp increase in the amount of unbearable crap unleashed upon cinema goers but also placed Cronenberg, Canada’s first commercially viable filmmaker, in a fortuitous position. He was approached by Vision 4, one of many companies founded under the tax-shelter system, and production of Cronenberg’s next three films—The Brood, Scanners, and Videodrome—all began in the brutalizing cold of Canadian winter.
In The Brood, Nola Carveth (Samantha Eggar) is undergoing treatment at the rural Somafree Institute of Psychoplasmics under the care of Dr. Hal Raglan (Oliver Reed), the author of the self-help book The Shape of Rage and pioneer of psychoplasmics, which induces physical manifestations of mental pain. Nola’s rage takes the shape of small humanoids—who, in their snowsuits, could pass for her daughter, Candy (Cindy Hinds)—that murder her drunken, abusive mother and her passive father.
Frank Carveth (the affectless Art Hindle, brother of superbike racer Lang Hindle) begins investigating Dr. Raglan’s methods in order to secure custody, finding a few Cronenberg regulars along the way (Robert A. Silverman, with his trademark comb-over, plays a former patient with massive, dangling neck lymph nodes caused by psychoplasmics). After Nola’s “children” bludgeon Candy’s teacher before the entire class and lead her to Nola, Frank confronts Nola and Raglan at the Somafree retreat. During this climax, Nola lifts up her flowing white tunic and reveals several gestational sacs (which were made out of condoms and glued to Eggar’s abdomen). She bites the largest, bloodiest one open, pries the “baby” out, and licks it clean.
This final move was Eggar’s idea, a decision made all the more impressive by virtue of the fact that she was on set only for four days of the six-week shoot. The Ontario Censor Board, however, insisted on cutting the licking, which led many audience members to believe that Nola was actually eating the fetus—which is far worse.
“It’s a very bizarre situation, because if they decide not to cut something that they were considering cutting, you are supposed to be grateful. It’s like taking your child away, and instead of cutting off ten fingers, cutting off eight and asking you to be grateful that they’ve left two on,” Cronenberg bitterly told Screen International in 1979. In the Globe and Mail, he lamented the inability to show an unadulterated version of his work in his home province. Each province had its own censor board, but Ontario’s was the most stringent. They kept the excised pieces of prints, and often prints with those cuts were circulated in other provinces. If the uncensored version was screened in Ontario, the filmmaker went to jail.
In 1982, tax write-offs on investments in Canadian film were reduced to 50 percent, signalling the end of an era that yielded four of Cronenberg’s films, Meatballs (Ivan Reitman, 1979), and a ton of terrible, mismanaged, and/or unreleased motion pictures that have long since been forgotten. It was also the year that Cronenberg got his first agent, who had Cronenberg travel regularly to Los Angeles to make connections.
During one visit south, he met Carol Baum, a fan of The Brood and a producer who developed The Stepford Wives (1975) and was overseeing the adaptation of a number of Stephen King novels. It was Baum who suggested that Cronenberg direct The Dead Zone. Though it was shot in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, in the bitter cold of Canadian winter, production insisted on using preferred crew and actors rather than local talent; mainstays Carol Spier, Mark Irwin, Ronald Sanders, and Robert Silverman were given a pass.
Another notable exception was made for the seventeen-year-old special effects enthusiast Cathy Scorsese. Her father, Martin, had praised Cronenberg and Rabid during an appearance on Late Night with David Letterman. The elder Scorsese had attempted to connect with Cronenberg while in Toronto in 1978 for a screening of The Last Waltz but was informed that the Baron of Blood was unreachable.
After this talk-show confession, the king of New York met the king of Toronto; it was then that Scorsese remarked that Cronenberg looked like a Beverly Hills gynecologist. They became friends. Cathy was invited to work on The Dead Zone for a week, learning how to make blood bags. On her last day, the crew threw Cathy a going-away party that featured a cake that exploded when she cut into it.
Such warm feeling is absent from The Dead Zone, which is what makes it so powerful. The retelling of King’s novel is filtered through the eyes of its wounded protagonist: mild-mannered, virginal schoolteacher Johnny Smith (Christopher Walken), who falls into a coma and awakens to discover he’s lost his fiancée, Sarah (Brooke Adams), and gained clairvoyant powers. Isolated and bereft, Johnny uses his powers to avert disaster and ultimately decides to sacrifice himself in order to stop Stillson (Martin Sheen) from being elected president and starting a nuclear war.
The film is considered to be one of the best King adaptations—perhaps, if I may insert my own opinion here, because there was limited involvement from studios and the author himself. To honour his hometown, which had only one Dolby sound system, Cronenberg rented out the Crest Theatre for a month to present The Dead Zone as it was meant to be seen and heard.
Toronto reciprocated the honour by featuring a retrospective of his work at the Festival of Festivals (now the Toronto International Film Festival). Piers Handling, chief programmer of the festival, told Maclean’s that Cronenberg was the “only major filmmaker in English Canada to resist the realist impulse. . . . David’s fatalistic vision is very Canadian. He has an extraordinary sense of landscape and space—he is fascinated with the deadness of modern architecture and the schizophrenia of humans living in it.”
While the festival’s censor board still refused to screen the uncut version of The Brood, Cronenberg was becoming respectable.
Forty-some years and dozens of films later, including The Fly (1986) and A History of Violence (2005), Cronenberg has, despite his protestations, replaced Norman Jewison as Canada’s grand old man of cinema. Now he’s releasing The Shrouds, which interweaves his career-long interests in conspiracy, technology as an extension of consciousness and physical desire, decay, memory, and mortality. Its laconic dialogue is suffused with details of the most painful losses in Cronenberg’s life, a whisper-quiet gasp rather than a loud moan.
The Shrouds is a perfect comment on “now” (whatever that is) and, in its themes and subtle connections to his past films, an eloquent summation of a career that spans over fifty years. Despite the opprobrium from the public and Canadian film critics and the best efforts of censors (the most vengeful of which were in his home province), Cronenberg has come to define Canadian cinema. TIFF’s prim corporate funders will never object to giving him a slot in their festival; the final grades of students in Vancouver will depend on their papers about Dead Ringers or Naked Lunch; a precocious preteen in Alberta with a high-speed internet connection will download The Fly and be unsettled in a way that they can’t quite put into words yet. That this was achieved without compromise or feel-good pandering makes it all the more beautiful and rare.
Still, like the surfeit of data that the dead exude and the implications of post-mortem surveillance, there could (and should) always be more from David Cronenberg.
Excerpted from David Cronenberg: Clinical Trials by Violet Lucca. Copyright © 2024 Little White Lies. Used by permission of Abrams Books, an imprint of Harry N. Abrams, Inc., New York. All rights reserved.
