A couple of years ago Chris Plummer was nominated for an Oscar, for Best Supporting Actor, for his breathtaking portrayal of Tolstoy in The Last Station. Until he was nominated, however, no one seemed to have noticed that he had never been nominated before. Sensing real or imagined previous snubs, reporters asked Chris if he was surprised to be nominated, considering that his performances had been overlooked by Academy members so many times before. Chris told them he was very pleased to be nominated, but that he was now past the age where he could be surprised by such apparent discrepancies. “It happens all the time,” he added with a shrug. “Gordon Pinsent should have been nominated for Best Actor for his work in Away from Her, but he wasn’t. We all have our times.”
Yes, we do. One night we were at the same function and when Chris, who is always full of mischief, got up to speak, he said, “Gordon Pinsent is here. He does everything. He makes me sick!” Having Chris Plummer in my life, as a friend for more than half a century, has made my times just that much sweeter. And when he was nominated for an Oscar again this year, and then went on to win his first Academy Award, I suspect I was more excited than he was. Yes, we all have our times, and this is Chris’ time.
Each experience in this business is a little lifetime. And when you realize that acting is what you want to do for the rest of your life, that discovery is wonderful. What a splendid, splendid way it can be to live a life. The thing that can make a difference is that you have even less time to think about yourself. And the less you think about yourself, the more open you remain. So when happy surprises come along, they don’t have to scour the nation or even the neighbourhood to find you.
One happy surprise was my 2010 Gemini Award, for voicing King Babar in Nelvana’s animated series. Again, imagine getting a prize for doing something you love! Irving Berlin was right; there really is no other business like it. At the ceremony I thanked the producers at Nelvana for watering me down and cleaning up after me, but I know they knew I was quite delighted by the recognition. After voicing sixty-five episodes of Babar I assumed I would not be doing any more of them, because I was pretty sure that the episodes that we had just completed would last longer than I would. Wrong again. Fast forward a couple of decades, et voilà – a delightful new animated series called Babar and the Adventures of Badou. Who is Badou? My eight-year-old grandson! Well, King Babar’s grandson, technically. The new version cleverly plays into the way things are in the world today. And the new show has the smoothest, most beautiful look to the animation. It’s really quite something.
Another happy surprise was the audience response to a Sunday night CBC special, Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town. Never had so easy a job: I played the brilliant Good Humour man, Stephen Leacock, in a Leacock show, with only a few lines on camera and a small ton of voice-over, with the rest of the show being so beautifully done by the large, great cast – Jill Hennessy, Seán Cullen, Ron James, Debra McGrath, Patrick McKenna, Colin Mochrie, Eric Peterson, Caroline Rhea, Rick Roberts, Michael Therriault, and more. Peter had a key role, Leah did a beautiful cameo, and the young man who played Leacock as a boy, Owen Best, is a terrific young actor. I haven’t been on such a happy set for many moons. Strange, isn’t it? With so many styles and noises coming from the Chase to Be the Most Prominent, the plain old Sunday “roast beef shows” still hold a special place in our hearts. Plus, it was a great gig. I got to walk on, say next to nothing, and get star billing. Which is not quite fair. But, what the hell – I’ll take it!
After I finished my scenes for Sunshine Sketches, I flew home to St. John’s to shoot a new episode of Republic of Doyle with Allan Hawco and his tireless team of show-makers, then returned to Toronto to read the Bible. Yes, you read that right. One of several outstanding features of the Word Festival at the Young Centre for the Performing Arts in Toronto was a live-streamed reading of the King James Bible. I read the first chapter of Genesis like I’d written it. I was followed (as if anyone could really follow that!) by more than one hundred readers, including Cynthia Dale, Peter Mansbridge, and Albert Schultz, who read it all, chapter and verse, homily and benediction, for a total of seventy-six hours.
At this writing, despite the doomsday predictions of the Mayan calendar, 2012 has been a very good year for me. In early February I had a wonderful time shooting a short film for Stephen Dunn, a young Newfoundland filmmaker with an extremely promising future. Look up “go-getter” in your family dictionary and don’t be surprised if you find his picture there. It was Rick Mercer who introduced us. (It’s true, we islanders are thick as thieves.) Rick’s rise to fame has been somewhat meteoric, and when he won a Governor General’s Performing Arts award a few years back I felt the need to write a limerick in his honour.
