of the rock 'n' roll lifestyle come bursting hilariously to the surface! Featuring ...... Black Rider, a stage show by Tom Waits, William S. Burroughs, and Rob-.
BRUCE McDONALD'S HARD CORE LOGO
Consistently ranked as one of the best Canadian movies of all time,
punk-rock mockumentary Hard Core Logo (1996) documents the lastditch reunion tour of an aging rock band led by vocalist Joe Dick (Hugh Dillon). Well received by critics at the time of its release, the film continues to enjoy a devoted international cult following. This entertaining analysis of Hard Core Logo explores many of the
film's key themes, including the responsibility of documentary filmmakers to their subjects, the development of close male relationships, and the relationship between art and commerce in Canada, especially for touring musicians. Paul McEwan examines Hard Core Logo in the context of other adaptations of Michael Turner's '993 novel of the same name, as well as against other films from McDonald's celebrated career. Featuring interviews with McDonald himselfand others involved in the film, Bruce McDonald's 'Hard Core Logo' provides an engaging look at one of Canada's most mythologized movies. PAUL McEWAN is an associate professor in the Department of Media and Communication and the director of Film Studies at Muhlenberg College.
CANADIAN CINEMA 7
BRUCE McDONALD'S HARD· CORE LOGO PAUL McEWAN
UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS
Toronto Buffalo London
tiff.
© university of Toronto Press 2011 Toronto Buffalo London www.utppublishing.com hinted in Canada ISBN: rSBN:
Contents
978+4426-4452-6 (cloth) 978+4426-1273-0 (paper)
Printed on acid·free and 100% post-COIIBumer recycled paper with vegetable-based in.ks.
Acknowledgments
vii
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
McEwan, P;ml, 1972Bruce MCDonald's Hard Core Logo I Paul McEwan, (Can;ldian cinel'lla ; 7) Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-1-4426-4452-6 (bound).
ISBN
978-1-4426-1:m-0 (pbk.)
1. McDonald, Bruce, '959- - Criticism and interpretation.
(Motion picture).
r. Title.
PN1997,2.H365M34 2011
2. Hard core logo
II. Series; Canadian cinema (Toronto, Ont.); 7 791,43°233°92
C2011-904002-6
Part of the discussion of the film Higllwa!J61 appeared previously as 'Same as MagnifYing Glass: Clossing the U.S. Border in Bruce McDonald's Rigltway 61: Symplokl15 (1-2), 2008: 115-2+ Reprinted by permission of University of Nebraska Press. TIFF and the University of Toronto Press ac1mowledge the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council.
B12.
C!::>
Canada Council Conseil des Arts for the Arts . d~ Can",da
.J)J\ ONTARIO ARTS COUNCIL
M
CONSEll DES ARTS DE l'ONTARIO
This book has been published with the help of it grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and. Social Sciences, through the Aid to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canad.a. University of Toronto Press acknowledge~ the finandal support of the Government .' of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for its publishing activities.
Introduction
3
1 Adaptations
9
2 Punk Rock Nation
55
3 Easy Riders, Raging Fools
95
Epilogue: Hard Core Logo 1/
117
Production Credits Further Viewing Notes Selected Bibliography
119 123 125 129
Acknowledgments
I am indebted to everyone who gave their time for interviews by phone or email: Michael Turner, Noel S, Baker, Bruce McDonald, Hugh Dillon, Callum Keith Rennie, Nick Craine, Michael Scholar, Joe Keithley; Colin Brunton, Ben Kowalewicz, Moe Berg, Bill Baker, and Matt Smallwood. I would like to single out Patrick Whistler, Bruce McDonald's assistant, who has been helpful from start to finish, and Nick Craine, who provided artwork and key ideas, My editor at the University of Toronto Press, Siobhan McMemeny, has been endlessly encouraging, as have the editors of the Canadian Cinema series, Bart Beaty and will Straw. Doug Hildebrand at University of Toronto Press had the idea for this book in the first place. r am deeply grateful to my colleagues in the Department of Media & Communication and the Film.Studies Program at Muhlenberg College, who have provided a supportive environment for research and helped me carve out time to write. Muhlenberg also awarded me a summer research grant for this book in 2009. I would like to thank the bright students in my Masculinity in Film seminar in the spring of 2010, who helped me hone some ideas. I have been blessed with a supportive family who have encouraged my writing. My parents and my sister have been my cheering section since the days when I was trying to be a rock star rather than writing
Acknowledgments
about them, and it has been fun to talk about this book with my in-laws, since my father-in-Iaw's name happens also to be Bruce McDonald. Inspiration to do anything and everything comes from my children, and from my wife Eileen, to whom this book is dedicated.
BRUCE McDONALD'S
HARD CORE LOGO
Introduction
A hilarious rockumentary in the laugh-packed tradition of This
Ramona: It was just an act! Russel: It was an act of violence. And you loved it.
is Spinal Tap
critics everywhere are howling th~ praises of Hard Core Logo! The punk rock
From Roadkill
band Hard
is back - reunited and hitting the road on a last-gasp tour
across the western part of the nation. As magnetic lead singer Joe Dick holds the whole tour together through sheer force ofwilt all the tensions and pitfalls of the rock 'n' roll lifestyle come bursting hilariously to the surface! Featuring a memorable appearance by Joey Ramorre of the Ramones settle in and enjoy this offbeat comedy as it really cranks up the laughs! Marketing copy on the
us DVD cover of Hard Core Logo
Not much of the above is true, Hard Core Logo is a great film, but it does not seem fair to say that it 'cranks up the laughs!' Joey Ramone's appearance in the film lasts for less than thirty seconds and is one of the least memorable things about it. And while it is actually true that the band is 'hitting the road on a last-gasp tour across the western part of the nation,' this is a lie by omission, since American audiences would assume that this refers to the Uniteg States, when in fact it refers to Canada. Should we pity the poor viewers who getthe film home only to experience something much darker than they were expecting, or congratulate an enterprising copywriter who found a way to sneak another Canadian film irito
BRUCE McDONALD'S
I HARD CORE LOGO
unsuspecting American hands? Like a struggling band on the road with too far to go between pay cheques, the film industry in Canada faces some pretty brutal economics that make it hard to preserve our vision of how creativity should be shared. Sometimes it takes a fake benefit show to get people to come to your gig, and sometimes it takes some slightly misleading copy to get people to watch your film. As long as no one actually loses a limb, then all is fair, right? The point of the description on the case of an independent release like Hard Core Logo is traditionally to convince people to take it home from the video store. This of course assumes that people still go to video stores a reasonable assumption at the time ofthe film's release, but less so in the age of Internet-based DVD services and the shift towards direct downloading. Now that a growing number of a DVD 'rentals' are from services like Zip.ca and Netflix, who are in tum facing challenges from a number of legal and illegal download sites, the emphasis on consumer-created reviews means there is a chance for customers to either undermine or rectify the marketing of any film. At the time ofthis writing, nearly all of the most highly rated reviews of Hard Core Logo on American site Netflix mention that the film is much darker than the Spinal Tap comparison would imply. Some refer to it as a black comedy, or as drama rather than light entertainment. One review compares it to darker music films like Julien Temple's Sex Pistols documentary The Filth and The Fury and Penelope Spheeris's Decline ofWestern Civilization series of music documentaries. The reviewer then calls Hard Core Logo 'Unsettlingly real. Not like "Spinal Tap" at all, more like Scorsese than SNL.' While Hard Core Logo is indeed too dark for Saturday Night Live, it might seem a bit too light for Martin Scorsese. What it has in common is that a number ofScorsese's films feature protagonists using whatever skills they have to escape the life situations into which they have been born. Sometimes they succeed for a while, but they are never really
4
Introduction
of where they come from, and their own demons and the society them keep them in place. Joe Dick may not be Jake LaMotta Raging Bull, but he would rather blow his brains out than be a sidesl:lo'i'{ attractil:m. And while Joe has a self-destructive streak, he is far his own worst enemy, as LaMotta is. Rather, Joe Dick is a striver whose ambitions outstrip his abilities and his environment. If he is to have any type of success at all, he will need to depend on others to help him achieve it, and it is those others who betray mm, primarily his friend Billy Tallent, with whom he has been maldng music his whole life. Even if Joe Dick can keep the band together, they have an entire nation against them. It is not just indifference or their own personal demons that Hard Core Logo need to overcome, it is the very structure of their country thousands of miles, of empty space that make success nearly impossible. Hard Core Logo are divided over whether or not to pursue fame andfortUfle or to remain true to the independent spirit of punk, but in Canada at least, it is a false option. Canada is inherently a punk rock nation, where you might as well embrace your authenticity because you cannot sell out no matter how hard you try. The variety of significant themes in the film the relationship to nation, the friendship between Joe and Billy, the nature of artistic integrity, and the responsibility of a filmmaker to his subjects are what make this an object worthy of study so many years after its release. More importantly, it is these themes that have inspired a range of reinterpretations of the story. Along the way, the film has become both a cult object and a part of Canadian mythology, with a narrative that is proving surprisingly resilient, flexible, and popular. It is these many re-imaginings of Hard Core Logo that provide the focus for the first half of this book. All the versions of Hard Core Logo discussed in the first chapter are in dialogue with both Bruce McDonald's film and Michael Turner's book.
