By MICHAEL GINGOLD
George Mihalka, director of MY BLOODY VALENTINE among many others, received the Canadian Trailblazer Award at last month’s Fantasia International Film Festival in Montreal, so what better place to talk to him and Susan Curran (pictured above) about their upcoming documentary ANY MEANS NECESSARY: THE STORY OF CINÉPIX? The project is a chronicle of the eponymous Canadian production/distribution outfit run by André Link and the late John Dunning, who launched the careers of David Cronenberg (with SHIVERS and RABID), Ivan Reitman (with the Bill Murray comedy MEATBALLS) and many others–including Mihalka, who made VALENTINE and two other features for Cinépix.
“Honestly, I owe my career to them,” Mihalka, who’s serving as an executive producer on ANY MEANS NECESSARY, tells RUE MORGUE. “I don’t think [his first feature] PINBALL SUMMER would have made my career the way MY BLOODY VALENTINE did. When you look at David Cronenberg, Ivan Reitman, Don Carmody, myself, Denis Héroux, who was Quebec’s top filmmaker at the time–there’s a prize named after him in Quebec.”
Dunning and Link “were true mentors,” Mihalka continues. “When I was in film school in Montreal, I was watching and hearing about John and André, and obviously, we all wanted to work for Cinépix. That was the goal. John and André knew how to stretch a dollar, and I learned how to get production value from them. I learned how to cheat and make a movie look much greater than the money we spent on it. These two men inspired me over the years with their knowledge and their drive to make films that put bums into seats. That was their big philosophy: ‘There’s no film unless we can put a bum in a seat.’”
Adds Curran, who’s producing the doc, “André Link was once quoted as saying, ‘You know, they didn’t like us in Canada because we made money, and that simply wasn’t the Canadian way.’ So they had a different way of looking at things. They really wanted to monetize the talent in Canada. And they took the Canadian cinematic world to Cannes, and sold them on a world platform, and this was really the first time that had been done.”
ANY MEANS NECESSARY had its genesis when Dunning’s son John contacted Curran about working on merchandising opportunities for a number of Cinépix titles, including MEATBALLS and the slasher opus HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME. “I thought that sounded like fun,” she recalls. “And the more I dug into their catalog, and heard people’s responses when I’d phone them and say I had something like ILSA, SHE-WOLF OF THE SS [laughs]… People were really stoked about it. Then Greg asked, ‘Have you read my dad’s book [YOU’RE NOT DEAD UNTIL YOU’RE FORGOTTEN]?’ and I hadn’t. So he sent it to me, and I thought it was just a crazy, crazy story. It’s fun, there’s intrigue, there are bonkers shenanigans, especially with the late ’70s/early ’80s marketing they did. So I thought that this story needed to be told. When you talk to people about Cinépix, their eyes light up, and they have all these crazy stories to tell about things they did.”
The doc will be directed by Robert McCallum, who has done a number of non-fiction films such as MR. DRESSUP: THE MAGIC OF MAKE-BELIEVE and co-wrote and directed the 2013 fright feature THE UNEARTHLY. McCallum is also writing ANY MEANS NECESSARY with former RUE MORGUE editor Dave Alexander; the project is currently in the development stage, but some of the interviews have already been completed.
“We’ve talked to André Link,” Curran reveals. “He’s 90, sharp as a tack, and just amazing. We have also interviews done with the MEATBALLS cast and crew–not Bill Murray yet, but there was a reunion recently, and we got to talk with the actors and writer Len Blum. [Co-scripter] Dan Goldberg has passed, but his sister was there to represent him, and had all these great stories to tell. So we’re on our way with this.”
And how about Cronenberg? “Well, we spoke to his son [Brandon],” Curran says, “who told us, ‘Sure, my dad will do that!’ [Laughs] I haven’t fully reached out to the A-list people yet until we have the finances fully in place.”
Cinépix transformed into Lions Gate (now Lionsgate) Films in the late ’90s, and Curran says that through that and other companies, Dunning and Link’s legacy lives on, and will be celebrated in ANY MEANS NECESSARY. “So many executives today–at Sphere Media, Elevation, etc.–all have Cinépix stories because they all started there. Cinépix had a model that worked like gangbusters, and I would say that Blumhouse uses a very similar model to what Cinépix did back in the day.”