A radical Mercer named Rick
left his home to try every trick
Did he take his aplomb?
“I don’t know,” said his mom,
“but he went up the ladder some quick!”
In any case, it was The Mercer who acquainted me with the young master Dunn’s credentials: how he attended the Cannes Film Festival with his first short film and wound up on Roger Ebert’s new-filmmakers-to-watch list; how his short films had screened at the Toronto, Miami, Atlantic, and St. John’s international film festivals; how he was the youngest person ever selected for the Toronto International Film Festival Talent Lab, where he won two awards in TIFF’s RBC Emerging Filmmaker Competition.
The idea for his new short film was intriguing. A dark comedy called Life Doesn’t Frighten Me, it was about a twelve-year-old girl, on the eve of becoming a teenager, who gets her first period and thinks she’s dying. Would I consider playing her grandfather? I would. And, he didn’t even ask me to audition.
“Is it all right to tell people you’re going to be in my film?” he asked politely. He was now a fourth-year film student at Ryerson University. “Can I use your name?”
“Sure,” I said. “Can I use yours?”
“When I told my mother I was going to work with you,” he added, grinning like a Cheshire cat, “she said she shit her pants.”
Accordingly, I responded in verse, which was reprinted verbatim in the press release young master Dunn issued the following day. Which led off with the headline “Help Gordon Pinsent and Stephen Dunn Make a Movie,” and followed up with the news that Dunn, now in his final year of film school, “has been given the gift of working with Canadian Legend, fellow Newfoundlander and long time hero, Gordon Pinsent, on his final thesis film. Gordon enthusiastically accepted the role in Dunn’s film through a poem.”
“Stephen Dunn, are you there my son?
“T’is Gordon P who’s callin’ ye.
“to tell you if he gets the chance
“to work for ye for f*ckin’ free,
“t’is he who’ll shit his pants!”
Which was then followed by the pitch:
Filmmaking is no easy feat, especially for a group of broke film students. The film’s budget is over $9,000 and Dunn and Pinsent are inviting the public to help materialize this dream. In exchange for donations they are offering an array of exciting prizes, including signed posters, DVDs and a prestigious Executive Producer credit on the film.
Not since the Holy Mother Church started selling indulgences had I seen such naked ingenuity. It positively smelled Spielberg. “Good luck with that,” I told the boy with the solid-gold brainpan; but privately, I hoped he wouldn’t be too disappointed by the response.
He wasn’t. In the first twenty-four hours he managed to raise more than $2,500, which was about 28 per cent of his budget. By the time all the would-be executive producers had sent in their cheques, young master Dunn had raised $14,000. And then attorney-turned-agent Michael Levine stepped in with Bravo! FACT funding, and suddenly Life Doesn’t Frighten Me was in the black – Dunn like dinner! – before he’d even shot a foot of film (not that filmmakers use film anymore).
I had a wonderful time with cast and crew and especially with young master Dunn. Best part
of the whole shoot for me was when Linda Dunn, Stephen’s mother, flew up from St. John’s to personally make me some bakeapple tarts. Oh yes, there are still some things that money can’t buy, and bakeapple tarts remain high on my list. So all in all I think I can honestly say I will never work for Stephen Dunn again. Unless he asks me.
By mid-February 2012 I was in Mexico shooting The Flight of the Butterflies for the British director Mike Slee. Slee specializes in making those IMAX 3-D epics, and he had called me two years ago to pitch me on this one, before it was even financed. I must confess that I was quite taken with his passion, his commitment, and his persistence. In reality, this sprawling docudrama was still only an idea, because he was still searching for the money, but after we spoke I could tell that he had already started making the movie in his head. Some eighteen months later he called to say he’d put it together.