BRUCE McDONALD'S
I HARD CORE LOGO
By consideri):lg each of them in turn, we can of cours~ enrich our understanding and appreciation of the film, More than that, we can betteiunderstand the nature of adaptation itself, since each new adaptation has built on many of the versions that have come before, rather than returning to the source text to begin anew, In this way, it might be fairer to say that Hard Core Logo has become mythologized over time, as details change and the central story is clarified depending on who is doing the telling, Each person who has taken on the characters has had to decide how to tell the story in his or her own medimn, and in the process has provided a commentary on what the characters were about in the first place. This process is particularly interesting for a Canadian text, since Canada has so little of its own mythology. Considering the many interpretations of Hard Core Logo thus allows us to think about the kinds of stories that Canadian artists and fans might find appealing and why. Most of the themes in Hard Core Logo are not exclusively Canadian, but the entirety of the narrative is delineated by the range of options the band members have, options that are in turn determined by the challenges of trying to be a touring band in a vast and sparsely populated country. Geography is destiny to some extent, but more than that, geography affects choices and values in ways that we cannot ~lways see. This is perhaps why Joe Dick cannot see the futility of his tour, even though it is as plain as the endless highway in front of the van, As an audience we want to believe, as Joe does, in thetransformative power of the road and in the possibilities of success and redemption it pro~des. Deep inside, though, we know that the Canadian landscape is one that punishes such hubris. Since Joe is dependent on Billy Tallenc their relationship is the other key element of the narrative. The tWo men are friends, rivals, business partners, and 'brothers' whose interactions have been the sources of much speculation in both fictional adaptations and scholarly apprais-
6
Introduction
also This book tries to move the discussion of Joe and Billys relationship away from sexual and towards the emotional, with dual purpose. The reading of Joe and Billy's interactions as homoerotic has a lot of appeat but this has a way of masldng the complexity of their bond. Homoerotic readings occasionally run the risk of overshadowing, rather than illuminating, the relationships between characters, Thus, by resisting the temptation to see the two 'men as simply desiring one another, we might be better able to understand the depth oftheir emotional relationship, one that would have forged in moments both private and public. This knowledge might, in tum, allow us to better , understand the construction of filmic masculinity, The last theme of this book is the stealth theme of Hard Core Logo the relationship between the documentarian and his or her subject. At the beginning of the film, it seems as though the mockumentary Bruce McDonald is playing himself, and style is simply a comic the documentary feel gives us a sense of immediacy and authenticity that fits the punk ethos, As the film progresses, questions of documentary move from background to foreground, and it is no accident that the film becomes darker as this happens, For much of Hard Core Logo, Joe Dick is the only character who seems mindful of the power of the camera, which is no surprise since he is also the most aware of his own fas;ade as a rock star. There are numerous moments in the film where he battles with 'Bruce McDonald' for control of the documentary and his own image, and these conflicts increase towards the end of the film as the stakes are raised, A thorough comprehension of the film thus depends on a consideration of this struggle for control over the band's image. In the end, Hard Core Logo becomes a thoughtful exposition on the responsibility of the documentarian, even as the fictional BruceMcDonald fails just about every test of that re~ponsibility,
7
Adaptations
Hard Core Logo· has likely inspired more significant textual material than any other imaginary band. In addition to Michael Turner's original book and Bruce McDonald's film, there is Noel Baker's screenwriter diary (Hard Core Roadsl1ow), a Hard Core Logo tribute album, a comic book (Portrait ofaTl10usand Punks); a stage play (Hard Core Logo: Live), numerous academic articles, and a slew of online fan fiction and remix videos. Hard Core Logo is the third chapter in Bruce McDonald's thematic road trilogy that began with Roadkill(1989) and Higl1way 61 (1991). It is the odd film out for a number of reasons. The other two have the same stars (Don McKellar and Valerie Buhagiar) and the same cinematographer (Miroslaw Baszak), and are shot in a relatively straightforward narrative style. (There is also a film in between that was shot before Hard CQre Logo, called Dance Me Outside, released in 1994, which is the story of two young native men on a reservation in Northern Ontario and is based on a series of short stories byw.p. Kinsella. It also features Hugh Dillon, in a smaller role.) While there are a lot of ideas that circulate among the three road films, none of the characters do. Instead, the three films reflect a conscious attempt to make a set of Canadian myths out of what are often thought of as American archetypes. The fact that Hard Core Logo has now become embedded in the nation's creative culture seems to indicate that, to some extent, the myth maldng has been
BRUCE McDONALD'S
I HARD CORE LOGO
successful. As just one example, the comic-book and theatrical versions ofthe story that have appearedsince'the film both credit Turner'sTIovel and the work that McDonald and screenwriter Noel S. Baker did on the film. Thus, the story really does start to become a myth that gets rewritten over time, rather than a series of adaptations of the same source text. And while it is Hard Core Logo that has inspired the remakes rather Roadkil! or Highway 61, it seems as though Hard Core Logo is the culmina~ tion of what McDonald had been thinking about, and learning, while he was making the other two films. According to screenwriter and actor Don McKellar, the idea for Roadkill actually came after he had already been hired to write Highway 61. What became Roadkil! started out as a documentary about a real band called A Neon Rome, whose singer disrupted shooting plans by taking a vow of silence. From this obstacle came the decision to make a narrative film in which part of the plot focuses on a singer who takes a vow 'of silence as part of a spiritual reawakening. McKellar says the original script was ~bout forty-five pages long and was written in a couple of weeks. 1 The new plot primarily centres on a woman named Ramona, played by Valeria Buhagiar, who is the assistant to a Svengali-ish rock promoter, and is sent into Northern Ontario to track down a wayward band called The Children of Paradise. Since Ramona cannot, actually drive, she 1s dependent on a range of eccentric personalities who take her where she needs to go, including a gregarious taxi driver, a documentary film crew helmed by Bruce McDonald, a wannabe serial killer played by McKellar, and a teenage boy who eventually gives her his father's car. The film was shot on location in black arid white 16 mm, and is indie filmmaldng at its most resourceful. Crowd shots were filmed illegally on the streets ofToronto, crew members and friends fill in minor roles, and Buhagiar's actual parents play her character's parents as she leaves home at the beginning of the film. For all its economic efficiencies, the film packs a lot of ideas into its
10
Adaptations
85 minutes. McKellar has talked about the motivation for shooting in Northern Ontario as a desire to feature Canadian places and to make them mythical in the way that so many American places are.' To that end, Ramona travels through a number of real cities and towns, and on-screen show us where these places are located in relaone another and to the endless wilderness that surrounds many of thein. The relationship to that wilderness is mocked in the first few minutes of the film, which parodies the Hinterland Who's Who films that were a feature of Canadian television for many years. These were short films featuring particular animals and their habitats, with a sonorous voice-over describing their lives and behaviour. Everyone who grew up in Canada in the 1960s and 1970S is familiar with the theme music, played by a lone flute, and the particular style of the films. In the parody; the featured rabbit is described as being threatened despite its fabled fertility; although no one apparently knows why..We then cut to shot of the documentary film crew's van bearing down on a rabbit in the middle of the road. The conflict between wild Canada and urban Canada is central to this film, and to Highway 61. In the case of Roadkill, Ramona is the city girlfinding her way in the wilderness of the north, where none of the usual rules apply: Rabbits aside, her encounters are primarily with a sodal wilderness populated by eccentrics who are both of this culture and not. Her funniest interactions are with McKellar's character, Russel, whom she meets after inadvertently spending the night in his house. Russel has chosen to be serial killer because he needs a career goal, and he discusses it nonchalantly in both professional and nationalist terms as he teaches Ramona how to drive: RUSSEL: Usually people in my line of work have to drive long distances by
themselves.
RAMONA: What is yotir line of work?
11
Adaptations
RUSSEL: I'm a serial killer. RAMONA: Awhat? RUSSEL: Aserial killer. It's a person who commits a series of apparently unmotivated murders based on personal compulsions. It's more of an American thing, traditionally, but it doesn't have to be. It's like everything else. There's this colonial attitude about it, that if you want to make it you've got to go down toCaliforrria or something, but I'm going to change all that.
Ramona's lesson in driving and American colonialism. Courtesy of Shadow Shows.
The satirical tone here both mocks a certain kind of provincial canadianness and then celebrates that Canadianness with genuine affection. It is a tough line to stick to, and that tension will become central 'in Highway 61, when McKellar and Buhagiar reunite to play very different characters. This film ends asa very dark satire, after Ramona·has successfully reunited the band for their final show in Thunder Bay. As Russel prepares to make the Children of Paradise's lead singer his first victim, the promoter shows up with his own gun and turns the place into a bloodbath, killing all the band members and a number of others. The film treats this violence nonchalantly Ramona is told to be in the office the next day at 9 a.m., and she reunites with a number of her other acquaintances as if nothing has happened and she has suffered no trauma at all. Thus, Roadkill establishes some ofthe ideas that will pervade the oth· er two films in this thematic trilogy - an emphasis on Canadian identity, the idea that the open road represents both freedom and futility, and a sense that satire allows usto deal with questions of nationalism without getting bogged down in the complexities of actual citizenship. The particularly Canadian identity with which the film deals is dependent on an idea borrowed from American road movies (imd from American westerns) that the road is a place where you learn about yourself. It is clear that Canadians, both in the films and in the audience, are people
13
BRUCE McDONALD'S
I HARD CORE LOGO
who need to learn about themselves. McDonald's road movies are an attempt to make both the land and its people into part of our own cultural mythology, rather than simply borrowing our cultural mythology from someone else. It may seem strange that we borrow an American form, the road movie, in order to develop our distinct identity, but much of Canada is. even more defined by the road than is the United States, since this is a country ofvast spaces and small cities, where there are a lot more in-betweens than there are places. Canadian roads allow Canadians to learn about themselves, but in a pinch, American roads will also do just fine, as we learn in Highway 61. The second film in the trilogy continues to develop all the ideas that McDonald and McKellar first explored in Roadkill, and it is the most clearly satirical of the three films in the series. The film was released in 1991 and is named for the north to south road that connects northwestern Ontario to New Orleans. It is the story of Pokey Jones, a barber and occasional trumpeter in the small northern Ontario town of Pickerel Falls who is briefly a local celebrity when he finds a dead body behind his shop. Pokey meets Jackie Bangs, a roadie who has stolen some drugs from a rock band and claims the body Pokey has discovered as her brother's, so that she can use the corpse to smuggle the drugs from Ontario to New Orleans. she convinces Pokey to drive her on this road trip, and Pokey gets to live his lifelong dream of seeing America, They are pursued by a man who believes himself to be Satan, and wants the body because it is the first of the many souls he has 'purchased' to actually die and he is ready to collect the young man's souL Most of the satire in the film is based on broad stereotypes of Canadian and American culture. In this film, Don McKellar, who plays Pokey. is still the northern innocent and Valeria Buhagiar, who plays Jackie, is again the city girl. In this case, though, their morality is reversed. Pokey is the moral centre this time, albeit one who needs to let loose a little bit. As they journey into the United States, they confront an overeager
14
Adaptations
border guard, played by punk: singer Jello Biafra, and a single father who has formed a singing group with his three spectacularly untalented daughters and who aims to bring good-time music to America. The film culminates with Pokey and Jackie's confrontation with Satan hims~lf, who lives in Louisiana and is tolerated by his neighbours as a harmless and amusing eccentric. It can be tempting to see Pokey as a relatively straightforward representation of a mild-mannered Canadian who triumphs in the face of American crassness and excess. Such metaphorical readings are a temptatipn in all discussions of national cinema, and Highway 61 is in some ways an exemplary text for considering the ways in which we think about the idea of 'national' cinema. Figuring out what is Canadian about Canadian cinema was an ongoing struggle for many years. Many scholars, myself included, were tempted to read elements of Canadian identity in particular films, especially films that featured 'outsider' protagonists like Highway 61 and the film that was one of its obvious influences, Don Shebib's 1971 classic Gain' Down the Road. Shebib's story of two Maritimers who anive in Toronto full of hope and short on skills is a classic tale of outsiders, and seems the perfect metaphor for a nation on the periphery. even if, in this case, the division is within the country Toronto is the centre and the Mari'9mes are the periphery. There are obvious problems with these types of metaphorical read, ings ofnational cinema. The first is that not all films are going to fit into an archetype that can be. read as Canadian. Very quickly the readings become more and more outlandish as we try to divine the Canadian essence in films by directors as disparate as David Cronenberg, Atom Egoyan, and Denys Arcand. In the end, various attempts to define the essential characteristics of Canadian cinema could never get past the bar, established by film scholar will Straw, who pointed out that most of the filmic elements that were being characterized as Canadiarl
15
BRUCE McDONALD'S
I HARD CORE LOGO
non-traditional protagonists, la!=k of narrative closure, stylistic restraint . _ were actually 'typical of art~house cinema practices generally, rather thm the expression of a national character.'3 It is much more productive and interesting to think of Canadian cinema as being occasionally part of the dialogue about Canada, but in a complex sense. Writing about Indian national cinema, the film critic Sumita Chakravarty-introduced the notion of 'imperso-nation.'4 Her concept starts with something relatively obvious - that films are not a direct reflection of a culture - but extends to provide a framework for considering the ways in which films are already talcing part in the dialogue about national idenrity. Simply put, films are not simple reflections of the culture in which they are made, and it is not the scholar's or / the critic's job to examine the film and the culture side-by-side to figure out the points of contact. Rather, the directorsand creative people who make films are already well aware of the competing norions of Canada and what it means, and also of the common perception that Canada's narional identity is considerably more fluid than that of many other nations. So films are already part of the discussion of national idenrity, and often represent a complicated and thoughtful response to questions of Canadian identity. In some cases that response is relatively direct, as it . is in Highway 61. In other cases it is a tiny part of the film, ~d even the decision to choose to ignore the discussion of nationhood might be a conscious choice rather than a happenstance of productio:q. There are many reasons why it is difficult to define Canadian iden~ rity, but the key challenge is that to do so is to attempt an essentially modern project. in a postmodern age, Most of the nations that we com~ pare ourselves to, particularly the United States, were able to define their national identity in a period where there was little worry about who was being excluded from the definition, Once there was a fundamental definition, the great sttuggles of American history have been about who deserves to be fully counted as a citizen, and in each ofthese
16
Adaptations
cases, the excluded group has sought to point out how normal it is, and how much its members represent core American values like respect for personal freedom and the primacy of family. That comparison has been the mode of entry for African-Americans, and for gay and lesbian people, even as it is a ticket that does'not come without costs in tenus of the group characteristics and culture that must be checked at the door, The key idea, though, is that there .is already an established identity that newcomers, internal and immigrant alike, must accept. Because English Canada did not shake off the weight of its British identity until about the '960s, the subsequent attempt to define a Canadian identity has taken place in the post~sixties era, when we are a,n too aware of the ways in which definitions of identity reinforce exclusions. We are trying to invent a Canadian identity now, but we are too aware of the complexity of our differences, We're not just English and French, but Aboriginal, immigrant, majority and minoritY, and facing divisions of region, politics, race, gender, and class. Highway 61's reliance on satire is what allows it to work as a com~ mentary on Canadian identity without falling into the usual difficulties of trying to ,define Canadian identity first. Playing with stereotypes in a satirical fashion allows the film to both comment on Canadian and American identity and maintain its distance, Satire allows one to choose from the pool ofavailable images without needing them to be accurate, and it succeeds best when its targets are stereotypes, Part of the joke is the idea that there is any group of people who really act like this, so the lack of accuracy can actually be a help rather than a hindrance. In other words, Pokey is not a stand~in for-all of Canada in its relations with the United States, even if he fits some of the stereotypes. Pokey in Highway 61 is very much the emasculated Canadian male, a type who features in alot bf Canadian cinema. He is rarely assertive, cannot really play his trumpet, and has to be forced to have sex at gunpoint. Jackie is the one who drives the action for much of the movie,
17
BRUCE McDONALD'S
I HARD CORE LOGO
and who goads Pokey into taking the trip in the first place. Even as he eventuallylearns to be more assertive, he never loses his core innocence completely; nor does he ever fully become the active male protagonist. He makes it to Satan's house on his own, only to be knocked out and imprisoned in the coffin he has carried all the way from Canada, From this impotent position, Jackie has to free him once again. In addition, it is not just characters that are being stereotyped here - McDonald also makes full use of conventional ideas about the differences between-Canadian and American landscapes. In the opening scenes of the drive, northern Ontario is an idyllic wilderness. As soon as they cross the border, they find themselves in a post-industrial landscape of decline and decay, even though northern Minnesota has plenty of unspoiled forests, The point of all this exaggeration is to allow the film to talk about Canadian and American identity while sidestepping the question of whether these differences are real or perceived. Canadians have a notion of themselves as being outsiders in American culture, and an idealized concept oftheir relation to the natural environment. Highway-61is about both of these ideas while simriltaneously being sceptical about the truth status of either. Satire gives the film the freedom, to deal with ideas about Canada without having to be about actual Canadians.. Benedict Anderson, in his influential book on the idea of nationalism, Imagined Communities, argues that nations are inherently imagined 'because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow~members, meet them; _or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion, '5. He clarifies that he not contrasting 'imagined' communities with 'real' ones: 'Com~ munities are to be distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined." We might use this idea in the case of Canada and Highway 61 to assert that the ideas about Canada identity are not distinguishable from actual Canadian identity. We are
18
Adaptations
thus free to imagine the nation we wish to be, and in some sense, imagining it makes it so. In Hard Core Logo, the imagined communities of canada, and of punk rock, are central to the conflict. The relationship to landscape and geography is somewhat more direct. Geography is a metaphor in Hard Core Logo, as it is in Highway 61, but at the same time the dist,ances that the band must travel are real and concrete, and can~ not be imagi.ned away.
Hard Core Logo - The Novel The genesis of Hard Core Logo is Michael Tumer's '993 book. Like much of Turner's work, it is an experiment with the form ofthe novelJ The book is constructed out of written snippet~ that tell a story as much by what is missing as by what "is there. Instead of reading a modernist narrative that fills in plot and dialogue, we are reading set lists, song lyrics, phone messages, and diary entries., As the band ~lowly comes apart on their western Canadian tour, their divisions are reinforced by the fact that we are only rarely reading anything that could be called a dialogue between them. Each of the band members is recording their own thoughts in various ways, so there is little chance for them to workout their dif~ ferences. Thus, the form of Turner's book models the atomization of the band - they are by now a collection of fragments themselves and there is little chance of them ever coming together. Towards the end of the book there are numerous sections where band members do address each other directly, but these tend to be one~sided lists of accusations and recriminations. The inclusion of contracts and budgets also rein~ forces the cold hard facts the band is up against. Their hopes of making some money are undermined from the outset by the lists of expenses, and by the fact that Joe has optimistically spent much of their money on demo tapes and T-shirts, a fact that is downplayed in the film. There are numerous other significant differences between the book
19
. c ,- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
BRUCE McDONALD'S
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and the film. In the book, the band's reunion gig and tour are acoustic, which means that they aresoni~ally only an echo of their former selves, even as they occasionally enjoy the new sound. The reunion gig is an
environmental benefit rather than a 'Rock against Guns' show, so Bucky Haight and his invented injuries do not figure in that part of the story at all. Haight himself does appear towards the end of the book, but only to act as a cautionary tale of rock stardom, recounting his horrific experiences trying to make an album for a major label in New York City. Only a handful of words in the book ever come from characters' mouths on. screen, and most of these are incidental moments like Joe's discussion of how they sold 100 T-shirts a night 'at the peak of our fame.' Pipefitter's threat to urinate in the back of the van contains his film dialogue, but the film also adds the detail about the hole in the van floor that he nearly falls through and the important moment of his humiliation as he wets himself.