In Flight of the Butterflies I play an Ontario man named Fred Urquhart who spent his life trying to track the nesting place of monarch butterflies. It’s a fascinating detective story. Urquhart’s painstaking research first led him to Texas, until he finally discovered that the monarchs actually nest in the Sierra Madre Mountains in Mexico, and fly to Canada from Mexico every spring. Mind-boggling.
Making the film in Mexico was an exhilarating experience. After shooting in Mexico City for about ten days, we were transported to a small hotel halfway up the volcanic mountains of the Sierra Madre Occidental mountain range, and remained there for two days so our bodies (and, especially, our brains) could adjust to the altitude. On the third day we climbed into a series of vans and were taken to a considerably higher point. Then we set off on horseback for our still-higher location. Two or three dozen crew members had gone ahead of us with heavy IMAX cameras, setting up the scenes for the best 3-D visuals possible. They’d already been shooting bits and pieces when I donned a crumpled hat and traced Humphrey Bogart’s steps, ten thousand feet up, popping my blood pressure pills. I could already envision myself descending, wrapped around a donkey, having gone up as Tim Holt but coming down as Walter Huston. Which was not quite the swan song I had in mind.
As we approached I could see a group of tall trees whose trunks and branches were dripping with what appeared to be Christmas lights, in big yellow cascades. The young Mexican lad leading my horse was wearing a bright red shirt, as vibrant as the yellow of the Christmas lights, but as we got closer we could suddenly hear the strange, unique sound of millions of fluttering wings, and could see that the Christmas lights were actually hundreds of thousands of monarch butterflies. On the ground ahead of me were thousands of their dead, covering the ground like an ethereal, pale yellow blanket. My young Mexican minder stopped at the edge of this sight, and I made my way around the rim on foot, to the set.
We repeated the climb, and the careful skirting of the butterflies, every day, until Mike Slee was satisfied with the day’s takes.
We came back down, returning to reality. Looking up at the Sierra Madre made us wonder if we’d really been up there, or if we’d simply dreamed the whole thing. I had had the strange sense, while being with the monarchs, that we were only as much a part of their world as they had allowed us to be; the monarchs had been given to Mexico as a gift, and now, would be seen by the world. At any rate, we were allowed to be there for only so long. But at least we had photographs. I had sent Leah a snapshot of myself astride the small horse they had provided for me to ride to and from the set every day. “Oh, Daddy,” she emailed back, “that horse has even shorter legs than you do!”
When Newfoundland producer Barbara Doran was shooting her biography on me in 2010, she asked me to recite some of my poetry on camera. Unbeknownst to me, her cinematographer Michael Boland liked what he was hearing and called his friend Travis Good, of the Sadies. Travis liked what he heard too, and called his friend Greg Keelor, of Blue Rodeo. And that’s how our musical adventure (and resulting CD) began.
Boy of fiction, future wise
I cannot see tomorrow in your eyes
Got no more rights, got no more say
So maybe you should think of movin’ on today.
The CD’s title track, “Down and Out in Upalong,” came out of the memory of a slighter, poorer, flat-footed chapter of myself, working the highways out of North Sydney, Nova Scotia; taking aim at the dream-belt of Toronto; praying nicely, past the steadily barking night-time farm dogs, for each morning light; with half-baked confidence, half-decent footwear, and a too-far farmhouse, and not enough breadcrumbs to get back home to a crying girlfriend. Upalong was what we Newfoundlanders called the mainland, Canada; if you look at a map you’ll see why.
Down and out in Upalong
Got no story, Got no song
Down and out in Upalong
Comin’ back to you where I can do no wrong*
I had written and would strum these songs to Charm in the kitchen as she was making dinner. I’m pretty sure that, in her mind, that took care of me, and kept me out of her way, but these were good, warm moments. I never considered collaborating with someone else. I’m a child of Lightfoot’s time, where the poet comes out in the writing. So my words meeting up with Greg and Travis’s music was a bit like finding relatives I never knew I had. I gave them the material, performed some of it for them, and they came back with eleven songs. They grabbed their guitars and came over to my place, and started to play what they’d written, and I was thrilled.