Adapting a novel for the screen is obviously a challenging task, but
Hard Core Logo is challenging in a particular way. Any adaptation involves decisions about what the core ideas of the novel are and how these might translate into pictures, Internal dialogue and motivations must be acted out, as must omniscient narration, usually with little or no use of voice-over. Inmost cases, the act of converting a nov~l into a film involves cutting away most of the book to make the film a manageable length. Most literary adaptations, even the epic films, have to cut out the vast majority of their source material. The risk is that too much is lost, that characters become flat and one-dimensionaL that their actions become unmotivated and random. Hard Core Logo presents the opposite challenge. While there is enough plot for a movie, anyone who tries to adapt it has to invent the scenes that go between what Turner has given us. In this way it is something like adapting a short story, in which we have to fill in the gaps rather than pare away material. It is not that the characters are one-dimensional on the page - far from it- but Turner
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has left a lot of material to the reader's imagination, including physical descriptions of the characters and the details of their motivations. Billy, in particular, is sparely drawn. He has the least to say about himself, and the others primarily describe him as a drunk. It malces sense that he is the least reflective character in the film. Of course, Turner's Hard Core Logo is a different book now than it would have been before the movie was made, as the physical descriptions of the characters have now been filled in by our images of the actors. Unless you haven't seen the film, or haven't seen it in a long time, it is impossible to get the picture of Hugh Dillon out of your head as you read about Joe Dick, no matter how much the character on the . page differs from the one on screen. If the novel offered us a distinctly different physical image of Joe, then we might be able to imagine Joe as someone different, but the spaces Turner leaves for his reader are inevitably filled in by McDonald's pictures rather than the reader's own. One of Thmer's later books, American Whiskey Bar, seems influenced in some ways by his experience watching Hard Core Logo be adapted for the screen. American Whiskey Bar is apparently the screenplay for a film that Turner wrote for an eastern European director named Monika Herendy. In a foreword to the book, he explains that he had little interest in fiims or in writing screenplays, and that Herendy talked him into it over the course of a few months, and encouraged him to create a script for a film concept she was caIling A Bunch ofAmericans Talking. In the end, he ended up submitting a first draft of the screenplay under pressure and was horrified later when that draft, which he considered notes towards a film rather than a complete screenplay, was turned word-for-word into a finished film, albeit one that barely saw the light of day. Reading Turner's explanation of the film's creation, one is struck by the immediate irony that a screenwriter is complaining that his screenplay made it to the screen unaltered. He must be the only screenwriter in history-to have had this experience, let alone the only one to cOm-
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plain that he expected his work to be adapted more. His foreword is followed by one from the director herself, which begins by asserting that she only agreed to write an.essay for Turner's book if she was able to correct his mistakes about the crea~ion of the film that became American Whiskey Bar. She contradicts his claim that he was a reluctant partici~ pant in the film process, and writes that there is a lot about the production that he did not understand. As she begins to recount the details of her own background, including time at a pre-l989 Soviet film school and a stint making fetish pornography for a shadowy German producer, you find yourself thinking two things: (1) This is the best description of a film production disaster I've ever read and (2) I've got to see this film. As Monika's story gets stranger and stranger, though, you begin to realize the true btilliance of the exchange. In actuality, all of what you are reading - Turner's introduction, the director's response, an afterword from another participant, and the script itself - are fiction. American Whiskey Bar is not actually the script to a never-released film accompanied by notes from the screenwriter and director; it is a novel thatplays on our expectations of novelistic form and drama. The descriptions of the stop/start creation of an independent fihn are completely convincing, and what gives the illusion away in the end is not that TUrner gets some of the details wrong, butthat the story is actually t'oo perfect to be real. of course, if you read the back jacket copy, you would probably be alerted by the blurb that calls the book a 'faux memoir' but then
goes on to describe the film as if it were real. To add to the potential confusion about American Whiskey Bar, it actually was made into a TV movie in 1998 by Bruce McDonald. Again the adaptation was handled by Noel S. Baker, the Hard Core Logo screenwriter, and the structure of the film was something of an experiment. It was shot and broadcast live from the CITY-TV studio on Queen Street West in Toronto. Turner himself played the bartender in the film, and says it was a 'meta' moment because d~ring the live broadcast he could look
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out across the street to the Beverly Tavern and see the show playing on one of the bar's televisions while he was in the middle of making it. Michael Turner has had one other intriguing collaboration with McDonald, on a short film that McDonald made in 1998 with Don McKellar and writer Michael Ondaatje. The film, Elimination Dance, is based on a poem by Ondaatje. An elimination dance is one in which couples dance until one of them is eliminated by a particular criterion. Traditionally, tbis might be something like 'anyone wearing a bowtie: Ondaatje's much more creative list consists of such things as 'Any person who has lost a urine sample in the mail,' {Anyone who has testified as acharacter witness for a dog in a court of law,' and 'Any person who has had the following dream. You are in a subway station of a major city. At the far end you see a coffee machine. You put in two coins. The Holy Grail drops down. Then blood pours into the chalice: The film takes place at a dance and we watch as the couples are eliminated one by one. Turner plays the caller, and reads the elimination criteria from a stack of cards he holds in his palm. But while most of the film is a relatively literal interpretation of the poem, the fact that it is presented visually changes the meaning substantially. In isolation, Ondaatje's list of ctiteria is intriguing and compelling but inevitably abstract. When it is acted, the context must be filled in - dancers, the caller, and a band are all performing ~heir customary roles. But now, dancers look extremely embarrassed and leave the floor as Turner calls out, say, 'Gentlemen who have placed a microphone beside a naked woman's stomach after lunch and later, after slowing down the sound considerably, have sold these noises on the open market as whale songs.' We start to wonder about things that were not apparent on the page. The realism of the scene makes us want to come up with an explanation: How did these secrets about people get onto the cards? Is this about social surveillance and control, or random chance? The fact that Turner's character seems to be merely a channel for the insights the cards reveal means that it is
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not about him, that there is some sort of larger s?cial phenomenon at work, even if we have no idea what it is. In this way it becomes reminiscent of a story like Jorge Luis Borges's famous 'The Lottery in Babylon: in which it is not clear whether we are controlled by men or by fate, and it is impossible to tell the difference, One story that Turner tells about his experience on the film set of Elimination Dance is revealing of his views about adaptation and autho~ rial authority. Since the poem was written tobe read on the page, some of the items sounded a bit strange when read aloud. Sttuggling with one passage, Turner asked Ondaatje if he would mind rephrasing the line slightly, and Ondaatje complied without complaint. AI; Thmer himself points out, approaching Ondaatje in this way, to get an authorial rewrite, completely contradictedwhat Thmer believes about the importance of the author, As his characters from Hard Core Logo have been rewritten and reinvented by numerous' people, including screenwriter Noel S. Baker, McDonald and the actors on set, comic~book artist Nick Cr~ine, various stage~play adapters, and writers of online slash fictio ll1 Turner has maintained the view that his version of the characters is not primary, and that the reaclings of others are interesting and equally valuable, Claiming that he read too much post-structuralism and postmodernism in university to cling to a traditional notion of the author, he points out that since everything is a reading anyway, then it makes no sense to value his in particular. So seeking out the approval of Ondaatje to change a few words runs contrary to the free rein he has encouraged others to take with his work. Hence the· imaginary 'Michael Thmer' of American Whiskey Bar, who claims to be annoyed that his screenplay was not changed enough. of course, it is one thing to disavow your own authorial privilege, and anotherto disavow someone else's. It is hard to imagine many people would take liberties while performing Michael Ondaatje's words, particularly while he is standing a few feet away watching them do it..
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Adaptations
McDonald and others involved in the film version of Hard Core Logo seemed to have exactly that issue with Turner. Turner recalls being shown the script before it was shot, and being invited to view a rough cut of the film in an editing studio, In both cases, he says, the others present wanted him to approve of the changes they had made. obviously, he liked some of them more than others, but recognized that it was now someone else's vision. McDonald's version of the story was darker than his, more 'existential,' but he loved it at the time and still does. His only complaint is about one of the side-effects of adaptation in generaL Most people have had the experience of watching a fiim adaptation of a favourite book and realizing that their mental pictures of the story and the characters are being overwritten by the film's images. Filmic images are so powerful that they tend to overwrite your own images forever, so that the lonely and hapless protagonist you have been picturing now looks forever like the Hollywood star who portrayed him or her on screen. It does not occur to most of us that the same thing can happen to the person who wrote the story, and Turner reports that this is exactly what happened to him. His original images of the characters have been permanently erased, with Hugh Dillon, Callum Keith Rennie, and the other actors filling those roles permanently.. This seems like a genuine loss to him, and it is a little-discussed but inevitable byproduct of filmic adaptation, assuming of course that the author views the final product. Despite the influences of post-structuralism, and a society in which everyone is an amateur critic, the romantic notion of the author/art~ ist still has considerable force. Part of that notion is the idea that the author's version of the story is more valuable than that of a reader. Our justification for literary biogr"phy is that the author's life can reveal something about the work. We attend readings to hear the author read what we could read ourselves, and interView authors and artists endlessly about their ideas, their motivations, their secrets. It seems to fol-
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low from all this attention that the mental images an author carries
of his characters and a story's action have intrinsic value. We are curious and want to be allowed inside. But what happens if a film erases some of that memory? Is that not, is sornesense, the loss of some valu~
able piece of the art? We think of adaptations as spealdng back to the original source, as critiquing them, as entering into a dialogue that we can enjoy on its own terms. But such,metaphors are not tech!101ogical enough to describe what also happens - that adaptations also write over original ideas, erasing and obscuring them forever.
The Making of Hard Core Logo Before the imaginary band Hard Core Logo could begin their'quixotic quest around the country, Bruce McDonald had to begin his. By '994 he was the director of three critically acclaimed features in a row, having div~rted from the road films after Highway 61 to adapt some W.P. Kinsella short stories into the film Dance Me Outside. McDonald first heard about Hard Core Logo ftom Keith Porteous, a manager of bands like 54-40 and Mae Moore, and one of the first steps was to hire screenwriter Noel Baker whom he also heard about through Porteous. F~nding independent films in Canada is challengi;'g, and often fundamentally different than in the United States. Government funding agencies in Canada essentially fulfil part of the role of a movie studio _ they provide money, but also offer advice and demand changes to scripts and plots in order to increase their odds of seeing a return on their investment. McDonald submitted an application for a development grant to the Ontario Film Development corporation, which would have provided money for scriptwriting and other upfront expenses. The OFDC were ambivalent about the film, and about the prospect of McDonald making another road movie, and turned it down at first. Despite this setback, writing and casting continued towards the
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end of '994 and the beginning of '995, with Julian Richings being the first person cast, as punk legend Bucky Haight. s The next people cas~, during a west coast scouting trip, were cal~ lum Keith Rennie, who plays Billy Tallent, and Bernie Caulson, who plays Pipefitter, the band's drummer. Finding someone to play Joe Dick was obviously of central importance, but none of the candidates seemed like a good fit, and McDonald eventually suggested Hugh Dillon, the lead singer for Canadian band The Headstones, who were popular at the time and had scored several hit songs throughout the '990S from the albums Picture o[Health ('993), Teeth and Tissue ('995), and Smile and Wave (1997). Dillon had been cast in a small role as Clarence Gasldll in McDonald's Dance Me Outside in 1994. Neither screenwriter Baker nor Dillon himself was enthusiastic about the prospect of him playing Joe Dick. There was the obvious question of whether Dillon, as a relatively inexperienced actor, could carry a lead role like this. For Dillon, there was a concern that if the movie was terrible it would ruin his credibility with The Headstones' fans. He says he turned it down five times. In the end, two things led to him being cast. The first was that Dillon would be allowed to make changes to the script to better reflect his own experiences in a band. As he puts it now, they 'allowed me to bring the reality to it.' Part of that reality is that some of the politics were dropped, so that the character became more like Dillon himself. 'You don't have to take just what's on the page.' he says, having spent the intervening years doing more acting than music. 'Otherwise you're just limiting yourself as an artist - just trying to colour within the lines.' The second important component was the rapport between Dillon Rennie. McDonald says now that it was 'the first time I understood casting notion of chemistry.' He also says that the two of them were 'a bit cagey and suspicious of each other' at first, in part because had very different backgrounds in acting and music, 'worlds they with a lot of hard-earned chops.' Over the course
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of rehearsals and shooting, though, McDonald says the two developed a
The completed film debuted at the Cannes film festival in May of
'mutual respect society and then a mutual need society' since they had a lot to learn from one another. Rennie describes it thus:
Variety. More enthusiastic reviews followed the release of the
Hugh is phenomenal. He hadn't had a huge amount of [actingl work up
on 18 October, including one from the Montreal Gazette that called Core Logo 'The best rock 'n' roll movie in the history of rock 'n'
until that point, but to work with him was to be electrified because you never !mew exactly what he was going to do. He was coming from rock
and roll, and Iwas respecting that. He was using me for guidance on 'how do we get through this movie?', '~OW does this stuffworlc?' So there was
a great back and forth of covering each other's asses and watching each other's backs, to make sure that we were in the right place.
~nd earned good reviews, including a rave from industry maga-
movies.' The film was nominated for a number of Genie awards, Picture, Best Director, Best Achievement in Editing, and Adapted Screenplay, but lost in most of these categories to David
lllC:!UlllIlg D,eOL
Crcmenb'erg's Crash, winning the Genie for Best Song, an award shared Peter Moore, the band Swamp Baby, who performed the music, and who wrote the lyrics. The film fared better in a Take magazine film critics' poll at the end of the year, and was chosen
Both actors desctibe themselves as friends to this day. For his part,
the best Canadian film of the year, over a sttong group of films that
Rennie says that 'Hugh and I have had an up-and-down relationship for many years, much like the movie. And that was captured in the maldng ofthe film. It's a great friendship and it's endured a lot of things, so we
includ.ed, in addition to Cronenberg's Crash, Robert Lepage's Le Con!esMort Ransen's Margaret's Museum, and David Wellington's version
were filming real life: Shooting finally began in Vancouver on 25 October '995, about six months behind the initial schedule. Various pools of public and private money had appeared and then evaporated, before funding from the British Columbia Film Commission made the film possible. Most of the film was shot in and around Vancouver, including all of the interiors that take place in the other western Canadian cities. The cast and crew
ofIiug"ne O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night, which had been made an award-winning cast from the Sttatford Festival. In terms of box office, McDonald says that Hard Cafe Logo 'was never wildly successful when it came out: In. the years since it has bea cult film, finding its audience one referral at a time. 'It's some-.
people have been allowed to discover: McDonald says. 'They've it and it's become theirs, rather than something that's been sold to them:
then drove east to film some of the road sequences, with principal photography finished in mid-November. Screenwriter Noel S. Baker describes the editing process as one where the fihn 'found its feet.' In some early versions, it wasn't clear enough what the stakes were for these characters, and the film seemed to drag near the beginning. The addition of screen titles, maps, and other documentary effects managed to give the film much. more momentum, while preserving the documentary feel.
28
Core Roadshow: A Screenwriter's Diary Core Logo is one of the few films for. which we have a detailed prodUlctic)ll diary, because the film's screenwriter, Noel S. Balcer, wrote a about his experience on the film. The appeal of the book goes far our ability to learn something about this particular film - it is a compelling account of the economic and creative challenges of
.ucy"«u
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Adaptations
being a screenwriter, challenges that are particularly acute in Canada, but that occur anywhere. Baker begins his book with the declaration 'I am so fucking broke: and begins to describe how a number of happy coincidences allowed him to meet Bruce McDonald after a ftiend had recommended him as a screenwriter and how he began the task of adapting Turner's book. His account of this process alone makes the book worth reading, because it illustrates some of the complexities of adaptation. At first, his instinct is to fill in the spaces in Turner's book as gently as possible, but eventually he realizes that he needs to change some elements to make the film more cinematic. The band's acoustic tour becomes electrified, and Billy's chance at fame in the United States appears sooner and becomes central to the plot. Baker is repeatedly torn between his love for the SQurce book and respect for Turner as a fellow artist on the one hand, and his need to follow his own narrative instincts and the demands of the· screen on the other. Because Baker was involved in the film's extensive and drawn-out pre-production, he also manages to chart the draining process trying to get a film made. As with many films, there. are numerous points when the project seems dead in the water, only to be resurrected again and again. By the time the film began shooting, about a year and a half after his first meeting with McDonald, Baker had been through extensive rewrites. Reflecting his common practice, McDonald had Baker on the film set when shooting finally began, a situation he describes in foreword to Baker's book as 'kinda like inviting the priest to come on your honeymoon,'9 since screenwriters are more often exiled the film production process once the script has been turned in. Baker ends his book happy with his film but distressed at the of filmmaking in Canada, where so many artists end up looking as Billy Tallent does, to try to earn some financial success. The option, Joe Dick's, is not so appealing. Confronting Margaret At'NOI)d's famous assessment of Canadian stories as being fundamentally
of
30
he writes that 'at the end ofthe road, mere survival doesn't cut any more.'l0
'UIVW,H.
Tribute Album the traditional soundtrack album was released, McDonald deto continue the pretence th~t Hard. Core Logo were a real band releasing a tribute album, with a number of actual bands recording Core Logo songs. The liner notes are part of the joke too, with the writing fal,e tributes about how Hard Core Logo changed their or influenced their music. Some write about memorable gigs they with the band. Almost all of the artists on the CD are Canadian, from popular rock like The Pursuit ofHappiness, 54-40, and the odds to indie bands e The Super Friendz and Cub to rappers like the Dream Warriors. The ~st track is one of the most interesting, since it is Hugh Dillon's real and, the Headstones, covering a Hard Core Logo song, so that Dillon .now his real self covering his fake self. The Headstones were a punkfluenced rock band, so the gap between the two is not that large, but is clear that they are two different bands, and that Dillon significantly ged his vocal style to perform as Joe Dick on the Hard Core Logo rigs he recorded for the film with backing band Swamp Baby. As Joe iSk, Dillon sings in a punk semi-yell, throaty and urgent. With The )~dstones, his voice is much more bluesy, even as guitars chug along l1e background. The song that The Headstones perform on the trib,'Son of a Bitch to the Core,' is not on the soundtrack album, nor in movie, so one cannot do a track-to-track comparison, but his voice 's song has a disce~ble twang that is also evident on Headstones 'Unsound' and'Cubically Contained: who warrant tribute albums generally have a reasonably exback catalogue, but there are a limited number of Hard Core
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Logo songs "based. on Michael Turner's lyrics, so some of them appear multiple times on this album. There are two versions of 'Edmonton Block Heater,' one by The Pursuit of Happiness and the other a rap ver-
sion-by the Dream Warriors. The rap version of the song is strong, and might be one of the only rap songs ever recorded that is about winter. The Pursuit of Happiness version is a high-energy-punk song inspired in part by singer/songwriter Moe Berg's youth listening to punk and new wave while growing up in Edmonton. 'My first couple of bands in Edmonton were a part of that scene,' he says. 'Because I'd spent so much
time listening to punk as a lcid, I felt we could lend some authenticity to the proceedings. I based my arrangement for the song on SNFU's "Gravedigger." SNFU were also former Edmontonians and I watched them grow up and become one of the most influential punk bands of all time. It was a blast recording the song and I was pretty proud of how it turned out: The Pursuit of Happiness knew McDonald well, since he had di- . rected the video for their song 'Cigarette Dangles' in '993, which Berg describes as 'one of the best ones we ever did: He says that Hard Core Logo 'very accurately depicted life on the road, especially for a band not particularly well funded by a label. The sight of a van on an icy winter road is the most common mental picture any band wh~ has toured Canada sees,'
Adaptations
songs before the film began shooting so that he could lip-sync believably in the film. The soundtrack is rounded out by tracks from Teenage Head, The Ramones, and chris Spedding. The Swamp Baby tracks are musical originals except for two: 'Sonic Reducer' is a frequently covered punkclassic by the Dead Boys that was first recorded in '977 for their album Young, Loud, and Snotty, and now turns up frequently in skateboarding videos and video games, The other is 'One Foot in the Gutter'
by a
late-1970s Toronto band called The Ugly, whose story is in many ways more outrageous than that of Hard Core Logo, Colin Brunton is a Toronto producer and director of a documentary about the late-1970s Toronto puni< scene called The Last Pogo Jumps Again. He also, coincidentally, was the producer of Roadkill and Highway 61, and Hard Core Logo is dedicated to him and four other people, According to Brunton, 'One Foot in the Gutter' was a song by The Ugly that was written somewhere between 1976 and 1978. It was written by bassist Sam Ferrara and guitarist Raymi Mulroney. Raymi's brother, Mike 'Nightmare' Mulroney, was the lead singer. Brunton describes their career
thus: The Ugly didn't call themselves 'punk' ... They preferred the term 'Hoodlum Rock,' because they were, Mike and ugly manager Zoltan Lugosi (who changed his name to Johnny Garbagecan) were 'second story artists,' i.e.