Some of the songs had come from my roots, and some had stuck to my boots crossing the country over time. As for the roots, Newfoundland does that. You’re surrounded by water, and all of these little gems are sitting there, waiting for you to dig them out of your own past and make something happen with them. What you don’t know is how other people will hear them. Greg was particularly taken with “Let Go” – “Let go, music, so I can sleep.” He’s done some damage to his hearing over the years, and as a musician the idea of not being able to play music terrifies him. So “Let Go” holds a whole different meaning for him. I wrote another song, “Shadows in the Sun,” about a vibrant community becoming a ghost town after the local industry shuts down – every Newfoundlander’s fear. But Greg and Travis heard it as a mournful salute to our fallen soldiers. So apparently it works on that level too, which the poet in me finds fascinating.
In the months that followed I went on stage with Travis and Greg, test-driving the tunes in Peterborough, Ontario, and kicking the musical tires in Toronto, and I won’t be too modest about it – some of my lyrics sound pretty bloody good! (When we played Peterborough, I told the audience that I hadn’t performed in that city in twenty-five years. “But here I am,” I added, “back by popular demand!”)
The original idea was to do an acoustic album, just guitars and voice, but of course it grew and grew. I was going to recite a couple of poems on one track, and the next thing I knew, it was a two-disc album, with their songs on one disc and my spoken words on the other. Greg still insists he likes my disc better. “Gord’s metre is so impeccable!” he told the Globe and Mail’s Brad Wheeler. (Did you get that? Impeccable.) And Travis told one interviewer that when I perform on stage with them, “He’s like the Young of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young.” Hey, you’ve got to live a lot of years to get a review like that.
Much to our delight, when the CD “dropped” (yes, that’s what we say in the music business), it was warmly received by critics and fans. So far it’s been a wonderfully unexpected adventure, which happened because I let it happen. I didn’t stand in my own way. I let it happen, just in case it could ever get this far and I could end up sitting next to Anne Murray at the Juno Awards!
In any case, it was genuinely satisfying to be back on radio. I wish I could be back on radio, working for producer Mary Lynk. Her CBC Radio series The Late Show was a compelling, beautifully crafted series about people who have made a difference – unsung heroes whose “songs” were being heard for the first time. It really was what it claimed to be – an unconventional take on the art of the obituary
– and the key word here is “art.” In 2010 Mary asked me to host ten of these stirring stories, and then ten more, and then ten more, and three seasons later I was hoping she’d ask me to do ten more. But her Late Show was another casualty of still more government cuts to our notoriously underfunded public broadcaster’s dwindling budget. In my opinion, The Late Show gave Canadians an exciting, important, and richly rewarding radio experience, and as long as she kept asking, I would have kept saying Yes.
This past April brought another unusual opportunity my way, when I was invited to participate in memorial ceremonies for the one-hundredth anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic.
When I was a young fella in Grand Falls, every second house had an etching of the Titanic going down. A reminder that the Atlantic, shiny and beautiful and blue as it was, was also bloody dangerous. Living on the coast, we had a close relationship with the sea, with all its vicissitudes, its perils, and the way it could swallow you up. Thinking about the Titanic still shakes me, that it could happen so quickly. I have seen the story in its many versions on screen, as most have, and each time, I swear off watching them. Someday, maybe.
Some 150 of those 1,500 who perished are buried in Halifax, and Halifax has not forgotten them. On the Saturday evening, April 14, 2012, a funeral carriage pulled by horses led a procession through the city’s downtown streets to the wail of bagpipes, and hundreds of people, some carrying candles and wearing period costumes, followed the hearse. The procession made its way to the Grand Parade, the public square in front of city hall, where we were waiting for them. They tucked me into stage right, seated, with tea and suchlike, where I belted out the evening’s material to the mostly blanketed and loyally attentive audience. Reminded them, that “people marvelled, not just on hearing of the Titanic’s sheer size, but on learning of her grand opulence. She was a sight to behold – massive and majestic, shiny and sleek. Everyone wanted to be part of her maiden voyage to America.” And after she sank, swallowed by the frigid waters of the North Atlantic, south of the Grand Banks, “Halifax was a city in mourning, a City of Sorrow.”
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