they specialized in B& E's. One of the interesting things about their music
The Hard Core Logo Soundtrack
was that it was true. In other words, if they wrote about holding up a milk store, you can bet they held up a milk store. Mike carried a gun, which
The official soundtrack, released two years after the film in '998, is now' out of ptint and lists for up to $150 on eBay, although copies can sometimes be found for under $50. It is ptimarily composed of the songs originally recorded by the Toronto band Swamp Baby in the spring of '995. The band wrote most of the songs themselves using Michael Turner's lyrics, and then Hugh Dillon rerecorded the vocals over the
31
was unheard
~fin late seventies Toronto. He moved to Vancouver in the
early nineties, like lots of Toronto punks, lured by cheap, good heroin. Thrown off of a three-story building by bikers who's hangout he'd bro-
ken into (I swear I'm not,making this up), he landed in a garbage dumpster. Though unconscious, the bikers proceeded to kick the shit out of him a little more.
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As for the soundtrack itself, it has a 10-£1 aesthetic that increases its authenticity. The sound is a bit muddy, and sounds reasonably like it might have been recorded by an independent punk band in the '980s. In the film, it also has to function as a 'live' recording, as when the band plays 'who the Hell Do You Think You Are?' at the Rock against Guns benefit, so the music can not sound too polished or clean. One of the apparent ironies of the music is that it is so good. Swamp Baby is a little-known independent band, but several of these songs are perfectly believable as punk rock 'hits: That is not to say that it is surprising their songs are so good, rather that they should be more famous themselves. There is no discernible difference in quality between 'Sonic Reducer' and 'who the Hell Do You Think You Are?'·~ except for the fact that one is now considered a punk classic and the other is not. It makes sense then that McDon~d would have chosen these two songs as the first two Hard Core Logo tracks in his film, as it is impossible to tell the original from the cover.
Portrait of a Thousand Punks: Hard Core Logo Nick Craine's comic-book version, Portrait ofa Thousand P1'lnks: Hard Core Logo, is as much a co-production as an adaptation, since Craine collaboratedwith McDonald on the project and was present on the film shoot. Craine is a comic-book creator, artist, and illustrator based in Guelph, Ontario. His illustration work is now commonly featured in newspapers like the Globe and Mail and the New York Times. Portrait ofa Thousand Punks is a blend of material from Thrner's book and McDonald's film. For the most part, it looks like the film. That is to say, while the main characters are not exact replicas of Hugh Dillon, Callum Keith Rennie, and the others, they are obviously inspired by them. Some of the black and white illustrations are copies of the shots in the film, but most are original creations. The dialogue is a blend of
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Turner's book and Baker's screenplay, some of it word-for-word from the film. The final result is an odd amalgam of other work, but it stands on its own, especially since Craine allows himself to fill in some of the peripheral details of the band using newspaper articles and testimonials from people who 'knew' the band or worked with them at some point in their career. All of the imaginary writers and contributors have the names (and sometimes the faces) of Craine's friends and colleagues from Guelph. Using his artistic licence to add something of an in-joke, he replaces the recognizable square van that the band drives in the film with a representation of his old band's touring van. For much of the mid· to late '99os, Craine played in a rock/punk/folk band called Black Cabbage that did its share of touring across Canada. Craine had previously worked with McDonald on a graphic novel version of Dance Me Outside, and waS a collaborator on Hard Core Logo as well as an adapter. He was on the set in British Columbia, and watched the band and the film come together. 'It was a very interesting vibe: he says, 'because there were so many last minute decisions.' Some of those decisions had to do the cast, Dillon in particular: (Most of what you see [of Dillon] in that film is not acting ~ it's really just his personality.' When it came time to produce his version of the story, Craine thought carefully about the nature of adaptation. 'It wasn't going to be just a straight panel representation of what happened: he says. 'I wanted the content to drive the fonn. I also let my own experiences inform it: He decided to maintain the film's ending rather than the book's, even if it seemed to him that the book's finale, where Joe ends up starting a new band under his original name of Joe Mulgrevv, was a more suitably Canadian one. 'Is it really a Canadian story if Joe shoots himself?' he wonders. 'That's an American celebrity move, but I still liked the ending cinematically: He added one gruesome visual detail to the overhead view of Joe Dick on the pavement - an image of a cat licldng up blood. 'I wanted to show Joe bleeding like the marty.r he
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thought he was. Even this little cat is drawing something fro';' him. Even though he was a taker himself.' Overall, he argues that one of the reasons Hard Core Logo has been so popular in its many permutations is that it is a type of story that is rarely or never told. 'It occupies a gigantic deficit that is not repre~ . sented in pop culture. Anytime there's a gigantic deficit like that, there are hungry minds aJ.?d audiences and artists who want that part to. be represented: Filling in those deficits is extremely difficult, of course, and Craine points out that ;most people don't have the talent or the stupidity to take off on a tangent and see it to fruition.'
Billy Talent
Music rehearsals for Hard Core Logo. Top (L-R), Bruce McDonald and John Pyper-Ferguson. Bottom (L-R), Pyper-Ferguson, Hugh Dillon, and Bernie Coulson. Photo montage by Nick Craine; courtesy of Nick
Craine.
Originally from Mississauga, Ontario, the hand now known as Billy Talent began life as The Other One, and then called themselves Pezz for a while until, according to singer Ben Kowalewicz, they received a call one day from a Memphis-based band who also called themselves Pezz, threatening a lawsuit if Kowalewicz's band did not change its name.· In the search for an alternative, two things came together. The first was his love for jane's Addiction, which inBpired his search fat a band name that contained a proper name. The second element was the appeal of Hard Core Logo, which he had recently seen. 'I was working in a record store in Meadowvale [Ontario] and one of my co-workers recominend~ ed the film and I watched·it myself. It just kind of connected with me: he says. And while it might seem like many people would choose joe Dick as the most inspirational Hard Core Logo member, Kowalewicz found Billy Tallent 'just as strong a character: especially his 'air of oldschool arrogance.' Oddly, the name change Seems to have been the best thing that ever happened to the band since, as Kowalewicz notes, 'as soon as we changed the name our sound became more precise. After that things
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started taking off' As Billy Talent (with one less '1' than the character) the band has since produced three albums, and all have gone platinum in Canada, some of them several times over. They have also found success in Europe even though, like most Canadian bands, they have found it difficult to replicate that success in the United States. Their sound is a blend ofpuul< and hard rock, and more polished than Hard Core Logo's music, closer to the music one could imagine being made by Jenifur, Billy Tallent's other band in the film. Kowalewicz says he is pleased that some people have now discovered the book and the film because of his band's name. 'It's cool that we can have people talk to us and say that they watched the movie or read the book. It's happened all over the world, from Russia to Spain, It's interesting that we were inspired by the movie and people go back to the movie. It's all full
circle.'
Hard Core Logo: Live The latest addition to the Hard Core Logo canon is a stage version of the
story that debuted in late 2010 and early 2011 in Edmonton and Vancou~ ver. Produced, written by, and starring Michael Scholar, Jr, it is officially an adaptation of Turner's book, McDonald's fibn, and Baker's screenplay. scholar says that he had the idea for a stage version not long after seeing the £ibn in '996, but figured that someone would have done it already. He ended up making a name for himself with a version of The Black Rider, a stage show by Tom Waits, William S. Burroughs, and Robert Wilson. Scholar and his father produced the show for the Edmonton Fringe Festival in '998, took it to the New York Fringe Festival, and toured with the show on and off for the better part of a decade, ending with a six~week sold-out run at the Tarragon Theatre in Toronto in the fall of 2008. Soon afterward, Scholar began working on the stage version of Hard
38
Adaptations
Core Logo, once he had managed to get permission from Turner, Mc~
Donald, and Baker. The show is a combination of drama, puppetry, and musical performance, with songs performed in their entirety rather than the snippets and medleys that appear in the film. Like Nick Craine before him, Scholar chose not to adapt either the book or the film exclusively, but has created an original piece from elements of both. He was primarily interested in the novet but there are elements ofthe film narrative that he found compelling, like the idea of the benefit being for Bucky Haight and all that that implies. He also says that he could not imagine not having the film's ending. His motivations for wanting to remake the story-are numerous, and include the simple fact that he loved the story and wanted to be a part of it. Casting himself as Joe Dick allows him to play rock star, and he says he did not feel a lot of pressure to either re~create or counter Hugh Dillon's performance in the film. A crucial motivation, though, was his desire to turn this back into a Vancouver punk story, The novel has a lot of specific Vancouver references, and even though the film is set there it drops much of the local specificity in favour of a more general punk attitude. In particular, Dillon's influence on the script meant that much of Joe Dick's politics were stripped out of the film. For his part, Dillon says that the book's politics 'didn't mean a thing to me' and describes politics in general as 'just another thing people hide behind: One of the primary ways in which Scholar put the Vancouver back in Hard Core Logo: Live was by hiring Joey 'Shithead' Keithley from the punk band no.A. to write new songs for the play, songs that again use Michael Turner's lyrics from the book. Keithiey has been central to the Vancouver punk scene for thirty years, but it is not just his connections to the place and the story that made Scholar want to work with him. It was Scholar's sense that Vancouver punk sounded different than Toron~ to punk, that the fonner was closer in style to the more aggressive west coast sound while the latter was more influenced by New York bands
39
BRUCE McDDNALD'S
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Adaptations
like the Ramones. He says, 'I wanted to take the great story elements
nQ.A. played an acoustic gig in '990 at the Arlington Cabaret in
from the movie and the great poetic elements from the book and then in~se the Vancouver musicality that comes from the godfather of Van-
VaI1COUV''', where the opening band was the Hard Rock Miners (who were Michael Turner's band); That show seems to have inspired the
couver punk, which is joey Shithead:
idea of a legendary punk band now playing an acoustic gIg. These two similatities, coupled with both joes' politics, makes it clear that there is at least some poetic inspiration going on here, although from this basis
Keithley's band nO.A. were fonned ih the late '970S and released their first album, Something Better Change, in '980, followed by Hardcore '81, which was apparently the first use of the word hardcore to refer to punk rather than pornography. The sound was fast and aggressive, and the band toured extensively around North America and around the world throughout the '980s. Like American band Black Flag, they were often the first punk band to play in small cities and towns, and Keithley is proud that his band was a lot of people's first punk show. The band has gone throug~ numerous pei:mutatiohs over the years and is still active, although Keithley is the only member who has been part of the band the entire time. He has maintained his political interests in part by seeking public office, and was a candidate for the Green Partythree times in recent years, although he now says he is finished with that type of politics. For one thing, he differed with some of the members of the party on a number of non-environmental issues, and says that at least one party leader was anti~abortion and anti-uniC?u.:fIe also says that when he ran, 'no one from the Green Party in North America had even been elected, so there was no corruption .. , Once you get elected then you start being corrupted almost right away, and being pushed and pulled as a politician: Then there is the lifestyle: 'I didn't really think it would be fun to be elected, because then I'd just be away from home and listening to a bunch of people bitch at me. That sounds a lot less pleasant than being away from home and being on a nO.A. trip: If joe starts to sound like a real-life version of joe Dick, it is because he is, at least in part. He has often been regarded as at least a part of the inspiration for the character in Thrner's book, not least because of the similarity of the punk handies (joey Shithead / joe Dick). In addi-
40
the story diverges substantially from Keithley's. 'nO.A. had its dysfunctional moments,' he says, 'but I never carried on like that.' As for a Vancouver sound, Keithley says he did not think that much about that as he was composing. He was more concerned about captuting the decade-appropriate tempo of the band's sound, which he describes as 'medium-paced punk: acknowledging that it would have sounded fast at the time, but that a lot ofbands have since played much faster. He also differed with Scholar slightly on the importance of preserving all ofTumer's words. 'I would pare down some ofthe words but Michael would insist on putting them all back in there: he says. In the end, there will be atleastthree versions of many of the band's songs, all of which began as lyrics on Thrner's page years ago. Keithley's versions will join the Swamp Baby renditions that are in .the film and the tribute album covers. To add one more twist, KeitWey's label released a 7" single with Scholar's stage band on one side performing 'who the Hell Do You ThinkYouAre?' and D.O.A. on the other side, covering 'Blue Tattoo: These songs, and this band, have ended up having a life far beyond that of the majority of real bands.
Slash Fiction and Remix Videos The relationship between joe and Billy in Hard Core Logo has become a source for much online 'slash' fiction - stories .generally written by
women that focus on romantic and sexual relationships between the two leading men. The peculiar online culrure of slash fiction actually
41
BRUCE McDONALD'S
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pre-dates the Internet, and is generally assumed to have begun with Star Trek famines in the late '960s and early '970S." The relationship between Kirk and Spack is the most famous of these imagined homosexual relationships, but slash fiction exists for a vast number of film and television texts. Hard Core Logo is actually among the less commercially successful of these source texts, but the creation of slash fiction for the film can be attributed in part to the complexities of the relationship between Joe and Billy. At one point in the film, John tells a fan that Joe and Billy have actually had sex, although it is unclear whether he is telling the truth, is delusional, or is simply out to get revenge on the two of them. At least one of the fan fiction stories deals directly with the infamous encounter that John details, and places· the sex between Joe and Billy in the context of their long-developed emotional closeness and friendship, even as it offers a detailed and pornographic account of
the actual sex,12 Some slash fiction is based on the contention that the codes of an erotic relationship are present in the source text, and many ofthe online fan videos posted on YouTube also make this claim by showcasing potential romantic looks between Joe and Billy. By re-editing the film and rearranging various shots, the videos make the homoerotic undertones of the film into an explicit romantic relationship. Sev~ral of the videos compile shots that feature Joe and Billy standing close together, smiling at each other, or exchanging meaningful glances, and add a soundttack ofromantic music. Two ofthe available examples at the time ofthis writing were set to the Dandy Warhol's 'You Were the Last High' (sample lyric: I am alone but adored / by a hundred thousand more / than I said, when you were the last) and Puddle of Mudd's 'Blurry' (lyric: You could be my someone I You could be my scene I You Imow that I'll protect you / from all of the obscene). The videos are, for the most part, creative and well constructed. Another example uses a brush-off song recorded by Pink, 'u + Ur Hand: and begins with the shot of Joe putting the
42
Adaptations
band's demo into the van's tape deck and telling the others that this is 'the best thing we've done yet' as Pink's drumbeat begins. The video then cuts to a shot of Billy lowering his book in the back ofthe van, and other shots are cued to the lyrics of the song: 'I'm not here for your entertainment' as Billy points at the camera and asks for it to be turned off during their argument in Regina, and 'keep your dream just give me the money' as Billy throws the telephone off the motel balcony. What makes these works particularly fascinating· is that in the case of Hard Core Logo, they are the only part of the fictional universe created by women. Indeed, that is the situation for many of the texts that provide the inspiration for slash fiction and for fan fiction more generally. There are no easy answers to the question of why a group of women, most of whom identify as straight, wonld be interested in writing about homoerotic and homosexual relationships between men, It is likely that many of the potential answers have an element of truth to them, at least for s0!lle of the women creating this work. In a relatively early study of fan fiction communities published in '992, Camille BaconSmith found a range of answers when she asked writers why they focused on romantic and sexual relationships between men. One woman volunteered, 'Our culture so thoroughly denigrates the personalities, of women that women cannot imagine themselves as heroic characters unless they imagine themselves as male.'13 While this might be true, it is also the case that female writers and filmmakers outside of the fan fiction world create stories about women all the time (even as they might have a harder time having these stories published or produced). Many of the responses Bacon-Smith collected centre on the conne~tion between sex and romance in the stories, and posit that what the stories provide is a vision of sexuality as inexorably tied to romance that ap~ peals to some women. 14 In any case, these fictional creations are valuable and interesting in their own right, especially for feminist scholars seeking to better
43
BRUCE McDONALD'S
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understand women's relationships to mass media and cultural produc~ tion; While fan fiction and Internet videos currently occupy a relatively low place on the cultural hierarchy, that is more a result of their status as gendered and amateur objects, rather than a reflection of their inherent value as creative.works. As Francesca Coppa notes in an article titled 'Writing Bodies in Space: Media Fan Fiction as Theatrical Performance: there are plenty of models for 'derivate' works of art, In which original texts are subject to endless and infinite revision. Theatre and performance provide the most obvious examples, and, quoting Mar~ v1n carlson, Coppa points out that theatrical perfonnances inevitably include information not featured in the written script, and that in add~ Ing these details they point out the omissions and hidden subtexts in the original work. 'Fan fic~ion works much the same way. Once a story supplements canon :- giving us something the original source did not by filling in a missing scene, getting inside i character's head, interpretIng or clarifying or departing from the story as originally told - future supplements become inevitable, and they aren't any more redundant than multiple productions of Hamlet'" Anticipating the objecrion that Hamlet is a richer text that can support endless performance, Coppa argues that 'it is Shakespeare's endlessly creative fans ,- be they theatre practitioners carrying the stories on their bodies or literary critics teasing out new textual interpretations - who keep Shakespeare going.'Ib
Readers still inclined to be dismissive offan fiction and videos might want to consider the relationship of all of this work to the other adaptations of Hard Core Logo I have been disclissing so far in this book. We might imagine someone making the case that only Turner's original novel is a work of artistic value and that all ofthe subsequent works are oflesser standing, but we would have trouble actually finding someone to make that case, living as we do in a world where even academic ivory towers harbour few such champions of the purely literary, and where
44
Adaptations
explosion of cultural and media studies since the '980s has led to serious academic consideration of all manner o~ creative texts. Michael Thrner himselfis emphatic that his own novel h~s no special status over subsequent creations. And once we accept that McDonald's film, and filmic adaptation more generally, is a legitimate form of art, it becomes impossible to justifY any criterion of cultural value that excludes vvhat has followed the film, whether it is a comic book, a punk song, or a piece of erotic fiction. Each work or interpretation.succ.eeds or fails on its own terms, regardless ofthe form it takes, and each is are-imagining of what came before, The fan fiction that imagines the beginning of Joe and Billy's relationship or the consequences of)oe's death, and the videos that fill in the gaps between looks and gestures, are all, in their own ways, essays on the original text. The second half of this book constitutes one more addition to this considerable and rich collection of essays, but first we must briefly consider McDonald's work since Hard Core Logo, since much of it is a continuation of the ideas he developed in his road movie trilogy,
Bruce McDonald's Films since Hard Core Logo For much of the decade after completing Hard Core Logo, Bruce McDonald worked primarily in television, directing an extraordinarily wide variety of programs, Including Emily of New Moon, based on a series of books by Lucy Maud Montgomery (most famous for writing Anne of Green Gables) and Queer A5 Folk, a groundbreaklng series about gay life for the us pay channel Showtime, which was set in Pitrsburgh but filmed in Toronto.
Picture Claire McDonald directed only one feature film in the ten years after Hard Core Logo, 2001'S Picture Claire, a noir-ish thriller intended for wide release,
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BRUCE McDONALD'S
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and shot for a reported
$10
million with several American stars, in- .
eluding juliette Lewis, Gina Gershon, and Mickey Rourke, (The latter's role amounts to not much more than a cameo). In the film, Lewis is a French-speaking Quebecois woman fleeing drug dealers in Montreal
who seeks refuge with her boyfriend, a photographer in Toronto. Being at the wrong place at the wrong time leads to her being suspected of murder, and the rest of the film involves a complicated plot with a number of unlikely coincidences. The film is in some ways a victim of its own ambitions in casting, since it is immediately difficult to accept Lewis as Quebecois, as she is not a native French speaker and certainly does not speak with a Quebecois accent. The fact that she cannot communicate at all in Toronto- renders her mute for much of the film and makes it difficult to identify with her character. Gershon performs well, but the only person in the fihn who seems comfortable in his role is Callum Keith Rennie, whose good looks and charm make his portrayal of a violent hoodlum all the more creepy. Picture Claire debuted to tepid reviews and was not released to theatres, which was obviously a disappointment, and occasional source of conflict, for McDonald and the producers.
The Tracey Fragments Beginning in 2007, McDonald began a second strong run of features with The Tracey Fragments, starring Canadian acttess Ellen Page. The film's marketing was helped by the fact that Page's next film, also released in 2007, was Juno, which became a major hit and earned four Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture and Best Actress for Page. juno grossed over '40 million dollars in the United States, and all of a sudden Page became the centre of the marketing campaign for The Tracey Fragments. Anyone who chose the film expecting something like Juno was in for somewhatof a shock, however, since the film is easily McDonald's darkest - an impressionistic and hallucinatory portrait of
46
A typical montage from The Tracey Fragments. Courtesy of Shadow Shows.
BRUCE McDONALD'S
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a teenage girl's unravelling. Page plays fifteen-year-old Tracey Berkowitz, a teen outcast whose younger brother has gone missing. As Tracey .
searches Winnipeg for him, just in advance of a predicted blizzard, she rides city buses and encounters avariety oflowHlifes. At school, Tracey is mocked, degraded, and taunted as 'It' by her classmates because of her underdeveloped body. At home, her parents only speak to yell, and the boy she fantasizes about victimizes her. Whereas Juno could fit somewhere in the John Hughes pantheon of films about outcasts who find someconnectiori to those around them, The Tracey Fragments is much closer to works by Atom Egoyan or David Cronenberg in that it offers little redemption from its darkness and dysfunction. The Tracey Fragments is also McDonald's most formally challenging film. It is told in flashback, and the sequence of events is never quite clear. For almost the entire film, the screen is subdivided into images of various sizes that are constantly combining, shifting,.and disappearing. Sometimes these frames show the same scene and shift the time slightly, so that moments are repeated or occur out of order. Sometimes they show scenes that happen before or after the primary scene, while at other times they show objects and footage of the city. The idea is to capture Tracey's subjectivity and the way in which she remembers the traumatic days during which the film takes place. McDonald further emphasized the fragmentary nature of the narrative by releasing raw footage from the film shoot and encouraging fans to 'remix' it. The best of these remixes were then speCial features on the DVD.
The film makes one further artistic risk in casting - it features Julian , Richings, who plays Bucky Haight in Hard Core Logo, as Tracey's female therapist. Richings wears a skirt, blouse, and wig, channelling the obtuse and clueless psychologist for whom Tracey cannot seem to provide the correct answers, Having Richings playa woman captures Tracey's sense of the therapist, in the way that a teenager might label an older
48
Adaptations
';,,,,~,m
she dislikes as a 'man: The film received strong reviews, inc.1uda New York Times piece that dalmed 'The 77 minutes of The Tracey Fraaments are not always easy to endure or to believe; but their cumulais also hard to shake.'"
Mc'D6nald followed The Tracey Fragments with Pontypoo! (zo08), a horror about a zombie-creating virus that appears in the small town of POIltvPO()1, Ontario. Almost the entire film takes place in a radio stalocated in a church basement, where a grizzled alcoholic DJ named Grant Mazzy and his two female co-producers begin to receive reports about strange crowds attacking a doctor's office, and then horrific calls from their traffic reporter about cannibalism and murder. They eventually realize that this virus is transmitted in words, but not before one of the women succumbs to the virus and tries to attack her two co:workers. Since the virus has only infected the English language, Mazzy and producer Sydney Briar (played by real-life husband and wife Stephen McHattie and Lisa Houle) keep themselves safe for a time by speaking French. The film is a great example of accomplishing a lot with a limited budget. Since most of the horror is described rather than seen, the film creates continuous tension without recourse to 'a lot of effects, and the idea ofa virus transmitted through language is a compelling one that allows the film to comment on media, social interactions, and the nature of linguistic comprehension. Since it is such a 'talking' film, it depends heavily on the performances of McRattie, Houle, and Georgina Reilly, who plays Laurel-Ann, the young assistant producer who eventually succumbs to the unnamed virus. Allthree performances are strong, and the fihn received good reviews overall, including a positive notice in the Globe and Mail, which called it 'ultiinately a testament to its frequentlybesieged director's audacity and vision. 1l8 .
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This Movie Is Broken In 2010, McDonald completed or released a remarkable four films, all of which had music themes. The first of these, released at SXSW in Austin, Texas, was This Movie Is Broken, a fiction/documentary hybrid which
second film of the year, Trigger, debuted at the Toronto InternationFilm Festival in September of 20l0, and was the first film screened
the festival's new permanent home, the Bell Lightbox theatre. The
combines a narrative with concert footage of Toronto band Broken So-
screening was a difficult moment, because one of the film's two stars,
cial Scene. The story is set against the backdrop of a real Broken Social
Tracy Wright, had died in June of that year. Wright had played Margo, the spaced-out rock star, in McDonald's Highway 61, and had also had roles in Pieture Claire and This Movie Is Broken. She was the long~t:irne part~ ner and wife of Don McKellar, McDonald's frequent collaborator. In Trigger, Wright plays Vic, one half of a '90S grunge band who reunites
Scene concert at Harbourfront in Toronto in the summer of 2009. The actors were filmed in character in the crowd, watching the show and
eventually ending up backstage. About half of the screen time is taken up by the band's performances. The story is a simple one for most of the fibn. We follow a young
with her former partner, Kat, one night in Toronto, for dinner and a
man named Bruno during a day that begins when he wakes up next
women-in-rock tribute show. In the years since their band split over
to Caroline, his long-time crush. All would seem to be good, except that Caroline is getting ready to go to France to study, and he would like to convince her to stay. After Bruno's friend Blake boasts on his behalfthat he can get Broken Social Scene tickets and backstage passes,
their creative differences and addictions to alcohol and drugs, Kat (played by Molly Parker) has moved to L.A. and has a successful career working in music for film and tele'(ision. Vic has stayed in Toronto and is trying to restart her music career with some acoustic shows. When
Bruno must scramble to get them to impress Caroline. Since the story
they meet at the beginning of the fibn in a fincy Toronto restaurant
only takes up about forty minutes of screen time, McDonald has to work hard to build up his characters and narrative quicldy, and at first it seems like not much can happen here. Either Caroline will stay or she will go. And while she does indeed have to make that d~cision, the film has a few genuine narrative surprises up its sleeve. This Movie Is Broken is yet another example of McDonald maldng
that Kat has chosen, there is a history and tension between the two
something compelling and rich out of next to nothing. There is a mo-
ment in the maldng-of documentary on the DVD that is particularly illustrative of his resources and budgets. It shows the shooting of a scene in which Bruno carries Caroline through the streets of Toronto on his bike. In the documentary, we see a cameraperson, presumably
cinematographer John Price, perched on the back of another bike, with McDonald himself pedalling away in front,
50
women that is immediately compelling. In addition to the chemistry between the two, the film doubles as an affectionate tribute to women in music, and is perhaps the only film to treat female musicians with
this level of respect. The film's implied feminism is somewhat ironic given that the script was originally conceived as a sequel to Hard Core Logo, one in which Billy and Joe reunite after many years (dealing with Joe's death would have required some explanation). The inability to malee the scheduling work led to the film being re-imagined as the story of two women. The script deals with the aftermath of a friendship and an artistic relationship in compelling ways, and the fact that the characters are now female adds resonances that would not be there in the original version. Some of
51
BRUCE
McDO~ALD'S I HARD CORE LOGO
the most emotionally powerful moments in Trigger come when young women recognizeKat and Vic, and say thing like 'You made high school not suck so much.' There is a sense throughout the film of the community ofwomen in music, even ifthe relationships between them are not always smooth and peaceful. The film is also very much a Toronto movie, with settings ranging from recognizable restaurants to a local high school.
Adaptations Ciriterest in working on a sequel that revisits their characters, assuming was something that they believed in, and assuming that everyone in.·
